Market This!

Here’s a nice little PSA for teens on standing strong when girlfriends or boyfriends try to pressure or control you via cellphone. The spot is called “That’s Not Cool.”

The music and narration are nice, but the use of sock puppets and talking apples seems a little Sesame Street to us. And we’re guessing (though we could be wrong) that this isn’t a message for 6-year olds so much as it is for 16-year olds.

What do you think? Is this visual style hip and edgy animation a la “Coraline” and “The Science of Sleep?” Or is it missing the key demographic with its Saturday morning Nickelodeon puppet look?

Via AdFreak and AdWeek.

Aw, c’mon, Twitter. With your latest round of financing yielding a reported $100 million, you can spare a paltry million, can’t you?

I mean, if someone had just given you 100 bucks, you’d throw a dollar at a little girl selling lemonade on the corner, wouldn’t you?

C’moooon, Biz! We’ll be your best friend! We’ll tell all our friends about you! (Okay, we already have. But that’s not the point.)

No? You’re going to be stingy and hang onto the money?

Well, fine then. Hope you can figure out a way to invest it in something profitable, instead of just sitting on it like the rich, successful, revolutionary, influential miser you are…

When the new Audi R8 went on sale in Canada this year, it sold out fast.

Appropriate, since everything about this car is fast.

For those of us who missed out on taking one of these bad boys home, however, there is a solution: a giant sticker you can throw on your [closed] garage door to make it look like a[n open] garage door with an Audi R8 inside.

Clever, eh? (One commenter at Creativity Online mentions that Toyota did this back in 2007, but we’re guessing it didn’t generate the same neighbor-envy among those who got them…)

But here’s the rub: the cost for this little trinket is a whopping $469.99.

Oh, sure, that’s in Canadian dollars, but it’s still a chunk of change for a novelty item.

Then again, it is Audi, and their parts never were cheap, were they?

Here’s a clip to get the auto fans’ hearts racing…

Via AdAge.

New York City got hit this morning with 10,000 of these phony newspapers predicting an impending environmental apocalypse. The move is timed to precede Tuesday’s U.N. climate change summit, and was carried out by the Yes Men.

The most hilarious part? Since everything but the cover is fact-checked and accurate, the only thing Rupert Murdoch Corp could find to take issue with was the phony issue’s lack of creative writing skill.

The Post claimed it had “none of the wit and insight New Yorkers expect from their favorite paper,” calling it a “witless spoof in flawless format.”

Gotta protect your brand, right? If people know your paper for its outrageous headlines and pithy writing, make sure you defend that image at all costs. And whatever you do, don’t mention that this cheap knockoff, for all its lack of cheeky headlines, has probably bested the real thing from a journalistic standpoint.

For more, check out this video, the Yes Men press release, and the online version of the phony paper.

Listen man, if you’re looking for a cool decoration for your dorm room, I’ll give you my old Pink Floyd poster. It’s totally vintage now.

Apparently Asher Woodworth, 23, needed something a little grander in scope. So he recruited three female friends to stand watch (“Just stay there and be impressed by me, ladies. Oh, and tell me if anyone’s coming.”) while he climbed up on the roof of a Chili’s restaurant in Bennington, VT at 2 a.m. and tried to, er, “liberate” the sign using a drill and a hacksaw.

Asher plots the most "rad heist ever."

Though the arresting officer claimed “there was some thought put into this,” Asher didn’t have the foresight to use a battery-powered drill, opting instead to run 450 feet of extension cord across four lanes of traffic and up onto the roof of the restaurant. It turns out, however, that hacking the bolts off a Chili’s sign will trip their alarm (who knew?) so cops caught the group in the act.

The original story is here, and it keeps referencing the sign as a “logo.” So when we at A&B heard there was someone trying to “steal a logo,” we assumed it was an intellectual property issue. Imagine our delight when we learned it involved 4 idiotic college students, 6 extension cords and a hacksaw. (They must REALLY like the Chili’s brand identity…)

As a virtually-based marketing agency, we tend to embrace investment in, and adoption of, new technology wherever it can improve people’s lives.

So when we heard that a prep school in Massachusetts was dropping a cool half-mil on flat screens, laptop carousels, e-readers and a full-blown cafe for their library, we thought, “Good for them! Way to give your students a cutting-edge place to learn.”

But here’s the rub: they’re chucking all the books.

And why not? The future is digital, Cushing Academy says. Books are a dying technology. Nobody’s checking them out of the library anymore. We need to upgrade or be left behind!

Only this is a ridiculously short-sighted decision on the part of the school’s administration, for many reasons. A few of them:

• Some books aren’t free on the e-reader, meaning students may be relegated to reading books on computer screens (try doing 100 pages of Modern Lit reading on your iMac).
• Large, richly colored art history books can no longer be paged through and appreciated.
• Discovering interesting reading for enjoyment or research in the way that only a library allows becomes next to impossible.
• Just because fewer people are checking out books doesn’t mean no one needs/looks at them. Though its advocates rave that the Kindle is just like reading a paper book, it’s hard to imagine stumbling upon an interesting-looking title by chance and being drawn in by it.

To be sure, Cushing should absolutely be adopting the new technology. But the most basic question is this: when the tech you’re investing in (e-readers and flatscreens) takes up so little space, why do you need to get rid of the books at all? Isn’t there room to have both? Would it kill you to have a few stacks around the periphery? (Shit, you hung onto microfiche for at least 15 years after it was obsolete, didn’t you?)

Moreover, couldn’t a digital future integrate these two technologies, rather than dismissing one for the other? Couldn’t Cushing build a network that links websites, Kindle books and blogs on one side with relevant books, magazines and newspapers on the other?

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s hard to focus on the issue right now, since my laptop’s making my eyes burn.

Time to power down and pick up a good book…

via Josie Leavitt.

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