Monthly Archives: August 2006

they do it differently – way – in s. africa

AdForum’s Top 5 commercials for the week included Ogilvey and Mather – Africa’s 50-second spot for Harley, which features adultery, voyeurism and just a few seconds of Softail footage to establish the brand.

Las Vegas’ “What Happen’s Here, Stays Here” theme may push the envelope in the States. This effort (“Affair”) by Johannesburg shop Fresh Water Films rips it up and tosses it out the window.

The spot opens with the resident bad boy pulling up late in the day and a nice shot of the kickstand being lowered. A quick cut inside the house to a chick and her boyfriend in the sack is an obvious sign of trouble, big trouble, ahead.

But all isn’t what it seems, and you have to watch the surprise ending to figure the plot out. Closes with a nice fade in dimensional shot of the bar and shield over the slogan “R E S P E C T”.

I’ll try to put it up.

look out! he’s got more bandwidth!

Having already decided I was spending too much time in front of the computer, it was only natural I’d figure out a way to flog my uncomplaining G4 from yet another direction.

To say blogs are all the rage misses the point. The skeptic in me assumes this is all just training against the day when the ozone layer’s totally fried and to avoid the same fate we take to caves, where we blog, podcast, e-mail and in general record every waking moment of every person’s time on earth.

On the other hand — and there’s always another hand — as long as we’re busily e-mailing to and fro anyway, why not try and improve the efficiency ROI?

Here’s what I’ve learned. All blogs are web pages, but not all web pages are blogs. If a web page is a more formal, one-way communique, a blog (if I understand things correctly) assumes the informal, spontaneous, and somewhat limited in terms of function role.

The primary goal’s to take mainstream advertising, marketing and public relations bits and pieces and compare them to their powersports counterparts. That’s in general, and we’ll see where it goes. Beyond that rather broad undertaking we’ll post content that can, regardless of stretch, be connected to the powersports market.

We’ll avoid screaming matches, believing as we do in the solid entertainment value of, say, an exploding gator-eating python over run-of-the-mill politics and religion.

Let’s see how things work out.