Out of Home

BY DIANNE NICE
THE GLOBE AND MAIL

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Slutty puppet banned
There will be no cleavage assaulting the decency of transit riders in Colorado Springs, not even if it belongs to a fuzzy pink puppet named Lucy. Billboard company Lamar Advertising has rejected posters for Avenue Q, the Tony-winning Broadway show making a local stop next month. A Lamar executive deemed the image of the Muppet-like character “inappropriate,” saying he rejects anything he would have to explain to his four-year-old or grandmother. We guess that rules out quantum physics and the Internet. We wonder if Junior and Gran are allowed to watch Sesame Street? That Miss Piggy is pretty chesty.

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BY DIANNE NICE
THE GLOBE AND MAIL

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What Toyota can learn from Tiger
Taking a page from the Tiger Woods Book of Damage Control, Saatchi & Saatchi has advised Toyota to put a sock in it when it comes to its public image problems. The agency says it's confident Toyota can eventually make a comeback, just like Mr. Woods is planning to do Friday, with his first public statement since news of his philandering caused him to put his golf career on hold in December. In the meantime, Saatchi & Saatchi has suggested the recall-plagued auto maker turn off the ad valve while it focuses on fixing its vehicles and not say anything until it has something good to say.


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BY DIANNE NICE
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Krafty product integration
In a case of art imitating life, or something like that, the fictional town of Mercy from CBC's Little Mosque on the Prairie is joining hundreds of real towns vying to be named Kraft Hockeyville. On Monday's episode, Amaar and Reverend Thorne will create a video submission for the contest, which will award to the winning town $100,000 in arena upgrades, an NHL preseason game and a visit from CBC's Hockey Night in Canada. A Kraft spokesman said the point of integrating the contest into the show is to emphasize that all towns are eligible. The publicity for Kraft probably doesn't hurt, either.


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Mad Men meets the Shopping Channel
If you haven't found the perfect gift for someone on your list, the folks at Vancouver's Wasserman + Partners might have just what you need. The ad agency has unveiled a unique line of holiday-themed gifts, including the Santa Beard Mop for cranberry sauce spills; holiday-scented air fresheners in turkey, eggnog or Yule log scents; and seasonal avian-flu masks to halt the spread of germs. Our favourite is the Scotch tape dispenser, which dispenses both Scotch and tape simultaneously. You can wrap gifts while you rap to the Wasserman Holiday Shopping Channel's RemiXmas CD.



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The editors of Mediaweek recently published their media outlook for 2010.

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HAS DON DRAPER QUIT SMOKING? A cigarette held suavely in his right hand is as much a part of the ad man's identity as a highball and a leer. But in Canadian transit ads for AMC's Mad Men, Draper's smoke has been cut out of the iconic silhouette, the victim of local anti-tobacco laws. "Smoking is a big part of the show," said Jan Diedrichsen, the senior vice-president of affiliate marketing at Rainbow Network Sales, which reps the network's shows abroad."But it's much more important for us to get promotion for the show than to stick to our guns and have cigarettes on there."

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ONCE UPON A TIME, A SHARP DROP in the stock market meant mass suicides. Now? Mass stripping! The Puma Index is an iPhone app that features models in states of undress that are linked to the various major stock indices. Dow's gone down? Comfort yourself in the sight of some lovely (or hunky) model removing another item of clothing. When things get really bad--er, good--the model is left wearing nothing but Puma Bodywear. Now that's what we call a Great Recession!



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HOW THIN-SKINNED ARE TORONTONIANS? Three months ago, Molson Coors Brewing put up a billboard announcing that its Coors Light beer was "Colder than most people from Toronto." But after a Toronto newspaper ran a story on the ad this week, prompting a flurry of online carping, the brewer apologized and pledged to take down the offending creative. At least one Twittering Torontonian shrugged off the brew-ha-ha (sorry, we couldn't resist), tweeting, "We're not offended that you called us cold. We're offended that you suggested we'd drink Coors."

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CAN A DRINKING GAME ENCOURAGE sobriety? The Dutch brewer Grolsch is touting a game it developed for the iPhone that uses the mobile device's motion-sensing accelerometer app.

Walk the Link tests players' ability to walk in a straight line, tracking their movement with a red dot along a radar-type scope. Makers of the swivel-topped beer rolled out the game at the North Sea Jazz Festival, where players with high scores were offered a free photograph at the Grolsch bar while their inept counterparts were given a sobering glass of water.

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Eighty Sobeys stores in Atlantic Canada have just installed check-out conveyor belts imprinted with ad messages, reports in Media in Canada.

The "Art-N-Line" belts, developed by Little Rock, Ark.-based Envision Marketing, are custom-produced and -printed, and can display a wide variety of images and messages.

Sounds like a natural use of space previously unexploited by grocery stores, right? Which begs the question: Why haven't we seen this before?

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Adweek reports that several digital out-of-home networks have begun to offer bundles that include a mobile component.



It's a combination that, to me at least, just makes sense. Deliver a message while a consumer is out and about, and keep the conversation going on his or her so-called "third screen." Sounds like a very flexible platform that can serve as the basis of a totally new kind of marketer/consumer interaction.

And apparently, it's paying off.

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Ad Age and Creativity magazines have teamed up to publish their first-ever "Art of Outdoor."

In an introduction to the special report, Ad Age editor Jonah Bloom explains the thinking behind this enterprise: "[o]utdoor's biggest asset today may be that as audiences on every other channel are split into ever decreasing fragments, it can still operate on a mass, broadcast level. And, just as [Saatchi & Saatchi's famous] "Labour Isn't Working" billboard [for Britain's Conservative Party in 1978] ended up as an accidental case study in the power of integrated media, so today's out-of-home efforts are increasingly often integral parts of bigger digital campaigns...Creatives are clearly enjoying the ability to link the mass-market power of a poster to the personal power of the internet."

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