Clever and rather obsessive readers who work in the advertising business, when faced with this question, will immediately begin reeling off the names of the hottest advertising agencies around the globe. But stop there. This is a question for all of us, not just ad nerds. We?ll come on to the (dangerously controversial) matter of which ad agency produces the best advertising in the world later. First, which company, which brand, makes the best ads?

Go on, have a guess. ( Read more... )
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Jones, left, runs the advertising agency Euro RSCG, which won the Tory account after producing an image for The Sun's campaign for a European referendum, which ended up as the newspaper's front page. Featuring Gordon Brown in a Churchillian pose, but with his two fingers stuck up in disdain, it carried the slogan: "Never have so few decided so much for so many."

Now Jones and Euro RSCG's UK group chairman Kate Robertson are planning an ambitious event they hope ( Read more... )
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The watchdog received 82 complaints about three posters for the soft drink but said the slogans were unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence.

The majority of the complaints were about a poster which read "Too much Tango made me suck a bull's udder".

People said the slogan was offensive, irresponsible and unsuitable for public display because they believed it suggested oral sex with a bull.

But the ASA said there would be no such ( Read more... )
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Well, sorry. User-generated advertising is only over because it's been reborn and rebranded as something altogether more significant and ? if you work in advertising ? something altogether more pernicious: crowd-sourcing. You can probably tell from this fashionable new name (less functional, more conceptual) that crowdsourcing has become the latest thing, darling, in advertising and marketing circles.

And this time it's serious. Instead of a bit of playful dabbling ? ( Read more... )
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BlackBerry, the US technology company, is likely to have paid millions for the right to play a cover version of the 1967 "flower power" song in a series of TV adverts for its smartphones.

One online critic wrote: "The idea of using this song to sell a product is distasteful enough, but BlackBerry uses a cover version with a whiny vocal that is so annoying that the song actually elicits hatred."

Another complained: "It sounds horrible. It's disgusting that companies are trying to make ( Read more... )
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Shadowy characters have long been used by the tabloid papers to scare and thrill their readers, but this creation of the advertising giant McCann Erickson on behalf of the Newspaper Marketing Agency, which represents the national press, is intended to shock a particular community, namely the marketing directors and media planners who decide where advertising budgets will be spent.

McCann?s London chief executive, Chris McDonald, has delighted in debunking the modern ( Read more... )
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The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) meets this week to discuss initiating a formal investigation into Cadbury's TV advert ? slogan "show us your cocoa beam" ? which features a giant, negroid rotating head that unleashes mass dancing among what appear to be highly excitable people in an African village.

The advert and an associated poster campaign mark the chocolate firm's move to Fairtrade, but critics say this move has been overshadowed by the campaign's portrayal of African people ( Read more... )
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"The internet has now overtaken television advertising to become the UK's single biggest advertising medium," the IAB said, adding it now accounts for 23.5 per cent of the total market. Industry experts pointed to more time spent online, faster broadband speeds and more sophisticated online techniques as reasons for the shift.

The IAB said: "The results signal a significant restructure of marketing budgets as advertisers follow their audiences online and look to the ( Read more... )
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If you are tempted to say "so what?" cast your mind back to last September when the global banking system came close to meltdown. Despite the collapse of some of the world's biggest financial institutions, as the UK lifts out of recession and the big deals return, City greed could again hold sway over the nation's best interest. What might have appeared to be a small change in City media practices was in fact the start of a fault line in which the financial press lost their ( Read more... )
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It's not hard to see how the German creatives came up with the idea of Hitler having sex. Coming up with the idea, though, is one thing, having the nerve to make it into an ad is quite another. The result is a steamy soft-core porn film of a couple having sex, all grinding bodies and swinging breasts. It's not until the end frame that we see the man's face: a sweaty, straining, orgasmic Hitler appears, alongside the line "Aids is a mass murderer". The ad is beyond shocking, ( Read more... )
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The campaign, for hotel and holiday group NH Hoteles, ran on lastminute.com with the strapline "The Organisers. Operation Bikini".

NH Hotels' advert featured a woman and a girl in bikinis striking poses associated with fashion models.

The Advertising Standards Authority received one complaint that the image was offensive because it showed a young girl in a "sexually provocative pose".

NH Hoteles said that the image was part of a wider campaign, called Verano ( Read more... )
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The shots for trendy Los Angeles-based retailer American Apparel showed the girl wearing just a hooded top and shorts with minimal make-up.

In each picture she progressively revealed more skin until the final frame in which she wore the fleece unzipped with her nipple partially exposed.

American Apparel argued that the model was 23 and the six images showed how to use the top to create different looks.

But the Advertising Standards Agency decided "the photographs ( Read more... )
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I couldn't have been more wrong. What I didn't realise is that, mere seconds after they had grasped the concept of rational argument, they would also master the concept of arguing back. Suddenly it was like living with a couple of tiny George Carmans. "Why did you buy that hat?" "Why did we have to buy a black car?"

What makes this endless cross-examination of your life so mentally exhausting is that we really have no conscious, rational explanation for most of what ( Read more... )
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In eight short months, the British public has adopted the dapper Russian meerkat Aleksandr and his beautifully ridiculous "comperthemeerkat" website. Even better: this wave of affection has transformed the fortunes of the price-comparison website Comparethemarket.com which is, after all, paying for the whole caboodle.

So it is no surprise that Aleksandr has sent shockwaves through the price comparison website market. There is now a mad scramble among rivals to ( Read more... )
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Since Katie and Philip made their debut as the Oxo couple in 1958, Oxo's advertising has been a totem for the British way of life. Post post-war austerity, Katie and Philip represented all the promise of the modern age: good food, a nice house, a stable marriage ? thanks to the fact that Katie knew Oxo "gives a meal man appeal".

In 1983 a new Oxo Family was born, arriving into the recovering economic climate of Thatcher's Britain. Just as cradle-to-grave social certainties ( Read more... )
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Audi A4 Driving Challenge

Players test drive their A4 round challenging courses and the iPhone's accelerometer, which detects movement, tests your hand/eye co-ordination.

Barclaycard Waterslide Extreme

The Waterslide Extreme game, by Dare, has just become the number one free iPhone app in 57 countries, and the most popular free ad game since the app store launched. Tilt the phone to navigate a person down a giant shute, ( Read more... )
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Then factor into that equation the knowledge that you could, at pretty much any time of the day or night, be called out to fire fight on behalf of Amy Winehouse, one of the more volatile stars on your client list. And if not Amy, then maybe it will be Naomi, or Scary Spice. Would you then be prepared to represent a certain Ms Katie Price, fresh from her highly-public marriage bust-up?

You would if you were the publicist Alan Edwards, one of the most influential Britons in the global entertainment ( Read more... )
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Now, I know that describing something as the latest hot thing in marketing will have cynics assuming this is just another bit of commercial candy floss, all hype and no stamina. History, dear cynics, is on your side (does anyone remember Second Life?). But AR will literally change your world. Think Minority Report meets Star Wars, but not in a galaxy far, far away. In your street, at the shops, certainly at work.

First, though, the basics. Really, this whole Augmented ( Read more... )
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Attendance, in the end, was down by about 40 per cent as the industry put aside pleasure for prudence. At every turn, money is seeping out of the business, so splashing some of it around on the Côte D'Azur was not for the nervous. In fact, as a result, Cannes was rather more purist than usual. This year it was a place for winners and for those agencies that have approached the economic downturn with ambition.

Oh, and it was also a place for the big network chiefs to play ( Read more... )
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Tellingly, it was that most arrogant of Government departments, the Treasury, that defied him, as it pursued its vendetta against the Bank of England. Mr Bercow issued his injunction on Wednesday: The Treasury handed the Financial Times the details of its forthcoming White Paper on banking regulation in time for Friday's edition. The story? The Bank will have to share powers with the Financial Services Authority. Not Watergate, admittedly, but a useful scoop, and a slap in the face for the Bank. ( Read more... )
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