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He’ll do anything for love, but he won’t do that.

From AdWeek:

“The campaign would begin with three broadcast spots from MDC Partners’ Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami, including an ad called “Jumper,” in which a suicidal man stands on the ledge of a building as a crowd and police gather. The man then changes his mind after a stranger tells him about the three sub-$17,000 models from VW.”

Can’t imagine they won’t be pressured. Wonder how long this one will stay on air? Or if it will even make it to the airwaves.

UPDATE 2/15:  Yep they pulled it.  According to a story in AdWeek:  “Volkswagen today said it would pull a 30-second TV spot called “Jumper,” which had drawn criticism from suicide prevention groups…The campaign is all about how optimism…if given a chance, can prevail. Optimism is a huge component of the VW brand. Our position has always been that the campaign was not meant to offend anyone,” said client representative Keith Price. “Another element of the brand is sensitivity and with that sensitivity, we have withdrawn the spot.”

Let me reiterate: the suicide of a robot in a dream…in an ad…set off a controversy.

So it looks like General Motors caved and will edit the robot spots so that the bucket of bolts doesn’t jump off the bridge in the dream sequence. (They already pulled it off YouTube).

That’s two spots…one pulled and one now modified.

Seems like the winners in this year’s Super Bowl were the advocacy groups who got their cause coverage by protesting various multi-million dollar ad buys.

I couldn’t understand everything they were saying…but between the images and the words I picked up enough that I got the gist. A Vista demo on a Mac by a Microsoft rep….How ironic!

Especially in light of this article in Newsweek. For maximum entertainment value, read the hundreds of comments.

Apparently the Mac they used for the demo didn’t need any surgery to run the new Microsoft OS. (The one in the demo looked like an iMac. Maybe I should try and download Vista to my iMac and see if it will run.) Perhaps that should be Microsoft’s new strategy. Just run Vista on a Mac.

Note: I have both a Mac and PC. In fact because I’m vegged out on my couch at the moment, I am writing this post on my Dell laptop running XP. But…if I need a screen shot of a video stream (like for this post) I have to go to my Mac at the desk. You ever try and get a screen grab on your PC from a video stream and then try to crop it? What a pain in the ass. The Mac seems to understand that what you want from a screen grab is just a simple flat image so it creates a png file and just dumps it on the desktop (plus it lets you select which part of the screen you want)… whereas the PC screen grab 1) lets you only select from the active window or the whole desktop, 2) requires you to go into another program and paste the image… and 3) then if you need to crop a screen grab from a video stream…forget it you can’t. I’m sure there’s a way or some piece of software I can download, but I’ve tried multiple ways with no luck. I was tired of wasting time, so I gave up and just started using my Mac for screen grabs of streams — it’s a hell of a lot easier and faster. Even if it means I have to get up off the couch.

Sometimes you just need something real:

Millions followed the story of the guy who wanted to propose to his girlfriend via a spot on the Super Bowl i.e. Mysuperproposal.com. That didn’t pan out, but the proposal did.

She said yes!

From AdAge:

“The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is a little upset with General Motors Corp. over the automaker’s Super Bowl XLI spot in which a GM factory robot — obsessed with quality — dreams it loses its job, becomes depressed and jumps off a bridge.

Not funny, said the foundation, which released a request for GM to pull the commercial from future airings.”

Come on people!!!! It’s just a damn ad. With a f#&king robot for pity sake. IT’S NOT HUMAN!! It’s complete and total fiction. Lighten the hell up. It’s no wonder people think advertising in the States sucks compared to our European counterparts. Too many groups and individuals with apparently too much time on their hands and political agendas taken to the extreme. Come on… pick a bigger, more relevant and meaningful battle.

Definite repercussions over last week’s viral campaign fiasco. According to the Washington Post:

“Turner Broadcasting Systems and a marketing company have agreed to pay $2 million compensation and apologize for their advertising campaign that caused a widespread terrorism scare.

As part of the settlement, $1 million will be used to reimburse the agencies and $1 million will be used to fund homeland security and other programs. Turner Broadcasting, a division of Time Warner Inc., and Interference Inc. also will issue a public statement accepting full responsibility and apologizing for the incident.”

Ouch! That hurts.

Yet in this week’s Ad Age Poll, which asked: “Do you think the furor over the Cartoon Network promotion for ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force’ in Boston will have a chilling effect on guerilla marketing in the future?”, 76% of respondents said no.

Snicker’s Super Bowl ad, created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, which shows two men accidentally “kissing,” certainly got attention and was very popular among many. It ranked #3 in popularity on AOL’s poll, #5 on Adbowl among those under 17 and #9 in the USAtoday poll. However, complaints that the commercial was homophobic from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Human Rights Campaign led the company to withdraw the spot and the website (afterthekiss.com).

The last time I remember a high-visibility Super Bowl spot being pulled after just a single showing was back in 1997…the infamous “Bob” spot for Holiday Inn was taken off the air after widespread negative reactions. (Personally I thought that spot was perfectly on strategy for what Holiday Inn was trying to communicate at that time.)

But things are different now than they were in 1997. There’s no way the Snickers spot is going away. While it may be officially off the TV air waves, it’s still out there being viewed (and passed around) by millions.

According to a story in the New York Times today:

The Snickers commercial offers a cautionary tale about the echo chamber Super Bowl advertising has become. Years ago, Super Bowl spots pretty much disappeared after the one or two times they were shown during the broadcast. Today, they have afterlives because they are being made available on dozens of Web sites, written about on blogs, forwarded to friends as video clips and even scrutinized for the brain-wave patterns they generate in viewers.

Today it is all about “beyond the :30″. Advertisers seek innovative ways to leverage exposure for maximum value. Especially when that exposure cost $2.6 million for 30 seconds. According to Cymfony, a market influence analytics company, the three advertisers whose Super Bowl spots are being talked about the most are Anheuser-Busch, Doritos and Nationwide Financial — all three surrounded and supplemented their Super Bowl commercials with elaborate Web-based campaigns. Beyond the initial exposure, millions more impressions have been garnered on sites that are streaming the spots and/or have polls like AOL, iFilm, Adbowl, USAtoday, and of course YouTube. Reprise even put together a scorecard of how well each company did in terms of integrating their efforts between TV and the web. Snickers actually scored among the highest on that front along with others like Blockbuster, GoDaddy.com, CareerBuilder.com and SalesGenie.com.

Will the “kiss” spot negatively impact sales? And do we give the :30 spot way too much credit? Guess we have to wait and see. Damn near every woman hated those stupid GoDaddy spots last year that were all about T&A, but they seem to be doing well as a business (well enough to run another stupid spot this year). The SalesGenie.com spot with the cheesy sales guy was voted the worst spot in the USAtoday poll, but who had heard of them before the SuperBowl?

I was largely underwhelmed. Overall I thought the ads last night during the Super Bowl were, for the most part OK, but by no means great. Most seemed uninspired, relying on shtick and overdone production techniques.

The Blockbuster ad with the rabbit and mouse did make me laugh, but I wonder if it was a spot buy and not a national buy since neither CBS nor YouTube had it included in their listings. However, it did show up on the Adbowl’s rankings. But to me nothing really stood out as stellar. And apparently I’m not alone in my reaction.

Even more what-evertising.

Ads on New York City garbage trucks for Glad trash bags.

Reported to have boosted the brand’s market share by two percentage points in the city through December.