Post Advertising

In June 2006, under the name LonelyGirl15, “Bree” uploaded a 90 second amateur video to YouTube. In the video, Bree announces directly to her webcam “What you need to know about my town is that it's really boring. That's probably why I spend so much time on my computer, I'm a dork.”

Despite, or maybe because of, the banality of the content, by the time the sixth video “My Parents Suck” was uploaded, LonelyGirl15 had half a million viewers.

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Hugh MacLeod is a genius.

"It's all about thriving in markets that are smarter and faster than you are. It's all about being totally fucked if you don't know what I'm talking about."

Check out his blog and download his manifesto.

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Why do I wince every time I see George Clooney advertise a coffee machine?

Nespresso’s latest advertising campaign, "What Else?" features Clooney in an interactive short-film. The campaign is well conceived, humorous, has high production values, involves the viewer and has storytelling at its’ heart. In truth, it’s so polished they almost pull it off.

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Sometimes you get obsessed with watching certain things on YouTube. For me, it's been surfing, parkour, sharks and live Miles Davis. Lately, though, I can't get enough of Japanese commercials. And two recent ones (new to YouTube, not to the world) caught my post-advertising eye:

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What did rising Microsoft star Steve Ballmer do to sell a new product called Microsoft Windows in 1986? As hard as it is to believe, he did this:

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Not from us. From them. Them being all the ad agencies and media buyers and, dare I say, brand storytellers out there. It's a holiday tradition in the ad world: The over-the-top holiday card. They've been discussed and highlighted. Here are a few you may have missed:

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I’ve got this theory that brands can engender irrational consumer loyalty through generosity, which was recently reinforced by a trip in a London cab. Black cabs are not usually known for their largesse, however, this time it was different. Thanks to O², I was able to make free calls to any UK number from a branded radio phone in the back – it just so happened I needed to phone my mum, so I did.

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Did you ever in your wildest fantasies imagine the Mac guy and the PC guy coming to blows? No matter: The powerful CPUs in today's computers thought about it hundreds of millions of times before you even blinked. And this is what happened:

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The holidays are a lonely time of year for some people, especially those of you who decided to eschew a vacation in favor of working this week. With the below, I salute and thank you for your dedication, your attention and your utter lack of connection with the rest of humanity.

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A lot of people are aware that if global warming continues and sea levels rise that life in New York City will be threatened. Experts predict, for instance, that it may be harder to get a cab if the sea level rises so much as 12 inches. That's only one foot. Think about it.

But there's a problem that not a lot of New Yorkers are aware of that is probably maybe bad, too: The flyover states are becoming a whole lot less flyover-y because they are all getting fat with fat people. And for this, we need a post-advertising age solution. Read on.

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In the past few years, I've gone to not a few ugly sweater parties. And I had a mustache. How are these two things related? Well, sometimes dressing in an ugly sweater/having a mustache show that you are comfortable with imperfection. With ugliness. With being yourself. You and Vince:

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We’ve all heard that “traditional advertising is dead” and we all know it isn’t. It’s still alive even though it doesn’t work very well, is increasingly ignored, irritates people and isn’t really measureable. So when will it really die?

The incontrovertible axiom of the post-advertising age is that traditional, interruptive commercials will disappear completely (i.e., die) when there are no more traditional media to interrupt with ads. That explains why a recent obsessive focus of postadvertising.com is the lethal illness now afflicting traditional media — an illness that combines the virus of global economic collapse, the ongoing fragmentation of TV and the viral growth of digital.

This week, it’s the newspapers’ turn to take a leading role in the traditional media deathwatch. But it’s also magazines’ moment, and local TV (followed by national TV). It’s always the book business’s turn. And who knows whose turn it’ll be after that? No traditional medium is safe these days.

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