Some people hate the ultra-slow motion that so often features in today's movies, video games and TV shows and ads. I'm not one of those people, and this is probably the greatest Australian beer ad since the 1970s :

"Mr Latham Helping Himself To A Cup Of Coffee"

Nine surreal minutes of 24 hour live TV news, as a reporter reports on a reporter reporting. Some minor action at 7:02 when Mark Latham confronts Tony Abbott about his role in the jailing of former One Nation leader Pauline Hanson :



And speaking of surreal, there is this frantically OTT election promo from Channel 9 :



I swear the people who put these together have trawled through old pisstakes of exactly this kind of promo on Frontline and CNNN and thought, 'Fuck irony, this stuff is Gold.'

Compare. Two tourism ads using scenery, song and smiling, happy people.

The new Australian tourism ad :



The Iceland tourism ad :

Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

There's an energy to the Iceland ad that is sorely lacking in the Australian one.


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Still one of the most powerful public health ads ever aired in Australia. It's jarring to see this ad again, 23 years after its was first aired on Australian TV :

Federal Election 2010 : Free Buckets Of Fear & Paranoia For All

The Liberal Party may have John Singleton about to start churning out 'Tony Abbott : The Real Choice' ads, but Family First has got Groupthink :



UPDATE : I was shocked to learn the above is not a real ad for Family First's election campaign. They should purchase it immediately.

Unfortunately, that fake ad is exactly of the style and theme that we are going to be inundated with all the way up to the election.

It will be a repulsive campaign of negativity and fear.

And millions of Australians will fall for it, willingly, because they love to think they've got something other people want, and will do anything to get.


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"The World Thinks Australian Wine Drinkers Are Smug Wankers"

Mumbrella cites the below Jacob's Creek ad, screened internationally, as one of the most hated, most utterly despised Australian ads of last year, if not of all time. The Mumbrella YouTube channel, where this cloying drivel is embedded, is awash with brutal, violent comments from around the world, including this one :

"If I were at that party, I’d smash that Jacob’s Creek bottle and jam it into his throat"

And this one :

"What a complete fucking cunt that bloke is. He needs to be savagely raped with that wine bottle whilst his equally detestable stable of middle class cunt friends need shooting too."

Over the top? Yeah, that's what I thought, too. Until I watched it :



Mumbrella has collected more comments on how much this ad has made the world hate Australians here.


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"I Don't Care"

Documentary maker Errol Morris (The Fog Of War) calls this "the best commercial ever made". It's definitely the best no-budget commerical ever made.



The challenge has been laid down. Australian zero-budget local commerical makers, beat that.

Extras : How the commercial was made -Two Guys, One Camera

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Not a parody.....

I have no idea whether or not these skit-style VicRoads ads will help reduce death tolls and car accidents, but they're pretty funny and more likely to cut through and be remembered because they aren't grim lectures :







More VicRoads Ads Here

A Drive Isn't Funny, With An Empty Tummy

"the cows and the sheep and the birds and the horses were mooing and baah-ing and whistling and neighing....."

It took only someone asking if I remembered the words to an old Kenfucky Tried Chook (that's what we used to it) animated ad, featuring two kids pushing maximum density, for the jingle to shove aside whatever else I was thinking about and begin playing.

Disturbingly, I remembered the words, more than 30 years later, with at least 85% accuracy. No wonder the history lessons of the kings and queens of England didn't find a permanent home in my memory, it was already stuffed full of ad jingles.



It's been a long time since fast food admakers used a couple of dangerously fat children to flog their obesity-linked products. But it sure worked back in the 1970s. At least where I grew up, kids that fat, who could convince dad to pull into a fried chicken dispensary with only minimal moaning, clearly came from wealthy, or wealthier, families. This was aspirational.

The reason why the song entrenched itself so deeply into childhood memories? No doubt it was flogged mercilessly on TV, but the jingle was also issued as a (i think) bright red single and given away at the shops.

Clearly, I wore my copy out.


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The Greens : Vote For Us Or....We'll Politely Ask You Again To Vote For Us

Below is the absolute opposite of your bog standard political attack ads. And it cuts through. The message is clear, there's a vision for the future, and The Greens are not trying to scare you into voting for them. That in itself is refreshing.



I like a tastily vicious political attack ad, and I'll probably run a few here during FedElect2010, but all that bitterness and "Gotcha!" and 'nyah!nyah!nyah!' becomes incredibly tiresome, very quickly.

Let's hope we see plenty of creativity, or at the very least something we haven't seen before, in the video messages and ads served up by the political parties this federal election year.

They have to catch our attention now with great vids to even think about catching our votes.

From the Sydney Morning Herald, February 3.



They should have capitalised YOUR.

(thanks KCB)

An excellent series of sport-explanatory ads for the 2010 Winter Olympics on Foxtel, written by Charles Firth and Stephen Hancock :






Mumbrella Has More


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Digital Rupert Wants You To Pay To Read His News So He Can Datamine Your Personal Info For Advertisers

"News Is Very Expensive To Create"

By Darryl Mason

Here's Richard Freudenstein, CEO of Digital Rupert, explaining to the recent Sydney Advertising & Marketing Summit how the Murdoch media will not only charge for online content but will also suck up personal details about readers and make them available to advertisers.

In short, the Murdoch media want you to pay so they can target ads directly at you.

"The problem is that the traditional advertiser-supported model is not enough, by itself, to pay for the level of investment in journalism that society needs.

So to make up the difference we have to look at charging for content.

The question is having been given it for free, will people now pay for online news content?

The first thing to remember is that people happily pay for news every day.

Indeed nearly 19 million newspapers are bought in Australia every week.

So clearly there is a healthy market for news.

But the future for Murdoch media is not newspapers, that old "dinosaur industry" as Stephen Mayne calls them, but Digital Rupert's holy grail/messiah: The E-Reader.

"a high-definition full colour e-reader, containing all your favourite newspapers and magazines from around the world...."

Sounds awesome.

But wait....

"It will deliver high definition ads which, when touched, will run a video, give detailed product information, download a brochure, or run a price comparison across local retailers.

An exciting proposition, I’m sure you’ll agree."

So you will have to pay to have some hyper-reality ad leaping out of the middle of a story shouting your name and telling you how absolutely rocking you will look in this new electric car.

Who will this paid content e-reader near-future world of Murdoch news be actually serving. The consumer, or the advertiser?

Some refreshing honesty from Digital Rupert's CEO :

Indeed, uppermost in our minds is that whatever the platform is, it must work effectively for not only our readers, but also for you – our agencies and advertisers.

We’re confident that the combination of print, online, mobile and e-reader presents a terrific opportunity for advertisers.

We’ll have a large, highly engaged opt-in audience who are open to advertising messages.

Now it sounds fucking shit, particularly if I'm paying for it.

And we all know what 'opt-in' means. If you don't read the contract and/or agreement carefully enough and see the part where you have to 'opt-out' to stop the bombardment of advertisers, you will automatically be 'opted-in.' Some still seem surprised to learn that someone else can own the rights of their photos when they publish them on social networking sites.

But here's the hook for those who want to drive you bonkers with ads, it's the real brilliance of getting people to pay for online content in the first place: the customer be able to sign on to get the news anonymously, there will be mandatory details that will have to be supplied, along with the payments. Not solely for security reasons, but so your personal details and interests and online habits can be auctioned to advertisers. Data-mined in other words.

"....we’ll have their full registration details – location and demographic details. We’ll know their consumption habits and we’ll be able to target them across multiple platforms."

I don't know if you've ever been "targeted across multiple platforms", but it doesn't sound pleasant.

So this is the future of Murdoch "quality journalism"?

It's the digital equivalent of what one of my old newspaper bosses told me about the value of news and feature stories in his publications : "They fill the space around the ads. They give readers something else to look at."

And finally this revelation from the Digital Rupert CEO :

But when it comes down to it, people want the news, and they want news they can trust.

The problem is that such news is very expensive to create.

Did he just confirm that the Murdoch media "create news" instead of simply reporting it?

There is a very exciting e-reader news revolution about to begin, but there will be many who will find a way to make it profitable without data-mining their customers and storming their brains with electronic advertising designed to distract you from what you're trying to read, or watch, or hear.

"Anyone Here From Wagga Wagga?"

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's the Jerry Seinfeld ad for Newcastle's Greater Building Society :



How did a small financial institution in Newie manage to get Jerry Seinfeld to star in their ad?

They simply called and asked his manager and Seinfeld liked the concept. The reaction in some of the international media to Seinfeld doing this ad, which obviously didn't earn him a pile of money, is mostly one of 'downright mystified', which is probably exactly why Seinfeld did the ad in the first place.

Sometimes you just have to ask and the seemingly impossible can come true.

I really like that they got Seinfeld to set up his own gear, before the street performance. It must have reminded him of his early days in stand-up comedy, another reason why he probably decided to do it.

Mumbrella has a great slab of other very creative, downright clever, recent Australian ads for bursts of 60 second enjoyment.

UPDATE : Jerry Seinfeld explains to the Newcastle Herald why he did the ad :

...the star whose agent reputedly knocks back 50 commercial overtures a week, hinted it was more about "feel" than fiscal reward.

"We don't think about money too much these days," he said. "I like to do things because they feel right."

Yesterday, he suggested Australia's affection for the show might have predisposed him to the cheeky approach from a financial institution he never knew existed.

"I was down there in '98 right after the show went off the air and the response from the people I met on the street, in the restaurants, everywhere was so special I felt kinda close to them."

The ad wasn't filmed in Newcastle. It was shot in Cedarhurst, New York. Had me fooled.

I wonder how many people in Newcastle didn't notice it wasn't local?