viz.

Image credit: FeelUnique.com via NYT

Well, after today I will absolutely stop poaching all my Viz. entries from the The New York Times, but their home page is currently trumpeting a story on "The Body as Billboard" that I imagine any reader of this blog would be interested in.

Here’s an interesting ad campaign that attempts to connect the visible, the tangible, and the audible:

I saw these two responses to the our recent economic woes on BoingBoing.

The first, posted by guest-blogger Clay Shirky, is a graph showing the distribution of the returns of the S&P 500 in 10-percentage-point increments since 1825. The placement of 2008 adds a chilling perspective to our current crisis.

The second is a humorous response to the proposed auto industry bailout in the form of a car advertisement:

A study recently conducted by researchers at UT-Austin and the University of Florida has shown that alcohol advertising is significantly heavier around schools with Hispanic populations of 20% or more.

I couldn’t be happier. After years of watching new versions of one of my favorite commercials

Microsoft finally took up the challenge and came back with a counter-ad.

Liberty Mutual, the insurance company, is the sponsor of "The Responsibility Project," a multimedia effort to get people to consider what it means to do the right thing. The project was spawned by the overwhelming public response to a Liberty Mutual commercial -- you've probably seen it -- in which a chain of strangers in some urban setting do nice things for each other without recognition. The "nice things" are mostly small acts of courtesy -- we're talking moving a stranger's coffee cup away from the edge of a table so that it doesn't fall off, opening a door, keeping a van from backing into a motorcycle. Not world-changing acts here. Yet the argument of the commercial, apart from "buy Liberty Mutual," is that these chains of small acts of kindness have big results. With Hem's weepy song "Half an Acre" playing in the background and city-dwellers pausing in contemplation of an unexpected kindness, wistful looks in their eyes, the commercial probably elicits a groan from the cynical and a tear from the sentimental. Or, if you're like me, a tear followed by a groan.

That was the seed. The flower is a website with numerous short films exploring the issues of responsibility, obligation, community, and, yes, serendipity. The website reads, "We believe that the more people think and talk about responsibility, and even debate what it means, the more it can affect how we live our daily lives. And perhaps, in this small way, together, we can make the world just a little better." I watched one of the short films, "The Lighthouse," which was all about the way a community comes together to keep the lighthouse lit and prevent a ship from foundering disastrously on the rocky shore. It was sweet. Inspirational. Manipulative?

Now, it's not that I don't think that discussion of these issues is important. It is. And it's not even that I object to pathos-laden appeals to duty. But something about an insurance company sponsoring this discussion really bothers me, probably because these short films, while interesting statements on their own, are being used in the service of promoting Liberty Mutual. "The Responsibility Project" is an ethos-builder for the company. But is that a bad thing? Check out the website; I'm interested to know what others think.

According to the interwebs, these ads, explaining how you can buy a pill to transform you into Kanye West, are for Absolut Vodka.

Mr. West’s tongue-in-cheek appearance marks the second collaboration with the vodka company, which is sponsoring his “Glow in the Dark” tour this summer.

In a video at the Web site bekanyenow.com, which is designed to resemble an infomercial, Mr. West sells tablets called “Be Kanye” that promise to transform the taker into “Kanye” for a four-hour duration. “How many times have you told yourself, ‘I feel famous and powerful on the inside, but nobody sees it that way on the outside?’” he asks.

via SuperTouch

Mad Men, AMC’s show about the advertising industry in the early sixties, returns for its second season this Sunday. If you haven’t seen the show, it’s a fascinating look into the way in which products are packaged and sold to consumers, as well as the racist, sexist advertising culture of the time.

In conjunction with the premiere, AMC has described the process behind the ad campaign for this new season.

I want to take a break from politics for a second to address alcohol. Er, wait....hard to divorce the two when Absolut runs the following image in their Mexican advertisements:

It's part of Absolut's campaign to define the brand as "perfect" and follows in the footsteps of:

A couple of discussions online of late have got me thinking about what happens when we interpret an image one way and are called on the carpet for "mis"interpreting it or reading too much into it. What do we reveal about ourselves and our own possibly subconscious biases when we publicly interpret an image, especially a problematic one?

A couple of weeks ago, a blogger on Feministe.com posted the cover of the current issue of Vogue, which features LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen in a pose that the blogger felt was racially insensitive:

Note here that her commenters were pretty much split in their assessment that they couldn't see the problem with the image or that Jill was spot-on in her analysis.