Hunter's Canvas

Fuck you WNBA Public Relations!

The WNBA recently unveiled its plans to boost support for the league and its bottom line: femme-ing up its players.  Instead of focusing on the amazing athleticism these women possess, instead of putting more money behind marketing and media for the teams and the league, their answer is to make these athletes "women first."  There are all sorts of gender issues here: the sexualization of women, the homophobia that exists in sports, women forced to change instead society moving forward.  It's just disgusting that we are still forced to deal with things like this in 2008.

Below is a commentary from Feministing.com's "Friday Fuck You" series on YouTube.  (Definitely worth subscribing to.)  Also check out the discussion on Feministing.com here.

Levi's: how viral is done

Comcast has joined Twitter. Could this possibly be good?

 

So Comcast is now on Twitter.  While this makes me want to puke quite a bit (especially the name Comcast Cares) I do think it's a step in the right direction.  Comcast is an evil behemoth corporation and the thought of them trying to become more "personal" just doesn't seem right, but at least maybe they are listening to consumer complaints and trying to do something about it.  A perfect example of my love/hate relationship with Social Media.

VIA

This is a fun little site

Awesome!

Via AdScam

Super Bowl XLII Recap!

Eric and Aldo at Super Bowl XIX, originally uploaded by darsys.

OK, so until a couple weeks ago, I didn't understand football at all.  I didn't understand the mechanics of the game and never really understood why people get so fanatical about it.  But I recently moved to Providence (home of the Patriots) from New York, my home town and a city I love dearly, and I now realize that it's really just about pride.  It's totally silly and pretty meaningless in the scheme of things, but I was proud to be a Giants fan last night (even when they were down a bunch of points with only minutes to go) and it's mostly because I'm proud to be from New York. Really kind of silly.

It was a very exciting game to watch.  And who can't enjoy a tear-filled interview with a wide receiver named Plaxico? That was certainly more entertaining than the ads this year.  Overall they were awful, with two great standouts:

And:

So I'm basically a sucker for anthropomorphic animation, and now football as well.  Go Giants!

Look at this dog

lookatthisdog, originally uploaded by sugarfreak.

Via boingboing

 

We're headed to Geektown today. Don't tell me you don't love it.

Check out this great video montage of all the most famous viral videos from the past few years.  It's long, but really worth watching. 

The Internet Stars Are Viral:

Stop motion cereal

A very simple TV spot for Kellogg's cereal, shot and edited by Head Gear Animation in Toronto, Canada for Leo Burnett.  The concept and execution are elegant and the track is great too.

I love stop motion!

Motorola + Gondry = $800k down the (boob)tube

So Motorola, through San Francisco shop Cutwater, spent $800K on a TV commercial to launch the new Razr2.  It was directed by Michel Gondry and, like many of his films/commercials/music videos, it was beautifully shot and produced.  But will it sell any phones?

Moto doesn't think so.  It has decided not to air the Gondry spot, and is instead airing this spot produced by the Beijing and New York Ogilvy offices:

It's an unfortunate series of events.  It sounds as though the campaign wasn't fully thought through from the beginning, and the agency sold Moto on a cool TV ad, but was not able in the end to bring the creative to other (necessary) mediums like print, DM, interactive, etc. 

So a good spot dies, Moto screws up their Razr2 launch, agency gets fired, we all move on.

Good ol' beer advertising

One of the wonderful things about beer marketing is that since most folks (at least in America) choose their beer based more on badge value than on actual quality, one can do silly things that are just cool and say nothing about actual product attributes.  Enter a recent website for Guinness. Launched earlier this year, it's an elegant little site (sitelet?) full of stop-motion fun.  Let's hope it increased sales...