Adrian finds the worst in stock photography. Be A Design Group also points out a great list of stock photo cliches. Interestingly, the photo cliches seem to touch on the deeper advertising cliches - and dare I add the cliches in business discourse - contained in televisual advertising as well as print.
It’s early yet in the live debate between Maura Hennigan and Mayor Menino, but my initial reaction is that Hennigan is winning on points but by carping on one city fault after the other comes across more like a city councilor than a mayor. On the other hand, I’m wondering if Menino’s response to every […]
Pelican has an interesting post on the "Diderot Effect" in marketing:
Essentially, the Diderot unities are the relationship between a product and a cultural role or cultural meaning. You all know how this works. If I say Rolex, what car do you imagine the owner driving: a hyundai or a BMW?
BMW would be the correct […]
Over at Be a Design Group, Paul Berkbigler complains about the stripping down of graphic impact in logos. He points out a before and after tale between a heyday of corporate design and the watered down, overly rendered style of today. His example is UPS, but I think that changes in Coke and Sprite designs […]
I’ve complained before about the trend of television advertisements to . Now, via Seth Stevenson’s ad review in Slate, I’ve come across a great term for it - “the myth of communicative transcendence” - as well as a semiotics website by Robert Goldman documenting and taking apart said commercials. What’s interesting about both reviews is […]
The Economist has an article on why mobile-phone text messaging just hasn’t caught on in the US like it has in Europe or Asia. Basically it boils down to costs and alternatives: in the US landline phone calls are cheap and free above a certain fixed charge, so the main raison d’etre of texting is […]
Five Forbidden Marketing/Ad trends for 2003:
“Powered by”: You’ll notice the Powered by Blogger icon on this page - quite a reasonable claim given that Blogger does provide the service that lets me organize and post these entries. But what in god’s name does it mean when radio stations are powered by AOL broadband?
People of the […]
Everyone seems up in arms about the SUV-causes-terrorism ads. (See today’s Globe or Bob Zellnick’s rant during last Friday’s Greater Boston). Granted, the ads do draw with a large brushstroke, but the apologies for SUVs that have come in their wake are nauseating. I refuse to believe that roads are safer since SUV popularity has […]
After a breakthrough of gay-vague commercials and print ads, it seems like more and more ads are fitting what I’d call post-gay-vague: that is, their intention is not to use a subtext to coyly address a gay spectator but rather to use an overt gay text as a means to speak to a straight, even […]