Here’s a pleasant little Dutch treat. Developed by Czar.NL for Heineken in the Netherlands and launched in late December 2008, this clever ad projecting the perceived differences in fashion focus between men and women was viewed a million times in its first week!

I’ve written about Black Friday before and still marvel at the spooked herd mentality of people responding, like Pavlov’s dogs, to the ring of the shameless loss leader. But this year may be a little different given the state of our economy. While I expect crowds will still be ridiculous by normal standards, it will be interesting to see, when the numbers are tallied, whether tight money dampened or ignited shoppers’ enthusiasm for bargains.

Me, I’m writing this Thursday night for auto-posting tomorrow at 5 A.M. because we plan on sleeping in. Happy Black Friday!

You may remember various email hoaxes over the years claiming that cell phones could cook an egg and therefore were frying your brain while you used them. Well, a new version popped up May 28th in the form of YouTube videos purporting to demonstrate how cell phones can pop corn. I’ve received several emails from friends “alerting” me to the danger.

Sorry, folks, but all three videos were illusions produced by Cardo Systems, Inc., a provider of Bluetooth headsets, as part of a marketing campaign to - you guessed it - sell more headsets. Pretty clever, I suppose, but how was it done? Well, someone’s produced a video that purports to “expose” the hoax. The video on the left is one of the three produced by Cardo showing the corn “popping”, the one on the right by someone dismantling a microwave to demonstrate how the trick was conceivably accomplished. Kids, don’t try this at home.

A word of caution seems appropriate here. Cardo refers to their videos as “illusions” without explaining how they were accomplished. The video purporting to expose them was not produced by Cardo and could conceivably be a hoax itself. In any event, attempting to reproduce the illusion as shown in the second video would be, at the very least, dangerous. At worst, you could be electrocuted or burn your house down. Needless to say, I don’t recommend anyone try it.

Following up on Monday’s post about the spread of airline add-on fees for everything from peanuts to baggage and aisle seats, U.S. airline Southwest is resisting the trend — and picking up a lot of extra business — by sticking to their business model. The airline ran this ad in the Wall Street Journal (click to enlarge):

It reads “Don’t #$*!% me over” followed by “Southwest is the only airline that accepts this coupon” and the clever tag line: “Fees don’t fly with us.” More   (Hat tip to Teddy and Billyum!)

I suppose it was only a matter of time. Philadelphians opened their newspapers Friday to ads trumpeting new airline Derrie-Air’s announced policy to charge passengers “by the pound” reasoning that “it takes more fuel to move heavier objects.”

Derrie-Air’s sample rates range from $1.40 per pound to fly from Philadelphia to Chicago, to $2.25 per pound to fly from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Philadelphia Media Holdings spokesman Jay Devine said “there’s already buzz about the campaign…”

It’s a radical plan, but not surprising with fuel prices sky-rocketing and airlines scrambling to eek out a profit. Other airlines have announced plans to charge passengers for second checked bags, with one airline planning to charge for each checked bag.

Derrie-Air claims to be the world’s only carbon-neutral luxury airline, and it justifies its fare policy by pledging to plant trees to offset every pound of carbon its planes release into the atmosphere. That may help appease green travelers, but other passengers may not be as receptive.

You can read more at flyderrie-air.com and in this SFGate news story.

All right, I’m no supporter of PETA, but I ran across these ads and wondered if its current campaign featuring assorted actors and A-listers declaring their vegetarianism (and support for PETA) actually moves anyone to become a vegetarian.

PETA doesn’t particularly care about our health. They advocate vegetarianism in order to protect animals. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you.

So does anyone really get behind PETA or become a vegetarian because they like seeing Alicia Silverstone or Sophie Monk naked? I mean, I’m a red blooded American male who enjoys seeing naked women as much as the next guy, but I’ve never felt an urge to buy a Caterpillar tractor because a naked actress posed for their calendar…

Great game notwithstanding, for some the Super Bowl is all about the commercials. There were some pretty good ones this year. These were some of my favorites:

Bud Light - Breathe Fire

Pepsi - Magnetic Attraction

Diet Pepsi Max - What is Love

Audi - Truth in Engineering

Budweiser - Clydesdale Team

FedEx - Carrier Pigeons

Bud Light - Wheel Suck

Bud Light - Jackie Moon

Mike sent this in response to last week’s post about exotic juices. A hidden camera settles the debate once and for all…

I’ve been watching HD DVD’s plummeting popularity since Warner’s decision to jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon, especially evident following CES. But Toshiba’s apparently not going down without a fight. In Bryan Gardiner’s article for Wired, he explains what may be their “Hail Mary” effort to stem the tide.

You’ve got to hand to Toshiba. Even now, when faced with overwhelming evidence that Sony’s Blu-ray has won the high def format war, the mortally wounded HD DVD backer just keeps on prolonging the inevitable.

First, Toshiba decides to dramatically cut prices on its HD DVD players in the U.S. following Warner Bros. Blu-ray defection earlier this month. Now, for reasons that also escape us, the company has decided to buy a 30-second Super Bowl spot for $2.7 million to advertise its desperation those marked down HD DVD players.

Of course, none of this is really convincing consumers. As Ars Technica recently noted, in the week following the Warner Bros. defection, weekly HD DVD player sales tanked big time, falling from 14,558 the week previous to a measly 1,758.

Meanwhile, Blu-ray saw a reverse trend, climbing from 15,257 to 21,770. In fact, the format ended up capturing approximately 93 percent of the market that week, according to NDP. …

We’ve watched the format war rage for nearly two years. The world’s apparently made its choice. Maybe it’s time for Toshiba to throw in the towel on this one.

I always enjoy Apple’s “Get a Mac” advertising campaign and look forward to each new release. Today Apple posted their newest installment touting Leopard’s “Time Machine”, its automatic back-up and file retrieval system that can easily locate and retrieve even long ago deleted files.

The ad features the “Mac” and “PC” guys (Justin Long and John Hodgman) explaining, in simple but entertaining ways, how it works. You can watch the ad below or in various sizes/resolutions on Apple’s site.

And here’s one they used for the 2007 WWDC to introduce Apple’s Phil Schiller. You have to admit, these guys have a great sense of humor!

…several times, in fact. I wasn’t going to say anything about the experience, but I have to tell someone so I can get on with my life!

First it was my cousin, Mike. Then Frank. Teddy hit me the same day. And then Kerri and Gary! And Candy and her friend. Even my brudda-from-anudda-mudda, Michael, and his missus, Sisko, elfed both Dawn and me!

I’m sure Office Max is getting a nice ride from the viral advertising. Pretty clever campaign.

Click on any elf and watch our “elfing” by Michael and Sisko. They even elfed themselves! That’s Dawn and me in the #2 and #4 slots.

This chalk drawing video is actually an advertisement by Sony BMG (Canada) for Alicia Keys’ latest CD album. Drawn by Victor Fraser in the heart of Downtown Toronto, it took about six hours to complete.

The crowds, the traffic, the utter mayhem. You already know all about the day after Thanksgiving, appropriately dubbed Black Friday. And although I’d vowed never to set foot in a retail store on that day, I found myself accompanying Dawn last Friday as we shopped for a few early Christmas gifts. But guess what - there’s another day for you to deal with. It’s called Cyber Monday.

Feeling left out of all the hoopla, online marketers (they prefer being called e-retailers) conjured up an ad blitz for the first work day after the Thanksgiving shopping weekend and even created a special web site. I suppose It was only a matter of time. In fact, I have to wonder what took them so long. Well, word has spread and now online marketers (oops… e-retailers) offer some real deals on Cyber Monday, everything from free shipping to one-day sales specials.

Shop.org claims that, according to its online survey, 72 million folks will shop online from work (hmmm… I suppose there will be a corresponding drop in business productivity) for holiday gifts, up 11 million from last year. And yes, Dawn and I keystroked our way to a couple of good buys, too.

E-retail believes that, with everything going high-tech these days, they’re entitled to their own traditions, especially those that also happen to turn a profit. I suppose it’s only fair.

Today marks the start of the Christmas shopping season with what retailers see as one of their busiest shopping days of the year and what many shoppers see as their best shot all year of snagging one of a handful of $400 laptops and other teaser bargains. It’s such a phenomenon, it’s been dubbed “Black Friday,” the day retailers say they expect to move from being “in the red” to being “in the black” for the first time all year.

But from where I stand, Black Friday should more accurately be called “Black and Blue Friday” as Americans across the fruited plain have been stampeding and, in many cases, fighting each other in the rush for  — “seasonal bargains.” And to be honest, there are some bargains to be had. Unfortunately, most shoppers lose perspective and become part of the feeding frenzy to grab anything and everything that seems cheap. Never mind whether or not they need it - it’s a bargain!

And that’s the biggest problem I see with the whole fiasco. Shoppers scour  myriad ads touting ridiculously cheap stuff — like the $400 laptop — and rush to grab one only to find that all eleven of them are already gone. But now they’re primed to get whatever bargains remain, often leaving the stores with carts filled to overflowing with crap they don’t need. 

Is this what Christmas has become? Who are these people? Have they completely forgotten what Christmas is about? Have they no common decency, courtesy, manners? Were they raised in a cave by wolves?

It’s sad on so many levels I don’t know in which direction to scream first. So, like many, most I suspect, I refuse to play. Sure, I’ll probably pay a little more for some gifts, but I won’t subject myself or anyone I care about to such lunacy. These folks may get some great bargains, but they’ll show who they really are in the process. And how they were brought up. And how they lack manners. And how the real meaning of Christmas has completely eluded them.

Do retailers really need this to make their annual nut? I doubt it. Folks would still shop — even these folks — if retailers simply agreed to quit feeding this annual frenzy. But retailers won’t…

While the madness continues, I should remind you that it’s also Buy Nothing Day. What’s that, you ask? Well, about fifteen years ago, Vancouver artist Ted Dave founded a movement, now celebrated on the Friday after Thanksgiving, to protest rampant over-consumerism. Since then, the movement has spread to some sixty-five nations. Has it had a major effect? That’s debateable, but if it’s done nothing more than cause shoppers to re-examine their spending habits, it’s served its purpose.

So were you one of the many who stood in line awaiting the 4 a.m. Target and other store openings? Did you elbow your way through the herd and grab one of the prize widgets on sale for half off? And, having made the big score, did you turn around and leave? I doubt it. Like most, you probably came home with a car full of crap you don’t need. Happy holidays.

I’ve been remiss in following up on the Cadbury Gorilla story that’s been one of the most popular posts on this site in some time. The ad was viewed almost 500,000 times on YouTube during the first week of its release! Everyone’s enjoyed it, but the burning question has been, “Who’s the guy in the gorilla suit?”

While many speculated it was Phil Collins himself, it apparently was Garon Michael, a relatively little-known actor who seems to specialize in playing primates, having appeared in Congo, Instinct, and the remake of Planet of the Apes. No stranger to film, he’s appeared with such heavyweights as Anthony Hopkins, Donald Sutherland and Mark Wahlberg.

Says Cadbury spokesman Tony Bilsborough, “We have been amazed by the way the advert has captured the public’s imagination.”

And so it has. It’ll be a tough act to follow!