+ The Japanese gallery of Psychiatric Art
+ A gallery of Spanish pharmaceutical ads
+ A gallery of US pharmaceutical ads
'Mabel is unstable', 'Nudge your patient to sleep' and 'Injectable whole Opium'. You probably shouldn't try these at home. Via Boing Boing, Evenings on the Lake and quite a few other blogs.
The Melbourne International Film Festival is a major cultural institution in Melbourne. It's also the longest-running film festival in the Asia-Pacific region. Over the past few years their promotional campaigns have been (if I'm being polite): 'interesting'. If I'm not so polite: duff.
Last year I blogged their 2005 campaign and I'm very happy to report that their promo campaign for 2006 – It's a Long Way from Hollywood – is particularly clever and right on the mark. Their 'Sequel Sequel' cinema ad and TVC, and the image (above) of the sagging 'Hollywood director puppet' is distinctive, memorable and entirely appropriate for the breadth and depth of cinema they screen for a few weeks in winter. It's great stuff: MIFF have finally got it together.
Tourism Australia's new 'bloody hell' campaign has attracted lots of publicity in both the local media and overseas—for different reasons. The mainstream media has focussed on the 'bloody' aspect in the campaign's tagline. 'How rude', 'how old-fashioned', 'how ocker', 'how inappropriate for those overseas who may not understand our local vernacular' has been the thrust of much of the popular press. Fran Bailey, our federal Tourism Minister assures us that "testing on 86 focus groups in Australia's top seven tourist markets caused no concern about the 'great Australian adjective' among more reserved Japanese, Chinese or Americans."
As of today 45,000 foreigners have visited the web site. The campaign's a hit or so it seems. But what about us? Are we really comfortable with what's being portrayed? After all, it's meant to be us.
Dove's recent 'real women, real curves' promotional campaign (now being echoed here in Australia) really deserves praise. It has been the subject of many articles in the press and elsewhere and was on the Oprah show, so I won't go into too much detail here (I'm not too sure how many readers of 1+1=3 regularly view her program!?).
In short, a campaign has been developed using real, live, normal, everyday women to promote their range of 'skin firming' products. Not fashion model types in fashion model poses (ie. disarmingly thin, stereotypically 'beautiful' young women lounging around in carefully contrived stances) but a group of women in their plain ol' white undies (they are selling body lotion) just goofing around. And whilst Dove are part of the 'beauty myth' industry (body firming lotion?) it's just so refreshing to see non-retouched models who obviously feel good about who they are.
Makes me smile every time I see the ads. I feel great every time I see this campaign – and I'm not a woman... Hat's off to Dove.
According to it's publicity material, the Melbourne International Film Festival screens over 400 films from over 50 countries to an audience of around 180,000 people. MIFF is also the Asia-Pacific region's longest running film festival.
A diverse body of feature films, short films, local and international films screen throughout Melbourne's CBD. Plus there are some special film-related events. In short, film-nuts, cinephiles and people that 'just like going to the movies' are well catered for: there's bound to be something there for practically everyone's taste. Which is why MIFF's choice of imagery for it's promotional material is especially curious. A feature of MIFF is its diversity and breadth of filmic scope. Yet a cartoon graphic (and its animation) has been chosen to represent MIFF this year. It's also curious because of both its form and its content.
Continue reading "The Melbourne International Festival of Huh!?" »
