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Advertising's scary new weapon: sonic beams

Just when you thought you've see it all, along comes a terrifying new form of advertising. An A&E billboard on Prince Street (bet. Mulberry and Mott) in Manhattan is using ultrasound waves to beam audio to hyper-targeted areas along the sidewalk below. If you've seen The Men Who Stared at Goats, then you'll recognize this as military technology that uses "your skull as a speaker." In other words, it beams hypersonic sounds to scare victims, make them nauseous, or cause them to faint. Yes, exactly the sort of thing we want on our streets!

Steve Lambert was able to get his hands on this demo video of the A&E ad, so you can see how it works. Hopefully neighborhoods groups (NYC Streets? Municipal Art Society? Project for Public Spaces?) will see this for what it is—a potential public health hazard—and pass ordinances banning this stuff.

(Via The Anti-Advertising Agency)

Advertising between Ads

According to the LA Times, the writer's strike may really be taking its toll:

Firebrand, a media company based in New York, launched the all-commercials-all-the-time show on the ION network (in L.A. on KPXN-TV Channel 30) late Monday with hopes of getting young people to view advertising: as entertainment, not an annoyance. ... The show, called "Firebrand," airs weeknights at 11. On both the show and its sister website, commercial jockeys called CJs introduce the mostly 30-second spots, which are selected by "commercial curators."

The article didn't put it this way, but using advertisements as entertainment (as opposed to merely making ads entertaining) appears to be something of a trend. Also, me crying at my desk is now something of a trend.

And they'll be even jumpier after they get the coffee

In what may go down as the worst idea ever, the Rancho Cordova police have started pulling over random drivers who are not breaking the law to give them $5 Starbucks gift cards — all under the guise of spreading 'Christmas spirit.'

It sounds like one of the Improv Everywhere pranks that starts out with good intentions and ends up creeping out the person being 'given a good time.' Just wait until a guy with a trunk full of pot stomps on the gas when he sees a cop on his tail, setting off a dangerous high-speed chase. Merry Christmas!

(Photo by Ed Giles)

Stay Free! presents "Adult Education"

Stay Free! is pleased to announce the launch of Adult Education, a monthly series at Union Hall in Park Slope. Each program will feature 4 or 5 speakers presenting brief lectures that use visuals of one stripe or another (kind of like "show and tell" for grown-ups). Each show will have a theme and each lecture will tie in loosely to that theme. Stay Free!'s own Charles Star will host.

To be kept abreast of forthcoming themes and events, see our MySpace and Facebook pages. Here's what we've got so far:

"MICRO-GENRE"
Tues., January 22, 2008
Union Hall (Union & 5th St., Park Slope), 8 pm

On YouTube, there are scores of toddler's expressions after sucking on lemons. Entire groups of flickr photos are organized around photos of people wearing sweatshirts, photos of painted trains, photos of body hair. You could fill a small bookshelf with fake children's memoirs. In this show, we discuss several examples of what we're calling "micro-genres."

Liz Clayton: The Architecture of Converted Fast-Food Restaurants
Paul Lukas: On Elevator World, American Jails, and other obscure trade magazines
Heidi Cody: First National Icons: Native Americans in Grocery Brands
Jim Hanas: On meta-tourism: photos of tourists taking photos
Russell Scholl: On TV Commercials for Personal Hygiene Products

ANIMALS & SIN
Tues., February 12, 2008
Union Hall (Union & 5th St., Park Slope), 8 pm

This will be the first in our series of "hybrid" themes, where we combine two dissonant topics and ask writers to come up with a lecture that somehow manages to incorporate both.

Daniel Radosh: The Quest to Develop Kosher Bacon
Mikki Halpin: Sexual Violence in the Domestic Pug
Jeffrey Kastner: A Brief History of Animals on Trial
Carrie McLaren: Animal Hoarding as Social Ill: Beware the Cat Lady

Rockefeller Tree = Death

An acquaintance, Dave Zweig, recently told me about an idea of his to protest the Rockefeller Tree. He writes, "Since I was kid it's been driving me nuts that they kill a majestic 60+ yr old tree every year for one month of entertainment."

Alas, his plan for a web site and petition is as of yet unrealized, but I think you all may appreciate his placeholder in the mean time.

Brain testing voters

The Wall Street Journal had a story on Friday about presidential candidates using "neuroscience" to test voters' reactions to certain issues and messages. Market researchers have been doing this for several decades, of course; it's only recently that campaigns have had enough money to spend spare tens of thousands on brain scans.

I probably would be more upset about this practice if I thought it worked. As it stands now, the whole thing smacks of snake oil. But it's worth pausing to consider what's going on here, aside from the colossal waste of money: these presidential candidates are essentially trying to read voters' minds.

Most Americans know that electoral politics here is a joke, that presidential candidates live and die by polls. But brain testing and the public's ho-hum response suggests is that even the pretense of having integrity is scarcely necessary. Now that is terrifying.

"Real beauty" from the makers of Axe?

It's been a while since we checked in on the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, but I would feel remiss in not pointing out the new round of criticism its getting.

If you haven't seen them, the Dove commercials are as genius as they are insidious (see Onslaught and Evolution, for instance). As the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood pointed out last month, Dove is owned by Unilever, which also produces Axe body spray and other personal hygiene products. So while the makers of Dove attack advertising that exploits female bodies, they're producing scores of those ads at the very same time. The Axe campaign, however, is particularly obnoxious. As media literacy consultant Bob McCannon has said:

In all my years of doing school workshops, I have never seen anything like the reaction of middle and high school kids. Almost ALL (no exaggeration) know the words to the Axe song, "Bom Chicka Wah Wah," by heart and sing it immediately and enthusiastically with the video, and most of them have been to the Axe "spanking vixens" site.

Now someone has re-edited Dove's latest commercial—replacing bikini bunnies from generic sources with those from Axe commercials—to call attention to Unilever's hypocrisy. See A Message from Unilever. With luck, word will get around to all of those middle and high school teachers using the Dove spots as media literacy. The real lesson here is not that Dove supports "real beauty" but that corporations will say anything—even ostensibly critical things—to sell their crap.