March 2008 - Posts
For some time now, Dunkin’ Donuts has been expertly refashioning itself as the everyman’s alternative to Starbucks - accessible, affordable and high in quality, but without the fuss of the more highfalutin coffee chain.
Like all good competitors, Dunkin’ Donuts is showing no signs of letting up now that Starbucks is slightly down (although surely far from out). As the coffee giant works to retool its image, the donut titan has launched a new take on an old joke - just how hard is it to order a drink at Starbucks and its Italian-inspired ilk?
The coffee-drink order shtick is, in fact, so reliable that even Dunkin’ Donuts has done it before. But some jokes never get old, and this is one of them.
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As if there’s isn’t already enough pressure on us not to disappoint our parents, now along comes Monster to tell us that the stork who “delivered” us is seriously questioning whether it wasted its time, as well.
The job placement firm’s recent commercial features a stork making an arduous journey over sea, mountains and desert, even battling other wild animals and a nasty storm, all in the pursuit of bringing its precious cargo to the doorsteps of a Volvo-driving couple.
Fast-forward two or three decades. The baby that endured the stork’s breathtaking journey is now a grown man sequestered in a drab office, a box of takeout on his desk, the expression on his face a mix of bored and slightly forlorn. And that’s before he sees the stork through the - of course, rain-spattered -window, a look of utter disappointment on its face.
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It’s not easy selling underwear.
Companies aiming to get customers into their underthings have to walk the fine line between becoming too sexy for themselves - a misstep Victoria’s Secret recently acknowledged - and getting too deep into the decidedly unsexy engineering behind undergarments (how much do we really want to think about bra fittings, after all?)
Hanes is aiming to find a happy - and humorous - medium with a new series of ads that tries, in a silly but sexy way, to sell a pair of underwear guaranteed not to give you a wedgie.
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In many ways, you can’t help but feel sorry for the U.S. auto industry. For years, they thrived on making vehicles that were bigger, brawnier and boasted ever more cup holders. Then, gas prices shot past $3 a gallon, Al Gore put out a little documentary and suddenly SUVs the size of urban studio apartments didn’t seem nearly as cool as a cute little Prius.
Detroit knows it can’t sell a hybrid like it stereotypically sells its biggest vehicles – stunning images of big tires plundering over once-pristine terrain might not strike that right tone. But different isn’t always better.
General Motors’ recent ad for the new Yukon Hybrid, which the company shelled out major bucks to air during both the Super Bowl and the Oscars, features a zippy line drawing of a man pushing a boulder up a mountain, which turns out to also be made of the same boulders.
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