September 29, 2013

If you see this ad, the model has died

Filed under: Health by Branko Collin @ 2:53 pm

Two years ago the Dutch ALS Foundation (ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in North America) started a bold advertising campaign to call attention to the disease.

The campaign consists of portraits of ALS sufferers on posters and in videos. New ads are released only after the model has died. The caption printed on the posters, “ik ben inmiddels overleden”, means “by now I have died”.

In 2010 the foundation made portraits of 9 patients which it expects to distribute in the next few years. It generally takes 3 to 5 years from the onset of the first ALS symptoms to the death of a patient. In 2011 the campaign kicked off after two patients had died, a woman called Conny Deenik and former hockey player and Olympian Theodoor Doyer (photo).

There is no cure for ALS. The disease causes nerves to die, after which the respiratory system breaks down.

(Photo and story: Adformatie / Stichting ALS Nederland)

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March 18, 2013

Film ad for Dutch wave pool (1953)

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 10:20 am

This video from 1953 shows an advertisement for an outdoors salt water wave pool called Bad Boekelo.

The film is called Zee op de Heide, ‘Sea on the moor’, which is ironic because Boekelo near Enschede is about as far away to the east of the North Sea as possible in the Netherlands. The video describes the wave pool from about 2 minutes in: “An ingenious construction with two mechanically moving doors creates a real surf.” The hotel was built to give the business people dealing with the nearby salt industry a place to stay, and filling the pool with the salt from nearby salterns must have been a nice gimmick.

The hotel still exists, but the wave pool (which was built around 1934) has been turned into a pond. The name of the salt company, then called Koninklijke Nederlandse Zoutindustrie, still survives in the KZ of Akzo Nobel.

Note that completely by accident this has become the third posting in a row where I describe the demise of a notable pool or resort in the Netherlands.

(Video: Youtube / Historisch Centrum Overijssel. Image: still from the video.)

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August 12, 2012

HP opens miniature store in tram stop

Filed under: General,Technology by Branko Collin @ 10:37 am

A little unexpected guerilla action from staid and stoic Hewlett-Packard at the Leidseplein in Amsterdam—in a tram stop just across the new Apple Store the computer manufacturer has opened its own Spectre Store.

Spectre being a new 14-inch laptop by HP that nominally competes with the 1- inch Apple MacBook and the 14-inch Dell XPS. I say competes, but according to this Engadget review, it is slightly slower and more expensive than its competitors, and the only thing you get in return is a better screen. Then again, if you had cash to burn and a good screen was what you craved the most, you probably wouldn’t buy an HP in the first place.

The tram stop store has a display window with actual laptops, and HP has sales people on hand to tell you about their new ultrabook. Passers-by can win a laptop by scanning a QR code. The store will be up and running until next Tuesday from 10 am to 9 pm.

According to Bright, this is one of the busiest tram stops in the country.

(Photo: Edelman PR)

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March 31, 2012

Hamburger ad uses make-up to seduce

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 8:43 pm

According to Jezebel this is a Dutch advertisement for the Burger King hamburger chain. Unfortunately I have been unable to confirm this, or to find out who the makers of this ad are.

I remember when the only hamburger joint in town was Wimpy, and they weren’t very popular. Back in the day fast food in the Netherlands tended to be french fries served in snack bars with a side order of frikandel or croquette. The introduction of McDonald’s in the Netherlands in the 1970s changed the landscape a little, although today there are only 200-something McDonald’s establishments and still over 4,000 snack bars.

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August 9, 2009

Pollster Maurice de Hond too reliable for TV ad

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:36 pm

The Dutch advertising authority has judged a TV advertisement non-compliant because well-known and presumably very impartial pollster Maurice de Hond is pushing the wares of a utility company, reports De Volkskrant (Dutch).

In the ad, De Hond compares rates of competing utility companies, and claims that viewers can make substantial savings. The advertising authority, Reclame Code Commissie, says (largely paraphrased):

Maurice de Hond has been famous for years as an impartial researcher. He (still) has a certain trust with a substantial part of the TV audience. The advertisement uses this trust, because De Hond refers to his own research.

The advertising authority therefore feels that therefore the ad is in violation of article 11.2 of its own code, which states that advertising and other programming must be clearly separated. Since the authority has no legal, er, authority, it can only ask the advertiser to stop broadcasting this particular ad.

De Hond responded on Twitter: “Glad they did not say ‘not reliable enough!'”

(Photo by DJ, TV host, Wikipedian and De Hond’s son Marc, some rights reserved.)

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April 18, 2009

Gorilla-proof glasses

Filed under: Animals by Branko Collin @ 2:32 pm

Last year a gorilla called Bokito attacked a woman in the Rotterdam zoo, presumably because she had behaved herself aggressively by staring at the animal and grinning at it. Advertising agency DDB came up with a campaign for insurance company FBTO which resulted in the handing out of 2,000 of these Bokito-proof glasses that lets you look at a gorilla directly while seemingly looking away. Nice case of gorilla marketing (pun intended).

(Image source unknown, presumably one of the two companies mentioned above. Link: BoingBoing.)

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December 21, 2008

Guy in ad switches from English to Dutch to order pea soup

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Branko Collin @ 2:22 pm

Dunglish.nl, one of Orangemaster’s many ventures, posted this brilliant ad for Unox pea soup a while ago. In it, you see some sort of sales manager walk through a company cafeteria while holding a bluetooth-enabled phone conversation in that lingua franca of the Dutch business world, English with sprinklings of Dutch. When it matters though — that is, when he wishes to order pea soup — he switches to all-Dutch.

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