I’d like to apologize to our readers for having gone more than a year without an update in our award-winning series cataloging uses of the typeface Chicago in the wild.
I’m pleased to announce that you have to wait no further, because we’ve once again detected Chicago: this time in a television commercial for American Airlines. The word “DINER” on the window visible at the very beginning of the ad is set in this illustrious typeface.
This is a promo for Ron Paul, “The High Tide,” from 2008 that I only just found now. According to the copy, it was created by a “small group of dedicated grassroots artists,” so it was apparently not an official campaign ad.
It features CG Ron Paul.
Look at that shit. That is some fucking CG Ron Paul.
My favorite part is at 0:41 when doves fly underwater past CG Ron Paul.
I don’t have a punchline or bit of snark to end this post. There is nothing I can do that can top simply repeating that doves fly underwater past CG Ron Paul.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlXfFNl6C_A
Here’s a bunch of bad 2012 apocalypse jokes followed by Betty White saying “deal with it.”
Alfred Chicken is an old platformer for a few systems: Game Boy, NES, etc. It apparently had an unusual advertising campaign in the United Kingdom, according to Wikipedia:
Karl Fitzhugh, the Product Manager of the Amiga version of the Alfred Chicken video game, ran as the Alfred Chicken Party candidate in the 1993 by-election in the Christchurch, Dorset constituency. The exercise was done to promote the original game’s release. Fitzhugh finished second last with 18 votes, two votes ahead of the Rainbow Party candidate.
He also finished five votes behind the “Ian is King” party candidate.
Decades of Miss Subways smiled on NYC straphangers
Associated Press article:
It was an ad campaign conceived as eye candy to bring attention to other advertisements in New York’s transit system. But the “Meet Miss Subways” beauty contest posters of pretty young New York women and their aspirations quickly evolved into a popular and even groundbreaking fixture that ran for 35 years, from 1941 to 1976.
…
The first African-American was crowned Miss Subways in 1948 — long before Vanessa Williams was named Miss America in 1984 — and the first Asian-American was honored in 1949.
“It was the first integrated and ethnically diverse beauty contest in America,” representing working-class women, said [photographer Fiona] Gardner, who was born the year the contest ended. “I realized I had stumbled on a piece of forgotten New York history.”
I don’t know terribly much about the New York City subway system, nor was I alive before 1976, so I’d certainly never heard of this ad campaign before. The reason this story was written is that that quoted photographer, Fiona Gardner, has an exhibition at the New York Transit Museum about Miss Subways starting later this month. Records of the winners were lost, so she tracked down existing copies of the old posters and then the women themselves.
How Companies Learn Your Secrets
I missed this New York Times piece by Charles Duhigg back in February about Target’s tracking of customers. Which was probably for the best, because reading it caused my head to spin around with rage so fast that it created a tornado and destroyed my house.
It starts with the following:
Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?”
Which is one of the slimiest things I’ve read all year.
It was outslimed later:
“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
I basically just hate everything. Literally every single thing. This is the fury I have.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRQFJF6OV4g
On the plus side, I never had any desire to buy Vitaminwater to begin with, so this commercial doesn’t make me any less likely to.
Microsoft readies NUads: They watch you watching them
Declan McCullagh, CNET:
“The innovation that we’re seeing is absolutely incredible,” [Lyn] Watts said. Kinect, he said, can allow advertisers to “go after that holy grail” — the living room.
Kinect’s unique capabilities to record and compile detailed biometric data raise some novel privacy issues. Kinect’s microphone array can record audio within earshot and transmit it to advertisers. It performs face recognition and can transmit video.
“How many people are in the living room? Are they taking any action based on the advertising they just saw?” Watts said. “Can we watch the customers’ reaction, and if we can, do we have the capability of showing a different ad, or the same ad, depending on what the reaction was?”
No no no no no no no no no no no no no please under no circumstances should you ever do anything like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXCZVmQ74OA
Tom McCarthy for The Guardian:
After building a political campaign that was long on passion and grassroots support, if ultimately short of votes, Texas congressman Paul announced today that he is suspending his hunt for the presidency.
The candidate urged supporters to continue their efforts to amass delegates at state conventions, however, as part of a strategy to gain a voice at the Republican National Convention – and influence over the direction of the party.
“We will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted,” the Paul campaign said in a statement sent to reporters. “Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have.”
Ron Paul’s “BIG DOG” ad is pretty easily my favorite ad from this election season, and I’ve been waiting for something like this to post it. My tribute to Ron Paul now devoting all his time to his shadow campaign.