Posts Tagged ‘Advertising’
Ad Campaign Takes Aim At Climate Change
Martin Mittelstaedt reports on how the fight over climate change is heating up, for the Globe & Mail:
Friends of Science, a Calgary-based non-profit group, is running a national radio advertising campaign mocking the whole idea of climate change that has mainstream environmental groups miffed.
The groups are claiming that funding for the anti-global warming effort is coming from the oil and gas industry.
James Hoggan, chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, lashed out Tuesday at Friends of Science in a speech in Toronto, calling it one of several “industry front groups” in North America that are trying to create uncertainty about the existence of climate change to undermine next month’s United Nations climate change talks in Copenhagen.
The ads, which claim the planet has actually been becoming cooler in the past 10 years, have…
Amelia Earhardt Shills For Lucky Strike
In honor of the forthcoming biopic “Amelia,” the Sociological Images blog unearthed this 1928 ad in which Amelia Earhardt reveals that Lucky Strikes fueled her journey around the world.
“Fly”ing Advertisements
From animal:
Earlier this week, the US military revealed that’s it’s getting closer to realizing a fully operational squadron of robo-beetles for recon missions. But a couple of weeks ago, German publishing house Eichborn unleashed 200 “fliegenbanners” on startled conventioneers at the Frankfurt book fair. Ad agency Jung von Matt/Nectar says the mini-banners were designed “so that the fly could fly with it, but low and for short distances, constantly landing on visitors.” And I’m sure more than a couple of the winged mediums were then subsequently squished.
Half of All New Pharmaceutical Drugs Developed Fail to Beat Placebos … and Drugmakers are Scared
Have pharmaceutical companies gotten so good at advertising that now most people think the answer is in just taking a pill? Quite the Frankenstein effect for Big Pharma … perhaps the billions they spend on trying to convince people to take drugs they don’t need will be their undoing. (Big Pharma spends twice as much on marketing than research & development.)
Steve Silberman reports in Wired magazine:
Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn’t introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.
In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck’s research director, laid out his battle plan to restore…
Should Digitally-Altered Photos in Ads Carry Disclaimers?
Kind of interesting, and I doubt this would ever happen in the United States. Eric Pfanner writes in the New York Times (Image via Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tollieschmidt):
Concerned that girls and women feel excessive pressure to live up to the digitally Botoxed and liposuctioned images of human perfection they see in glossy magazines, lawmakers in Britain and France are trying to push advertisers to get real.
Under their proposals, ads containing altered photos of models would be required to carry disclaimers.
“When teenagers and women look at these pictures in magazines, they end up feeling unhappy with themselves,” said Jo Swinson, a British member of Parliament from the Liberal Democratic Party.
The Liberal Democrats, the third-largest party in Britain, after Labor and the Conservatives, adopted Ms. Swinson’s proposal for a labeling system this month as part…
