Archive Category: Business
Blue Busters: 1984 Ghostbusters Spoof
Back in 1984, Apple produced this video parody of the movie Ghostbusters to show at their company-wide sales meeting in Hawaii. Back then, their main competitor, IBM, was called “Big Blue,” so Apple aspired to be “Blue Busters.” Jobs and Wozniak appear briefly. -via The Daily What
Man Advertised on Billboard to Get a Job
Bennett Olson was unemployed and desparate for a job, so he decided to do a bit of creative advertising to get hired:
And yes, he landed a job: LinkIn April, Olson paid $300 for an 8-second time slot on an electronic billboard near downtown Minneapolis. His ad was up for 24 hours, rotating with other ads on the billboard. The words "Hire Me!" appeared next to his website address and a picture of his face.
In Case of Emergency, Eat This Book
After you've foolishly walked away from your Land Rover to explore a mirage in the Arabian desert, you've found yourself lost. What to do?
Thank goodness for this survival guide that explains how to keep yourself alive with tips on dealing with scorching temperatures, building shelters, lighting a fire and so on. The best thing is: you can eat the book!
Actually the whole thing is a clever ad campaign by Y&R Dubai ad agency for Land Rover:
Y&R Dubai researched every indigenous animal and plant, people could encounter in the Arabian Desert and how they could be used to survive. They studied the topography of the region to guide people to safety. The agency used a reflective packaging similar to army rations, which could be used to signal for help, and bound the book with a metal spiral, which could be used for cooking. Finally, the agency even took an extra step so that in case of emergency, people could always EAT the book. It was made out of edible ink and paper, and it had a nutritional value close to that of a cheeseburger.
Link - via DesignTaxi
Psst! Your Vascular System is Showing!
Actually, they're just painted on. UK's National Health Service is worried that the upcoming summer Olympic Games would mean that blood donors are too busy watching the games that they'd forget to donate. So it embarked on a publicity stunt to raise awareness of the need for blood donation in Britain.
Metro has the pics: Link (Photo: Adrian Brooks/PA) - via Notcot
Advertising Arms Race in Beijing Food Court
Photo: Anja Hitzenberger
If a little advertisement is good for business, then A LOT of it should be fantastic, right? During her two-month residency in Beijing, China, photographer Anja Hitzenberger captured the intense competition between stalls in a food court:
This series, shot in a temporary food court set up inside Beijing’s Olympic Park, reveals a visually and viscerally overloaded fast-food culture that may make some mouths water and other bellies ache. Hitzenberger concentrates on the saturated visual displays of the food stalls and the way the environment contrasts with the boredom of the workers, offering an insight into some of the contradictions in contemporary Chinese culture.
Folks, this is what happened when you have an arms race in advertising: Link - via Creative Roots
Shopping Bag Smiles When You Buy Stuff
(Video Link)
This shopping bag offered at Joupi, the French toy store chain, is a clever ad by Euro RSCG 360. Place an item inside and pull up on the handles. The front handle slides up, replacing the child’s frown with a smile.
Greatest Business Ever: Drive-A-Tank
Do you need to drive a tank? Call Drive-A-Tank, a company that lets you drive a tank.
When do you need to drive a tank? The correct answer is ‘yes’. For as low as $399 a day, you can drive a tank through the woods near Kasota, Minnesota.
Link (warning: auto-sound) -via DVICE | Image: KARE
Chinese Lottery Winners in Silly Masks
Common advice on what to do when you win the lottery is to not tell anyone. That’s especially hard to do in states where you are required to make a public appearance or have your name published. In China, lottery winners are required to appear on camera accepting the prize, so they have developed the custom of wearing masks or full head coverings while doing so. Some of these disguises are better than others, as you’ll see in a photo collection at EgoTV. Link -via the Presurfer
Why Americans Don’t Save: “Credit has become America’s welfare policy.”
Unlike people from other countries, Americans aren't big savers - that much we know. But why exactly?
Sheldon Garon, professor of history and East Asian studies at Princeton University explains in his new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves
... in the 1980s, Americans stopped being good savers - at first slowly and then very rapidly in the 1990s, particularly as housing and consumer credit became available to Americans in amounts unlike anything seen in the rest of the First World.
First, the credit card industry was deregulated as the result of a 1978 Supreme Court decision. Now able to impose any interest rate they pleased on unpaid balances, credit card firms aggressively expanded their customer base beyond the affluent to target middle and lower income households. By the 1990s, most Americans held not one but several credit cards, and more than half of those cardholders carried unpaid balances.
Second, home equity loans—which had heretofore scarcely existed—exploded. This occurred after the 1986 tax reform made home equity loans one of the few types of credit in which interest remained tax-deductible.From the 1990s to 2005, homeowners borrowed more and more against their equity as home prices skyrocketed. Americans essentially stopped saving. Why save when you could borrow so easily?
Link - via Metafilter
The Texting and Driving Test
The Belgian organization Responsible Young Drivers (RYD) confronted the issue of texting while driving by telling student drivers they would have to pass a test on their texting while driving skills, and then recorded their attempts. The results are a lesson for all of us. -via mental_floss
The Perfect Milk Machine
The best dairy Holstein in the U.S. is not even a cow -he’s a bull named Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie! So far, 346 of his daughters already produce milk, and thousands more are to follow. It’s all a matter of genetics. Dairy industry experts crunched the data on this bull’s bloodline and rated Freddie’s semen as the best, measured by an elaborate formula that determines the “lifetime net merit” a dairy cow’s sire contributes to milk production.
When you add it all up, Badger-Fluff Fanny Freddie has a net merit of $792. No other proven sire ranks above $750 and only seven bulls in the country rank above $700. One might assume that this is largely because the bull can help the cows make more milk, but it’s not! While breeders used to select for greater milk production, that’s no longer considered the most important trait. For example, the number three bull in America is named Ensenada Taboo Planet-Et. His predicted transmitting ability for milk production is +2323, more than 1100 pounds greater than Freddie. His offspring’s milk will likely containmore protein and fat as well. But his daughters’ productive life would be shorter and their pregnancy rate is lower. And these factors, as well as some traits related to the hypothetical daughters’ size and udder quality, trump Planet’s impressive production stats.
One reason for the change in breeding emphasis is that our cows already produce tremendous amounts of milk relative to their forbears. In 1942, when my father was born, the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk. At the same time, the number of dairy cows has decreased from a high of 25 million around the end of World War II to fewer than nine million today. This is an indisputable environmental win as fewer cows create less methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and require less land.
At the same time, it turns out that cow genomes are more complex than we thought: as milk production amps up, fertility drops. There’s an art to balancing all the traits that go into optimizing a herd.
While we may worry about the use of antibiotics to stimulate animal growth or the use of hormones to increase milk production by up to 25 percent, most of the increase in the pounds of milk an animal puts out over the pastoral days of yore come from the genetic changes that we’ve wrought within these animals. It doesn’t matter how the cow is raised — in an idyllic pasture or a feedlot — either way, the animal of 2012 is not the animal of 1940 or 1980 or even 2000. A group of USDA and University of Minnesota scientists calculated that 22 percent of the genome of Holstein cattle has been altered by human selection over the last 40 years.
The Atlantic has a more-interesting-than-you’d-think article about the genetic science of producing both cows and bulls that drive the efficiency (and profitability) of the dairy industry to ever-greater heights. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Kathy DeBruin)
Time-traveling Birthday Party
Tipp-Ex is like white-out with an applicator. Their viral advertising involves a birthday party that is interrupted by a meteor. To escape, you’ll have to take the party to a different year, which you can do over and over in this interactive YouTube video. -via the Presurfer
Bizarre Street Art Promotion For Goodwill
These spooky figures, holding a note with their faces obscured, are part of a strange street art advertising campaign by Red Agency for Goodwill stores, to illustrate that Goodwill is the best place to buy costumes.
The slogan is “Be Anything This Halloween”, but I don’t think I’ll be going to this year’s Halloween bash dressed as a dumpster.
Still, as far as advertising campaigns are concerned, this is a rather creative and surreal campaign, and it would be fun to spot these odd stickers all over town.
Bisleri Mountain Water
One of the benefits of Bisleri Mountain water is that it can keep your child from choking on his food! -via the Presurfer
Proof You Aren’t Actually Reading All Those Privacy Policies
You can click all the boxes you want, but we all know you aren’t really reading all those privacy policies you agree to online. How do I know that? Because scientists have estimated that the average internet user would spend a month every year reading all the policies for all the sites they visit and let’s face it, you aren’t sitting back and reading boring legalese that often.
They measure the length of privacy policies, ranging from just 144 words up to 7,669 words (median is around 2,500 words) and recognize that at a standard reading pace of 250 words per minute, most privacy policies take about eight to ten minutes to read. They also ran some tests to figure out how long it actually takes people to read and/or skim privacy policies.
They put all of this together and estimated that it would normally take a person about 244 hours per year to read every new privacy policy they encountered… and even 154 hours just to skim them.
So how many of these have you even skimmed in the past year?
Link Via BoingBoing
It’s a Beermergency! Call the Beerbulance!
(Video Link)
There are two kinds of beermergencies: bad beer and no beer. In either event, call the Beerbulance for immediate assistance from beer professionals. The Beerbulance is a promotional gimmick for Red Brick Brewing in Atlanta, Georgia. Drivers use it to pick up customers and deliver them to the brewhouse.
Official Website -via Nag on the Lake
Download And Play Chex Quest 1-3 For Free
Good news everyone! Another gaming relic from your childhood is available to play for free, thanks to those clever marketers who know that letting a game like Chex Quest make the rounds again gives you an opportunity to once again advertise your product.
The product in question is Chex cereal, and since it’s not a detestable product I’m sure many who remember the silly advertising games from the 1990s will appreciate being able to play them all again, if only for the sake of nostalgia.
Link –via Geekosystem
Old Spice Guy Action Figure
Hello, Neatoramanauts, look at your action figure. Now back to this. Now back at your action figure, now back at this.
Well, it's about time! Mick Minogue has created the action figure of Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice guy, for Gallery 1988's upcoming MEMES show. The "Master of the Ladies" set comes complete with wild horse, man towel, sweater armor, scepter, oyster with 2 tickets to that thing you love, diamond, and, of course, Old Spice Body Wash Formula.
Check out more pics at Mick's website: Link - via Super Punch
Previously on Neatorama: Old Spice's Manmercials
Steve Jobs’s Dream to Become Willy Wonka
According to Ken Segall, the author of Insanely Simple: The Obsession that Drives Apple’s Success, Steve Jobs devised an outlandish scheme to promote the iMac. Jobs would dress as Willy Wonka from Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and give a lucky winner a tour of Apple’s facilities:
Steve’s idea was to do a Willy Wonka with it. Just as Wonka did in the movie, Steve wanted to put a golden certificate representing the millionth iMac inside the box of one iMac, and publicize that fact. Whoever opened the lucky iMac box would be refunded the purchase price and be flown to Cupertino, where he or she (and, presumably, the accompanying family) would be taken on a tour of the Apple campus.
Steve had already instructed his internal creative group to design a prototype golden certificate, which he shared with us. But the killer was that Steve wanted to go all out on this. He wanted to meet the lucky winner in full Willy Wonka garb. Yes, complete with top hat and tails.
Link -via Super Punch
How Much Money You Need To Realistically Recreate The Scrooge McDuck ‘Gold Coin Swim’?
Scrooge McDuck, that great genius of anatine finance, is fond of diving into his vast piles of money. No doubt all of us would like to do likewise. So how much would it cost? Matt Powers, whose qualifications include being “good at making up fake math”, crunched the numbers:
Looking at some of the best pictorial evidence of the McDuck vault, it is evident that this large pile of gold on the left appears to be five feet tall. This is deduced under the assumption that the average duck 14 inches tall, which is then used comparatively to quantify the pile (5 ft = 4.3 duck heights). With a little calculus and graph-work, the rough integral can pinpointed to y=-x2-1x+5. This equation puts every “x” and every “y” value at exactly one inch, as seen below.
When the area under the curve is calculated (from x=-3 to x=5), it yields roughly 46 square inches. The assumption will be made here that one cubic inch is roughly one ounce of gold. To convert that into a dome shape the value is simply cubed, which becomes 97,366 ounces. Given that 1 ounce of gold is roughly $5.00, it can extrapolated that each large pile of gold in the vault is worth $486,830.
Link -via Joe Carter | Image: Disney
Prison is for People Who Have Never Roller Skated
(YouTube link)
Maybe we should give up this life of crime and go roller skating! The ad for Roller Kingdom in Reno, Nevada was produced by Rhett & Link, the team who brought us Chuck Testa. Oh yeah, the kidnapper became the owner of the rink, the gang leader became the skate instructor, and the drug dealer is now the rink DJ. All’s well that ends well! -via b3ta
The Forbes Fictional 15
Forbes has announced its annual ranking of the world’s richest fictional characters. They say the collective fortunes of those ranked at the top have surged tremendously over the past year.
On top of the list is the ancient red-golden dragon Smaug, known by hobbits and dwarves across Middle Earth as “Smaug the Tremendous” and “Smaug the Unassessably Wealthy.” Smaug’s personal fortune jumped 16% from last year to $62 billion after wyrm watchers crafted a more detailed analysis of his massive hoard of coins, jewels and antiques.
In case you’d like to skip the slideshow, here is the list:
1. Smaug
2. Flintheart Glomgold
3. Carlisle Cullen
4. Jed Clampett
5. Tony Stark
6. Richie Rich
7. Charles Foster Kane
8. Bruce Wayne
9. Forrest Gump
10. Mr. Monopoly
11. Lisbeth Salander
12. Tywin Lannister
13. C. Montgomery Burns
14. Robert Crawley
15. Jo Bennett
Scrooge McDuck and Santa Claus, who topped the list in previous years, are nowhere to be seen. Link -via Blame It On The Voices
(Image credit: DeviantART member BillCorbett)
Olympic Tearjerker Spotted
(YouTube link)
If there was anyone who forgot this is an Olympic year, prepare yourself, because the emotional ad campaigns leading up to the London Olympics have already started. This Mother’s Day ad from Procter and Gamble will make you wish your kids had athletic ambitions. Or… it might make you appreciate the sacrifices your mother made for you. -via The Daily What
The Avengers Assembled Out Of Household Items
Target stores have come up with an extremely clever way to advertise both the items they sell and the upcoming Avengers movie-they’ve put together household items sold in their stores to form iconic images based on The Avengers.
The images are so densely packed with details that it takes a while to see all the products featured in each photo, which is what, in my opinion, makes them cooler than your average advertising campaign.
And I must admit that these ads make me want to buy some Avengers related merchandise, and I now have a mysterious craving for a Mr. Goodbar and a Dr. Pepper!
The World’s Most Downloaded Man
Photographer Fernando Martins of Camera Clara Photography Studio is angry. Very angry.
Fernando is miffed that stock photography - those generic images of models that you can buy for cheap - are competing with his own high-quality photography business. So he decided to travel from Brazil to Denmark to track down Jesper Bruun, the model whose handsome face earned him the moniker of The World's Most Downloaded Man.
Watch:
[YouTube Clip - via The Atlantic]
No, it's not real: the video above is actually a clever ad for Camera Clara Studio. In this weird mesh of fiction meets real life (Jasper is an actual model) - sort of like an advertisement in form of a mockumentary - Fernando acts out the dream of photographers who has lost out on many jobs because of their archenemy, stock photography.
Well played, Fernando. Well played.
The Man Who Quit Money
In 2000, Daniel Suelo (previously on Neatorama) pulled his life savings - all $30 - from his pocket and put it inside a phone booth and walked away for good from money. He has since lived without using any currency.
That's right - Say hello to the The Man Who Quit Money.:
Daniel Suelo lives in caves in the canyonlands of Utah. He survives by harvesting wild foods and eating roadkill.
He has no job, no bank account and does not accept government welfare. In fact, Suelo has no money at all.
Suelo may have shunned all the trappings of modern American life, but he is not an isolationist.
Since abandoning money in 2000, the former cook from Moab, Utah has remained an active member of his community and avid blogger.
The BBC has the interesting story of Daniel Suelo, as told by Mark Sundeen who wrote the book: Hit play or go to Link [Vimeo] | Daniel's official website Living Without Money
The Bizarre Stuff Sold in the Back of Comic Books
Remember the first time you saw an ad for Sea Monkeys? I really wanted some, but never made the order. I figured the X-ray Spex were a rip-off, even in my childhood. Kirk Demarais was fascinated with those ads in the back of comic books, so much that he made a film about them, went to work for a novelty company, and wrote a book called Mail Order Mysteries. He talks about some of those products in an interview at Collectors Weekly.
Collectors Weekly: Isn’t it funny how when your parents tell you something is a rip-off, it just makes you want it more?
Demarais: Oh yeah. Suddenly, it was the forbidden fruit. I trusted my parents in general, but something about that, I thought, “How did they know?” They didn’t order it. It’s also the first time I ever encountered dishonest salesmanship. I thought, “With all the other commercials I see on television, you get what they show you.” Part of me had a hard time fathoming that people would just out-and-out rip you off, especially kids. That’s the coming-of-age lesson behind it.
Read the full interview, and learn the truth behind those tantalizing products at Collectors Weekly. Link -Thanks, Lisa!
The Weirdest Tax Deductions Ever Submitted
I’m sure I don’t need to tell all of our American readers that your income taxes are due on April 17 (it’s usually April 15, but since that was a Sunday this year, we got a short little extension). While you might have made some seemingly strange deductions on your income taxes in the past, chances are that you’ve got nothing on these ballsy write offs, although, surprisingly, many of them have been accepted by the IRS.
Image Via kenteegardin [Flickr]/Senior Living
9 That Have Been Accepted:
Fancy Dresses. The catch here is that the dresses that TV star Dinah Shore was able to write off could only be used on her show as they were so tight that she couldn’t even sit down on them. Being as how they could only be used for her work, the IRS let her keep the deduction.
Boob Jobs. Not just anyone can write off a breast enhancement, but if you’re a stripper who gets the surgery so you can make more tips, you might just qualify. After all, Chesty Love already won a battle with the IRS over whether or not her 56 FF enhancement should count, the court agreed that if she didn’t get them she could lose money to other dancers. This same principal applies to lingerie, make up, and other accessories that dancers in this trade might need for work, as long as they can prove the items aren’t being used for personal purposes outside of the club.
Image Via Caza_No_7 [Flickr]
Body Oil. It’s not just women who get to claim deductions related to their appearance. Professional body builders are allowed to claim (legal) products they use to keep their muscles looking great. While steroids don’t qualify, body oil and tanning sessions do.
Clarinet Lessons. Don’t get too ready to sign up for music lessons. This deduction was only allowed in one specific circumstance where a doctor recommended a patient take up the instrument because it has been known to help lessen the pain associated with an overbite. Since it was considered a legitimate medical expense at that point, the patient’s parents were allowed to write it off.
Swimming Pools. more …
You’ll Need a Microscope to View All of the Information on This Business Card
Is this clever, aggravating, or both? The employees of Ebolaindustries, an Italian ad agency, go by pseudonyms (e.g. Mrs. Grey) on their business cards. If you want to learn their real names, you’ll have get out a microscope.
Link -via Super Punch
Mike and Ike Split Up
Say it ain't so! Mike and Ike (of the chewy fruit-flavored candy) are splitting up and fans are devastated. Devastated!
WHEN beloved pairings split, fans may grow distraught, at the prospect of Simon without Garfunkel, Lennon without McCartney, or Martin without Lewis.
Now Mike and Ike, the brand of chewy fruit-flavored candies, is announcing its pair is separating, and hoping the development captures the interest of younger consumers.
Packaging that began appearing in stores recently has logos with either “Ike” or “Mike” scribbled out, as if by a felt-tip marker.
On the back of packages with Mike’s name crossed out, a handwritten message from Ike faults Mike for “spending way too much time on his music.” Packages with Ike’s name crossed out have a message from Mike faulting Ike for “spending way too much time on his graffiti art.”
Chew over this report by Andrew Adam Newman over at The New York Times: Link
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