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Interesting article from AdAge:

Creatives Have a Crush on Obama

Anybody remember those racist ads for Salesgenie.com? The New York Times reports that one portraying talking panda’s with Chinese accents is being withdrawn.

I thought the first one (with the guy with the Indian accent and 7 children at home) was racist, but the Salesgenie spokesman, Vinod Gupta, who wrote both of the spots, says he’s half-Indian, so…

He says, “We never thought anyone would be offended.” Advertising is a process. There’s research, media buys, writing, art direction, production (which may outsource things like film production or animation), legal, and other areas I’m probably forgetting about. Taking the quote only partially out of context, Mr. Gupta said “We never thought.”

Now, if they could only withdrawn those racist ads featuring Ned Holness.

BK Says ‘Freakout’ Drove Spike in Sandwich Sales

from AdAge

You spend a lot of money on school to do a job that anybody thinks they could do. Why on earth would you want to let them do it?

Subway is suing Quiznos and iFilm for inflammatory and false accusations in a “create your own ad” campaign. They posted over 100 videos made by Quiznos fans after they instructed them to draw “a comparison between Quiznos and Subway with Quiznos being superior.” The results were filtered, but the messaging was off to begin with. Quiznos has taken an aggressive stance against it’s number one competitor, so I’m sure the video review was very liberal.

I don’t think you have to be a professional to be funny or to have a good idea. But advertising and design are more about painting a pretty picture. You have to create something that’s well thought out and meaningful. Interactive, by nature, engages people to participate in the process of advertising. But if you rely on people to figure their own way through a campaign, you better be able to accurately predict the outcome.

I’m not exactly sure when these two campaigns happened, and if they occurred at similar times, but Chevy Tahoe tried an approach that let you make your own Tahoe commercial using canned footage and text overlays. The plan back fired in a big way when videos like this one flooded YouTube //