I started AdMonkey one year ago today, so it’s strangely appropriate that this is the day that I decided to end it. After a year, I expected the readership to be greater than it is. The process of searching for ads, scanning them, doing color corrections, posting them, and writing commentary is simply too time consuming to justify continuing the blog, even on a less-than-daily basis.
For the most part, print ads are awful (this follows Sturgeon’s Law, which states that “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”). Most TV commercials are awful. The era when advertisers can sell products by interrupting people is coming to an end.
The newspaper and magazine industries are dying and neither has much time left. The newspaper industry deserves to die because newspapers are biased, and the nature of news makes it better suited to being delivered electronically. As for magazines, consumers will simply refuse to purchase magazines that seem as if they’re about ten pages long. The latest issue of MacWorld should have been called MacWorld Air (a little Mac humor there).
In the future, print ads will be something that you’ll look at in an online museum.
I’ll be focusing my attention on a new blog devoted to photography called One Photo A Day. I’ll be taking pictures every day and uploading one photo each day. The number of visitors won’t matter because it’s really just an exercise designed to get me back into photography. I actually have a B.F.A. in photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
I have been, and will be looking for full-time work, so if anyone reading this has any leads on a job in the Orange County, CA area, please contact me though the e-mail address on the About page or through my website.
I’ll leave this blog up for a little while, perhaps for six months or so.
In this ad, Gillette takes a mundane object—a razor—and transforms it into something amazing by playing with the perspective. Add the orange background and you have a winner.
My only complaint with this ad is that the copy is difficult to read against the yellow glow in the background.
I’m thinking that an ad for a product of this type should probably avoid using the words going down in the headline (for readers who may be non-native English speakers, it’s a slang term for a certain sexual act).
A friend recently asked, “Which celebrity do you associate most with apples?” I immediately answered, “Marcia Cross.” I mean, it’s a no-brainer. Marcia has red hair. Apples are red. Marcia’s face is smooth and wrinkle-free. Apples are smooth and wrinkle-free. Marcia grows on a tree and is picked by farm workers. Apples…
So we know why Mott’s picked Marcia to be in this ad. What we don’t know is who are these two kids? Marcia has two-year old twin girls and these kids aren’t them. Like Laminites, those strange people who show up in the photo section of brand-new wallets and picture frames, these kids are fake. Well, they’re real kids who are out there somewhere with their not-Marcia Cross mom and their not-Marcia Cross’s husband dad. But they’re not her kids, despite what this ad would like you to believe.
In case you are one of those skeptics who need proof, here are Marcia’s real kids. You’ll notice that neither of her twin girls are a little boy.
So there’s Marcia, with her fake kids, all dressed in the colors of apples: red, yellow, and green. Even the wall in the background is yellow and green. And all the yellow and green are the same shades of yellow and green in the Mott’s logo. Pretty clever. (As a matter of fact, the same colors come up in the photo of Marcia and her real kids—just what is going on?)
I don’t know whether these people are human logos, if their hair is really made of apples, or whether it’s wrong to crave apple juice after looking at Marcia Cross’s hair. These are just too many existential questions for me to ponder before lunch.
The image of the woman in a yoga pose in this One A Day Women’s2O (who’s the genius who came up with that unfortunate name?) is used so often that it’s a bad cliche (one wonders if there’s such a thing as a good cliche). It’s meant to wow, but bad lighting and awkward design elements transform the ad into so what?
This is an ad for something called Bio-Oil. It features a lengthy testimonial that uses Courier type to made to look like it was typed using a typewriter on paper. Remember typewriters?
The testimonial is followed by more lengthy copy that extolls the virtues of Bio-Oil in tiny little print. Who do they expect is going to read all of this copy?
Copywriter and SEO professional Marc Librescu critiques today's ads.
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