The advertising campaign for Sony's Playstation 2 breaks this Friday with a grainy, black-and-white TV ad which features among other things, a duck wearing a suit. The ad was directed by cult movie director David Lynch.
A teaser campaign has been running on Irish poster sites for the past week and the all-black poster with a stylised letter in the middle will be replaced this Friday with a poster for the games console.
A book cataloguing Irish Superbrands sounds like a timely and smart idea but the contents of the glossy hardback, which was launched yesterday, immediately raised questions about the criteria for inclusion. Baileys, Guinness, Aer Lingus and Goodfellas arguably belong in the Irish Superbrand category but what about Toyota, Adidas and Volvo? The Blanchardstown Shopping Centre makes it in under the Irish part of the title but surely it is not a superbrand in the accepted sense of the word? Light dawned when Mr Noel Derby, editor-in-chief of the book, revealed that the 57 brands included all paid just short of £4,000 (€5,079) each to be in there. Many brands which were asked to pay to be included, declined. So, really the book is what would be described in book circles as vanity publishing - or in ad speak as a great big "advertorial".
The radio ads for Trocaire's Global Gift Campaign have to be the funniest heard all year and are far from the dull but worthy approach that once typified charity advertising. At the Kinsale Festival this year (as with every year) the atrocious standard of creativity in Irish radio advertisements came up again and again for special mention - but Charlie O'Neill who wrote the Trocaire ads is certainly upping the ante. The £100,000 (€127,000) campaign was devised by specialist communications agency PCC.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/VR3765MFOBH2NMV2QNICYDF67M.png)