Car commercials didn't previously quote iconic comic book lines, did they? Does this mean that Ford is about to do a 30-second piece using lines from Star Trek?
"When on the road of life, the needs of the many...outweigh the needs of the few. The new 2014 Ford Expedition Ultra: boldly going where no family has gone before..."
I have a Wii U. I like it. I skipped the Wii, so I have a lot to catch up on. Sales figures have been in the toilet for it. These new commercials on Nintendo's YouTube channel are so unfocused and bland, I just don't know what they're thinking.
The quickest solution to all of this is releasing three big games this summer and then keep actual games coming out instead of ports of year-plus-old games.
UPDATE: John Gholson sums up exactly how I missed this one. It's actually a commercial for a church, right?
Deadline retracts/corrects a story they helped blow up earlier today. 20th Century Fox is still going to be 20th Century Fox in all consumer-facing ways. "21st Century Fox" is just a name for the new umbrella corporation that envelops all of News Corp's being-spun-off media properties.
This, the latest choice from the company that decided to launch a new cable channel called FXX when they already have one called FX. No one will get confused, I'm sure.
The title of this post references the 1953 merger of 20th Century Pictures and the Fox Film Corporation, where the new company's name featured a hyphen for some years as "20th Century-Fox".
Since Facebook requires you to sign in to embed videos, here's an AdAge story where they have it embedded.
The ad is done by Wieden & Kenedy (W+K for short), who are generally pretty great at fun, spunky clips that entertain and engage (like the "Dance Pony Dance" one for Three.co.uk). This one reeks of a different kind of spunk.
Those "Like"-ing it on Facebook, I assume, are doing so as endorsement of their respective Facebook addictions, the fun music, or what they see as a cool new version of their timesink of choice. Everyone critical of it, like me, are mostly responding to how the advert actually highlights all of the most negative or annoying things about Facebook: the force-fed sensory overload, the head-in-the-phone syndrome, and the narcotic-like nature of being hooked on using it.
CNBC broke the news within the last hour. Plenty of people have speculated that this was going to happen for months and months.
If anything, not giving Johnson's reworking of the JC Penney a chance to work over time will end up being their next-biggest mistake to signaling that JCP really doesn't know what it's doing by re-hiring the guy who got them in bad shape in the first place. Their stock fluctuation in the short term, I suspect, will be indicative of the long-term trend.
The best things Johnson's overhaul brought to JC Penney were the streamlining of price structure (eliminating 70 different "Clearance" racks) and making checkout possible in less than 10 minutes. I started shopping there again. Maybe he belonged at Apple in the first place. I hear there's a job opening.
Everything old really isn't new again.
I thought there'd be just the one terrible rebranding today! AdAge covers the rebrand of Gannett's flagship publication.
Old compared to new. "That's no moon..."
Three Elaborated Problems:
1) Their "masthead" version of their new "logo" is more like "headline" formatted "text". It gets the viewer immediately, completely lost in an impenetrable wall of text. At the very, very least, it simply blends rather than pop. Was that the goal? If so, success!
2) The new utilitarian-ization of their sections could use a strong icon-based do-over, if the plan is to make that succeed in strongly marking what section you're in at a given time. The "turquoise moon" and the typeface change make this look like an offshoot of the USA Network instead of a news publication.
3) This half-hearted rebranding is unfortunately indicative of the fact that their business model fundamentally does not understand digital delivery and is limply kicking and screaming to not adapt and evolve. This is why Gannett and other publishing monoliths have been on the decline for years.
I do brand consulting for money. It's a thing I do. Welcome to the first bit of commentary on that world on AC.
eBay unveiled a new logo today. It's terrible. Why? Three reasons off the top of my head:
1) Needless dumping of an iconic, non-problematic brand identity.
2) Insanely terrible kerning. John Wayne Gacy-level insane.
3) See item 1