The German website pundo3000.com has assembled a collection of 100 food products and compared what each one looks like, as shown on the packaging, to the actual product. In the majority of cases the difference is quite dramatic. But a few of the food products hold up pretty well in real life. For instance, the Milka chocolate bar looks almost exactly the same as it does on the packaging. But the roll (shown below) looks pretty unappetizing.

Funtasticus.com has collected all the images together into an easier-to-view format.

The following video shows kids (maybe in Brazil, I'm guessing) performing extreme freestyle soccer tricks. The tricks are pretty cool, but of course they're fake. The flips may be real, but the soccer ball must have been digitally inserted into the shots. The video is a viral ad for a new playstation game, FIFA Street 3. It reminds me of that Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho that was going around two years ago.

Recently strange ads for a drug called "Obay" began appearing around Toronto. The ads were pretty obviously satirical, but who was responsible for them? The Church of Scientology was an early suspect, since they're well known for their anti-psychiatry stance. But it turned out they had nothing to do with the ad campaign.

The Torontoist tracked down the real culprit. It's an advocacy group called Colleges Ontario, which represents twenty-four colleges in Ontario. The Torontoist writes:

This poster for "S. Watson's American Museum of Living Curiosities", which dates from 1885, can be found at the British Library site. All the exhibits seem like pretty standard stuff for a 19th-century museum: the stoutest lady in the world, the two-headed marvel, snake charmer, etc. It's the "Australians" exhibit that puzzles me. They don't really look like Australians. Are those outfits something that Aussies often wear?

Here's an ad, apparently created by a Brazilian extermination company, that is placed inside pizza boxes. The ad shows a photo of a dead roach, but it's only revealed as the pizza is removed from the box.

I'm sure the ad would attract people's attention, but I find it surprising that a pizza company would agree to place an ad like this beneath their food.

No word on if it's a real ad campaign, or just a mock up. (via nulovka via adrants)

Cranky Media Guy sent me an interesting link to an article published last December in the New York Times about the artist Richard Prince. He's described as a pioneer of "appropriation art." What this means is that Prince takes photographs of other photographer's photographs, and then displays them as his own. For instance, he had an exhibit at the Guggenheim about cowboys, which basically consisted of photographs of Marlboro ads. The guy who actually took the images for the Marlboro ads, the photographer Jim Krantz, visited the exhibit and was like, "Hang on, those are my photographs!"

In the thumbnail, you can see Krantz's original photograph on top, and Prince's rephotograph of it on the bottom.

Prince doesn't try to hide what he does. And art critics love his work. According to the NY Times: "one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million." That's good money for a photograph of someone else's photograph.

It raises the question, is this really art, or is it just mindless copying? To which the answer, as always, is that art is whatever art critics say is art (and whatever the courts allow artists to get away with).

Generally I take a very liberal attitude about copyright. I think it's necessary that people are allowed to copy works of art in order to be able to comment upon them, criticize them, or develop them into something new and different. But what Prince is doing looks more to me like glorified scrapbooking than creating original art.

It also reminds me of the scam that art museums try to use to establish perpetual copyright to the works in their collection. They take photographs of all the paintings they own that have passed into public domain. Then they claim that, while the original might be in the public domain, their picture of it is copyrighted -- and then they demand exorbitant fees from anyone who wants to reproduce it.

This ad, which has been running on digg, seems like a particularly egregious example of false advertising. Of course, if anyone would challenge the company in court they could say, "we never actually claimed our product could make an old lady look like a young model. That picture, as the disclaimer indicates, is merely simulated imagery."

The grammar cop in me also has to point out that it should be "fewer wrinkles," not "less wrinkles."

(via adrants)

The image to the right shows what is supposedly a guerrilla marketing campaign by Jontex, a Brazilian brand of condoms owned by Johnson & Johnson. The campaign involves a cardboard cutout that can be positioned beneath the door of a bathroom stall. The Brazilian phrase translates to, "You do not know when it can be necessary."

But strangely, Johnson and Johnson is denying responsibility for the ad. Or, at least, the folks who run the Johnson and Johnson blog claim it's not their company's campaign:



It seems like a lot of work for someone to create as a hoax. It could either be a subviral campaign (an ad campaign that a company creates but then denies responsibility for), or a "spec ad" (a speculative ad created by an agency to show a potential client what they're capable of).

If you've been to Starbucks in the past week or so, you've been at risk of finding yourself trapped in a "cheer chain." What this means is that the person in line in front of you pays for your drink, and in return you're supposed to pay for the drink of the person behind you. This goes on and on, ad nauseam. The Associated Press reported on one cheer chain that totaled 1,013 customers.

The question is, are these cheer chains a true spontaneous phenomenon, or are they a cynically created pr stunt? The phenomenon supposedly began when Arthur Rosenfeld offered to pay for the drink of the guy behind him in the drive-thru line who was honking and yelling. Rosenfeld is a tai-chi master, and he wanted to change the man's consciousness through a random act of kindness. The guy who was honking decided to pay for the car behind him, etc. etc.

But I'm in the camp of those who, like consumerist.com, believe they're a pr stunt. Consumerist points out that Starbucks is even issuing coupons to encourage the cheer chain movement, plus they've set up a website about it. (Thanks, Bob)

Here's another case of a misleading claim in an advertisement. This time from Papa Johns, who offers unlimited toppings, as long as you have a maximum of no more than five toppings. (posted by Nave_7 on flickr.)



Related posts:
Deceptive Ad (Dec 3, 2007)
Deceptive Sign (Sep 10, 2007)

Here's another example of a retailer creating a misleading display for their product. It's not technically a lie, but it certainly could confuse a shopper who didn't pay close attention. The image has been circulating around the internet recently. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I first saw it.

Related Post: Deceptive Sign.

Update: The image was first posted on Consumerist.com, emailed to them by "William" who saw it at a Toys R Us. (Though I figured out that I first saw it via this reddit link, which didn't offer any explanatory details.)

I've recently been rereading Phantom Fame, the autobiography of Harry Reichenbach, who was a famous publicist during the early 20th century. In the book Reichenbach describes all kinds of bizarre and amusing publicity stunts he dreamed up. When I first read it, years ago, I took it all at face value, assuming Reichenbach really did all the things he described. But now that I'm rereading it, I'm realizing that at least a third of it is complete baloney.

For instance, Reichenbach claims he was responsible for making September Morn one of the most famous paintings in the world by convincing New York's anti-vice campaigner, Anthony Comstock, to denounce it as immoral. But the reality is that Reichenbach wasn't involved in the September Morn scandal in any way. (I posted about this recently.)

Reichenbach also takes credit for dreaming up a low-budget publicity stunt involving a "Brazilian Invisible Fish." The idea was to put a large, transparent bowl of water in the window of a store with a sign in front of it reading, "Brazilian Invisible Fish." People soon gathered around to try to see the invisible fish.

I think the reality is that this was a common stunt in sideshows long before Reichenbach ever took credit for it. (The showman Florenz Ziegfeld, of the Ziegfeld Follies, also took credit for inventing it.) It's certainly easy to find the stunt described in newspapers years before Reichenbach described it in his book.

But I'm wondering whether there actually are invisible fish? Or, at least, transparent fish. I imagine there are. I found one report, by the Smithsonian, describing a species of Pacific fish called "sand divers" whose bodies, except for their eyes, are apparently as transparent as glass.

I'm hoping that the Museum of Hoaxes' Deputy Curator In Charge of Fish might be able to shed some light on this matter.