10 Ads The US Won't See 536
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.
kazaa (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about ads you can only see here? (Score:4, Informative)
The inspiration for Honda's "Cog" ad (Score:5, Informative)
Honda's "Cog" ad is a direct homage to The Way Things Go [frif.com], a 30 minute film [yahoo.com] of an amazing kinetic art installation (here's a video clip [tcfilm.ch].)
You have to see this at least once in your life -- it's the most amazing "Rube Goldberg" contraption you'll ever see.
Re:But... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/autos/business/hondacog.a
American advertising is *really* conservative... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm from Australia, and the one thing that's extremely noticeable about US advertising is the huge numbers of drug commercials. Here in Australia, advertising perscription drugs is banned (though drug companies try to subvert the ban by funding ads that say something like "consult your doctor about treating disease X" without mentioning the drug they're pushing).
Re:The inspiration for Honda's "Cog" ad (Score:3, Informative)
I doubted this was true (the quality of the light is almost "too perfect") so I did a bit of looking around and found a little more about the production [deathfall.com]. Wow. (And it only took 606 takes [dailyrecord.co.uk].)
As someone else noted, there's one bit of CG work. Quoting the Daily Record Just one second of computer generation is used to link the two halves - when an exhaust pipe rolls across the floor.
OTOH, "The Way Things Go" is a single 30 minute take.
Japanderers (Score:3, Informative)
Japanese ads that will never air in the US [japander.com] (works in Xine).
They did use CG/Editing. Honda's claims are false (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Help us out (Score:1, Informative)
Ireland also has "taking the mickey out of him", which is much the same thing - the phrase comes from you notionally "reducing the efficiacy of his penis" by embarrassing him. Island nations (Britain, Ireland, Japan, etc.) tend to run societies like that.
MMS / ASF Streams will work with mplayer! (Score:1, Informative)
the mms URLS, then load them in gmplayer.
Works great!
#gmplayer mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/mrkippling
#gmplayer mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/carenz-sku
#gmplayer mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/johnsmiths
#gmplayer mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/sylvania-r
#gmplayer mms://windowsmedia.dvlabs.com/adcritic/honda-cog.
(Note remove any extra spaces in the text above if you want to just cut and paste.)
They work fine in xine, too. (Score:4, Informative)
The movies work fine in xine [sourceforge.net], 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" [mrkipling.co.uk]...)
Re:Shit nuggets taste better than testicles?! (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, that sort of thing is all too common [wpxi.com]. It varies by state [lalecheleague.org], though-- for example, it's explicitly legal in Florida [lalecheleague.org].
IANAL.
How Honda got its groove back... (Score:3, Informative)
'Nuff said. Look it up if you don't know.
But OK, I can't resist, so:
I remember when the thing came out and there was the point that they "cheated" once or twice. I believe the "cheating" was less about physics than about photography - maybe the speakers?
In any case I hope Peter and David were paid well for this, 'cause if not then it's a rip-off of the highest order.
Not that they'd find that a bad thing necessarily... we artists are usually tickled pink to be plagiarized by Big Capital, and it certainly doesn't hurt our prices.
Since I live in both the "traditional" (painting) art world and the "new media" (computer/network/etc) world, I always find it amusing how people in the latter tend to be more ignorant of the former than the other way around. Even though there is always a lot of osmotic exchange of ideas between the two.
Re:I 4 1 (Score:2, Informative)
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o
Re:even better than The Way Things Go (Score:4, Informative)
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 [imdb.com], but the single-take thing isn't unprecedented: Alfred Hitchcock did the same thing with Rope [imdb.com]. 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 [imdb.com] probably being the best example, but also recent ones like Time Code [imdb.com] and Nick of Time [imdb.com]. 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 :-)
Re:Shit nuggets taste better than testicles?! (Score:2, Informative)
Freudian bullshit. It amazes me that people still say such nonsense, many years after Freud's pseudoscientific crap has been completely disproved.
Here are a couple of good places to start: 1 [skepdic.com] 2 [amazon.com].
Re:Shit nuggets taste better than testicles?! (Score:3, Informative)
SCORE: +3 STUPID +2 IGNORANT.
If you smoke crack, whether you're in highschool or not, it's a bad thing. I'm not saying getting pregnant in high school is good, but I am saying that I wouldn't mind my (hypothetical) 6 year old daughter hanging around a 28 year old responsible pregnant woman. Your logic is aweful.
People get pregnant. It happens. Pregnacny is a beautiful thing. My fiancee and I have a kid on the way (she's 4ish months pregnant). We're both 22, and it seems to be the thing to think that 22 is young to be having a kid. But, we love each other, and we love the kid (already, even before birth).
But, to compare this to crack is... just irresponsible at best, and damaging at worst. Pregnancy is a wonderful thing that has it's place and time. Crack has neither: it destroys lives and relationships. To be facing the pregnancy question a little early, and compare it to crack... are you suggesting that there's a proper time in one's life to smoke crack? That you'd let your kids hang out with crack addicts, as long as they're 30 and married? The longer I type, the less of a point I see in your arguement, and the more pissed off at you I am.
Telling your kids that pregnant people in high school are bad, and you shouldn't hang around them, is a terrible thing to do. Often, girls in this situation need love, appreciation, and support. To cut them off because they're diseased is just wrong on every human level I know of.
It's not possible. You can't marry someone of the same gender anymore than you can murder a dead man. The meaning of the word prevents it from happening.
From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed.:
MARRIAGE - NOUN: 1a. The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife. b. The state of being married; wedlock. c. A common-law marriage. d. A union between two persons having the customary but usually not the legal force of marriage: a same-sex marriage.
Look, the arguement is "marriage is blah, special, a sacrement, this, that, the other thing". Fine. Whatever. Call that marriage, and call equal protection for couples under the law "civil union".
The arguement stands like thus:
Conservative Preacher: "Gay marriage would ruin the specialness of marriage"
Gays: "Fine, whatever, don't call it marriage. In the mean time, we have a loving, monomogous relationship, and your laws are costing us a lot of money that we wouldn't have to otherwise pay if we were like you".
Conservative Preacher: "Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman."
Gays: "Dude. Don't call it marriage if it makes you feel better. Whatever. But, whatever the civil, protected by US law equivilancy is, we'd like to have that".
Conservative Preacher: "Same sexed couples cannot have children on their own, therefore they should not have be entitled to the protections of marriage."
Gays: "How does the ability of two people to have children relate to their home loan interest rate? To their need to pay more taxes? To their need for more expensive health insurance (no children should mean less expensive health insurance)?"
Whatever. Every arguement I've heard against gay marriage goes back to the definition of marriage, which is defined in an anti-gay religious sense. However, somehow this has been extended to the law, and it's just stupid. There are 2 parts to a union-between-two-people. One is the part that the church, god, and your parents will recognize. The other is the one that the IRS, blue cross/blue shield, and Century21 will recognize. All that most gay people want is the 2nd part, and they're even willing to not call it marriage, opting for calling it what it really is, a "civil" (or having to do with the law) "union" (partnership of two people).
Re:What about ads you can only see here? (Score:2, Informative)
I was told this by a journalism prof, thought it was bullshit, then picked up a copy of Maximum Rock'n'Roll, saw that there was a new Fugazi album coming out (because Dischord put in an ad to tell me) and I was enlightened.