Link Banana

Farhed Manjoo gives some (metaphorical) ink to a fact that’s been bothering me lately:

Ha, ha, ha. These days the Web brims with opportunities for such chuckles. “Stealth viral” video ads—i.e., clips that betray few obvious signs that they’re part of a campaign—have invaded the Internet. You may think you’ve just seen a ball girl at a minor-league baseball game scale a wall to catch a foul. Wrong: She’s a stunt woman, and that’s a Gatorade ad. Did you recently send your friends that kick-ass security-cam clip of an office worker going berserk? If so, you took part in director Timur Bekmambetov’s bizarre stealth advertisement for his film Wanted. Ray-Ban, Levi’s, Nike, and other brands have also recently launched similar campaigns.

Calling to mind this story, a British website paid people to stand on the street with “If you ask me for a £5 note you can have it” sandwich boards. They report surprisingly low acceptance of the offer.

(via Boing Boing)

It’s a pretty clever idea: rather than wasting money for adspace in periodicals or buses, drop that money from the sky and take advantage of the free coverage that brings.

(via Passport)

Designing the News has a pretty clever idea for advertising: using pictograms. Admittedly, part of the reason I like it is it reminds me of a childhood “activity books.”

(via Magnetbox)

I won’t attest to the veracity of the information in this chart, but I do think it’s interesting none the less.

In the last three months of 2007, 70% of e-mails offered sexual enhancers, 16 percentage points more than during the first three months of that year. Financial offers accounted for 5%, down from 23%, possibly reflecting the gloomier economic climate. Around 10% tempted holiday-season shoppers with counterfeit goods.

Clive Thompson’s got an interesting piece in February’s Fast Company about the research of Duncan Watts, who rather doubt the “influentials” theory presented in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend — not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one — and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

(via kottke)

At Slate, Jeff Greenfield takes an interesting look at why politician don’t speak frankly about politics in advertising, and what it would be like if they did. His ad for John Edwards would have been interesting:

I’m John Edwards. Maybe you’ve noticed there’s something different about me. Of course, I’m talking about geography.

Here’s an unavoidable political fact: Since the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the only Democratic presidential candidates who have won a clear plurality of popular votes have come from the South or the border states—the Red States. Our only victors have come from Georgia and Arkansas (and Tennessee, if you count the victory they stole).

All of us—Sen. Obama, Sen. Clinton, and myself—will fight for health care, a fairer tax system, a chance for those who haven’t gotten a chance to live out the American promise. But if we don’t choose a candidate who can compete everywhere, we will never get the chance to do any of these things. Choose me … or lose.