Zurich police welcomes EuroPride 2009: for “a tolerant and free society”

This is the advertisement supplied by the Zurich police department for publication in the EuroPride-Magazin, in anticipation of the festivities that will run in Zurich from May 2 to June 7.

A spokesman for a local gay group, according to a media report, has commented on the ad saying that it is “etwas klischiert, aber es ist ja Werbung”: a bit of a cliché, but that’s advertising.

The home page of the Zurich police department says that their central preoccupation is “Sicherheit als Grundlage einer toleranten und freien Gesellschaft”:  safety as the foundation of a tolerant and free society. How many of your local police departments have this mission on their home page?

I’m right and the world is wrong (Unicredit Group campaign)

Love the picture, hate the copy.

What a lovely and whimsical image to shake off that stodgy bank feeling. And yet, what an arrogantly nonsensical statement they chose to go with it.

Eliminating the “Maybe” in “Maybe I’m right and the world is wrong” means no healthy skepticism. No awareness of what we don’t know. No willingness to learn more. If that’s what you aspire to, we’ve got a bank that’s ready to serve you. In fact, in its desire to foster certainty and eliminate ambiguity, this campaign stands as the polar opposite of the thought-provoking HSBC “Your Point of View” campaign, the one you’ve seen gracing several airport walkways over the last couple of years. In that campaign, who’s right and who’s wrong is about different points of view, and HSBC apparently maintains that celebrating differences is better than eradicating them. Feel free to call its cultural relativism naive and dangerous, but I find it a rather more appealing brand statement than UniCredit’s monolithic erasure of doubt.

More about the UniCredit campaign in the Advertising section of the bank’s site. The print ads show a campaign URL, www.be-free-of-maybe.eu, but that site doesn’t seem to be quite ready yet (as of today the URL merely redirects to the corporate site).

Draw me into an immersive game

Sometimes I think it’s too bad I’m not much of a Nine Inch Nails fan, because it could be interesting.

Advertising: here comes the coffee bean scorpion

I don’t drink coffee, but if I did, I’d be seriously looking into the coffee pot in this ad. (Agency: Lorenzo Marini & Associati).

Advertising: we like it like that

This gentleman, caught on camera while painting in a frenzy reminiscent of Nick Nolte’s abstract painter in Scorsese’s”Life Lessons” segment of the trilogy New York Stories, is a Frenchman who won an eBay auction to star in a commercial together with an item for sale. He painted the item during the filming of the commercial itself, which ends in a surprise finale. The painting was then auctioned off, and ended up selling for Eur 2,090 on Nov. 25.

Watch the full commercial on this page, and find nine others built around a similar concept here.

Sandy Skoglund, Radioactive Cats and lighting fixtures

I’ve always been a fan of Sandy Skoglund’s photography, but I’m wondering why on earth lighting fixtures firm Fratelli Martini chose one of the artist’s more somber and disquieting works for the cover of its 2007 catalog.

Paola’s Facebook account valued at $306; Microsoft pays $4.90 for a 1.6% share

Since I am one of Facebook’s 49 million active users, it looks like I’ve just made Mark Zuckerberg and his pals five bucks richer (but I am implicitly being valued at over 300 bucks). I ought to be feeling good about it. After all, if I am somehow generating $3 of revenue for Facebook this year (the company’s top line is rumored to be about $150 million in 2007), and my lifetime value is 100 times that, and I don’t think I’ll ever use Facebook more than I’ve used it this year, it means that I am going to live until I am almost 140 years old and add about 10,000 more friends. That’s called scaling.

Get Facebook to 490 million users at some point in the future, though (not unlikely given current growth rates), and the burden I’m carrying decreases. I only have to spend 10 more years on Facebook and add 1,000 more friends.

That’s a relief: I’m looking forward to having time left over for doing other stuff with my life.

Are you happy? a debate on whether self-reported happiness scores actually mean anything

The Freakonomics blog is hosting an interesting debate on why women report being less happy today than they were 35 years ago. This appears to hold true across ages, occupations, educational levels, marital status and almost any other variable you can think of. (Exception: black women report an increase in happiness).

I think Steven Levitt is right to point out that, even if many researchers are trying to make the study of happiness more, well, scientific, the methodology is intrinsically unreliable and the question itself has such a big halo of cognitive and linguistic uncertainty to be largely meaningless. Suppose a researcher came to you and asked you: are you happy? I would have said yes this morning while drinking my favorite cup of tea, and no way in hell later today while stuck in the Rome airport due to a delay in the arrival of the incoming aircraft for my outbound flight. In general, though, and abstracting from incidental circumstances, are you happy? My answer: I really don’t know. How would I know happiness if it stared me in the face? would I have deserved it? and, should I ever be happy, would I lose my drive and stop being able to get stuff done?

Supposing the scores actually mean anything, though, I also wouldn’t discount the ever-increasing expectations for female perfection in our society. Martina posted today on Adverblog the latest video, Onslaught, made by Ogilvy for Dove’s Real Beauty campaign. It is worth watching as a commentary on Levitt’s question – truly a case when a video is worth more than a thousand words.

Making advertising fun: Fight For Kisses

You know you work with people who have a sense of humor when your boss sends you links like this. Enjoy.

Beta testers wanted

Well, I should say “tasters”, not “testers”. And it’s not really a beta anymore – although traditional Modena balsamic vinegar takes years and years to ripen, I think we can safely say we’re out of beta by now. Our barrels (durmast oak, chestnut, acacia, ash, and cherry wood) have been working their magic and the stuff that comes out the small end of the line is liquid brown gold.

If you’d like to come see us in Modena, this trade show on the first weekend of October is a great time. Everybody who’s anybody in balsamic vinegar will be there, and your taste buds will have the time of their life. Other interesting exhibitors, at least judging from names and locations, will be: Osteria Caserma Guelfa & Nudo e Crudo, Vinaigre del Condado de Huelva, Consejo Regulador Vinagre de Jerez, Vinaigrerie La Guinelle, Pars Yeema Biotechnologist Co., Wuhan Polytechnic University, and the College of Food Science and Technology of Huazhong Agriculture University.

Finally, a few words on the show’s visual identity. The model is good-looking and the product is appealingly shown on a chunk of Parmesan (although fans believe that dunking, not sprinkling, is the recommended tasting solution for traditional balsamic and Parmesan). But it feels like we’ve seen this advertising trick (show model’s mouth, hide model’s eyes) a gazillion times before. Creatives, some more creativity next time, please.