Advertising Hoaxes

Extra Virgin Mary —
Status: Prank
image I'm about five days late posting this, but better late than never. An advertisement for an "Extra Virgin Mary Statue" slipped by the editors of the conservative Catholic magazine, America. The advertisement offered "a stunning ... statue of the Virgin Mary standing atop a serpent wearing a delicate veil of latex." The "delicate veil of latex" was a blue condom. America's editors didn't examine the accompanying photo closely enough to realize this. And so the ad ran in the December 5 edition. People who contacted the seller were told the ad was meant "as an assault on Catholic faith and devotion." I don't know who the artist was who created the ad. Maybe it was Banksy.
Posted: Wed Dec 28, 2005.   Comments (11)

Sony’s Fake Graffiti —
Status: Faux-rilla marketing campaign
image In order to promote its new handheld game player, Sony is paying artists to spray paint fake graffiti on buildings in major cities. (They're also paying the building owners for the right to spray paint the graffiti, which consists of images of spaced-out kids playing with the new handheld device.) But according to an article in Wired, the fake graffiti has provoked the anger of some city residents, who have spray painted over the images messages such as "Get out of my city," and "Fony." The Wired article points out that this isn't the first time advertisers have created fake graffiti: "In 2001, IBM paid Chicago and San Francisco more than $120,000 in fines and clean-up costs after its advertising agency spray-painted Linux advertisements on the cities' sidewalks." In Hippo Eats Dwarf I also briefly discuss how The Gap once spray-painted fake graffiti on its store windows. The phenomenon is called faux-rilla marketing (i.e. guerrilla marketing that relies on fake elements).

But I wouldn't put it past Sony to have stage-managed this entire controversy. In other words, Sony could have paid the people who spray-painted the angry messages over the original images. After all, the Sony marketers would have to know that fake graffiti, on its own, isn't much of a story. In fact, most people would never even notice it. But fake graffiti that provokes an angry response is likely to get media attention. This theory occurs to me because the Sony spokeswoman quoted in the article, Molly Smith, sounds a bit too pleased by the angry response the graffiti is provoking:

When asked about the criticism, Smith countered that art is subjective and that both the content and the medium dovetailed with Sony's belief that the PSP is a "disrupter product" that lets people play games, surf the internet and watch movies wherever they want.
Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005.   Comments (8)

Ronaldinho Nike Ad —
Status: Undetermined (but I'm guessing fake)
image Nike has a new ad featuring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho Gaucho. In the ad Ronaldinho puts on a pair of Nikes, juggles the ball a few times, and then kicks the ball towards the goal so that it hits the crossbar and bounces directly back to him. He does this four times in a row. And it's all shot in a single take. This has inspired a lot of discussion on the net, because it's hard to believe anyone could be skilled enough to do this. In an article posted on the BBC (in Portuguese... I read it via AltaVista Translate) Ronaldinho swears that the scene is real, although the reporters interviewing him refuse to believe him. Given that it's an ad, I would assume it's fake, since one should always assume that what you see in ads is bogus, unless it's proven otherwise.
Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005.   Comments (56)

Cyber Monday —
Status: Marketing gimmick
Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving when all the stores have their big sales. It's said to be the biggest shopping day of the year. Cyber Monday comes three days later, and (according to what I heard on many newsasts this year) is supposed to be the biggest day for online shopping, a phenomenon caused by millions of shoppers returning to work on Monday and looking for bargains online. But apparently Cyber Monday isn't the biggest online shopping day of the year. And the term itself is the very recent invention of marketers. Robert Hof debunks Cyber Monday in an article in BusinessWeek.com:

Contrary to what the recent blitz of media coverage implies, Cyber Monday isn't nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It's not even the first big day of the season. For most online retailers, the bigger spending day of the season to date was way back on Nov. 22, three days before Black Friday. What's more, most e-tailers say the season's top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15...
So what's up with this Cyber Monday idea? A little bit of reality and a whole lot of savvy marketing. It turns out that Shop.org, an association for retailers that sell online, dreamed up the term just days before putting out a Nov. 21 press release touting Cyber Monday as "one of the biggest online shopping days of the year." The idea was born when a few people at the organization were brainstorming about how to promote online shopping, says Shop.org Executive Director Scott Silverman... "It's not the biggest day," Silverman concedes. "But it was an opportunity to create some consumer excitement."


It's kind of sad to see how eagerly the media promoted this as if it was something real.
Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2005.   Comments (9)


Breath Capture —
Status: Real (but possibly a publicity stunt)
image Breath Capture is a company that's selling air. Or more specifically, they're selling tubes. The customers themselves are supposed to provide the air by breathing into the tubes. They promote these tubes as a way to "Capture the breath of a loved one or friend and keep them close. Forever." So it's a gimmick, kind of like pet rocks, or buying land on the Moon. But what gets me is this claim the company makes on it site:

Breath Capture is a patent-pending method and apparatus for collecting human breath as a keepsake display.

They applied for a patent on this? It's just a tube into which you blow before putting the top on. How could this possibly be patentable? This made me suspicious enough to check out the site's registration info. Turns out it's registered to Thompson & Company, a Memphis-based marketing firm. So possibly Breath Capture is a stunt dreamed up by this marketing agency to prove that they can sell anything—even air. (Unless the Breath Capture company hired Thompson & Company to promote its product... but surely there can't be that much money in selling glass tubes that they could afford a fancy marketing agency.)
Posted: Mon Nov 21, 2005.   Comments (7)

Road Rage Video —
Status: Commercial
image Someone emailed me a videoclip titled "Road Rage". It shows an old woman slowly crossing a road, as a guy in a sports car lays on the horn, trying to get her to hurry up. I won't ruin the ending, but it's pretty amusing. However, the video (in the version I received) appears to be an unscripted scene accidentally caught on video by an amateur. There's no identifying information to suggest otherwise. But since I was curious about whether the scene really was unstaged, I managed to find it on Google Video. Their version was a few seconds longer, preserving the ending in which it's revealed to be an ad for IKEA. So apparently the scene was staged. It's still funny. But, I have no clue how the scene is supposed to inspire anyone to shop at IKEA.
Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2005.   Comments (16)

Great Pointed Archer Society —
Status: Undetermined (but probably a hoax)
image Not many people like rats. But the members of the Great Pointed Archer Society do. As they proclaim on their very slick website: The immediate goal of this website is to replace the offensive name ‘rat’ with the untainted, and beautiful name Great Pointed Archer. By doing away with this all-to-common slur, we can begin to repair centuries of disrespect and hatred. After all, it’s not their fault they live in the sewer and eat trash.

It's not clear who's the creative force behind the Great Pointed Archer Society. It seems to be a little too well designed to actually be a society of rat lovers. For instance, compare it to the much less flashy (and therefore more obviously real) Rat Fan Club website. So almost everyone is guessing that it's a stealth advertising campaign whose ultimate object has yet to be revealed. The Great Pointed Archer Society is selling t-shirts (which is always a strong indicator of a hoax), but I can't believe that the entire site was created just to sell the shirts. (Thanks to S.M. Elliott for the link)
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005.   Comments (8)

Charlotte Church/Liam Gallagher Pepsi Ad —
Status: Hoax
It's been very widely reported in the past few days that singer Charlotte Church and Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher will be paired up in a new ad for Pepsi. According to the report:

the unlikely pair will head-up a lucrative advertising campaign, which will feature the OASIS frontman "teaching" Church how to trash hotel rooms and smash instruments while enjoying a selection of alcoholic drinks mixed with the cola beverage. A PepsiCo source tells British newspaper the Daily Star, "We've always got safe, family friendly stars to endorse Pepsi in the past, like BRITNEY SPEARS, BEYONCE KNOWLES, CINDY CRAWFORD and BLUE. But Pepsi is becoming more and more popular as a cocktail mixer at parties, so we want a wilder, more controversial image to go with that, and Liam and Charlotte are ideal. They both love their booze and between them they cover the gender demographics we're trying to target."

However, in today's New York Times Pepsi denies the whole thing: Richard Detweiler, a spokesman for the Pepsi-Cola International division of the Pepsi-Cola Company in Purchase, N.Y., says that the United States, Pepsi-Cola's biggest market, typically tends to have its own campaigns, with other ads running in major markets like Europe... Asked about the British newspaper reports, Mr. Detweiler says "there are no such plans" for the commercial they described. "I assumed it was tongue-in-cheek," he says, because of the implausibility that Pepsi would sell itself as a mixer with alcoholic beverages.
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005.   Comments (4)

Cillit Bang’s Barry Scott —
Status: Fake Person
imageHoax forum regulars are familiar with Cillit Bang (a brand of cleaner) and its over-the-top advertisements. Now it seems that Barry Scott, the fictional Cillit Bang spokesperson, has materialized in cyber space with his very own weblog. As if that wasn't enough, Barry Scott has also begun leaving comments on other people's weblogs. Tom Coates, of plasticbag.org, reports that after he posted an entry about his father, whom he hasn't seen in over thirty years, Barry Scott left a comment (as well as a link to cillitbang.com):

"Hi Tom, Always remember one thing. Life is very, very short and nothing is worth limiting yourself from seeing the ones you love. I hadn't seen my father in 15 years until 2 years ago. I was apprehensive but I kept telling myself that no matter how estranged we'd become there was no river to wide to cross. Drop me a line if I can be of any more help. Cheers, Barry"

Seems like an oddly personal message for a faux person... and a very elaborate form of comment spam. Cillit Bang, Scott's creators, later apologized for the comment. But not before Barry left another message:

What the f***? Can't a viral advertiser be human, have a father he hasn't seen in 15 years, or make a non-job-related personal post on another website?
Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005.   Comments (15)

Liquid Oxygen Skin Cream — New Scientist has flagged a product whose promoters are guilty of making a few misleading claims. It's Neaclear facial cream, and it's advertised as containing a "powerful combination of liquid oxygen, vitamins C & E, sage, chamomile, seaweed and rosemary, coconut oil, sweet almond oil and hydroquinone." The company even boasts that they're the first company "to combine stabilised liquid oxygen into all of its products." New Scientist notes that "We have certainly never heard of a skin cream that contains liquid oxygen, the temperature of which is normally somewhere below -183 °C."
Posted: Thu Sep 08, 2005.   Comments (15)

Advertising Cliches — John Camm, writing for the BBC, has compiled a long list of ways in which life as it's portrayed in advertisements differs from real life. For instance, in advertisements:
  • Men are obsessed with sex but will forego sex in order to watch football or drink beer.
  • Any act of male stupidity (e.g. walking across a clean floor in muddy boots, putting the dog in the dishwasher, etc.) will be met with a wry smile, not genuine annoyance/anger.
  • If you work for the emergency services, you are a better person than the general population.
  • Elderly relatives NEVER suffer from senile dementia.
  • Scandinavians are, without exception, blonde and beautiful.
  • Women have jobs they never do in real life, e.g. dockworker (who looks like a model).
  • Men are inherently lazy/slobbish; women are the reverse.
  • Chocolate, however, will cause women to immediately fall into the languor of the opium eater.

Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2005.   Comments (10)

Fake Registration Day — A movement is underfoot to undermine news sites that require registration in order to read their content by submitting fake registrations en masse:

We, the undersigned, wish to demonstrate the pointless nature of forced web site registration schemes and the dubious demographic data they collect.
On November 13th we will each register an account using fake details at one or more of these top 10 offending sites:
www.nytimes.com
www.washingtonpost.com
www.latimes.com
www.ajc.com
www.chicagotribune.com
www.dallasnews.com
www.nypost.com
www.baltimoresun.com
www.philly.com
www.mercurynews.com


While sympathizing with the sentiment, I see a couple of problems with this. First, even if you submit fake details, you still need to submit a valid email address (there are ways around this, but I bet most of the people participating will give their real email). Second, when you visit their site they'll know your ip address, from which they can get some demographic info (such as what city you're in). In other words, it's hard to give them completely misleading information, so they may still end up benefitting from fake registrations. (via J-Walk)
Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2005.   Comments (15)

Google Content Blocker — Here's a good idea: Google Content Blocker. It allows you to block all that annoying content, so you only have to see the ads:

Google's mission is to organize the world's advertising for maximum exposure to Web users. Unfortunately, annoying Web content often overwhelms the page, causing many users to become distracted and overlook the ads. That's where Google Content Blocker comes in. It effectively blocks all Web site content, leaving only the advertisements...
After you install Google Content Block, just surf the Web as you normally do. When we find a site that has content, we will block that content so you see only the ads. It all happens automatically, with no effort on your part.


Brought to you by John Walkenback of J-Walk, who has also brought us the Nigerian Email Conference and the WiFi Speed Spray.
Posted: Thu May 12, 2005.   Comments (5)

Wal-Mart Advertisements — There's an interesting Q&A in today's Stuart Elliott column in the NY Times:

A Reader Asks: I have a question regarding Wal-Mart's advertising. Do you know if Wal-Mart actually uses employees in its ads or does it hire actors?

I've wondered about this myself. Are there really all these happy people working at Wal-Mart? Elliott's response:

The people appearing in the television commercials and print advertisements for Wal-Mart Stores are actual employees, according to Wal-Mart and its agencies. Such ads have been appearing more frequently as part of efforts by Wal-Mart to counter critics who charge the company does not offer its employees adequate health care or other benefits.

So they're really employees. But I'm still not buying that Wal-Mart is such a great place to work.
Posted: Tue May 10, 2005.   Comments (41)

M’azing Commercials — image The TV commercials for a new chocolate bar called M'azing show people doing amazing things in order to earn a bar of M'azing chocolate. In one commercial a guy balances a washing machine on his jaw. In another one a girl twists her legs all the way around her body in a way that really doesn't look possible. You can see all the ads here (quicktime and wmv format). Someone wrote in to Stuart Elliott's advertising column in the NY Times asking if the movie with the girl doing the thing with her legs was real. Elliott says it is. This is his exact response:

Stuart Elliott: The gymnast in the commercial is really performing what you see on screen, according to the Masterfoods division of Mars in Hackettstown, N.J., which markets the new M'azing line of candy. The spot, called "Mystic Pixie," is indicative of the direction of the campaign, which is to celebrate people whose talents enable them to perform feats that are truly amazing. The performers are, of course, meant to personify the amazing taste of M'azing. The campaign is created by the flagship New York office of BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group.
Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2005.   Comments (33)

Perfect Housemate — This craigslist ad posted by a man searching for a roommate has been doing the rounds. The man starts off sounding kind of weird when he describes himself as a Beverly Hills plastic surgeons whose staff "is somewhat dubious of my methods", but then he progressively begins to sound weirder and weirder as he lists the rules that his "perfect housemate" must follow: "You must brush your teeth at least twice a day", "On every third-Tuesday of the month I request that you vacate the house between the hours of 4 pm - 11:45 pm while I upholster various pieces of antique furniture", "No newspapers or magazines", "if you speak either French, Urdu, or Afrikaans, I kindly request that you not speak them in my vicinity", "Please do not purchase fruits or vegetables and bring them home". It's impossible to know if this is a joke (it's not even on craigslist anymore; it's mirrored on someone else's site), but I have heard roommate horror stories involving housemates that were as bizarre as this, so it could definitely be real.
Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2005.   Comments (11)

Bovine Unite — The cows are plotting something. They're meeting in secret COWncils. They're even keeping blogs. I'm not sure what it's all about, but it seems that 05.05.05 is the date when the cows will show their hand (or hoof, as it may be). (via Metafilter)
Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005.   Comments (57)

Last Resort Retrieval — A few of you have noticed the strange ad that is now running on my site (in the left-hand column) for a company called 'Last Resort Retrieval' that claims to specialize in recovering stolen art. Yes it is a hoax site, or rather it's part of a marketing campaign for a product other than a company that recovers stolen art. But that's about all I can say about it, because I'm supposed to keep the secret (since they're paying me to put the ad there).

The thing is, I really don't think it would be easy to guess what product they're marketing, though I think the ads are going to develop over time and offer more clues. If you go to the site and click on the 'login' screen, you'll discover it's possible to login without a username or password.

p.s. I don't get any extra money if you click on the ad. They pay a flat fee to put the ad there. I just thought it was worth pointing out the strangeness of a hoax ad running on a site about hoaxes.
Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2005.   Comments (12)

Steve Wynn Hotel Ad — If you've seen those commercials with Steve Wynn standing on top of his hotel in Las Vegas you might find this interesting. I had assumed the shot was fake, but apparently it's not. Stuart Elliott has provided some info about this in his NY Times advertising column (I get the column sent to me by email, and I don't think it appears on the Times website, so I've pasted it below):

A Reader Asks: In the new commercial for his eponymous hotel, Steve Wynn is shown atop it. Was he really up there, or is it just computer-generated?

Stuart Elliott: That is indeed Mr. Wynn atop the tower of the Wynn Las Vegas mega-resort, which is scheduled to open on April 28. The commercial was created by Korey Kay & Partners in New York. Newspapers in Las Vegas have covered the commercial extensively; one article, from The Las Vegas Sun, even began this way: "Yes, Steve Wynn really was on top of his Wynn Las Vegas hotel when the resort's new television commercial was filmed." Mr. Wynn was attached by a web belt and a rope to a pipe hidden behind his leg while a camera crew circled the site in a helicopter.

Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2005.   Comments (2)

Cure The Catch — I received this email from 'Kurto': i have been a frequent visitor of your site for some time now. Recently this bombardment of advertisements about "The Catch" has been bothering me. The ad's contain figures stating million of Canadians have the Catch, and there's no cure. I'm curious to what exactly they're referring to. The website they encourage people to visit is http://curethecatch.com i have doubts to the validity of this so called disease. See if you can dig up any dirt on this.

A little googling reveals that 'The Catch' is a new viral ad campaign dreamed up to promote Virgin Mobile pre-paid phones:

Virgin has started placing teaser ads for its first campaign on subways and buses, with the second phase expected to hit the airwaves after Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson visits Toronto on Tuesday to promote the company's new services. Mr. Rosenberg says the campaign is designed to capitalize on the frustration many consumers feel about the fine print in their current plans, such as long-term contracts and the monthly system access fee. The campaign, created by Toronto ad agency Lowe Roche, is designed to create a not-too-subtle parallel between those frustrations and a fictitious venereal disease called "the catch." Mr. Rosenberg says he doesn't think Canadians will be offended by the ads. And if they are? That's part of what makes Virgin different.

Now Kurto, you aren't a Virgin Mobile ad rep, are you?
Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2005.   Comments (4)

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