Copyright Violation, Postmodern Edition

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Movie Logos

Nice image and notes-based piece on movie logos in the art life.

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Advertising Battles

Wang Qingsong is bang on:

My new work "Commercial War" focuses on the power of ads and the misconceptions that ads can create. For this photo work, I constructed a chaotic backdrop where over 20 people are depicted in a frenzy of competition with some even fist fighting while jostling for ad positioning on a huge billboard advertisement; this struggle for the most optimal outdoor ad placement is perceived as inevitably bringing power and influence. The struggle for ad placement in public space in China is not unlike a battlefield strewn with casualties after a pitched battle for power. Today one brand wins. The next day, its competitor will replace it with better positioning on public spaces. Every day, new ads go up, and old ones fall down, scattered in pieces, and discarded on the ground under newly erected billboard advertisements. [Link]

Annals of Web Advertising: The Iced Coffee For Discriminating Tastes

I'd love to call this proof that McDonald's never fails to take advantage of a promotional opportunity, but in fact it's just an ad system blindly matching advertising with content without any appreciation for context. The bricolage is very satisfying though, because even this explanation feeds very well into the basic message of the story, which is that McDonald's is institutionally incapable of addressing people as human beings rather than as teeny tiny cogs in its corporate machine.

Question is, will the pairing ever be overriden by a human being?

[Original story via]

Giant Telephone-Wielding Man Walks Streets, Vows To Crush Burry's Elf

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Fox and CBS: Condoms Safe, But Not Fun

Fox and CBS have both rejected a new Trojan ad because they say that ads for contraceptives "must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy."

Supporters of the condom company were not surprised. The New York Times article has two standout quotes:

Mark Crispin Miller, media critic at New York University: "Let’s get real here. Fox and CBS and all of them are in the business of nonstop soft porn, but God forbid we should use a condom in the pursuit of sexual pleasure."

Carol Carrozza, VP of Marketing for Ansell Healthcare (LifeStyles condoms): "We always find it funny that you can use sex to sell jewelry and cars, but you can’t use sex to sell condoms."

You can watch the ad online here.

Burry's Corn Muffin Mix Stalker Lies In Wait for Newlyweds

Burry's has a posse, and he looks like Howdy Doody. Eeek, biscuits!

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Bread Wrappers

More at the link.

Google Street View Censoring Microsoft Ads?

Nick West says,

I was cruising Google Maps' new Street View in San Francisco...and saw this billboard for competitor Microsoft's Virtual Earth. There's also a "black hole" in the same shape as the billboard right next to it -- it even obscures an edge. Maybe Google intended to delete the entire billboard for "privacy", but missed by a few feet?

Anyone disturbed?

[Via|View the map]

Billboard Drawings

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TV-B-Gone Discount Extended!

The TV-B-Gone 20% discount offered through TiP has gone over well and inventor Mitch has agreed to extend the offer through the end of June. The code has made it onto some coupon-code sites, which seems to be driving additional sales beyond the ones coming through this blog.

If you've been wanting to get your hands on a TV-B-Gone, the new model is the one that works with the most (and the vast majority) of televisions on the market today. We love ours (we were early adopters, buying one when the TV-B-Gone first came out and recently upgrading), and the discount you'll get using our coupon code, THINKPICS, is double what you'll see anywhere else, and better still than places which buy at wholesale and then sell at higher prices than the manufacturer. Final price through TiP is $15.99 plus tax.
Thus ends a brief and rare Think in Pictures sales pitch. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Buddy the Value Dog

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Inflatable Planet

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Graffiti and Advertising

Photo shared on Flickr by cinnamon gurl

Medill Reports has an interesting piece about graffiti being used as advertising. From the opener:

Graffiti and advertising are kind of like cops and robbers: eerily similar to each other yet at complete opposition.

And later:

What’s relatively new is not the selling of graffiti in and around the art world, such as Prigoff's "Spraycan Art" book or mod apparel lines, it is the selling of everyday products using the aesthetic of graffiti and street art, it’s that graffiti is culturally relevant enough that it can be used to sell deodorant, phones, food and cars.

Read the full at the link.

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King Vitamin Cereal

More at the link.

Fast Food Ad Culture Jamming

East London, UK.

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Fake Ambush Marketing: When Ads Go All-Concept

Hot on the heels of this great example of ambush advertising, the ad blog How Advertising Spoiled Me sent out a post via RSS last night showing this image:


But the post has since been removed from the blog. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it was a fake and that someone - the airline? - fooled our friend Arvind. It's always fun to see something you're not supposed to (ever seen a retracted post from Think in Pictures?) but that wouldn't be enough to merit pointing it out, so bear with me. I think this incident highlights one of the most overlooked aspects of our current media age, in which the Internet has pushed progressive advertising methods to be almost entirely conceptual. The actual audience for the physical work is secondary to the virtual audience who will consume it in a manner dictated by those who document the product. And this is a big change. Let me elaborate.

I noted a while back that tone of the main benefits of the Internet for non-permission-based public artists (i.e. graffiti artists) is that ephemeral works can be documented and shared far beyond the place they are created:

Illicit art created in the physical world now has the power to reach vast audiences through its documentation and dissemination via the Internet, and while some of the pleasure of discovery may be missing - imagine stumbling across that row of tanks in Basel versus seeing it here - the objects' poached presence in the real world, and the knowledge that many others have stumbled upon them, and others have walked by them without noticing them, is no less delicious. This accessibility is, of course, wildly divergent from artwork's context in the real world; there, the piece will soon be discovered and likely removed, if this has not happened already. In rare cases, citizens lobby and win the right for a piece of illicit art to be adopted and "legalized," but this requires organization, speed, and open-minded governance. On the web, however, the piece is available to all for as long as it is of interest, and can be passed around among viewers, reinvigorated by new discussion, and take on a virtual life of its own. This is one of the wonderful ways in which the Internet is not like the "real" world: Everyone has a wall to tag, paint, or advertise on, and the strength and relevance of one's message plays a much greater role in its successful infiltration of a virtual visitor's life than any other form of visual or written communication.

But while this development allows graffiti art to live on and be a part of a conversation far broader than the local and temporary effect it used to have, it also has the effect of reducing the significance of place, that is, of making the obviousness or accessibility of the graffiti site far less important, because so much of the work's audience is virtual. This means that good, effective public displays may actually be less accessible, less productive, less meaningful for the human beings who interact with the work in the "real world."

Advertising has undergone the same transition. Take, for example, a work of conceptual advertising like the one Germany's BUND (Friends of the Earth) documented a few weeks ago [via Art Threat, which is getting better every week]:

The balloon reads "The world can't take anymore [sic] CO2." When the car starts, it inflates, then bursts, surprising the automobile's driver and, presumably, briefly displaying its message to others before doing so. But as a live event, the action is an abject failure. Think about it:

1. Balloon is surreptitiously affixed to tailpipe, and must not be seen by the driver.
2. Balloon inflates, revealing tiny message that is too small to be legible.
3. Balloon pops, alerting driver to something amiss.
4. Driver checks tailpipe, finds obliterated balloon.

Who does this action serve? An exclusively virtual audience. Like any good conceptual artwork, it is the documentation and explanation that provides pleasure and stimulation, not the experience itself, which may be confusing, absurd, or mundane. As Art Threat noted:

The most common critique, however, damns the guerrilla tactic as pointless, as it may be near impossible to read the message on the inflated balloon before it explodes. Given that the campaign has already generated a ton of media, discussion and debate, I think it's fair to say that these detractors have missed the point entirely...

There is balance of power - akin to evolution, or to an arms race - between advertisers and their audiences that media critics rarely recognize. We do not simply absorb advertising, but critique, selectively acknowledge, and/or deflect it, and advertisers are always looking for new ways to work around or subvert audience barriers or defenses. I think what I find interesting about the developments in such "secondary" advertising methods (which have been around at least since the days of radio, but have been flourishing in the age of the Internet and digital photography) is that they are, in essence, advertising about advertising, and they utilize new forms of manipulation, against which audiences have not yet developed any successful defenses. As a result, we are all implicated and even enmeshed in these advertising efforts by our receptiveness to, or even our participation in creating, the fictional stories that complete them.


Take (again) the image above. What is true, and what is false? The concept survives whether the actual billboard was placed or not. The status of the advertiser as "trickster" only increases. They are also more likely to appear "Internet savvy," because someone in their organization knows how to doctor a photo, and is willing to do so. They get their advertising message out, and they save the expense of putting up a billboard, which might not even be possible at the site. So many questions remain. If the billboard were not in a prominent location (I have no idea where it is) and we learned that the number of viewers who saw the photo online far exceeded the number who saw it live, did Kingfisher waste their money putting up an actual billboard? Or is Kingfisher's physical counter-advertisement a necessary element of the set-up for GoAir's hoax?

More broadly, when real-world events are faked, simulated, or heavily enhanced, when and how do advertisers cross the line between advertising and straight propaganda?

Arvind's original post.

Cityspeak Turns Billboards Over To Text Messagers

From Art Threat:

Cityspeak is ephemeral graffiti, using private modes of communication to generate public displays of commentary about a particular location. It is an example p2P (private-to-public) communication which allows participants to use communication technologies we tend to think of as private--cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants--to create public displays.

Cityspeak's website also allows anyone to post a message to the billboard. [Link]

Ambush Marketing

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Don't miss the next chapter of this advertising saga...

Webby Awards: What's Your Favorite?

My favorite personal discovery so far in perusing the extensive awards and runners-up for the Webbys is the Ikea Dream Kitchen website, which stitches together a cycle of 360-degree views of new kitchens. There are many things that are great about this promotional vehicle, and they're all obvious, so check it out for yourself if you haven't seen it yet. Great stuff.