Advertising
- Blendtec – The blender product, claimed by its creator Tom Dickson to be the most powerful blender, is featured in a series of YouTube videos, "Will It Blend?" where numerous food and non-food items are used within the blender.
- Cooks Source infringement controversy – An advertising-supported publication's dismissive response to copyright infringement complaint causes online backlash.
- Elf Yourself (2006) and its related Scrooge Yourself (2007) are both interactive websites created by Jason Zada and Evolution Bureau for OfficeMax's holiday season advertising campaign. Elf Yourself allows visitors to upload images of themselves or their friends, see them as dancing elves, and includes options to post the created video to other sites or save it as a personalized mini-film. According to ClickZ, visiting the Elf Yourself site "has become an annual tradition that people look forward to". While not selling any one specific product, the two were created to raise consumer awareness of the sponsoring firm.
- Embrace Life – A public service announcement for seatbelt advocacy made for a local area of the United Kingdom that achieved a million hits on its first two weeks on YouTube in 2010.
- FreeCreditReport.com – A series of TV commercials that were posted on the Internet; many spoofs of the commercials were made and posted on YouTube.
- HeadOn – A June 2006 advertisement for a homeopathic product claimed to relieve headaches. Ads featured the tagline, "HeadOn. Apply directly to the forehead", stated three times in succession, accompanied by a video of a model using the product without ever directly stating the product's purpose. The ads were successively parodied on sites such as YouTube and rapper Lil Jon even made fun of it.
- Horse ebooks – An automated Twitter account featuring amusingly garbled tweets, linked to a website selling low-quality e-books about horses. The account has become the inspiration for fan art and merchandise, as well as attempts to identify its anonymous creator.
- Little Darth Vader – An advertisement by Volkswagen featuring young Max Page dressed in a Darth Vader costume running around his house trying to use "The Force". It was released on the Internet a few days prior to Super Bowl XLV in 2011, and quickly became popular.
- LowerMyBills.com – Banner ads from this mortgage company feature endless loops of cowboys, women, aliens, and office workers dancing.
- The Man Your Man Could Smell Like – A television commercial starring Isaiah Mustafa reciting a quick, deadpan monologue while shirtless about how "anything is possible" if men use Old Spice. It eventually led to a popular viral marketing campaign which had Mustafa responding to various Internet comments in short YouTube videos on Old Spice's YouTube channel.
- "Nope, Chuck Testa" – A local commercial made for Ojai Valley Taxidermy, owned by Chuck Testa, suggesting that the stuffed creatures were alive until Testa appeared, saying "Nope, Chuck Testa!"; the ad soon went viral.
- Shake Weight – Infomercial clips of the modified dumbbell went viral as a result of the product's sexually suggestive nature.
Read more about this topic: List Of Internet Phenomena
Famous quotes containing the word advertising:
“The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The same people who tell us that smoking doesn’t cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn’t cause smoking.”
—Ellen Goodman (b. 1941)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)