Tuesday, June 3, 2008, 08:13 AM
We have been relentlessly told that our insatiable appetite for personal mobility is costing the planet. We have become acutely aware of our carbon footprint and tread as lightly as we can. In social situations, we feel a pang of self-consciousness when talking about our long-distance holiday trips - such reckless pollution doesn't go down well any more.
And so one can be excused for feeling a little confounded when one reads here that it is a bad thing that US travellers have in the last 12 months avoided 41 million flights that they would otherwise have taken. Seems that it's bad for the economy, now.
There's no pleasing people, is there?
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Friday, May 30, 2008, 08:18 AM
Most advertising is bland, boring safe stuff. Occasionally, a daring company will do something a bit spectacular, which these days amounts to giving people entertainment that doesn't necessarily push the product (Honda and now Cadburys have got this right).
But once in a while, someone comes along and makes something so fundamentally weird, that you have to replay the ad just to check that you had not been hallucinating.
So without further ado, please sit back and enjoy this bonkers commercial for a KIA car:
Alarmingly, there's an even more disturbing version of this out there, viewable at this link here - it appears to be the same ad, but they actually decided to edit the bit where the tennis star inserts his limbs into a host of mini-people. You will see the difference and be truly disturbed.
Just goes to show - once you have released the viral genie from its bottle, it is so difficult to put it back in...
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Thursday, May 22, 2008, 07:00 PM
I was left shocked and dismayed by the outcome of The Apprentice last night. I felt almost as winded as a Chelsea fan who had just seen John Terry's penalty skid the wrong side of the upright. I knew that Alan Sugar lacked elegance, but that he could also be so lacking in commercial judgement was quite beyond me.
If you missed the programme, he compared two ads made by his teams for tissues, assisted also by Ogilvy, which presumably in their wisdom they plucked as a right-minded ad agency. I was dumbfounded when he opted for a nasty, misleading, amateurishly-scripted ad that basically suggested an antibacterial tissue could cure a poorly child. When I first saw the ad, I chuckled to myself, looking forward to the deserved bollocking that its creators would receive. The British public would see through this as quickly as they would an ad for a ketchup that cures cancer.
But no... he not only picked the stinker of an ad (aided and abetted by the cutting edge advertising minds of Ogilvy), but also fired the wrong man - Raef Bjayou. Never before had it been so clear that the mighty Sugar has a very slight problem with those of a more privileged class.
Still, this from the man who despises the ad industry, and managed to better undermine it in one programme than in years of moaning about how few Amstrads it has shifted him...
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Saturday, April 19, 2008, 10:50 PM
Who was it who decided that all jeans should be blue?[ add comment ] | permalink
Friday, April 18, 2008, 12:45 AM
Entering two YouTube vids in quick succession on my blog smacks of laziness, however this one is a milestone. It is the first time our daughter Ruby and I have sat together and both enjoyed a movie together. We both laughed, and she ended up doing a good mimic of the high hooting noise.
Enjoy.
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