Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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..."
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.
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
...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.
This and other posts I see all the time on Slashdot hit that most hit of nails sqaure on the head. The market (that'd be us) wants to be able to watch our shows when it suits us and skip the crappy commercials so we buy PVRs. The Industry responds by suing PVR manufacturers, putting the commercials IN the shows themselves and generally jamming it's fingers in it's ears and humming really loud. And yet these same people, so terrified of losing advertising viewers, when confronted with the evidence that there are many commercials that not only do consumers want to see, they actually want to download them and pass them around to each other - (ie, the same people who skip over crappy ads like the good ads so much they will happily spend their own time and resources to distibute them) - the industry responds by trying to shut down the websites that make this possible (remember what they did to the first incarnation of adcritic) and if they ever do decide to make them available online they do so in some crappy streaming format. It must be just me, but if I'd spent a million dollars to produce a spot so funny/compelling/whatever that ordinary people are going out of their way to see, I'd make damnned sure it was available on the net in every format possible, via webistes, bittorrent, kazaa and carrier pigeon.
Faced with their markets avalanching away from their beloved business models to third party on-demand digital alternatives the various industries (RIAA, networks, advertisers et al) have made the decision that it's the consumer who is wrong and therefore the only solution is to re-apply their failed methodology with even more vigour only now with DRM, region encoding, lawsuits and "re-education" campaigns.
Networks and advertisers should be partnering with PVR makers, not fighting them - every PVR should not only report back (anonymously) exactly how many people are watching what show, but what commercials they are skipping and which ones they are stopping to actually see. Let the advertiser's message live or die by the quality of that message; no-one watches your ad? Tough. Make a better one. (I'm talking to whoever made the current crappy "Intern" Dell commercials here)
The networks also like to bleat on about trying to fund their shows from dropping advertising revenues. I worked on a show for years, and I can tell you that not only was money pissed against the wall, it was more often than not fed into high pressure hoses and blasted directly into the furnace. There's no way these shows actually cost these huge amounts to make. It's just from inefficiancies on set, all the way up to the top-heavy upper echelon parasites, vast amounts of production money is either wasted or siphoned off as "fees". If networks really are worried about the cost of producing these shows versus the amount of money they can recoup from selling advertising they could probably start by firing a few VPs, (for christ's sake, these people are simply content aggregators - how many "development execs" do they need to just buy shows from production companies and put em on the air?) and actually putting some damnned oversight into how their production budgets get spent.
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.