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mad science
speed racer
The latest cross-promotional marketing activity for the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, coming out next Friday, is something that can't end without pissing somebody off. The ads feature a race between Speed Racer and the Road Runner to pimp Time Warner's high speed internet service. Somewhere in the afterlife, Chuck Jones and Tatsuo Yoshida are both weeping with shame at this very moment.
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Speed Racer, Road Runner Beep Beep Their Way Into Advertising
The latest cross-promotional marketing activity for the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, coming out next Friday, is something that can't end without pissing somebody off. The ads feature a race between Speed Racer and the Road Runner to pimp Time Warner's high speed internet service. Somewhere in the afterlife, Chuck Jones and Tatsuo Yoshida are both weeping with shame at this very moment.
More »
nanotech
All the Nanotech You Can Eat
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 »
advertising
UFOs and Shoe Polish Have a Lot in Common
An ad agency in Buenos Aires, Argentina made this series of print and TV ads for Nugget Shoe Polish. What does shoe polish have to do with UFOs? Well, the obvious point is that UFOs are shiny and shoe polish creates shine. But the truth goes much deeper than that, and involves little boys, exploding woodpeckers, and lots of cars from the 1940s. Click through see to the movie that explains everything. More »
survey
Take the io9 Psychographic Survey
Yes, it's time for our every-few-months psychographic, demographic, non-pornographic survey. As ever, we use this survey find out more about you so that our nice advertising department at Gawker Media can sell more ads in those wee sidebars, and thence allow io9 to continue thriving as the commercially-sponsored free thing that it is. In addition, those nice advertising people are sweetening the pot by offering you a chance to win a $300 Amex gift card if you fill out the survey (winners will be picked at random by evil robots, and some contest rules apply). OK, so fill out the survey already. It will only take about ten minutes.
icky sexbots
The Creepiest Sex Robots In Mass Media Right Now
Ashton Kutcher posed as a robot being "tested" by his creator, in this photoshoot for vMan magazine with famous photographer Mario Testino. (See gallery below, completely with weirdly exaggerated robo-package in his briefs.) He says he got the idea from a Gatorade ad in which someone's being tested for their physical performance, and then he started thinking, what if God could test us, his creations, to see if we're fulfilling our function? And then somehow that led to him thinking about a robot being tested by his actual creator. Actually, his explanation is less cogent than that. But actually, Ashton's only the third creepiest and most inappropriately sexy robot in mass media at the moment. Want to see the two that are worse? More »
retro futurism
We Will Land on Mars and We Will Sell Them Shoes
Capitalism triumphs again in this cartoon from a novelty ink blotter dating to the 1950s. Ink blotters, by the way, were absorbent cards used to soak up excess ink from your fountain pen. Thanks to the invention of the ballpoint, they were a dying technology when this one, celebrating future technology, was printed. More »
rant
Is Sweding a Corporate Plot?
I hate to get all indie rock on your ass, but isn't it kind of lame that everybody is going apeshit over Sweding when the whole meme was invented by the marketing team for Be Kind Rewind to get people interested in the movie? I'm not saying Be Kind Rewind was a bad movie, nor that the spirit behind Sweding is bad either. I like the idea of people making cardboard light cycles to parody Tron, or making fun of Predator with an all-female cast like the Swede I've got for you right here. And I think it's great that people are figuring out that it isn't some kind of crime against copyright to create silly versions of their favorite movies. But every time I see a new Sweded flick, I feel like the person doing it is just advertising Michel Gondry's flick rather than making a new cool thing. More »
advertising
Speed Racer To Shorten MTV Viewers' Attention Spans Further
If you're an MTV addict — and, really, who doesn't find themselves glued to My Super Sweet 16 every time it's on? Why didn't my parents rent out NYC and buy me Jay-Z when I turned 16? I feel deprived — then I just want to tell you in advance: Your TiVo isn't broken. It's just been hijacked by the Wachowskis, who plan to fast forward through trailers to give themselves some time to tell you about Speed Racer. More »
advertising
To celebrate the premiere of Lost Season 4 in Europe, Portugese guerrilla marketing firm Torke collaborated with Fox to drop Dharma Initiatives boxes onto the streets of Lisbon. A couple of blogs mentioned this yesterday, but nobody has revealed what's in them. What could be in it? A polar bear? Walt? (Maybe Walt.) Boxes of Dharma coke and Dharma cereal? We don't know for sure, but Lost fans in Lisbon were psyched to see artifacts from their favorite TV show appear on their doorsteps in real life.
What was in the Dharma Initiative Boxes in Lisbon?
To celebrate the premiere of Lost Season 4 in Europe, Portugese guerrilla marketing firm Torke collaborated with Fox to drop Dharma Initiatives boxes onto the streets of Lisbon. A couple of blogs mentioned this yesterday, but nobody has revealed what's in them. What could be in it? A polar bear? Walt? (Maybe Walt.) Boxes of Dharma coke and Dharma cereal? We don't know for sure, but Lost fans in Lisbon were psyched to see artifacts from their favorite TV show appear on their doorsteps in real life.
retro futurism
Fancypants Garage of the Future Runs on IBM Cards, 1964
Candy-colored floors, bright white Eames-ish work stands, and a "punched card" holding all your car's pertinent information: that's the "Auto Service Center of Tomorrow" presented in United Delco's ad for its exhibit at the '64 World's Fair. Your mechanic (is that him in the nosecone, dressed in antiseptic white?) takes the card, pops it into the computer and, boom, your automotive problems are solved. IBM cards have gone the way of the dodo bird and garages are as greasy as ever, but the predicted marriage of cars and computers was right on the money—even if they missed the part about how the onboard computer itself is often the very expensive problem. Click through for a closer look at Delco's vision of tomorrow's garage. More »
advertising
NBC Will Stop The Internet For Battlestar
Apparently, the Cylons aren't the only ones with a plan. Sci Fi Channel parent company NBC/Universal is pulling out all the stops to promote this Friday's return of Battlestar Galactica, including switching off the internet and telling you to watch television, instead. According to advertising bible Brand Week, NBC/Universal has made sure that you're not going to be able to surf the web instead of watching their show on Friday night.More »
advertising
Admiral Adama's Death Race With A Rocket Bike
Battlestar Galactica's post-apocalyptic leader, Edward James Olmos, races his sportscar through a world of flying cars, elevated trains and missile-firing rocket bikes, in this commercial for Farmers Insurance. Olmos has been appearing in Spanish/English Farmers ads for a while now, but this one features CGI world-building by Zach Mandt, who just finished working on Speed Racer. Also, that exploding building Olmos drives up to at the end? According to reader cde, it's the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers' Command Center, where Zordon and his cylon-esque robot Alpha-5 hung out. Click through for a side-by-side comparison. More »
advertising
Creepy Corporate Data-Sucking Machines of the Future
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 »
advertising
Stealth Marketing Campaign for "Shutter" Promotes Bullshit Science
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 »
advertising
Mind Control Is Just a Click Away
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 »
Marvel/ABC Cross-Promo Brings You a Second Iron Man Ad During Lost
Marvel Comics have announced that the next trailer for its big summer blockbuster Iron Man will first be seen during this Thursday's episode of ABC's Lost. The publisher makes sure to tell fans just when to tune into the show, which seems a more interesting tact to take in light of the Marvel/ABC advertising deal that has seen Marvel books filled with references to the new season of Lost.New Iron Man Movie Trailer Debuts During Lost [Marvel.com]
Marvel Comics have announced that the next trailer for its big summer blockbuster Iron Man will first be seen during this Thursday's episode of ABC's Lost. The publisher makes sure to tell fans just when to tune into the show, which seems a more interesting tact to take in light of the Marvel/ABC advertising deal that has seen Marvel books filled with references to the new season of Lost.New Iron Man Movie Trailer Debuts During Lost [Marvel.com]
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