This week's theme for Four Links is marketing and design humor.
1. The Cheap Ingredients Behind High Tech Products
If you remember the comics magazine Cracked from back in the day (it was similar to Mad Magazine), you may be surprised to see that Cracked.com is completely different. The internet-age incarnation now lampoons strange and unusual facts.
For instance, this recent article (NSFW) reveals that there's not much to common "high tech" products except good marketing:
Screen capture from the Head-On commercial.
HeadOn, as it turns out, is almost completely made from wax, with a small amount of extra crap--small as in parts per trillion--added in. That means it is, effectively, just wax.
2. Business Guys on Business Trips
This comic blog is a recent find for me. If you're in the marketing and design biz, you'll recognize some all-too-familiar frustrations here.
3. Things Marketing People Love
If these are some of your favorite sayings or ideas, you just might be a marketer.
Marketing People Love: Augmented Reality
4. Billboards That Don’t Belong Next To Each Other
Forgive the spammy nature of this post, but these are some pretty good juxtapositions (some NSFW). It's funny to see two strong marketing messages, oblivious of context, crash and burn together.
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Nick — Aug 6, 2009
In the first of a weeklong series on codes of ethics, DLB examines the ways in which a doctor is like a McDonald's.
A while back, we brought up the dilemma of balancing business with authority. How can experts like designers be trusted not to misuse their expertise for the sake of profit?
In that same post, I suggested that a potential solution to the problem of trusting authority is a code of ethics. Today, I want try and connect this idea with some of our previous writing and state that a code of ethics is a form of branding.
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Nick — Mar 16, 2009
In our continuing investigation into the role of promising in advertising, DLB looks at two pathologies of promising: insinuation and vagueness.
Promises entail promissory obligations. That is to say, what it means to promise to do something is to create — apparently out of thin air — the obligation to do it.
On Wednesday, I talked about the advertising strategy of committing a company to a minimal obligation, or one that's already in place. Today I'm going to look briefly at two related types of canonical advertising promises: namely, vague promises and insinuations.
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Paul — Dec 26, 2008
