Entries Tagged 'Advertising' ↓

It takes a lot for me to watch white people dance with Black people and forget that I’m watching white people dance with Black people. Target’s “Happy Together” spot, agencied by Wieden + Kennedy Portland (of NIKE fame) and directed by Mike Maguire, doesn’t come close, but may be pointed in the right direction. (YouTube has it linked to the screenshot, above. However, I’d suggest you check out the QuickTime on the Coloribus.com web site, which is, as well as being clearer, downloadable.)

And since you’ve been wondering, the sexy track and video is “Calabria 2007” by Enur feat. Natasja.

Also, did you notice the line we just crossed?

This is MEDIA ASSASSIN’s 250th post!

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Up yours: James Bond (Daniel Craig) flips on a foe

When the family of the late Albert R. Broccoli, producers of the James Bond film series, decided that the archetype needed a reboot, and hired actor Daniel Craig to play the titular superspy in the 21st Bond movie, 2006’s Casino Royale, the fan response was overwhelming…and stupendously negative.

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Now we come to the payoff: After seeing naught but Bond’s shadow in the earlier teaser poster, the second advance delivers the goods with an original, double-sided, rolled, 27″ x 40″ one-sheet, $40 at MoviePoster.com.

While I’m glad that BestWeekEver.tv hipped me to this French Orangina television ad, above in English, I want to wash all of it—including the sight of a bear, above, grinding a busty deer on a swing—out of my eyeballs. Now. Please.

McDonald’s “mixed race” “cha cha slide” kid

“The biracial look is in vogue in advertising. The process of changing racial definitions continues, and dramatic new developments may be on the horizon.”—Anthony J. Cortese, Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorities in Advertising (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), p. 113

Always count on BlackCommentator.com to, once again, boldly go: “Biracial is the New Black,” by K. Danielle Edwards, laments what the author sees as a new light-skinned color standard for Black people in advertising and related contexts:

What’s up with all the olive-skinned, spiral-curled, hazel-, blue- and green-eyed folks standing in for black people in commercials and print advertisements these days?
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Director James Marsh’s new movie, Man on Wire: A Tale of High Crime, documents French high wire artist Philippe Petit’s August 7, 1974 tightrope walk between the then new, 1350-foot-high twin towers of the World Trade Center.

The film opens next week, Friday, July 25th. Marsh is a guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, July 18th, 2 pm ET.

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On September 11th, people repeatedly said that the destruction of the World Trade Center “looked like a movie.” But no one had ever seen a movie before during which an exploding building powerfully, suddenly, ejects thousands of reams of paper with a woeful, confetti-like bloom. That sight was completely unexpected, a detail few would have anticipated, the random visual white noise that reality adds to a disastrous purview.

I thought of 9/11 while scoping this incredible, horizontally-formatted poster for The Dark Knight (double-sided, 40″ x 30″, rolled, $75.00, MoviePoster.com). Of course, that’s director Christopher Nolan’s sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, and the late Heath Ledger in his final movie role, opening this Friday, July 18th.

I’m conviced that, especially as we get more and more distance between us and that horrible fall day, imagery straight from the Towers’s deaths will infest our cinematic visions as the only universally credible depictions of apocalypse.

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Vocalist Rene Marie prepares to knock one outta the state

Kanye West’s “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” speech is now officially retired as my favorite “Straight Jack-Move Racial Protest by a Musician in a Public Forum.” It’s now a distant second to Colorado jazz vocalist Rene Marie’s singing the “The Star-Spangled Banner,” July 1st, at Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s State of the City address, but, instead of using Francis Scott Key’s traditional words, switching them out for the lyrics to James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the so-called “Black National Anthem”!

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Here you go, just in case you, like I, missed that ridiculous Fake Obama Kia commercial, as it was originally seen on The Daily Show. I guess this also implies that an Obama win “promises” four years of work to Black actors with floppy ears.

Bet she kept this clip off of her reel: Ayds diet candy commercial

What do you do when the name of your number one product, under which you’ve been selling your goods for decades, becomes a homonym for a deadly scourge?

That’s the foul question the makers of Ayds, an appetite suppressant, found themselves having to address 20 years ago. By that point, it had become clear that acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, was not going to be a flash in the pan—a temporary blip that the company could just ride out—but would be, in fact, the disease of the century, if not the millennium.

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