And people complained about MY Venn diagrams!

These ads for some service called Speck apparently ran recently in New York. I’m sure New Yorkers have more important things to worry about right now, but I thought I’d catch the rest of you all up on this ad, which completely mangles the very concept of the Venn diagram to a far greater degree than I ever could.

Speck ad: Venn diagram of three circles labeled 'People who live in SoHo', 'People who live in NoHo', and 'People who can afford their rent', with the Speck logo in the triple overlap.

Copyranter has more. Apparently the entire ad campaign is predicated on making three mutually exclusive categories and saying their service, Speck, is for people who are in the overlap between them. When people got annoyed, their response was apparently “lol we’re dumb.” Yeah, I have to say that advertising a service as being for exactly zero people isn’t the best way to sell your service.

Okay, in THIS case, Speck might be for the super-rich people who own two houses in two separate districts of town, and can afford them both. That’s still not exactly defining a huge niche for your product.

(Inb4 trolls saying “they’re still better than yours!”)

And people complained about MY Venn diagrams!
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That Mitchell and Webb Look on gendered TV ads

That Mitchell and Webb Look is the same series that resulted in that Homeopathic Hospital sketch that like everyone in the skeptical blogosphere has posted at some time, that ‘atheist miracle watermelon’ sketch that everyone in the atheist blogosphere has posted at some time, and the “How would BBC1 handle an alien invasion” sketch I featured here a while back.

I said then that they appear to be eminently meme-worthy. Here’s yet another brilliant example of how meme-worthy they are.

Yep. That pretty much sorts it all out.

That Mitchell and Webb Look on gendered TV ads

What’s better than sex?

According to a Salon article, surveys are trying to make the answer to that question “everything”.

I had to wonder: Why have these sex-devaluing surveys become so popular?

In part, it’s good business. Take a survey finding that 43 percent of Canadians would choose bacon over sex – it was conducted by Maple Leaf Foods Inc., a bacon producer. Then there’s the one sponsored by the Better Sleep Council, a creation of the mattress industry, which found that 61 percent of American adults would choose a good night’s sleep over sex. See also: a survey by mobile app company Telenav which found that — surprise, surprise – one-third of Americans would rather go without sex than their cellphone. (On a related note, Gazelle, an electronics trade-in site, found that 15 percent of respondents would rather “give up sex than go for even a weekend without their iPhone.”) Sex is the ultimate measure of desire — so why wouldn’t a company try to position its product as shockingly even more desirable?

Continue reading “What’s better than sex?”

What’s better than sex?

French car ad shows gay marriage, declares “times have changed”

Via Copyranter, a French ad for the Renault Twingo shows gay marriage as a matter of course.

This proves to the cynic in me that there is no social change so great that it cannot be used to sell you something. At least that is an immutable fact of our society!

Very cute otherwise. It actually made me smile.

French car ad shows gay marriage, declares “times have changed”