Toronto, we really do love you...

Coors pulling B.C. billboards as frosty mugs from Toronto call new beer ads tasteless.

"colder than most people from Toronto."

The billboard, which was part of Molson Coors' "Colder than . . ." summer beer campaign, went largely unnoticed by anyone east of the Rockies until a Toronto newspaper carried a complaint from a Toronto resident who saw the ad while on vacation.

Within hours of the story, Molson Coors backtracked and cancelled the campaign after it received complaints from people who thought the ads offended residents of Canada's largest city.

Via Vancouver Sun

If only the ad was for a beer worth drinking.

Facebook Adblock Followup

With the first afternoon and night of testing over with let's get to the results.

Just over 4,000 impressions and 2 clicks - Who was that? You cost me a good 50 cents jerk.

I haven't received any emails reporting ads other than our own. As for myself, I am seeing other ads but that's probably because facebook won't show me my own ad.

Afternoon and night 1 was a success. I'll continue to monitor this over the next few days, but my first impression is that it sort of works.

With the vast majority of ads we see now under our control at a very low cost how can we better use them?

The adspace could be a fantastically intrusive status update, or I could setup some sort of mystery where hints are given out each day in the adspace. My problem now is that if the ad becomes more interesting in any way the click-throughs will rise and I'll see a bill.

hrm.....Any Ideas?

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Facebook adblock?

I'm just thinking out loud here but couldn't I block competitors ads on facebook by creating an ad that people are extremely unlikely to click and bidding high on the cost per click?

The high bid on CPC would mean my ad would be displayed over a competitors because I've priced them out of the market - but if nobody clicks the ad it all happens at no cost to me.

Where I'm going with this is, should my friends and I decide for some reason we don't want to see advertising on facebook we could create a dummy organization for ourselves. Some brave soul then creates an ad we don't intend to click, and bids high to ensure "our" ad is the one we are served.

Someone tell me I'm wrong about this. Actually, I'll just go ahead and try this out.

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Indie rockers all smoke right?

Labels Seek Apology From Rolling Stone for Camel Ad

I've talked about hating bad advertising before right? I actually don't mind this so much, but only because it's basically another brick in the wall between me and wasting five bux on a crappy magazine.

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The post office opens your mail and I hate advertising

I stumbled across a post by Scott Rosenberg about deep packet inspection. He likened the practice to a the post office reading your mail. It's not the perfect analogy, only because the post office would then also have to put RFID tags under your skin and monitor your every move and use that information to push targeted advertising at you.

Right now Rogers is using a kind of deep packet inspection to let users know when they near their bandwidth limit. Any bets on how long it's going to take for them to begin serving ads in the same way they serve bandwidth notices?

It's a new revenue stream that could make them a lot of money, but it's an invasive technology that scares the shit out of me. What the hell, the internet is loosing its cool.

Dear Advertising,
You ruin good television, good radio, and now you are ruining the internet.

Please don't, I like the internet. It's a lot like I thought radio was like before I learned that the different public broadcasters were the exception rather than the norm. I hated you for a long time when I learned that 99% of the radio out there is little more than a vehicle for advertising. I even hated radio its self a little when I worked there and realized how much more money and effort went into advertising than went into content - music included.

My hate turned to a mere dislike as I began to explore the internet, and you became a neighbour instead of an enemy. You could have commercial TV and radio (god what a sick, sick thing) and I could have my telnet, archie, and gopher. As that all changed to my ie and netscape, mozilla and safari, you began to creep in, and my hatred of you returned.

These days my hatred is back in full friggin force. You're trying to creep in to my conversations on Facebook, you change your colours like a chameleon depending on where I shop on-line, and you pose as real people with real blogs when all you are is goddamn commissioned lies.

Advertising, I hate you and I want you to leave me alone.

Sincerely,

Michael Boronowski

Someday I swear I'm going to snap and move to a little cabin in the arctic, then someone is going to start experimenting with monetizing the channel that is my trap line.

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Hacking Ads?

I Hate Love Hate Love respond with strong emotions to advertising. Bad advertising will make me change the channel in an instant, really bad advertising makes me turn of the TV or radio.

Apple, love em or hate em, make some reasonably cool ads. I was floored to learn a new television ad for their iPod touch was actually a tweaked fan-ad found on Youtube.

Here's the video:

As a believer in empowering people and celebrating success I applaud Apple for making a great move.

AdHack opened my eyes and mind to DIY advertising, although I've always been one to ask "real people" rather than trust a marketeer. It's exciting to see something they've been evangelizing produce such great results.

Their post on the subject links to Digg comments as kind of a proof-of-concept. Man, I like it when Mondays make me happy.

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