Mountain Dew recently dropped this controversial ad that featured a battered waitress trying to pick her assailant from a lineup of black suspects and a goat.

One could be forgiven these days for turning to the astrology section of their local paper, or a curious nod to the evening sky to see whether a full moon was in effect. Everything just seems more random, lacking any ability to forecast or predict.

Today’s front page of The New York Times reports that the level of carbon dioxide has passed a long-feared milestone. Gas concentration in our atmosphere has not been this high in at least three million years, before humans even evolved. There’s no longer any question whether carbon emissions are contributing to a rise in sea level and climate change.

If there’s a sense of the end being near, it certainly is not being helped by the progressively bizarre wave of advertising that seems to have taken root.

Trying to Be Hip and Edgy, Ads Become Offensive

According to Stuart Elliott, advertising is increasingly offensive — mostly because agencies are under so much pressure to break through the clutter, but there are also other considerations that are pushing agencies to take these risks on behalf of their clients.

The past decade has ushered in a whole new era of stranger-than-fiction concepts. Much of this is driven by the massive number of outlets and channels, the overwhelming amount of corporate brand messages being blasted from every corner, every second of our lives. But according to Tor Myhren, chief creative officer at Grey New York, it’s also intended to find ways to resonate with Millennials — who grew up in a world of digital media and random, sometimes bizarre, images.

Bob Garfield, an advertising critic and author of the book, “Can’t Buy Me Like,” says that the situation is propelled by a “no holds barred” Internet culture on which Millennials seem to gravitate and respond. “There’s a sense of permissiveness that is subsequently allowing poor decisions by agencies, marketers and corporate brand managers,” says Garfield.

Nancy Hill, President and Chief Executive at the 4A’s, says that the “race to retweet and to click thumbs up” overwhelms the impulse to take a step back and make sure the ad is crafted exactly the way you want it to be received.

How effective are these advertising campaigns, and what is the risk to companies that don’t entirely think through the expression of their brands? I invite your opinion on this Blog or through email. Send me a note and share your thoughts at dflinchum@iridiumgroup.com.

http://weburbanist.com/2010/11/08/15-cool-crazy-controversial-advertisements/

Photo from the website of Defense Distributed, a nonprofit group founded by Cody Wilson. The group intends to release CAD files this week for a gun that can be downloaded, completed printed in 3D plastic and assembled to actually discharge as a lethal weapon. A positive use of technology?

Media and communications are in the midst of most sweeping revolution in history, with so many innovations, so rapidly deployed. Significant technological advancements like Google Glass are being being launched with such frequency that no executive could honestly profess to know how to manage it all, much less where it’s all headed. Just twenty-five years ago, blue chip giants like Kodak and Polaroid had been untouchable, unflappable bastions of American business for many decades. Now, Kodak is fighting to emerge from bankruptcy this summer, a fragile shell of its former value. “Digital” truly leveled the playing field. It’s also created a kind of chaos, with the distribution of power to so many people with such different values, and from such different cultures.

Most of the new devices and platforms are innocuous. No one seems to have discovered anything all that harmful to do in the world of friends, fans, and likes. However, if we consider the news lately we might see a different, somewhat threatening picture unfold — one full of many new kinds of risks.

*     *     *

The Dow may have passed 15,000 for the first time on Friday, but on April 23 there were plenty of investors and analysts in major firms and institutions scratching their heads.

The index fell 150 points in minutes after a hoax on Twitter stated that President Obama had been injured in an explosion at the White House. It took less than 140 characters to put global markets on the precipice of spiraling panic. The speed and accessibility of communication — in this case from hackers getting into the Associated Press — could have sent entire economies in developed nations into months of recovery.

What will the future hold when we combine high frequency trading — billions of dollars moving across markets in milliseconds — with broadly dispatched, erroneous information? Hacking appears to be the new sporting pastime of governments. Now, it isn’t just bombs and hijackers we must worry about; we can also start our days weary of misinformation being fed into Bloomberg terminals.

Twitter Speaks, Markets Listen, and Fears Rise

Forbes reported that the world’s first gun, digitally printed from a 3D printer, is about to be made available. Think of the many ways this could be abused: Go online, download the CAD files, print and assemble your own firearm — one that can potentially pass through the most advanced screening devices and airport metal detectors.

As Andy Greenberg writes, Cody Wilson, founder of the non-profit group, Defense Distributed, has remained committed to the cause. Next week, the 25 year-old University of Texas law student plans to release the 3D-printable CAD documents for a gun he calls “the Liberator.” On Friday, Congressman Steve Israel offered a press release, saying “Security checkpoints, background checks, and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print plastic firearms at home and bring those firearms through metal detectors with no one the wiser.”

This Is The World’s First Entirely 3D-Printed Gun

http://defcad.org/

Finally, think about the Boston Marathon bombings. How did they get the plans to make the bombs? Online, of course. The Tsarnaev brothers apparently sourced the insight to construct sophisticated weapons through the English edition website of Inspire, supposedly published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. According to Wiki, Inspire is an important brand-building tool, designed to spread the key messages and goals of AQAP. That sounds like so many nonprofit organizations I have helped. Only, in this case, the content is published with the intent of inspiring homegrown terrorism against the U.S and other Western interests.

It’s all within the last few weeks that these concerns — massive abuses of information and communication — have been newsworthy. And they all relied on emerging channels of media enabled by technology.

The cold reality is that this genie back can never be put back into its bottle. We live in an increasingly volatile, unpredictable time. For every benefit and constructive use of emerging technologies, there will surely be those inventive and malicious enough to find equally destructive applications.

Technology may be our friend, but knowledge accessed so freely across international borders is certain to yield at least a few dark results.

Many companies affectionately termed such line extensions as “special projects.” There were elaborate sales strategies designed to bring these sponsors into the publication. Such units within media companies were often frowned on by traditional editors, even as those divisions leveraged the media brand, paired it with clients’ messaging, and earned a pretty penny for those companies.

Whole departments were formed to package such hybrid content, and it was constituted and reconstituted in a variety of ways, from custom-published corporate magazines to sections within existing magazine titles.

As for presentation, there were strict guidelines published by ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors), rules that were considered sacrosanct among top publishing companies. Hence, we see a small “Advertisement” blurb at the top of those sections. We were given stringent instructions. Fonts were monitored carefully and the design was intentionally distinct from the “run-of-book” editorial sections within any particular publication, to avoid confusion.

In a recent article, The New York Times cited instances on Mashable.com where paid sponsorships were published in such a way as to resemble editorial content. An article on Google glass technology was shared over 2,000 times on social media sites.

Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads

According to David Hallerman, an analyst at eMarketer, “Brands are everywhere, and brands have now leaked into what has been traditionally the editorial space, not just the content but the look and feel of the content.”

In reality, this has been happening for a long time. The new name may be “native content,” but regardless of what it’s called, it’s still the same thing: An opportunity to extend the sales strategy of any media company into other revenue streams.

Without a doubt, it’s now a trickier proposition for those reading or those delivering. With the explosion of media channels in recent years, it’s increasingly difficult to distinguish between what’s real and what’s been paid for. It’s also becoming a complicated proposition to sell it convincingly.

Traditionally, my nonprofit partners and client-side managers have taken a passive, even humble, approach to their marketing efforts. In fact, many of our clients working in private philanthropy don’t even refer to their efforts as ‘marketing.’ Their world is one of ‘communications’ — of outreach, of educating target audiences about their goals and achievements. Historically, for organizations we have worked with such as MacArthur Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts and others, they often have no use for consumer marketing tactics to build an organizational brand. It can even be frowned on in certain cases.

Increasingly, cause-based nonprofits are leading the charge with more aggressive tactics, emulating their corporate counterparts in daring advertising campaigns. As reported by Stuart Elliott in The New York Times, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has launched a controversial campaign that boldly declares that a cure to cancer is very close.

In These Ads, ‘Someday’ Is More Than a Wish

ADWEEK: Leukemia and Lymphoma Society New Campaign

Aiming for pure shock value, the theme of the campaign, “Someday is today,” features consumers and headlines reading “Cancer Cured!” in newspapers and other media venues. The PSAs are extensive in reach, with applications in broadcast, print, and across multiple digital channels in six large markets.

Citing a need to be more proactive and less traditional, Lisa Stockmon, SVP of Marketing at LLS explained, “We wanted to be less sort of guilt. We wanted to be less trite. We want to be more part of, ‘You know what? The money that you invest in us…makes an impact and we have been able to change the face of cancer from the work that we do.’”

We’re seeing this approach in corporate advertising as well as the most progressive, action-minded nonprofits. It’s been called ‘disruptive,’ and it appears to be very effective in every instance. My personal view is that this type of approach can work very well to differentiate an organization and generate a level of engagement, but also, it seems increasingly necessary to break through the overwhelming amount of clutter across a dizzying assortment of media channels. The idea is a smart, show stopping punch — designed to arrest consumers’ attention even just briefly and create a memorable impression that deeply connects, that resonates.

This breakaway campaign will no doubt be very effective at building brand recognition and image for LLS, and in time I am certain that other public charities will follow with similar tactics and advertising campaigns. If you could see the desired outcome, the result of your gift, wouldn’t you be willing to chip into the cause?

Orgcentric.net

IridiumGroup.com

They’re the storied predecessors of Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.  The “Big Three” weekly news journals were the foundation of news and more specifically, media. The publications roared through decades as established bastions, unflappable sources of information for generations of American readers. They appeared untouchable — until they were. The age of participation was ushered in with the Internet. No longer were we reading one way, digesting our news and ideas from a finite group of professional editors and writers; the experience became a conversation ­— an exchange of expressions. We read not one source, not a dozen, but hundreds, sometimes even thousands of individual, independent expressions, and we also share our own. Hence, large mass print publications struggled; some became irrelevant and ceased doing business.

But how much has truly changed? How “untouchable” is Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube as “generalist” venues for digesting and sharing information?

If the history of traditional print journalism taught us one thing, it provided a clear example of the progression from simplicity toward fragmentation. If there is one successful model built for a mass audience, you can bet that there is an entrepreneur ready to carve out a sliver of that for a more specialized community. It’s the nature of business. Fewer eyeballs reached = smaller startups = manageable investments.

Now, in recent days we hear about the broad defection from Facebook by teens. Consider a service that was once established for college students, and later overtaken by an audience of one billion baby boomers and mature audience members being suddenly unappealing to Gen Y. Young people not wanting to hang out with their parents? Who would’ve thought?

Why Teens Are Tiring of Facebook

A new website called Daybees has rolled out in the UK, and is coming to the US and other countries soon. Positioned to compete with Google in one specific area — events — this service positions itself as the world’s largest events search engine. Wherever you are, how perfect would it be to call up this site and punch in a few simple coordinates to see what is happening nearby?

Seeking to Outdo Google in Searching for Events

“I love Google,” said Gary Morris, the founder and chief executive of Daybees. “I use it umpteen times a day. But if I want to find an event that’s taking place at a certain time on a certain day, 2,000 feet from my front door or wherever, it’s impossible.”

Technology has empowered us in ways unforeseen. It has created this ability to find what we want, when we want, and how we want. Now more than ever, it’s up to information service providers to deliver on that brand promise.

After the fragmentation of digital media, what new technologies will replace it?