If anyone can sell Burger King Whoppers, Domino's Pizzas and a book on dieting, it's Alex Bogusky. He believes that to stay trim all you have to do is eat from a nine inch plate. So if your New Year's resolution is to lose weight, and you're a Crispin Porter fan, stock up on some nine inch plates and throw away all your foot-long hot dogs.

Alex Bogusky doesn't think bigger is better. He believes we should think small—especially if we want to stay trim. The idea that if you eat less, you weigh less is hardly a new concept, but it's one that Alex has packaged into a tidy little eating plan and book, The 9-Inch Diet, that hits stores this week.

Having a rough day at work? Want to blow a hole through your creative briefs and account exec?
Don't do it! At least, don't do it without some practice at a firing range. This website has an awesome ad agency shoot 'em up game. Just click on Range 2.0.

Hello all. And a happy 2009.

Mine isn't happy. It hasn't been happy since 2 pm on the 31st of December 2008 when the adland server - named AMMO - crashed badly for the third time and took all it's backups with it.

This is not ammo that we are running on now. I do not trust ammo anymore, despite new discs (twice) new chassi (twice) and new kernel, that Dell PE2950 twin Quad Core Xeon is without a doubt the most crash-prone machine that I have ever encountered, and there still no word as to why it crashed like that. Three times. Taking three out of six RAID5 discs into never-never-bit-land. Yes, the impossible happened to me, thrice.

So here we are running on a slow previous machine with old backups and as you can see, much is lost. While I do my best to recreate all those posts, I can not recreate users through a series of wild guesses. I can not recreate user uploaded files (but will be fetching as much as I can from various caches on the web) - and all the while, I was working to fix things before the superbowl - and yes all of that work is lost too.

Pardon me if I'm a tad too depressed to elaborate further, I'm also quite busy as we will now have to move this to another machine and that takes some doing (ever seen an Art Director do data migration before? ha!) Because, as always, I am the one that will be doing everything. We don't have a crew of clever techies working for us, just this crazy Art Director here doing her very best. You may hate that your favorite video is now offline (at the moment, but I will get everything back, I'll work day and night I promise), you may curse loudly that your account was wiped, I totally understand. Just remember, my heart is broken too.

I'll give more updates as I have time to share them.

Meanwhile, just so that people don't run into bugs, the signups are off, and the upgrades are off. Luckily I have a copy of those updates in another machines as well - so those who lost upgraded accounts please forward your latest receipt to host -at - ad-rag.com and I'll get you (and a new account) sorted as soon as I can.  read more »

Advertisers who yearn to be on during the Super Bowl but can't afford the $3 million price tag can now get in for $395,000. The catch? They'll have to share the :30 spot with seven other sponsors. As a bonus, the spot will be available for a year at SuperBowlGlory.com
A few companies have been contacted, but it's not known if anyone has committed yet.  read more »

Arlandastad and First Hotels will begin building this hotel in 2009, as you can see there's a massive portrait of Crown Princess Victoria covering the entire building. An abstract stamp-like impression, where the horizontal lines varying thickness create the portrait.
I'm not saying my usual "gee, I've seen that before". I'm saying I know from experience that it'll look ossom. ;) In fact, I might even stay there if I can book a room in her nose. I've always aspired to get up the princess' nose.

Left: The planned princess hotel - Right me and my freehand portrait of Yuri Gagarin painted straight on my wall.
P.S. I won't be posting much around Xmas break because I'm busy working. Sorry. D.S.

Remember way back in 2003? Coke still doesn't get it - Julmust rules.
Yes, it's that time of year again. And Coke is selling us christmas again. For those who can read Swedish, Kontaktmannen is also ranting about this, with a few well chosen swearwords this year "Släpp musten för i helvete". Because yes, Coke still doesn't get it and they're still trying to make Coke synonymous with Jul in Sweden. As kontaktmannen so eloquently puts his point - Coke is the most drunk soft drink for 365 days, how can you even expect that this will suddenly be synonymous to an Xmas feeling, which most people only have for two weeks a year ? (And how do you become synonymous with christmas when you're synonymous with summer fun love, friendship, cinemas and whatever else?)

That's so true, whenever I see the new ad (Thanks Coke for shutting down the re-run of that horrid christmas trucks commercial we've seen every year since 1989), I shudder for two reasons. One, there's a flippin' world war style B-52 airplane dumping boxes of Coke over small Swiss looking towns. That's just creepy. I really don't like the connotations this brings up. Is it like that bomber that flew over east Berlin and dropped chocolate for the kids, if so what is Coke saying about Europe in general here? We're stuck in commie-land and only US Coke will help us? The symbolism is likely not even spotted by an American but over here it's borderline offensive.
Then, Coke is the hero in the ad, gleeful happy people holler "It's Christmas!" when a coke vending machine turns on and they can drink that brown softdrink... that .. they can drink all other times of the year. WTF? That makes no sense in a country where I throw myself at the first bottle of Julmust available only in late November. These bottles are not in the supermarket the rest of the year, so when you see them, it really means "holy shit it's Christmas!". You can't copy that when you crud is available all year round. No matter how many jolly santas that you put on the bottle. Coke even tried for a few years to make their own Julmust, with the very Swedish looking label and name "Bjäre julmust", but Swedes didn't fall for it, last year it was only available at McDonald's and this year they didn't bother making it at all.

But then, In the UK it seems to be going well, there some fool want to save the trucks, that is see that naff trucks advert every year until forever. That's my version of hell, folks. Coca Cola Christmas Commercial 2008 "It's Christmas" is available inside folks.

Twitter update: People are twittering to #Coke that julmust rules or "Leave Julmust alone!"  read more »

Now you don't have to work at Burger King to smell flame broiled. The King was kind enough to bottle the scent and sell it online. It's $3.99, about the price of a Whopper Value Meal.

The scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat.
Burger King, in its official description of Flame, the fast food restaurant's body spray for men.

See Firemeetdesire

Ah. I often argue that the media being identical doesn't mean that the idea is identical. Here on the other hand, what differs seems to be only the art directors choice of painting the city skyline as seen from above, vs on the sides of the pool. I don't care if they're intentional copies of each other, I'm more interested in which execution do you think is better?
First up, HSBC's Swimming pool for globalwarmingsolutions.co.in

It reminded me quite a bit of DDB Malaysia "waterworld" ambient underwater poster back in 2007.

(full views inside)

This version, for HSBC was created by Ogilvy & Mather in Mumbai, Hindistan (India)
Credits - EYY/ECD: Piyush Pandey • YY/CD: Rajiv Rao • SY/AD/RY/CW: Shirin Johari  read more »

Lets start adland-Friday off a little lighter than my morning has been, shall we? The top viral videos of 2008 have been edited together by Videogum, watch out for the Obama RockRolling you've been warned. Viral in this context does not mean "advertising" but don't be surprised if a lot of viral ads do something they found in this lot next year.

The mercury down in Oz are reporting a bit of a snafu for the athetist ad campaign there.

METRO'S refusal to run >ads for the Atheist Foundation is headed for the Anti-Discrimination Commission.
The foundation wanted to runs >ads on the backs of the state-owned company's buses that said: "Atheism - celebrate reason! Sleep in on Sunday mornings."
Foundation president David Nicholls said he was told, in effect, that the slogan was "too hot to handle".

The Metro buses have run ad campaigns on hot topics before, such as anti-abortion campaigns with some rather disturbing imagary, but they claim now that they don't run political or religious advertising or "anything that damages Metro's reputation". Which could mean that they'll ban anything they don't agree with.
Meanwhile, adfreak gossips that Christians making holy war on atheism >ads as a devout christian named JoEllen Murphy, is trying to raise $14,000 to counter the currently running American Humanist Association campaign with her own campaign, featuring >ads with the line, "Why believe? Because I created you and I love you, for goodness' sake. - God."
Lets not forget London CD Simon Veksner who is putting the final touches on a personal project a campaign for "DiscoverAtheism.com".
I'm not sure what you'll achieve by "unselling" religion to anyone, of if it's even possible. I would whole heartily support and ad campaign that argued the merits of a truly secular state, in order to let people agree that it is time to finally create one with no religion tainting schools for example, but if people fancy believing in, God, G-d, Allah, little green men at home or the flying spaghetti monster, whaddyagonnado aye? I'm not really sure what it'll achieve but tick religious people off, then again maybe that is the point? Anyway, he has a cute script-idea up, where people in a book store re-sort he bibles onto the "fiction" shelf, which sounds like it would work just as well as an guerilla idea if you can find enough people to do it. It reminds me of my younger self, when I went to try and find The Poetic Edda in several academic and university bookstores and kicked up a shitstorm each time that I found it wasn't sorted on the "religion" shelf, it wasn't even on the "mythology" shelves, but hidden somewhere in the dusty corners of the history section. But it also reminded one of the commentors over at scampblog of the reshelving project, where people put Orwell's 1984 in non-fiction as a statement against laws like the Patriot act in the US. Still, a nice idea.