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Recent Posts
What The Hell Is This Site?
A recent study* concluded that the average American is exposed to 480 trillion advertising messages every second. Bottom line: No matter what gets thrown up on the Giant Media Wall in our faces, 99.9% passes through our brains faster than you can say "CPM."
So it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of the stuff is throwaway. Who cares? Nobody's going to remember anyway?
Not here! At The Museum of Marketing Madness, we like to celebrate the failures. Remark upon the unremarkable. And otherwise...make fun!
Someone, somewhere actually rationalized that this particular photo, this copy, this graphic treatment is the penultimate expression of a product's promise, a brand's message.
They either think that or, more likely, they just said:
"Here. Show them this. Maybe this will shut up the client."
And the client says;
"Is this all they have? Ah, whatever...let's just go with it."
The Wings
___________________________
So it shouldn't be a surprise that a lot of the stuff is throwaway. Who cares? Nobody's going to remember anyway?
Not here! At The Museum of Marketing Madness, we like to celebrate the failures. Remark upon the unremarkable. And otherwise...make fun!
Someone, somewhere actually rationalized that this particular photo, this copy, this graphic treatment is the penultimate expression of a product's promise, a brand's message.
They either think that or, more likely, they just said:
"Here. Show them this. Maybe this will shut up the client."
And the client says;
"Is this all they have? Ah, whatever...let's just go with it."
The Wings
We're still building this museum, but here are some of the wings under construction:
The Comstock-Getty-Corbis Wing of Stock Photo Stupidity
The Rivers Cuomo Wing of EHWAHEC (Extreme-Height, Wide-Angle, Hip-Eyeglasses Creative)
The Ebenezer Scrooge Wing of Holidays-Are-Hell Marketing Madness
The Murphy-Law Wing of Error Messages
Some of the others are highlighted below. Each will be provided their very own page whenever I get around to it.
Copy for Copy's Sake Wing
How often do you just see a sign that says, "New," "Improved" or "Now with more <insert made-up useless additive here>." Packages can't be left well enough alone. Creative Director says, "If we have the label here and the photo here, this corner of the box looks empty." Gasp!
Copy for Copy's Sake Wing
How often do you just see a sign that says, "New," "Improved" or "Now with more <insert made-up useless additive here>." Packages can't be left well enough alone. Creative Director says, "If we have the label here and the photo here, this corner of the box looks empty." Gasp!
Gmail Madness Wing
When Gmail first started everyone freaked because they said they would "scan" email and serve up ads related to keywords that appear in your email. Oh no! They're going to know that when I talk to my Mother, she translates all of those Yiddish expressions! I won't be able to joke with friends in an email about blowing up buildings!
But, the scanning is done by computers. And the computers are not that smart (or maybe they're just funny). And so the ads served up are barely even related. Or not at all related. I mean it's as if they were matched up to the topic blindly, by some machine. Here at The Museum of Marketing Madness we're presenting ads that bear a flimsy to non-existent resemblance to the topic at hand for all to enjoy.
When Gmail first started everyone freaked because they said they would "scan" email and serve up ads related to keywords that appear in your email. Oh no! They're going to know that when I talk to my Mother, she translates all of those Yiddish expressions! I won't be able to joke with friends in an email about blowing up buildings!
But, the scanning is done by computers. And the computers are not that smart (or maybe they're just funny). And so the ads served up are barely even related. Or not at all related. I mean it's as if they were matched up to the topic blindly, by some machine. Here at The Museum of Marketing Madness we're presenting ads that bear a flimsy to non-existent resemblance to the topic at hand for all to enjoy.
*Trillion??! You didn't think I was serious did you?