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It Just Works…After These Messages From Our Sponsors

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , July 28th, 2010 @ 10:22 am

While everybody has been obsessing over the iPhone 4G “Antennagate” issue, the British IT news website The Register notes that Apple has submitted a continuation of a patent they submitted in 2009 that integrates advertisements into the operating system in a way that literally stops everything the computer is doing and forces the user to watch the ad before letting them continue working.

The code would allow the user to temporarily delay the ad, as shown in the diagram above. The revised code in the new patent filing does remove provisions that would deter users from disabling or tampering with the function by causing the OS to stop responding to an input device (keyboard, mouse, etc.) or by causing the application that was running to “cease generating output”.

Apple explains the idea as a way to let people have “free” OS upgrades — instead of paying the typical $69-$129 that Apple charges for a major upgrade, you could have it for free in return for letting your computer be crippled by occasional advertisements popping up, with no way of escaping them. Building in ads in return for free software isn’t a new idea — I have a couple of apps that I use all the time that always display an ad because I didn’t want to fork over fifty bucks — and there were even some PC makers who literally gave away their computers to people but forced them to have a frame of ads around their web browser window at all times, so I suppose it was just a matter of time before somebody applied the idea to the whole damn OS. It’s just disappointing (not surprising, just disappointing) that Apple might be the first one to implement it.

Mmm…You Can Really Taste The Pins

By Brian Filed in Food, Videos Tagged with , , , January 12th, 2010 @ 11:11 am

I think most people have at least some dim awareness of the existence of food stylists — the people who make all the food in ads look so damn appetizing — but probably don’t grasp quite how extensively they tweak the appearance of things. This video features a real food stylist giving away the secrets about how they make the burgers in fast food commercials look like something you would actually want to eat, as opposed to what you get when you hit the drive-thru:

At least these tricks involve using (mostly) edible items. Some food stylist techniques include using Elmer’s glue in place of milk in cereal ads, painting food with glycerin to make it look shiny and juicy, and spraying food items with spray paint to enhance color. Granted, nobody’s ever going to eat the food used in commercials and photo shoots, but it’s the sort of unrealistic expectation that food ads create that results in situations like Domino’s Pizza having to “reboot” their product because the reality was so unappetizing. (I wonder if they’re going to fix the pasta bowls, too)

That’s Gonna Need One BIG English Muffin

By Brian Filed in Amuse Tagged with , , July 17th, 2008 @ 1:04 pm

A Chicagoland McDonalds’ has a new sign in front of their restaurant that lets you know when breakfast is being served under the Golden Arches. As you can see in this series of photos, the “egg” cracks open to reveal one sunny-side-up interior when the breakfast shift begins, then closes back up once the menu shifts to the rest of the day’s fare. Not unlike the drool-inducing “Hot Donuts Now” neon signs that are in the windows of what few Krispy Kreme donut shops remain in business. (via)

Now they just need something for the rest of the day. Perhaps a guy who has a heart attack every time another batch of fries is ready.

I See What You Did There

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , March 27th, 2008 @ 2:30 pm

The video embedded above is about seven minutes long, but if you’ve got the time to watch the whole thing, the payoff is worthwhile. It’s a clip from a British television program that’s looking at how effective subliminal suggestion is in advertising. The presenter calls in a pair of ad agency creative guys to ask them to do a rapid 30-minute brainstorm on some basic ideas for a branding identity for a particular imaginary product. He doesn’t give them much background to go on. He also leaves a sealed envelope with them which contains a similar concept that has already been devised. The ad guys are not to look at the stuff in the envelope. And so they set about coming up with ideas for a quick pitch.

Watch the video and see if you can figure out the subliminal suggestions before they are revealed at the very end.

Nielsen Schmielsen

By Brian Filed in Links, Media Tagged with , , , , , , March 4th, 2008 @ 2:49 pm

Antony Young, the president of Optimedia U.S., a media strategy firm, had this article in today’s Ad Age about reconsidering the effectiveness of the traditional television ratings such as those measured by Nielsen and Arbitron and the need to consider the exposure of media consumers across media platforms. Television ratings have gone down as an actual percentage in the last two decades or so as a series of new media began to chip away at the dominance of the three major networks: first, cable, then the birth of new broadcast networks, and then, of course, the Internet. But because the content offered by the networks now reaches across more than one of these platforms, it’s useful to measure them and index their performance in all of these media.

Optimedia has developed a system they call “Content Power Rating” that looks at the overall audience of a television program on TV, online video (such as Hulu or Joost), web sites, and even mobile devices. Their index of these audiences comes up with a very different list of which shows score highest with viewers across media than traditional television ratings, as the graphic above shows. Programs that fall far back in the pack for television viewership can be big hits when viewed through the multi-platform perspective: notice that of the top ten in Omnimedia’s rankings, four of them are below the top ten in Nielsen’s ratings, and one (“The Office”) isn’t even in the top fifty.

Young says that in the U.S., media buyers are more interested in placing their ads in specific series, whereas in Europe it’s strictly about the stats (reach, CPM, and ratings), so a ratings system that pays closer attention to the varied audience a television series can now expect to garner, is a much better indicator of how well that program might perform for advertisers looking to reach highly-targeted demographics.

Optimedia uses this index in helping its own clients decide how to strategically target media buys, but this sort of rating system should turn out to be very generally applicable, if not outright critical, to media metrics while the so-called “new media” are still shaking up the overall media landscape.

A Mermaid, A King, and A Chicken Walk Into A Bar

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , , February 1st, 2008 @ 1:40 pm

Advertising Age reports that those Burger King "Whopper Freakout" ads gave BK a significant boost in sales of that particular menu item and are the best-remembered ad campaign in the last five years (ad agencies hire firms to measure how well people can remember an ad to gauge its efficacy).

Meanwhile, earlier this week Starbucks announced disappointing sales growth and said that they were planning to close 100 stores and stop opening up new stores every 500 feet.  There’s a new Starbucks under construction in my town (to compete with the SIX Dunkin Donuts stores), so it looks like it’s getting sneaked in just under the wire.  Also somewhat buried in that story is the announcement that Starbucks will discontinue their breakfast sandwiches sometime this year.  Maybe you can pick up one of those turbo-convection ovens cheap second-hand.

Oh, and does anyone in their right mind think that any player on the Patriots OR the Giants is actually going to do the KFC Chicken Dance during the Super Bowl?  The NFL has already warned them that they’ll slap a fine on anyone who does, and why would they give KFC a free plug like that?  It’s not like the "I’m Going To DisneyWorld!" campaign years ago, where the athlete actually WENT to DisneyWorld after the game.  They try too hard with all this guerrilla marketing bullshit these days.

Is That A Backlash I Smell, Or Just Your Grande Latte?

By Brian Filed in Amuse, Blogs, Food, Links Tagged with , , , January 17th, 2008 @ 2:53 pm

Over at Universal Hub this morning, Adam pointed out that one Miss Rachael Ray is suddenly conspicuously absent from Dunkin Donuts’ advertising after there being much ballyhoo about her becoming their spokesperson. As Adam points out, if you cruise around the DD site, she’s nowhere to be found, and the latest round of television commercials have John Goodman’s voice-over talents.

Adam wondered if maybe the new ownership wasn’t too happy about published accounts of the Queen of the Food Network calling their coffee “shit” during a commercial shoot and staging a major temper tantrum until somebody brought her a latte from Starbucks, which she called “her” coffee.

Well, I sure can see where that might make the guys who write the paychecks a little unhappy. But there may be a much bigger backlash brewing (pardon the pun). Gossip website PerezHilton.com says that staffers are fleeing her magazine in droves because she is a complete bitch. There’s already a thriving “Rachael Ray Sucks” web community, so it was just a matter of time, really.

Meanwhile, I guess Rachael doesn’t really need to worry about where her next paycheck might come from, even if the ubiquitous Dunkie’s has booted her out on her ass. She just re-upped with the Food Network to continue ruining that cable network for a while, and recently Bridget and I saw bottles of her own branded extra-virgin olive oil at the supermarket.

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