Results tagged “advertising”

The recently-engaged street artist Posterchild has an idea for the city's payphone network. He declares since the payphones have basically become nothing more than an "adverting-revenue generating platform, then they should make all local calls free."

Just months after Calvin Klein pulled down a risqué billboard amidst complaints from neighbors and a Christian advocacy group, the jeans and skivvies manufacturer has installed a new ad on the same wall that has once again sparked controversy among the prudes in SoHo, according to the Daily News. Filling a space that recently depicted a denim-clad threesome (or foursome depending on your perspective), the new ad shows a sweaty Eva Mendez in lingerie tugging at a male model's briefs.

       

You may have noticed teams of people in orange vests whitewashing advertising billboards in Manhattan and Brooklyn today. They weren't employees of NPA, the company that maintains the billboards. In fact, they were part of a subversive network convened by the Public Art Campaign to take back hundreds of advertising locations that NPA has placed around the city.

In reporting its parent company's $35.6 million third quarter loss, the NY Times notes that it "collect[ed] more from readers than from advertisers, in an industry where advertising traditionally outweighed circulation in revenue by at least three to one. At the company’s New York Times Media Group, which includes The Times and The International Herald Tribune, circulation revenue reached $175.2 million in the third quarter, while ad revenue dropped to $164.5 million." Earlier this week, the Times announced 100 newsroom positions would be slashed.

In what might inspire the first Arnold Diaz meta-segment, a consumer watchdog columnist was fired from a Hartford newspaper he had worked at for forty years after writing a piece that exposed allegations against retail giant Sleepy's for selling second-hand mattresses as new—including one with bedbugs. Despite the case being currently under investigation by the Connecticut attorney general, the Hartford Courant refused to publish George Gombossy's exposé on one of their largest advertisers. Gombossy quotes a report from a NJ environmental group that was brought in to exterminate bedbugs out of a box spring he had recently purchased at Sleepy's and appeared to have been previously used. The report found that the “box spring … was the culprit. There were bedbugs inside and the box spring did not look like it was new.” Gombossy has published the column on a new watchdog blog he started, where he prefaces it by saying, "This was the first time in my 40 years at The Courant that an investigation by the attorney general was withheld from the public." His site invites advertisers with the caveat "you will be treated the same as non-advertisers."

Earlier this month we noticed that the Conor Harrington piece at the corner of 13th and Washington was covered up by an illegal and unpermitted NPA advertising panel. Yesterday the Public Ad Campaign, who targeted the company's billboards during a takeover in April, uncovered the colorful piece of artwork and reclaimed the space... for now.

The Conor Harrington piece that's been up on the corner of 13th and Washington has been covered with a brand new NPA City Outdoor advertising frame and some sweet ads for Steely Dan, and major motion pictures District 9 and 2012. Street artists be warned: when you mess with The Man, you get The Dan!

The gangs of tourists roaming around from one set of patio furniture to the next in our new extra pedestrian-friendly Gotham are not only getting to enjoy some R&R for free, they're also getting to take in interactive displays informing them what the latest cable offerings are without the nuisance of clicking on a TV or flipping through a magazine. That's because we're now learning that the city has been quietly been pocketing money from advertisers and other private groups wanting to set up camp in the new pedestrian plazas. Officials have yet to deny one permit for companies who want to stage events in the plazas for fees as high as $38,500 that go into the city's general fund. No one would comment on whether the revenue potential was a factor in its plan for a car-free Broadway, but a spokesman did emphasize that unclogging traffic was its motivation. The Project for Public Spaces sounds generally supportive of the extra attraction that the paid events bring to the plazas, but one person lounging got demanding with who gets them, saying, “Would I have Mariah Carey here performing? Probably not.”

We all know that the MTA is in dire financial straits, thanks to dwindling real estate tax revenues, debts from previous borrowing, the rising expense of maintaining the different systems, and many other reasons. Today, the NY Times decides to look at yet another area of lower expected revenue— advertising on mass transit and in various stations.

As we've learned with the illegal, non-permitted Snickers campaign, shuttered storefronts are perfect for cheap advertising. The NY Times now reports that companies are "taking advantage of all the abandoned retail spaces in urban areas, marketers are leasing them at cut-rate prices and filling them with their ads." They call it the poor man's billboard, and it can cost just $500 for a 3-month runs in prime locations (something that could cost $50,000 were it on a regular billboard). Some landlords even donate the space, especially if they like the message. For example, Conservation International's campaign compared the destruction of the environment with that of the economy. The windows carried messages like 'Our shopping districts are starting to look as barren as our rain forests.'" Note that the retail vacancy rose 11.2% in the first quarter, the highest since the early 90s.

City buses in Manhattan might soon be catching your attention with new LED screens playing video advertisements along their sides as they ride about town. The MTA is about to test out the new ads on ten buses with hopes to expand to 200 buses with screens, which will they say will only be on the right side to avoid distracting other drivers. (No word on what happens if one bus is already another bus's right.) The screens will be equipped with a GPS, so ads can be adjusted for the neighborhoods they're driving through. An MTA spokesman said, "So if you're going down Lexington Avenue and the bus is at 65th Street, it could start advertising, hypothetically, Bloomingdale's." The screens have already began testing on the M79 in the Upper East Side, where residents are having flashbacks to the arrival of Kenny Rogers Roasters. One man told the Post, "It's just like you took my bed, and while I was asleep, moved it to the middle of Times Square. Neon signs are showing in my room. Bright, flashing neon."

Tropicana announced today that it will discontinue its new product redesign only a month after all of its orange juice containers were revamped. The Times calls the move PepsiCo's "own version of New Coke." We've heard quite a few grumblings around town about how generic-looking the new Tropicana cartons were and apparently some people took their gripes to the company itself. One customer asked Tropicana, “Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice? Because I do, and the new cartons stink.”

The NY Times has placed it's first large display advertisement on page A1 today, in a move the, uh, Times says is "a step that has become increasingly common across the newspaper industry." The Times had small classified ads on its front page, but this is its first foray into much more notice-able front page ads.

In case you weren't feeling confined enough while riding through the underground tunnels of New York, the MTA has taken a step to ensure everyone gets that cozy feeling of claustrophobia during their commutes. As shown in the above photo, the organization is now allowing full window ads. These aren't the kind that you can see clearly out of either, as one disgruntled straphanger noted: "outward visibility is significantly reduced in outdoor lighting, and severely reduced to totally eliminated at night or in low lighting." Someone bail the MTA out before we all become walking billboards.

   

Last month the History Channel series "Cities of the Underworld" was the first subway wrap ad to be unveiled on the Times Square Shuttle. Now Google Maps has stepped up to the plate, helping the MTA with their huge budget crisis by paying for a colorful ad campaign on the S. NYC the Blog notes that "Google has only wrapped the exterior of the train, leaving the interior with the more traditional ads we are used to seeing."

Perhaps you've noticed Bank of America's ad campaign that gives customers $10 back for every $100 they use on public transit. But NBC New York notes that the ads are a bit subversive in touting BoA's program, since the print ads, feature people and copy like "Ten bucks for every hundred I spend on transit? Great. How about finding a cabbie who doesn't mind going to Brooklyn?" or "Ten bucks for every hundred I spend on transit? Great. How about a solution for gridlock?" Maybe advertising to NYers is difficult: Earlier this year, Capital One's ad campaign launched its NY/NJ market campaign with the questionable use of huge push pins "hurtling from the skies and crashing into the NYC streets and taxis to demonstrate nearby locations of the bank's ATMs."

The MTA is currently testing out new digital screens that display ads on the sides of buses running on the M23 route. The screens, which use GPS technology to change according to each neighborhood's demographic, are being installed by New York-based ad company Titan Worldwide; the company's website declares that the 12-foot displays "are bright and unavoidable and will enable advertisers to target mass audiences by time of day, block, zip-code, demography and ethnicity." Yay!

Following the news that garbage trucks would soon be creative canvas for advertisers, and with ads already in and now around subway cars...it was only a matter of time before the interior subway tunnels themselves became a money-maker as well. Who looks out the windows while underground? Who knows, but LA has commercial images projected on the interior of tunnels, and now NYC is going to try it out. The NY Times reports that "starting next spring with the 42nd Street-Times Square shuttle, passengers will see advertising outside the windows as the train travels between stations. The messages will look rather like jumpy 15-second TV ads." To illuminate the underground with your ad, it'll cost around $95K for one month. Okay fine, it's actually kind of cool. But if you think the adsuration of NYC stops there, think again--turnstile arms (Purell should really get in on this action), station interiors and exterior station walls are also up for grabs now.

Nothing wrong with helping mend the huge city deficit by putting up ads right on city property, right? Billboards are already filling up the skyline, and advertisements have even begun to wrap themselves around the subway cars...but what if they were on a garbage truck? amNY reports that one estimate shows that "the city could generate up to $10 million to put toward billions in deficits by selling ads on garbage trucks and city vehicles." What surface of the city isn't marketable to a client at this point? Vanessa Gruen of the Municipal Art Society says told the paper that: "It seems to make sense that there would be a saturation point. Once it spills out to residential areas …people object to having it in the neighborhood." She also noted that it's hard to imagine "Chanel or Gucci putting an ad up on a garbage truck." [via Curbed]

It's unclear as to whether or not Jake Bronstein and his Zoomdoggle team are now hired guns for George Lucas & Co., but considering their latest Indiana Jones-themed stunt began on the day of the latest Indiana Jones DVD release, we're guessing it's a safe bet to say they are. Yesterday a Zoomdoggle employee tipster sent us in these photos of IndiHats around town, and another tipster informed us that Zoomdoggle updated their website with the following:

Here's a fun one, call it hat-vertizing, a brim-job, or just one hell of a scavenger hunt, but some Indiana Jones obsessed compatriots of mine have decided to “hide” 800 of these hats in four different cities starting today. In fact, while I type this, teams are cramming them into crannies, nudging them into nooks, and just plain hiding them them in plain sight in LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and right here in New York. Find one and it’s yours to keep. All they ask is that you snap a shot of yourself wearing it and upload it to flickr with the tag “indihat.”

Behold! This morning the MTA unveiled the first "full advertising wrap of the exterior and interior of a New York City subway." Synergy alert! The ad is for the History Channel's Cities of the Underworld, which follows urban explorer Don Wildman on his adventures beneath major cities. Adventures happening ever further down from the ones New Yorkers experience on the 42nd Street Shuttle.

City Councilman David Yassky announced a plan yesterday for the city to sell ads on its trash cans, a revenue source that he says could rake in $2.5 million. The city owns 25,000 trash receptacles that under Yassky's plan would all bear ads within two to three years. The move would also potentially put a stop to trash cans being funded out of Council members' budgets and then arriving on the streets with the only legal form of promotion currently allowed--emblazoned with the names of the Council members themselves. How close would this all lead us to designer trash cans? Garbage bins in Tompkins Square Park recently began getting spruced up with pink and polka-dotted bags designed by a local artist.

Earlier this week Gossip Girl's new ad campaign was revealed, just begging to be reworked by the infamous subway ad artist (or anyone with scissors and a distaste for teen dramedies). It didn't take long, as a reader sent us the above photo, from the 23rd Street C and E station, taken this morning.

The One Times Square building is empty. Why? Because the owner can afford it by selling ad space alone. It costs $300,000/month to advertise on that structure -- one of things you'll learn in this behind-the-LED-screens look at Times Square.

Ex-Road Ruler, and current-prankster, Jake Bronstein was back on the streets recently. This time he wasn't trying to get laid by wearing a wookie suit on the subway, he was getting strangers lucky!

   

The image below isn’t a rejected Rage Against the Machine album cover, but rather an ad campaign for a leading Brazilian business newspaper, Gazeta Mercantil. Designed by illustrator Pedro Izique for the São Paulo office of ad agency JWT, the print ad redesigns the Dollar, Euro and Yen with images of “some of the most important events of the last century.”

Observant New Yorkers may have noticed that someone's got an ax to grind with Sarah Marshall. There are posters all over town telling the woman that she is maternally hated, she sucks, and that yes, she does look fat in those jeans. The posters are part of an ad campaign promoting the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, featuring Kristen Bell as an ex-girlfriend who is difficult to forget. In a city the size of New York, however, there are the inevitable actual Sarah Marshalls, who can't help but notice they're being harangued by name all over town.

The Equinox fitness club chain will soon be bringing a controversial ad campaign to New York City that features nuns sketching a male nude model. The ads are currently on display only in Boston, but will soon be shown in other cities, including NYC. The Boston Archdiocese feels that the ads are a slam against the Church and the Catholic faith. Keira McCaffrey of New York's Catholic League expressed less outrage than disdain. "It's gratuitous. It's of course … it's a slap at nuns, but you know what? It's trite. It's not even clever. This is an old cliché ... let's make fun of nuns." Bill Donahue, the head of the Catholic League, weighed in, calling the ad "patently stupid" and "sophomoric." C.J. Doyle of the Catholic Action League wasn't as dismissive, calling the ad "unfair and depraved."

Now we know why there are still people heading to The Garden. There aren't any Knicks’ fans left, they are all paid actors. At least that’s the conclusion one could draw from a story in the New York Press. It turns out that the people in the "fan ads" (like the one pictured above), are mostly paid actors and their stories are made up for the commercials. The surprising thing is that apparently the Knicks didn’t know this.

This ad for Pakistan Airlines is real. And in the history of advertising, it really takes the creepy cake. Even worse than babies endorsing cigarettes! Seriously, if Nostradamus ran an ad firm to warn the world about blowback, this would have been in his portfolio.