Archive for the 'advertising' Category

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The Good Wife’s Guide

Published on July 5, 2007 in advertising and Society. 1 Comment

This is how women were advised to behave as a perfect spouse in 1955.

The Good Wife’s Guide (1955) (Flickr)
  • Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
  • Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first – remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
  • Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through at work.
  • Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
  • A good wife always knows her place.

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Equal Pay Day

Published on March 30, 2007 in advertising. Closed

That time of the month …

Equal Pay Day

Adultery and secure documents

Published on February 16, 2007 in advertising. 3 Comments

I get an email from CertiPost, a daughter company of the Belgacom/Belgian Post, that bears the title “You had an unwanted visitor last night“. When one clicks on the link, one has to give the name of one’s partner, best friend and favourite sport. The result is a somewhat customized movie about a wife who cheats on her husband, or actually, your wife cheating on you.
tristan-isolde

This obviously is a trial to make a viral video. They’ve made some mistakes though:

  • You can only personalize the movie for yourself, you cannot forward a copy personalized for a friend. That would have really made it viral.
  • I fail to see why “Your wife is cheating on you” would make the subject want to buy a product/service, expect if it concerns lethal weapons or a private detective.
  • The contrast between a movie that is trying to be cheeky and a company that is anything but cheeky – an institution that tries to sell you security services – makes it untrustworthy

MyCertiSafe

There are no Flash websites

Published on December 13, 2006 in advertising and webdev. 11 Comments

Never say “we have a Flash website”; there is no such thing. You might say: we have a website and it features, amongst a lot of relevant information in HTML pages, a Flash movie and/or application. You might say: we did buy a domain and we decided that a real website would be too accessible for our customers, so it only has a Flash blob on the ‘homepage’.

Flash is to websites what airconditioning is to a car: you might call it luxury, you might call it indispensable, but you cannot call it a car. It’s just airco.

For some reason, people that have experience with creating Flash applications also think they can make websites. “Just throw some Javascript on the homepage and it plays beautifully”, right? Wrong! If you have never heard of proper markup, SEO, the limitations of Javascript and Flash, you should leave making websites to professionals. If you insist that your branding cannot be properly expressed with just HTML/CSS/Ajax, you can add a Flash object to your site. But on its own, it’s a sorry excuse for a website.

Case: Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles
Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles
Le Fabuleux Marcel de Bruxelles is a new brand of singlets (‘wifebeaters‘ in English, or ‘marcellekes’ in Bruxellois). The idea is good, the branding is beautiful, the advertising is top-notch (not surprisingly, since the founder is also one of the founders of the ad agency LG&F).
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