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10 Ads The US Won't See
prostoalex writes "Some ads made by world's leading advertising agencies for well-known brands will never be seen in the United States. The Gucci G-Spot turned out to be too risque, video for Drug-Free America was deemed too disgusting, Internet's favorite Honda "Cog" commercial won't air due to the high prices for a 2-minute spot, and Japanese commercials with American actors have contracts preventing the companies to run the same ads in the US. AdAge provides a link to the pictures and video (Windows Media .ASF format, alas) of the 10 best unaired commercials." I can get the ASFs working under VLC.
don't welcome any new ads. The only good ad is the blocked/skipped ad.
I was under the impression that the Honda "Cog" commercial wasn't released in the US was because the car which was being advertised was a UK-only model! Anyway, I've seen it, and it's very impressive if you can stand the low-quality file from the Honda site.
Like eagles on pogo-sticks! -- Glottis
NOT safe for work...
Hand-rolled cigars (MPG)
I'm more interested in the ads that won't be shown in other countries because they are too "racy", "religiously offensive", etc. It's always fascinating to see how another culture rules out elements that we think are normal. The other way around is not so surprising, since we all watch the TV here all the time, and we know what shows and what doesn't on our own tv's.
Ultimately, I must agree that the "best" commercial is no commercial at all.
stuff |
Do a search on kazaa for banned commercials. It's too bad they are banned from tv because most are hilarious.
----
Squirrel
Even though it's not a real commercial (used to be on AdCritic back when it was good), I loved the Dodge Aries K-Class car commercial. It was a hilarious spoof of car commercials...
98 horsepower... standard.
map light... standard.
etc.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
Sick of seeing the same old ads on TV? Seems like every hockey game I see involves 5 minutes of ads, 3 minutes of which are repeats! Well I've got the solution!
All advertising must be done live. No pre-taped commercials, ever. Even if it's the same script read by the same person there will be some difference. Now if a company spends a mil or two on a commercial it'll really mean something.
Of course it'll never happen, but if it did I'd be alot happier with advertising.
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Something tells me the second ad, "Gucci's G Spot," will be the one primarily responsible for the site's eventual Slashdotting.
The coolest voice ever.
*useful product.
*credit goes to some person on fark a while ago.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Some ads made by world's leading advertising agencies for well-known brands will never be seen in the United States.
So basically, the good ads aren't broadcast, and I have to Tivo-triple-fast-forward all the ones I *do* get on TV because they're such a tripe.
Here's a suggestion for TV networks : instead of trying to sue DVR manufacturers because it lets customers skip your crap, why don't you replace the crap with good ads (and no, I'm not talking about Budweiser or Taco Bell ads)? Of course, you may have to leave good taste behind once in a while, but I bet good ads would being better brand recognition with less airtime, meaning less ads for viewers overall and less DVR zapping.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
After watching the Simpsons and the 10 minutes of commercial I get from that and coming to slashdot to waste some time geeking out and seeing an ad for "OSDN personals" (WTF, by the way...) I just got the feeling that I wasn't watching nearly enough commercials.
Microsoft Windows...stability guarenteed or your money back!
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
don't welcome any new ads. The only good ad is the blocked/skipped ad.
Yeah, but I hate to break it to you: you're not the majority. How many non-football fans watch the SuperBowl each year because of the commericials? A lot. That's because it's the one time of the year that you can be guaranteed that advertisers are honestly trying to catch your attention. So much of the other advertisements are bland and uninteresting. They're just not trying.
I think as technologies like TiVo start to take off there is going to be more and more pressure placed on adverising companies to come up with innovative ads that people won't mind sitting through. The real pickle for these companies is constantly coming up with new ads that are entertaining and push the limits and still not offensive to the majority of the American public. When I was younger I often wondered why ads suck so much. Surely there are tons of witty people who could write clever ads! Why aren't they being given the chance? Well, as I grew older I started to realize that a lot of humor is actually borderline offensive to a lot of people. Or they're simply too slow to 'get' the joke. Humor is, of course, the cheapest way to construct an interesting commerical. Other ways include novel imagery but this takes more talent and, arguably, more money.
Anyhow, I'm thinking that in the next 5 years we're going to see an improvement in the quality of advertisements to the point that they start to become entertainment in their own right. If companies do not do this, their ads are simply going to get blocked/skipped by an increasingly dissatisfied viewing public.
GMD
watch this
I saw a woman get kicked out of shopping mall once for breast-feeding her baby. I was sat close by with my wife and we didn't even notice. She was just sat quietly next to her stroller feeding her kid.
With that kind of brute insensitivity to the naked body you really expect the U.S. to show ads that just might disgust an audience that thinks breast feeding in public is perverted?
Honda's "Cog" ad is a direct homage to The Way Things Go, a 30 minute film of an amazing kinetic art installation (here's a video clip.)
You have to see this at least once in your life -- it's the most amazing "Rube Goldberg" contraption you'll ever see.
Dear advertising execs:
If you're going to put ads on the air, make them good and funny. And I don't mean ha-ha-shut-up funny, I mean really funny, maybe even piss-my-pants funny (but only the first ten times). I still won't buy your product, but you could at least entertain me.
With much contempt,
bersl2
Won't see this in the U.S., been trying to find a download of it since coming back from Australia but no luck. Goes something like this...
Beautiful woman is sitting at a restaurant table. The waiter delivers her drink and says "take your top off for a chance to win $10000!"
Woman: "You're joking!"
Waiter: "No, really!"
Woman: "Take my top off, that's all I need for a shot at $10000?"
Waiter: "That's right."
Woman has her already-skimpy top off in a flash. Cut back to the Waiter with a stunned expression.
"I meant the top off your Diet Coke..."
How about this---
John Smith's wildly popular U.K. beer spots by TBWA star well-known comedian Peter Kay as an overweight, useless parent who uses a sausage and a beer glass to illustrate the facts of life. Only a U.K. marketer would endorse such a loser as a brand spokesman
Umm, hello?
Dell Dude anyone?
Although they are fake, we cannot discount the highly suggestive Puma ads. Hubba Hubba!
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
The main problem with coal (and Oil, for that matter) is that they both involve releasing large quantities of Carbon from geo-lock. Because Fossil fuels have been sealed away from the environment for so long the chemical balance of the atmosphere and the ecosystems in general have evolved to deal with less carbon abundance. The rate of release of the fosil fuel carbon is astounding in terms of evolutionary and environmental studies, and could have a number of long term bad effects (lower atmospheric oxygen levels on a global scale) too soon in the near future for a solution to have been devised. It is better (cleaner, cheaper, more affordable) to burn trees: modern oxidation methods can reduce carbon particulate polution to almost nil, and trees get their carbon from the air - making growing a tree and burning it again a zero delta for carbon levels.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
one for the poms...
Any truth to the story I've heard about a new Becks beer ad ? tagline (supposedly) goes
you don't need to be Posh to swallow Becks
My grandmother got married a month before she graduated from highschool and had to keep it a secret or they would hav expelled her because she might corrupt the other girls. Whatever. To this day we segregate girls who get pregnant in highschool like they had some sort of communicable disease. And we still get our panties in a twist because the someone might want to marry someone who has the same genetals as them.
The USA is incredably sexually screwed up.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Mention on Slashdot: Priceless. ;)
Stop deluding yourself and others
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
I saw this Dutch ad on the Internet a couple years ago. Apparently it's an ad for English classes. That's not the only reason it would never been shown in the US though.
Quicktime Video
I think that Honda, and the ad agency, is lying.
Rob Steiner, agency producer for Wieden & Kennedy, says that not only were practical effects more attuned to the tagline of the commercial, but CG would not have done the job visually, either. "You couldn't create that type of tension with CG," he says.
However, computers did come into play in the editing phase. Indeed, what looks to be one continuous shot is actually two, seamlessly stitched together by Flame operator Barnsley of The Mill in London.
"Our reason for shooting it in two 60-second pieces was damage limitation, really," explains Steiner. "We knew everything physically worked." But the contraption simply wouldn't fit down the length of a single wall at the Paris studio, so half was built and filmed on one side and half on the other.
With the intent of making the spot look like one continuous take, lighting and shadows in the studio had to look smooth over the full two minutes. Still, "due to constant movement, we couldn't even give [Barnsley] a good lighting reference," says Steiner.
"Ads will HAVE to become better very soon"
Apparently you missed some of the finer points of this bit here. Why make better commercials when you can redefine the medium to require viewing of commercials? Think "Disney DVD."
We already have the "broadcast bit" in our flavor of ATSC now, what's to stop some new standard including a "no channel surfing bit?" It would allow broadcasters to charge even more to advertisers, which they would then argue would enable more/better shows. Why wouldn't Congress let this happen?
Although the idea itself was a bit novel, and hadn't been done before that I could remember, here is where it falls over
"take your top off for a chance to win $10000!"
Most people, obviously including this girl, would take that statement as referring to their "clothing" top. She was silly enough to take it literally - which is the lameness in the ad.
OTOH, if he had given her the drink and said "take the top off for a chance to win $100000!", it would have worked better because the "top" became ambiguous. Still, it then becomes insulting to either that beautiful woman specifically, implying the dumb "beautiful" woman stereotype (she was brunette, if she was blonde there would have been a huge outcry), or all woman in general, as it implies they all would be silly enough abandon their dignity in a restaurant for money (and only $10 000 - I'd suggest for most people the "abandon dignity" threshold is $1 000 000).
Now, I don't think I'm a prude, but there are two things in TV ads that I find offensive, as a (male) child of the 70s, brought up in the post feminist era :
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Por supuesto, todavia esta vivo
Here's a link to the ad mentioned:
e _bra.mov
http://www.msboycott.com/media/microsoft_ad_offic
-Shippy
The movies work fine in xine, too. I had to launch it from the command-line rather than the browser because of the weird protocol (what *is* mms, anyway?)
Here are the commands you want, to save you digging around the page:
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/mrkippling- birth.asf- babies.asfl l_gore.asfo aches.asf a sf
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/johnsmiths
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/carenz-sku
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/sylvania-r
and of course
xine mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/honda-cog.
Remove the spaces Slashcode's put in the URLs, of course.
(And there's only one P in "Mr. Kipling"...)
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
...look no farther than how American ads portray men and fathers. You mentioned role reversals, but the issue warrants more of a mention than that. Men and fathers are portrayed as helpless idiots, inferior parents and "humorously" subjected to violence.
There's the add where the woman takes pictures of items so her brainless husband can find the items in the store, the Dodge minivan ad with the caption "gets more work done than most husbands", the candy bar ad where a squirrel chomps on a guys nuts, the (insurance?) ad where the guy doesn't care that he's spilled hot coffee on his crotch, and worst of all, the Progressive Insurance ad where a vindictive woman tortures her ex with a voodoo doll site - including taking a pair of wire cutters to his testicles.
If women in this country were subjected to as much humiliation, or female genital mutilation was treated as a joke in a commercial, there would be blood in the streets and NOW would be storming these advertizing agencies with tanks.
I'd happily abandon my dignity for ten bucks.
Bah, an actor flubbing a line isn't neceessarily a disaster. If you think about it, people have been putting on plays for thousands of years, and as far as I know, the tradition is not, in any culture, to start over from the beginning if an actor messes up a line. Usually they just try to recover & keep going, and I'm sure that it was the same way with Russian Ark.
That's not to say that Russian Ark wasn't interesting, but the single-take thing isn't unprecedented: Alfred Hitchcock did the same thing with Rope. That film is shown as a single, uninterrupted narrative, but it was shot in a series of 8 minute takes, because traditional film cameras can't hold any more film than that. Russian Ark got around that constraint by shooting with digital film, which can run longer than a reel of 35mm movie film.
I think there are a handful of other examples of this, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. There are some movies shot in real time -- Gary Cooper's High Noon probably being the best example, but also recent ones like Time Code and Nick of Time. Interestingly, even though it's presented as one shot, "Rope" doesn't count as a real time story, because events are presented in an accelerated way (short dinner, fast sunset, etc) so that 100 minutes of "actual" time goes by in 80 minutes of "screen" time. But then, apparently "Russian Ark" covers centuries, so it's not even trying for that one :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
When I was in Taiwan there was a German company selling heaters there and the add company they hired put Hitler on the sides of busses and billboards announcing this Heater from this company would Win the War on the Cold Front!
It didn't take long for the German company to find out and fire the add company, but that is an add you won't see in America (and sure as heck not in Germany).
According to another article at AdAge.com (the same periodical as the main story comes from):
CINCINNATI (AdAge.com) -- Recent internal research by Procter & Gamble Co. indicates that consumers who fast-forward through ads with digital personal video recorders such as TiVo still recall those ads at roughly the same rates as people who see them at normal speed in real time.
Source: March 17, 2003
Can't link/copy the whole article, because they charge a few $$ for it.
It's morning here, and as I started reading "people upset because they won't get commercials" I figured I had gotten it all wrong and so I read it again.
And again.
Now, I know I'm gonna get stomped down for being a communist or something, but if I were you, I'd be quite happy not to get flooded by any more mindless brainwash designed to turn us all into happy Consumers than we already are!
We do not need commercials to tell us what we need.