For the Seriously Lazy

I’m not just talking about people who like to sleep in, or lounge in their La-Z-Boy®, or let the dog out of their truck half a mile from home so Rover can chase them the rest of the way and they can say they’ve “walked the dog”.  No, I’m talking about people to whom laziness is a higher state, a state of grace that they work on perfecting every day (work, but not too hard, you understand).  For those people (and I say “those” because surely I am not among them), there’s a new gadget that will raise their laziness to an art and a science.

I present to you the jewel in the crown of king-hell langour and lassitude, made to order for the Sultans of Sloth — a fridge magnet that can be pressed to order pizza.

Stand back!:

Ever wish pizza could magically appear at the press of a button? A pizzeria in Dubai has unveiled a new refrigerator magnet that actually orders pizza in a single tap. Impulse eaters beware.

Called the VIP Fridge Magnet, the pizza box-shaped magnet is connected to Red Tomato Pizza in Dubai. The magnet is preset to order a pizza online and is connected to the Internet via the Bluetooth connection on a smartphone. Red Tomato Pizza then sends a confirmation text and delivers the pizza soon after. You can also update your pizza selection online at any time.

Really: preset the thing online, connect with bluetooth and from then on, whenever you want your favourite veggie-pineapple-and-pepperoni pizza, you just drag your ass over to the fridge, press button and VOILA!  Confirmation text followed shortly by PIIIIIZAAAHHH.  (You still have to get up and answer the door, but I’m sure they’re working on that bug.)

I can’t decide whether this thing is cool or disgusting.  It’s one of those rarities that’s a bit of both, I guess.

So far it looks like it’s only available in Dubai, so we are probably out of delivery range… err umm not that we’d get one of these things anyway!

Photocopping

Nice work, Libs:

Two new Liberal ads in support of the federal long gun registry feature an image of a U.S. police officer electronically altered to include a shoulder patch worn by the Ottawa Police Service.

The distinctive crest appears to have been edited to remove the word Ottawa, but the image of a crossed shield with orange embellishments, flanked by golden leaves, would make it recognizable to residents of Ottawa.  [...]

The Citizen traced the picture to a series of stock photos sold by an agency based in North Carolina. A photo editor with the Ron Chapple Studios said the model is a real police officer serving with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police force.

Lame-o:  they couldn’t even find an Ottawa cop for the ad?  All they had to do was go to the nearest Tim Horton’s.  Or maybe just set a box-trap full of superdelicious choco donuts, ha!

(h/t – comments at Scott’s Diatribes)

Dogs in slow motion

Catching treats.  Cool ad for Pedigree:

Techxxx

Here’s what happens when the geeks in R&D spend too much time surfing pron sites on the job.  Stand back: it’s the newest, or should I say lewdest, thing in mouse technology — the “G-Point”:

Top view:

This design could only come from a company named “Yanko”.

Bestest Dog Commercial ever

I was wrong — that other one was the best SPCA commercial.  THIS is the best dog commercial:

Best dog commercial ever

Or at least it ranks right up there… and it has a good message!

(via balloon juice)

Interesting

Bruce has a post up about a Mr. Sub commercial that generated some controversy — so much controversy that the agency responsible has been fired following an outraged letter campaign orchestrated by the Canadian Auto Workers.  (Thinks:  Canadian Auto Workers?  Huh?)

Offensive or not offensive?  Watch the vid, make the call.

Sinead’s Hand

This marriage equality commercial from Ireland is great; simple and to the point:

(via Carnal Nation)

The Chaos Scenario

I can think of at least one person in the traditional media who might benefit from reading Bob Garfield’s soon-to-be-released book, the Chaos Scenario:

Scheduled for release Aug. 3, the book documents the converging forces he believes doom mass media and mass marketing as we’ve always known them. The historic disintegration of “mass,” he writes in the introduction, “will change your media environment in dramatic ways. It will change the advertising industry in melodramatic ways.”

In the second half of the book, Garfield goes on to discuss what he calls the “art and science of Listenomics,” which begins with the recognition that neither marketers nor any other institution accustomed to dictating from the top can do so for much longer. Garfield prescribes a series of measures in the digital-technology and social-media realms for not only listening to the “group formerly known as the audience,” but treating them as stakeholders with much to contribute to a brand, and to every aspect of the economy and society.

Change isn’t coming — it’s arrived.  Deal or die.

Bad ad watch

Easy on the (Photoshop-enhanced) mayo:

So much for “subliminal seduction”, eh?  Good grief, how many kinds of Wrong can you pack into one ad?

When I worked on fast food business in the ad industry, it was standard operating procedure to produce “male and female” versions of ads that featured one person.  I wonder if BK has a sister (or “brother”) ad for this one?   And if not, why not?

(from copyranter, via dependable renegade)

Life imitates the Onion in T.O.

Diversity FAIL (with a side of Photoshop Flop):

The smiling, ethnically diverse family featured on the cover of Toronto’s latest edition of its summer Fun Guide was digitally altered to make the photo more “inclusive,” which city officials say is in keeping with a policy to reflect diversity.

A spokesman for the department that publishes the guide listing recreation activities confirmed the publication was doctored to insert the face of a different father.

The intrepid NatPo took one look at that cover photo and immediately suspected a scurrilous ruse.  They ran it through enhancement-detecting software, only to find the original image:

D’oh!

Bill Donohue, call your office

This ice cream ad has 31 flavours of anti-Catholic blasphemy!!!:

But no need for the Catholic League to get excited — it’s from the UK, where the ad is already being investigated by an advertising standards agency to determine if it violates blasphemy standards (blasphemy standards??).

It could be worse… the nun could be an altar boy.

(via Adfreak)

Lost in the translation

“Fun which you need to lubricate”?  Um err yeah, okay.

Maybe the ad agency should have hired a human translator instead of relying on Systran to adapt this Chinese Durex ad:

I would have used

“A rusty screw will never do — Pamper your pubes with Durex Lubed”.

(from ad of da month)

From bus boards

…to bumper stickers:

The atheist advert campaign is spreading from buses to cars with the release of a “There’s probably no God” bumper sticker.

The 12in stickers are being sold to raise money for groups including the British Humanist Association, which organised for atheist posters to be displayed on the side of 800 buses around the country.

That campaign attracted complaints from more than 300 people, but the provocative messages now look set to get a wider airing on the windows of non-believing motorists.

Great idea, especially for those stuffed-shirt towns that rejected the busboard ads.  Let’s do it!

Virgin radio pulls goofy “Gods of Rock” ads

Well, that didn’t last long:

Virgin Radio has decided to pull its “gods of rock” ads from city buses, billboards and bus shelters after receiving complaints that the ads were sexist and offensive.

“We are a part of the community,” said Pete Travers, program director at Virgin Radio Ottawa. “We serve the citizens of Ottawa and there were definitely some people who took offence to our advertising campaign. It was not our intention to offend anybody.”

The ads featured visibly pregnant young women with doleful expressions and the slogan, “Lock up your daughters, the gods of rock are now in Ottawa.”

“The intention, to be clear, was to take a well-worn cliché and push it to an absurd level to make a joke,” Mr. Travers said.

Uh, news flash, Travers:  that cliche was well-worn by the late-sixties.  Because something happened in the late-sixties that freed young women from the tyranny of unwanted pregnancy and “homes for unwed mothers”.  Take a wild guess what that was!

But never mind that.  As a woman, I found the ads creepy, sexist and stupid.  But as a recovering advertising executive, I can’t help imagining that Virgin Radio’s marketing department was rocked by the sound of champagne corks popping like a shotgun blast as public reaction to the ads spiraled into outrage.  Virgin Radio has generated more notoriety and top-of-mind awareness in a week than they could have done by running more innocuous ads for 8 weeks.   And if they got out of their ad space contract, they saved money doing it.

Just sayin’.