Let's get addy

Many consumers associate bottled water with purity and safety and are willing to pay high prices for the product. But recent class-action lawsuits in six states, including Illinois, have shown that consumers may not be getting what they expect. Truth-in-advertising was one of the issues raised last month when a major bottled water provider agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged its water is neither spring water nor pure. In the settlement, the company did not admit to the allegations, and the legal dispute over the purity and source of the water continues, Garrett said. It will be interesting to see what comes of this investigation, if anything.

Bye-Bye Brawny Man - "The Brawny man for the new millennium is dark-haired, dimpled and clean-shaven, although he still wears his familiar plaid shirt," said Georgia-Pacific, the maker of the paper towel. The Atlanta-based company today is expected to unveil the new Brawny man with an updated look. The company will launch a new advertising campaign early next year to introduce the new Brawny man to Brawny fans. Replacing the 1970s-era Brawny man who currently adorns the packages is part of Georgia-Pacific's plan to reposition Brawny as a top-tier towel. The company concedes that Brawny is perceived to be of lesser quality than Bounty, made by Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble. He definitely has a metrosexual look to him. I prefer the older icon. Check out the poll on the page that is linked too. It's interesting but more seem to like the older one too.

Monster announced it is doubling its presence for Super Bowl XXXVIII. Just the first in a long list of Super Bowl news to come.

Belvedere Vodka is launching a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign today that it hopes will separate it from a growing pack of premium vodka brands. The print ads, created by Wieden + Kennedy, use the Belvedere bottle in a sketch of a person or icon worth toasting with the tag line "Na zdrowie": Polish for "to your health."
The first ad, to run this week in Entertainment Weekly and Daily Variety, features Quentin Tarantino. Another ad to run in January in Playboy magazine includes a sketch of a Playboy bunny. See an example here. I'm glad to see Belvedere stop whinging about the whole Grey Goose thing and take some action instead of crying to the courts.

Apparently the idea of comparing the sugar content of Sunny D to that of spinach really wasn't a great idea. Ads have been banned and after other PR disasters (a a three-year-old girl turned orange after drinking 1.5 litres of Sunny Delight a day) P&G has decided to sell the brand.

The Army is experimenting with some bold new recruiting techniques these days. They include no traditional appeals to patriotism, no heroic war stories by wounded veterans home from Iraq or ruggedly handsome role models in combat fatigues.
Instead, an amateur rap contest and free subscriptions to the popular hip-hop magazine The Source were featured yesterday as the Army put on a "Campus Combat" tour aimed at finding minority recruits at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The Army expects the "Campus Combat" tour to attract thousands of ethnic minorities at five eastern campuses over the next week, and generate thousands of leads to help meet its goal of about 100,000 recruits a year.
"We're looking for the next Biggie Smalls, and the Army is looking to increase its popularity among people of ethnicity," said Ousmane Sam, the mobile promotional director and the event's host. "I think we'll both reap the benefits here."
There's something about this that is disturbing, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

A poster advertisement for the German lager, Holsten, featuring a supposedly “unattractive” woman and the tag line “It’s what’s inside that counts” has been heavily criticised in an article that appeared in The Times on October 15. See said poster at the link above. And there's more on the whole campaign here, on the Holsten site.


Mazda RX-8 in action versus the humble traffic warden in a viral campaign. View it here.
A traffic warden is sucked into a Mazda RX-8 and stripped almost naked before being spat back out again in a viral ad marking the start of the launch campaign for the new coupe sports car. The ad shows an over-eager traffic warden wandering down a street when he spots a shiny new RX8 on the other side of the road. Smacking his lips and clicking his pen ready for action he pulls out his pad and walks across the road to ticket the car. Before he has a chance to tuck his ticket under the windscreen wiper, the car -- like a venus flytrap -- sucks him in, taking advantage of the car's freestyle doors, and shakes him up before spitting him out with just his underpants remaining.