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.
But... (Score:5, Interesting)
The solution to TV advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
All advertising must be done live. No pre-taped commercials, ever. Even if it's the same script read by the same person there will be some difference. Now if a company spends a mil or two on a commercial it'll really mean something.
Of course it'll never happen, but if it did I'd be alot happier with advertising.
Jonah Hex
What about TiVo? (Score:3, Interesting)
Stick a line on the Now Showing screen labelled "Check out the ads THEY don't want you to see!" or something like that.
If the ads are compelling enough to straddle the advertisement/entertainment line, people will watch. I watched those BMW commercials that ran in the same slot a while back-- didn't make me run out and buy one, but they were entertaining.
~Philly
This is wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
So basically, the good ads aren't broadcast, and I have to Tivo-triple-fast-forward all the ones I *do* get on TV because they're such a tripe.
Here's a suggestion for TV networks : instead of trying to sue DVR manufacturers because it lets customers skip your crap, why don't you replace the crap with good ads (and no, I'm not talking about Budweiser or Taco Bell ads)? Of course, you may have to leave good taste behind once in a while, but I bet good ads would being better brand recognition with less airtime, meaning less ads for viewers overall and less DVR zapping.
Re:What about ads you can only see here? (Score:0, Interesting)
Take anything that has to do with WWII and the nazis, look at how France and Germany react to things like that. They're way more restrictive than we are. And Germany has serious limits on the realistic depiction of violence in video games, so that will certainly affect what can be advertised there.
We're pretty serious prudes, but we dont have the market totally cornered.
Re:What about ads you can only see here? (Score:5, Interesting)
- Commercials every 5-7 minutes (and they lasted 5-7 minutes, too!)
- LOTS of car commercials. And the arguments were not about fuel economy, environment, or safety, but how fast and impressive they were.
The most absurd commercial I saw were clips advocating coal energy. The tagline was like "Electricity from coal: Cleaner, more
affordable and abudantly better.".
Also, regarding the article: I remember watching some sort of short documentary by Playboy a few years back, and they also covered commercials in Europe. I was quite fascinated when the narrator and commentaries were like "How can you even remember what they are advertising, this is hot stuff" - In a Rexona ad, two women get sweaty at the gym and afterwards go take a shower and use Rexona's soap. I don't think anyone in here would have considered that erotic or arousing, but apparently to American eyes it was like hard-core porn
Re:Shit nuggets taste better than testicles?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
That anti-drug ad... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it should be banned for sheer stupidity rather than for any sort of inappropriateness.
Re:What about ads you can only see here? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:But... (Score:2, Interesting)
In the UK, Honda gave it out on a free DVD to anyone who 'phoned - I got mine, but the idiots who encoded it did it letterbox rather than anamorphic.
I blame the agency for not knowing the difference.
Re:But... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Clean coal burning (Score:4, Interesting)
Becks Beer Ad (Score:4, Interesting)
Any truth to the story I've heard about a new Becks beer ad ? tagline (supposedly) goes
you don't need to be Posh to swallow Becks
Re:That anti-drug ad... (Score:3, Interesting)
No! No! Too Radical! Throw him out!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a radical solution to television advertising. It has worked for me for almost 18 months now - and I think you know what's coming next...
Throw out your television.
Yeah, yeah - I get flamed by people irl about this too. The lady at the cigarette counter at my local supermarket told me just last night that for someone to lack a television in this modern day was "just tragic!"
I see less shit ads though...
Re:Ads will HAVE to become better very soon (Score:3, Interesting)
Along similar lines, I hate to break it to you but Superbowl ads do not reflect peoples' opinions of ads in general. I would tend to agree with Zangief, that most people consider most ads (excluding those rare ones such as Superbowl ads or Honda's "Cog") at best ignorable, and if possible would completely eliminate them altogether.
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.
I agree, and would welcome that. We even have a precedent for that, where daytime soaps (which, although I personally consider them not much more entertaining than ads, they do seem popular) started out as serial soap commercials.
Re:What about ads you can only see here? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sir John A. Macdonald [friends.ca] (QuickTime 4.4MB):
Richard the Rocket [friends.ca](QuickTime 4.2MB):
Snow Gangsta [friends.ca] (QuickTime 4.2MB):
Bobby Orr [friends.ca] (QuickTime 2.8MB):
Re:But... (Score:3, Interesting)
The ironic part is that channel4 here in the UK had done a 3h show on the 100 best adverts in the history of British TV only about two weeks or so before Cog was first shown. I'm sure Cog would have knocked the Guinness 'Waiting' ad off the top spot.
Re:No! No! Too Radical! Throw him out!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
The TV is not the problem. Keep it for the console games. It's the broadcast that is broken. Are your friends upset because your house isn't entertaining enough to them since you don't have a TV, a DVD collection, etc? That would make sense, and of course it'd be their problem and not yours.
But I'm still trying to figure out how the subject of your not having a TV became a point of interest for the "lady at the cigarette counter."
I'm also wondering how you got the strength to quit TV but not quit smoking.
Actually, I found it quite lame (Score:3, Interesting)
Although the idea itself was a bit novel, and hadn't been done before that I could remember, here is where it falls over
"take your top off for a chance to win $10000!"
Most people, obviously including this girl, would take that statement as referring to their "clothing" top. She was silly enough to take it literally - which is the lameness in the ad.
OTOH, if he had given her the drink and said "take the top off for a chance to win $100000!", it would have worked better because the "top" became ambiguous. Still, it then becomes insulting to either that beautiful woman specifically, implying the dumb "beautiful" woman stereotype (she was brunette, if she was blonde there would have been a huge outcry), or all woman in general, as it implies they all would be silly enough abandon their dignity in a restaurant for money (and only $10 000 - I'd suggest for most people the "abandon dignity" threshold is $1 000 000).
Now, I don't think I'm a prude, but there are two things in TV ads that I find offensive, as a (male) child of the 70s, brought up in the post feminist era :
if you like sexism... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This is wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What about ads you can only see here? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:breast feeding on live Australian TV (Score:1, Interesting)
One of the female hosts recently had her first child, and one night after coming back from an ad break, she was sitting in her usual spot breast feeding her baby.
Quite possibly the first time on live national television.
Re:funny == good && good bad (Score:1, Interesting)
Its a fact of life. Clients want to be creative and will ignore the advice of a 15yr creative veteran with 40 different global awards and push their fucked up changes. It sucks, but thats the job. Don't like it, then quit. There's always an endless supply of 18yr old creative wannabe's with award school certs wanting to get in. (and if your a really penny punching Ad agency, their free as in beer)
Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
More ads you wont be seeing. (Score:1, Interesting)
In the land of the free press most of the free press (bar CNN) wont accept advertising thats unpatriotic or critical of corporate greed. They use bogus excuses about it being too discursive and issue orientated - crap like that.
Fact is corporate America gets its butt kissed by the press it gives advertising money to; not surprising but certainly hypocritical.
And the press doesnt want to piss off an unelected thug like Bush, well OK, elected by the Supreme Court if not the people.