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Yesterday we showed you the biggest ad fails at Comic-Con. But now it's time to talk about the very best of the Comic-Con advertising onslaught. Check out our gallery. More »
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First South Korea decided to remove inefficient non-electronic textbooks by 2015. And now they have created the first successful augmented reality supermarket chains in subways. More »
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It's long been established that the mighty brain is nothing but a mound of putty. We don't see what we think we do, we don't remember what we think we do, and we don't like what we think we do. If we did, advertisers would be out of business. As it is, they're literally putting false thoughts inside our heads. More »
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If you give a kid a choice between a healthy and a sugary cereal, the kid will tend to choose the healthy option. But what if you stick a beloved cartoon character on the box? Then all bets are off. More »
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Do you want to read The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon, a volume of eighteenth century poetry? No? Well, other people did. They read it so repeatedly, and recommended it to their friends so assiduously, that it was reprinted over twenty times throughout the eighteenth century. In later years, it was resequenced and expanded, with new verses added to the old. People still picked it up. It was a century-long bestseller. More »
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Vampire Diaries is getting creative with its marketing campaign. New billboards are popping up across the nation encouraging people to "Catch VD." GET IT? Nothing says super fun TV like "burning sensation" or "oozing sores." [EW] More »
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All those chocolate commercials with women lounging in a bath and luxuriantly eating chocolate may get a different spin. Turns out compounds in cacao could be a powerful treatment for the sexually-transmitted disease HPV. More »
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The original Tron was considered a failure in 1982 — and now, early tracking says Tron Legacy is on track to be another disappointment. The $200 million sequel could have a lackluster opening weekend. Plus check out two new featurettes. More »
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For some reason, the Buenos Aires branch of elite ad company Young & Rubicam figured that the best way to advertise condoms . . . is with images of a burning apocalypse? We've got the full (mildly NSFW) ad below. More »
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This past week at San Diego Comic Con, we've seen a lot of fans expressing their passion for their favorite stories. But we also got bombarded with manufactured hype. Why is it so hard to tell the difference between two? More »
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The $200 million film Inception has a cerebral concept and an austere marketing campaign. But what if it had a ridiculous title, and posters that talk down to the audience? That's what we asked the other day, and you delivered. More »
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Yes, it's a tool to help market an epic of epic epicness. Yes, everyone's already doing it. And, no, you cannot resist. Because it is, actually, pretty cool. [Scott Pilgrim Avatar Creator] More »
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Used to be that to succeed in business, you needed a combination of a tight resume, an arsenal of skills, and the right connections. Now, Chinese corporations will pay handsomely if you're Caucasian and look good in a suit. More »
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This probably isn't real, but that's too bad, because it's hilarious. In case your French is rusty, the words on the fauxphylactic mean "I will not be your father." More »
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It sounds like a good idea, at first: programming your GPS with the Sith Lord's dulcet tones so he can tell you when to turn and when to stop. But how long before all that heavy breathing gets insufferable? More »
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Don't even try to tell us that you haven't wondered about this one. More »
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William Gibson just finished his new novel (coming out later this year) called Zero History. And now he's come out of novel-writing mode to chat on his blog and Twitter to answer questions about everything from Belgians to branding. More »
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Former ad copywriter Graham Button is concerned about the future - specifically, the future of marketing taglines. How can companies remain buzzword compliant in a rapidly-changing world? Over at Fast Company, he's offered ten taglines for tomorrow. More »
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Check out the book trailer for Stephen King's Under The Dome, which plays like a splashy Michael Bay preview. Does it make you want to read the book? Laura Miller at Salon suggests some trailers make books less enticing. More »
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Jennifer's Body may not be an artistic masterpiece, but it's a smart, fun horror movie with a big star. It was a cut above the usual B-grade horror fare. So what caused its abysmal box office returns? Misguided, boy-targeted marketing. More »
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A flick about supersoldier drugs called Reckoning Day hits UK theaters this week. To promote it, a PR firm released a YouTube vid of people having intense, twitchy Salvia trips - "inspired by Reckoning Day." Guerilla marketing gone too far? More »
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Seems like everyone has been griefing the Syfy Channel about its new brand. What could be lamer than switching from Sci Fi to Syfy? At last, a designer and typographer has explained why "Syfy" is cool. More »
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J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot is the most successful Trek movie ever internationally... but is that because international audiences didn't know what they were going to see? In different countries, targeted publicity tries to make Trek into different movies. More »
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With the second Transformers movie opening this weekend in Europe, Paramount may have decided that one final push was needed to convince moviegoers to watch giant robots in action. That push? Viral videos showing that Transformers are all around us... More »
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Over the next few weeks, you will see posts showing up on io9 that look like crossposts from a Gawker Media blog called Blood Copy. These are not real posts. They are sponsored ads that are part of an alternate reality game (ARG) created by the True Blood marketing team. More »
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In science fiction, humanity usually embraces new technologies because those technologies are innovative, improve our lives, and let us do things we only dreamed of before. But if Amazon’s futuristic Kindle becomes this holiday season’s hot gift, it will have less to do with the e-book reader’s features than with Oprah’s enthusiastic endorsement of the product on last Friday’s show. Here's the truth that scifi rarely predicts: The technologies we adopt in the future may have less to do with how useful they are than with how well they’re marketed. More »
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How unstoppable was the marketing machine behind The Dark Knight? Enough for Heath Ledger's death and Christian Bale's predilection for family communication with fists to be easily cast off, apparently, leading to a movie whose success surprised even its studio head. The Hollywood Reporter looked into the efforts required to teach America to ask "Why so serious?" More »
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Right now you can buy over 600 consumer products that contain some kind of nanomaterial or nanotechnology, and it turns out that a lot of them are edible. The Emerging Nanotechnology Project has compiled a comprehensive list of consumer items that companies are billing as "nanotech," grouping them into categories like "health" (which includes food) and "electronics." Here you can see their chart showing the breakdown of which products you can buy that contain something that can be called "nano." The E-Nano site also lets you search the products for all kinds of keywords. Needless to say, you can find some pretty bizarre shit if you search under "food." More »
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Movie posters used to be simple and dignified, until marketing departments realized that the more sensational the poster, the more ticket-buyers. It's like the cover of a comic book: You might see an image of Batman riddled with bullets and dead, but that never takes place in the actual story itself. Star Trek has been one of the guiltiest parties in sensationalizing its posters with odd artwork and strange taglines (perhaps second only to the James Bond movie posters), and we've collected them for you all in one spot in the list below. More »
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It's time to monetize your datastream. You're generating all this data while you surf the web: what you buy, what you read, where you work, where you vacation, your current favorite music/video, where you bank, and of course what you're talking about in email. Shouldn't there be some way to commoditize all that? I mean, shouldn't you be putting all your personal web data together into a handy UDP, or unified data profile, and selling it to the highest bidder? Absolutely. And in the year 2024, a nice company called Datapoints wants to help you to do just that. The Datapoints site, written in hilarious biz-speak, is one of the only deliberately science fictional corporate websites I've ever seen. More »
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There's a fine line between creative genius and creative whoredom, and thankfully our friends at Smallville are happy to demonstrate just how fine that line really is. Consider the announcement of a new partnership between the show and Stride Gum. And it's not just a casual partnership — it's actually going to significantly alter the plot of the show. More »
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Shutter, a horror flick opening next week, is a purely supernatural tale about spirit photography (taking pictures of ghosts). But it turns out the Shutter viral marketing crew is trying to suck in the sciencey/gadget geek crowd with a stealth media campaign: Fox reps are urging journalists to write about the "scientific causes" of ghosts, and push expensive spirit-photography cameras on people interested in the movie. An anonymous source passed me a fairly creepy email about this that was sent to a large, glossy magazine's editorial staff. More »
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The goal of most advertisers is, frankly, to bypass your rational brain and reach down into the murky depths of your limbic system to control your desires. And the Web has given advertisers powerful new mind-control tools, allowing them to generate fake "buzz" for products by implanting references to, say, Hewlett Packard on YouTube or Cisco on Wikipedia. The idea is to make people think that their "friends" online like a product and artificially jumpstart a word-of-mouth recommendation for the product. At a South by Southwest panel Friday about the worst viral media advertising, several marketers and critics gathered to discuss the most heinous and failed examples of ads that are turning our mediascape into a William Gibson or Philip K. Dick nightmare. Two ad campaigns stood out as the worst. More »
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Inflated prices trigger the pleasure centers in your brain more than fair ones. Not only is the idea of buying something expensive more exciting than buying something on sale, but you'll actually get more genuine pleasure out of something expensive — even if it's not worth the cost. A group of social scientists at CalTech and Stanford discovered this not-entirely-unexpected fact when they stuck people into MRI brain scanners and gave them several glasses of wine, assigning each one a random price. More »
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We couldn't be more excited about Batman: The Dark Knight... or more sick of Warner Bros.' marketing campaign for the movie. When it was just sky-writing planes over Comic-Con and "Jokerized" dollar bills, we were sort of amused. But when Warner started baking Joker-cakes, we got indigestion. A gallery of weird schwag and a rundown of crazed marketing, after the jump. More »
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The writers strike is forcing executives to actually consider some of the rash decisions they've made. Case in point, the Justice League movie. Before the holidays there were announcements of cast members, chatter about the shooting location, a script that needed some work, and even rumblings from the Christian Bale/The Dark Knight camp that they weren't happy about another Batman hitting the screen. Looks like Warner Bros. has finally listened and is putting the skids down on the movie, hard. More »
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Warner Bros. has been tossing enough promo photos, teaser trailers, viral ads, and movie posters onto the internet to cause a serious glut of Dark Knight materials. Which is where this refreshing slap in the face video comes from. Netizen and part-time editor ntbone has mashed up the sound from the recent trailer for The Dark Knight with clips he's cut together from the 1966 Batman movie, starring Adam West as the caped crusader. More »
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Comic book artist extraordinaire Eric Tan created these 1950s style postcards as promotional materials for Wall-E, Disney/Pixar's new wacky robot adventure. I love how they perfectly illustrate a conflict that promises to be key in this flick: the ultra-leisure society of the humans versus the junkyard-dwelling garbage robots who do nothing but scut work. More »
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