Entertainment
At a time when retailers, and especially department stores, are struggling with a weak economy and fickle shoppers, JCPenney has lately been pulling out all the stops with pretty, musically interesting and eye-catching ads for its American Living line.
Now, it’s switching gears -- in the wrong direction -- with a back-to-school campaign that plays off the 1985 cult classic movie "The Breakfast Club."
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| JCPenney |
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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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| Hanes |
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As if there needed to be more proof that despite the internet, the world is actually a pretty big place with a lot going on you’ve never even thought about, much less heard about, seems Egypt has its own English-language music video channel.
(Seem to remember the U.S. did too at one time. Wonder what happened to them? We guess there are these guys, but only if John Mayer is your idea of “out there”.)
The network is “Melody Tunes” and, for all we know, may even be a hoax. Really all we have to go on is a bunch of Weblog entries and a listing here (yes, we were distressed to finally find something that could not just be lazily Googled or Wikipediaed).
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| Melody Tunes |
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We liked the ads, Geico. We really did. Even though some of them at this point probably don’t need another repeat airing.
But when we heard that ABC was going to create a series based on the Geico cavemen, we had mixed emotions. On one hand, stretching out a funny joke for 30 minutes was probably a bad idea ("Saturday Night Live" has problems doing it for five minutes at a time). On the other hand, … OK, so the emotions weren’t exactly mixed.
Then came the news that the show's producers wouldn’t be showing the first episode in advance to critics. That’s not always a bad thing. Usually critics will declare a show must be terrible if it doesn’t get screened for critics. This is only partly true. A movie can be truly bad, yet studios don’t need to screen it because it has a huge built-in audience that doesn’t care what middle-aged print media writers think – just think of every teen slasher movie that’s been made in the past five years.
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| ABC |
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We here at Ads of the Weird like Bob Mould a lot, and as business writers and editors we also are partial to financial news. But we know better than to mix the two.
Apparently the folks at TIAA-CREF don’t agree. The financial services company has decided to use punk music icon Mould’s “See A Little Light” as the cornerstone of an ad campaign touting the benefits “dot-orgs” over “dot-coms.”
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| TIAA-CREF |
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“Mad Men,” a new TV show about an advertising firm from cable network AMC, is set in 1960 amid a haze of smoke and booze that’s meant to reinforce the authenticity of the series.
The retro atmosphere also provides a convenient foil for pitching Jack Daniel’s, whose sponsorship of the 13-episode first season includes plans to feature the brand by name in three forthcoming episodes.
Yet you won’t hear the words “Jack Daniel’s” in the first episode, which premieres Thursday. Instead, unlabeled bottles of brown liquid adorn every office credenza, and when the characters are done drinking in their offices they head out to a favorite watering hole to order more of the same.
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| AMCTV |
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