New Advertising Trend: Fake “Public Service” Ads
PRWatch.org / Center for Media and Democracy
May 14, 2009

Consumer Reports’ AdWatch video for Chantix:
Source: Consumer Reports/Health.org, February 17, 2009

Pfizer has produced a great example of stealth advertising with its commercial promoting a Web site called MyTimeToQuit.com. The ad has the look and feel of a public service announcement, and mentions neither Pfizer, nor the popular smoking cessation drug it promotes — Chantix (varenicline). The ad represents a growing trend in drug advertising called “help-seeking ads,” which don’t mention a drug by name, but instead address the condition the drug is meant to treat, and then drive viewers to a toll-free 800 number or a Web site that offers an option to learn more about a prescription drug meant to treat the condition. It is a sneaky, but legal way to advertise drugs that have particularly bad side effects, since avoiding mentioning the drug by name lets the company off the hook for listing its bad side effects in the ad, too, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules. Chantix has some serious side effects, according to an alert the agency issued on Chantix, including “serious neuropsychiatric symptoms,” like changes in behavior, depressed mood, suicidal ideation and completed suicide.

Here’s the fourteenth installment of LiteratEye, a series found only on The Art of the Prank Blog, by W.J. Elvin III, editor and publisher of FIONA: Mysteries & Curiosities of Literary Fraud & Folly and the LitFraud blog.

LiteratEye #14: Detecting the Dark Side of Language
By W.J. Elvin III
May 15, 2009

It’s 2 o’clock in the morning in London as my email comes breezing in to interrupt John Olsson’s musings. Olsson interests us because he’s an expert at digging out the secrets of deceptive documents, anything from anonymous hate mail to plagiarized books.

My note found him puzzling over hidden clues in regard to the character of Bernard Madoff, the big Wall Street toad whose secret life involved scamming multi-millions from clients.

Might a keen observer have spotted what Madoff was up to, before it all fell down? Olsson pondered the name, “Madoff.” Odd, the wanderings of the mind in the wee small hours. “Made Off…,” he supposed. “Bernard made off…”

Well, John, maybe you’re on to something. And, believe me, you can throw LiteratEye readers a long one and they’ll be out there to catch it. But we better at least start a little closer to the line of scrimmage.

And so, down to business. In Olsson’s case, business is The Forensic Linguistics Institute and his studies are usually of a very serious nature. You can get a fairly good idea of what it’s all about from his new book, Wordcrime. (more…)

The Comedian as Media Critic
by Brian Stelter
TVDecoder.blogs.nytimes.com
March 13, 2009

Is the “weeklong feud of the century” finished?

Jon Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, critiqued CNBC’s coverage of the stock market on Thursday during a highly anticipated appearance by Jim Cramer, the host of the sometimes frantic stock market show “Mad Money” on CNBC.

Mr. Stewart questioned Mr. Cramer about the perception that CNBC acts as a cheerleader for the investment community. “The financial news industry is not just guilty of a sin of omission but a sin of commission,” Mr. Stewart said. Mr. Cramer agreed that he made a number of faulty predictions over the years.

(more…)

Reach Out and Smear Someone
Politico.com via PRWatch.org
September 16, 2008

The Republican Jewish Coalition says it hired the political polling firm Central Research to “understand why Barack Obama continues to have a problem among Jewish voters.” But the poll questions upset many of the hundreds of Jewish voters in Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey who received the calls.

Some say it was a push poll, designed to spread negative information and disinformation. Others say the calls, with more than 80 questions, were too long to be push polls; instead, they may be testing messages for future attack ads. One question the pollsters asked is whether it would affect the respondent’s vote if she or he knew that Hamas’ leader had “expressed support for Obama.” The Republican Jewish Coalition, which has endorsed John McCain for President, also helped launch the pro-war lobby group Freedom’s Watch. In the 2000 primary campaign, the Bush team targeted McCain with a push poll in South Carolina that claimed McCain had fathered an illegitimate black baby.

Read the whole article here at Politico.com.

photo: DataMikado.ning.com

Advertisers are trying harder and harder to trick consumers with ads that mimic the work of pranksters, street artists and media activists. Going viral with your ad has become the brass ring, with customers doing all the heavy lifting (i.e., distributing these ad campaigns through YouTube, blogs and emails) for free for the advertisers.

It’s challenging to tell the difference between true guerrilla theater and this new trend of verité advertising. Here’s a hint: listen to the audio quality and watch for camera angles. Frequently, the main character who’s supposed to be the unsuspecting target of a joke is wearing a hidden microphone and there are at least three distinct camera angles, meaning it’s an expensive multi-camera shoot. If it sounds and looks too good to be true — it probably is.

Check out this article On Advertising: Alternative advertising to grab your attention, by Stephanie Clifford of the International Herald Tribune, August 3, 2008.

And, this viral commercial video submitted by Andrew Boyd yesterday:

Hidden Camera Penny Prank in Jewelry Store

This one, picked up from V. Vale’s RE/Search Newsletter, is just a regular German commercial, but fun (and viral) because of its shock value. (more…)

Guerrilla Art Versus Guerrilla Advertising:
What’s the Difference?
by Delana
WebUrbanist.com
July 3, 2008

Not too long ago, walking along a city sidewalk would yield plenty of unique experiences in guerrilla art. Tags left by taggers who climbed into precarious positions, impromptu murals on the sides of buildings, and bizarre urban art installations were all a part of city life that some people admired and others considered a scourge.

Advertisements were clearly delineated, different and separate from art. They were easily recognizable as advertisements and no one expected them to be anything else.

Today, the urban environment includes not only separate instances of art and advertisements, but advertisements that look suspiciously like art. Guerrilla advertisements that use the familiar rough-edged look of graffiti – and others that use actual graffiti – are found now in cities around the world.

So what’s the difference between guerrilla art and guerrilla advertisement? How can you differentiate when the lines between the two are blurred as they are?

(more…)

Another example of astroturfing and viral marketing:

Guys fill their jeans with helium
by Unbuttoned Films

via Damn Cool Pics

Pinkwashing: Can Shopping Cure Breast Cancer?
by Anne Landman
Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch
June 11, 2008

You’ve heard the term “greenwashing.” It refers to corporations that try to appear “green” without reducing their negative impact on the environment.

Since 2002, the group Breast Cancer Action has promoted its “Think Before You Pink” campaign. It’s fighting “pinkwashing,” which is when corporations try to boost sales by associating their products with the fight against breast cancer. Pinkwashing is a form of slacktivism — a campaign that makes people feel like they’re helping solve a problem, while they’re actually doing more to boost corporate profits. Pinkwashing has been around for a while, but is now reaching almost unbelievable levels.

The worst pinkwashers exploit the intense emotions associated with breast cancer while selling products that actually contribute to breast cancer.

So how can the average person recognize pinkwashing? Here are some examples. (more…)

This Column Is Real, But Not All Authors Stick to the Truth
Deja Vu, by Cynthia Crossen
Wall Street Journal
April 7, 2008

A popular choice for ladies’ book clubs in the early 1940s was a slim volume of poetry by a 10-year-old girl named Fern Gravel. Fern had written the poems about her Iowa hometown in 1900 and passed them along to someone who had preserved them. In 1940, Fern Gravel decided to publish her nostalgic rhymes under the title, “Oh Millersville!”

Two snippets: “My Sunday-school teacher/Is Miss Minnie King./She is not of any use as a teacher/But I love to hear her sing.” “The soap they use in the Commercial hotel/Is awful; it has a horrible smell./Sometimes we have our Sunday dinner there/And the smell of their soap I can hardly bear.”

Critics were enchanted. The Des Moines Register praised the poems’ “warm feeling of validity.” Time magazine called the author a “precocity in pigtails.” The St. Paul Dispatch said “Oh Millersville!” was marked “for immortality.” And the book became the profit center for its small Iowa publisher, Prairie Press.

Six years later, Fern Gravel confessed: She was really James Norman Hall, co-author of the “Bounty” trilogy. In a 1946 article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Mr. Hall described himself as “shame-faced and apologetic,” but claimed that Fern had come to him in a dream and dictated her poems to him.

Literary hoaxes are almost as old as literature. Some have been inspired by poverty, others are simply pranks. (more…)

Submitted by Allyn Harstein:

U.S. Funded Health Search Engine Blocks ‘Abortion’
by Sarah Lai Stirland
Wired.com
April 3, 2008

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

The massive database indexes a broad range of reproductive health literature, including titles like “Previous abortion and the risk of low birth weight and preterm births,” and “Abortion in the United States: Incidence and access to services, 2005.”

But on Thursday, a search on “abortion” was producing only the message “No records found by latest query.” (more…)

A Family Tree of Literary Fakers
by Motoko Rich
New York Times
March 8, 2008

When the news emerged this week that Margaret Seltzer had fabricated her gang memoir, “Love and Consequences,” under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, many in the publishing industry and beyond thought: Here we go again.

The most immediate examples that came to mind were, of course, James Frey, the author of the best-selling “Million Little Pieces,” in which he embellished details of his experiences as a drug addict, and J T LeRoy, the novelist thought to be a young West Virginia male prostitute who was actually the fictive alter ego of Laura Albert, a woman now living in San Francisco.

But the history of literary fakers stretches far, far back, at least to the 19th century, when a slave narrative published in 1863 by Archy Moore was revealed as a novel written by a white historian, Richard Hildreth, and into the early 20th, when Joan Lowell wrote a popular autobiography, “Cradle of the Deep,” about her colorful childhood aboard a four-masted ship sailing the South Seas; in fact, she had grown up almost entirely in Berkeley, Calif.

Here follows a lineup of some of the past few decades’ most notorious fakes, with proof that in some cases, there are second acts in American lives. (more…)

The Whole Truthiness
by John Capone
MediaPost Publications
March 2008

Has the fake nightly news opened up a surrealistic media realm?

Nothing you are about to read is true, but it’s exactly the way things are. Trust me.

Who knows who Stephen Colbert really is? Who really cares? Certainly not Colbert himself. He was once a kid from Charleston, S.C., who grew up Irish-Catholic and graduated from Northwestern University with artistic pretensions. He is now such a muddle of refracted irony — a paradox of self-reference and false sincerity — and the work of teams of writers, that the actor has disappeared completely into the surrealistic world he’s created.

The persona is a media barrage. And this barrage has been embraced by millions — The Colbert Nation. This Nation is comprised of the people who watch his show, bought his book, made him a best seller on iTunes, read magazines (like this one) with profiles of their iconically ironic savior, and those who receive the news and advertising messages accompanying all of these media.

When Colbert addresses his audience on The Colbert Report, he’ll often begin with the salutation “Nation,” as if he were an earnest Cronkitian figure, but it is this Nation of fans he really means. Especially when he calls on them to vote to name a bridge in Hungary after him (which they did), change the Wikipedia definition of reality to read: “Reality has become a commodity” (which they did), or get him on both the Republican and Democratic presidential ballots in South Carolina (which they very nearly did).

Does all this add up to truthiness in journalism, canny social criticism, infotainment, pure entertainment or is it the high- (but ultimately unfocused) comedic art of an Andy Kaufman prank? The Colbert-cum-Tony Clifton–divisions run deeper than an actor simply taking on a role. (more…)

Editor’s note: Artist and ArtofthePrank.com editor Joey Skaggs will be joining the online class the week of February 18. Check it out!

Tricksters and Pranks with R.U. Sirius – February 11 – March 23, 2008

Pranks and Pranksters, Tricksters & Tricks — the brilliant ones open up a space in the world for magic(k), ambiguity, and novelty. They encourage us to Question Authority and better still, they cause us to Question Reality.

In this course, we will discuss the history of pranks and pranksterism in the contemporary world. We will examine mythical and world historic tricksters like Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Crowley, Puck, Heyoka, Papa Legba, Lucifer, and more. And we’ll explore and discuss the role pranksters and tricksters play in cultures. I will also discuss some of my own pranks and tricks and legendary pranksters Mark Hosler of Negativland and Joey Skaggs will be dropping in on the course to answer questions.

Finally, we will plan pranks, make pranks, and maybe even leave the course with a dedicated prankster cabal. No fooling.

For more information visit the Maybe Logic Institute. If that link doesn’t work, go here.

Related links:

Submitted by William of FORA.tv:

FORA.tv presents Joline Blais, in cooperation with the Long Now Organization, discussing the artwork of the Yes Men’s internet pranks that focus the world’s attention on big corporations and global political entities.

Joline Blais is co-author of At the Edge of Art with Jon Ippolito.

Related links:

From The New Press Web site:

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore

For years the do-it-yourself (DIY)/punk underground has worked against the logic of mass production and creative uniformity, disseminating radical ideas and directly making and trading goods and services. But what happens when the underground becomes just another market? What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are coopted by corporate America? What happens to cultural resistance when it becomes just another marketing platform?

Unmarketable examines the corrosive effects of corporate infiltration of the underground. Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore takes a critical look at the savvy advertising agencies, corporate marketing teams, and branding experts who use DIY techniques to reach a youth market—and at members of the underground who have helped forward corporate agendas through their own artistic, and occasionally activist, projects.

Covering everything from Adbusters to Tylenol’s indie-star-studded Ouch! campaign, Unmarketable is a lively, funny, and much-needed look at what’s happening to the underground and what it means for activism, commerce, and integrity in a world dominated by corporations.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is the co-editor of Punk Planet, the Best American Comics series editor, and the author of Hey, Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People. She has written for Bitch, the Chicago Reader, In These Times, The Onion, The Progressive, and Chicago Public Radio WBEZ’s radio program 848. She lives in Chicago.

To get more of a sense of what this book is about, check out Rob Walker’s very interesting interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore from his blog Murketing.