There I was, just popping over to the Turkish shop across the street when I noticed that the billboard on the corner had changed adverts.

And there I was trying to find a link between Vancouver and The Netherlands!

I know that this advert would never be accepted anywhere in Canada and that it’s no big deal here and simply funny. There’s a cultural difference right there. No freaked out parents claming this traumatises youth. It’s a nice change from the usually photoshopped tits and ass featuring underaged girls for useless products. As if the men’s speed skating outfits weren’t revealing enough.

The fire brigade got tipped twice that smoke had been spotted along motorway A4 in Hoofddorp, North Holland and both times, it was just a smoking advert. Car insurance company Ditzo had a big billboard advert with a time-clock giving off a lot of smoke, as if the Audi in the advert had car trouble. Motorists called 112 (the Dutch emergency number), as apparently the ‘joke’ was not very obvious. The marketing people probably thought this was brillant and it is a cool idea, except when in actual practice it fails and causes problems.

Allow me to show you what it looks like when you do this right, and by right I mean without causing panic and maybe even up for yet another award. Cossette Communications in Canada had a steam machine built into a bus shelter giving off periodic burts to announce that coffee was ready, which you can read straight away and which doesn’t make you want to call 911 (North American emergency number). I file this one under ‘zo kan het ook’, which means ‘it can also be done this way’.

(Link: webregio.nl)

Argyle socks and knee-length shorts, those are apparently part of the dresscode for footgolf, a sport invented by advertising agency Nothing.

Last weekend professional football player Theo Janssen won the first national footgolf championship at the Rijk van Nijmegen golf course, beating his fellow FC Twente attacking midfielder Kenneth Perez. Other participants included PSV striker Danny Koevermans, local boy Roy “the phantom” Makaay and Pierre “Pi-Air” van Hooijdonk.

A wary press, realising the joke might be on them (the jury is still out) covered the event, including public broadcaster NOS:

The sport is just like golf, with the exception that you play a football instead of a golf ball, and you use your feet to play it.

Apropos ‘Nothing,’ the company’s website explains that the name describes the space where ideas come from, but I cannot help but notice that it also neatly covers the emperor’s wardrobe.

(Photo: Roy Makaay teeing off, source NFGB.)

According to a press release issued by the Westin Resort on the island of Aruba (part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), the hotel is offering couples a 210 euro cheque (300 USD) for conceiving babies at their establishment.

“Couples who were inspired by Aruba’s coral mating ritual during their fall getaway (September 1 – December 19, 2009), and can prove they conceived during their stay [by way of a doctor's note], will receive a $300 ‘Conception Credit’ towards a return visit to the resort in 2010. With all the stress of preparing for a new arrival, the expecting parents will surely be in need of a pre-baby Caribbean retreat.”

Just remember that Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, the guy who allegedly kidnapped and killed American Natalee Holloway pretty much ruined any kind of tourism on the island for a very long time. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures.

(Links: bizz, frommers)

There is no lack of references about Belgians in the Netherlands, often referred to as ‘our southern neighbours’ by the media. When they do something stupid or brilliant, the media is on the front lines either poking fun at them or praising them for their ingenuity. However, poking fun at people’s lesser national traits, albeit a top sport in Europe, is not always appreciated.

The Belgian organisation for ethical advertising (JEP) has reprimanded the new Belgian mobile phone company Vikings because of their questionable slogans. “Gratis is voor Hollanders” (”Free is for Dutch people” – ‘Hollanders’ is a pet name for the Dutch in Flanders) has the press buzzing. The company’s French-language slogan “Gratuit, c’est pour les Flamands” (”Free is for the Flemish”) plays on the stereotype of the Flemish being cheap and is not going over well either.

AustralianSwedish telecom provider Tele2 (shown here) has had adverts in the Netherlands for months using the concept of cheapness. The idea here is two-fold: the sheep are a reference to ‘being cheap’ (the ads in the Netherlands are all in English and subtitled in Dutch) and point out the similarity of the words ’sheep’ and ‘cheap’ with a talking black sheep standing out from the herd. Although boring to look at more than twice on telly, Tele2 is doing it right, while the southern neighbours are doing it wrong.

Why the cheap jokes? The Dutch have a reputation (deserved or not) of going on vacation to France driving through Belgium with their caravans and bringing all their own food to save on costs. The goal is to enjoy the weather.

The Flemish part of Belgium used to be poor and frugal I would imagine. Today the Flemish part of Belgium (including Brussels or not, technically a governmental no man’s land) is the most dynamic part and the Walloon part has many economic problems.

(Link: zibb.nl, Photo: pleasecopyme.blogg.se)

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.)

Initially I spotted this delivery van on the J.M. Coenenstraat in Amsterdam simply because unlike most of its brethren it lacked any form of advertising on its sides. Only when I looked closer I noticed the URL. No, that is not ’shopped.

(Caption: “Women create their own glass ceiling”)

This advert has been around for a while and was published in a Dutch feminist magazine (Opzij), back when Hillary Clinton was running for President of the US, but the negative responses to it from men and women told me I had to run with it.

The glass ceiling is that invisible barrier some women encounter in the workplace when climbing the corporate ladder and not getting that promotion because they are female. In Canada and the US, this issue is pretty much a thing of the past, but in the Netherlands, set the clock back about 15-20 years. The top women in business here are often foreigners.

I polled my women entrepreneurs’ group and they generally did not like the cheap joke, although they could imagine that the marketing guys (men probably made this ad, statiscally) thought it was amusing, as did one woman. She also pointed out this ad was voted “most emancipatory ad” in Opzij magazine.

The whole point of this ad was to convince women to go to Gamma (hardware store) and buy stuff. All the women I polled said that they did not need signs with rounded corners and childish pink things to go out and buy a power drill. We all found that insulting.

And then I asked Dutch marketing journalist Jeroen Mirck what he thought.

“Every marketer reads the same market research, which means that all hardware stores get the same advice about marketing aimed at women. Although Gamma is extending their interior decorating range, people usually go to IKEA for that. A woman who builds things also needs a hammer, some wood, a faucet or a drill. It’s all really nice to push extra things at the cash register (which women are very sensitive to, according to the same market research), but a hardware store should not forget who their main target audience is: men.”

Besides the pink for women disease that so many companies fall prey to — and no one knows why AND it looks a gay pride thing — I thought the ‘glass ceiling’ bit was painful because it’s quite true here. And then when I saw the Oval Office, I thought of the other Clinton, the man that had Monica Lewinksy ‘climbing up the corporate ladder from under the desk’, but that’s just me.

Here’s a scary portion of “maybe the good marketers were on vacation” over at the Dutch bureau for tourism.

I bet you couldn’t guess what this advert was for even if you wanted to. It could be whitening toothpaste. Or Prozac. And you’d be dead wrong.

This advert was designed to encourage American gay men (because they keep telling us lesbians have no money) to come to Amsterdam. Since gay also means happy, everybody is laughing, including a dog (!) and an underaged boy (!!). They threw in an Asian and an ‘African-American’ (chances are they aren’t) like they do in the US. None of these people look Dutch, either.

I asked gay Amsterdam resident and Ph.D. in Sociology Laurent Chambon what he thought of this advert.

“This campaign is idiotic for two reasons. First, it seems like they were afraid of the word ‘gay’ and are playing on the word to disguise what they really want to say, which hurts after spending decades trying to come out of the closet! American gays come to the Netherlands to be themselves and for marihuana, sex, culture, architecture, shopping, design, clubs, etc. That is what we should be selling them.

The second is that they are selling Amsterdam as if it they were selling yogurt, insurance or a family vacation. Amsterdam practically sells itself, but here they are using generic headshots from an image databank.”

(Link and image: volkskrant.nl)

Hotels in Amsterdam literally come in all shapes and sizes, from villas to houseboats. More often than not, they are already booked, overpriced (just compared them to Brussels and even Paris) and I’m sorry to say, do not have the friendliest service in Europe.

Instead of trying to fool people with fancy words like many hotels do, the Hans Brinker Hotel in Amsterdam just tells it like it is: they are the worst. They have even turned this fact into an English book, which you can buy from Amazon.co.uk. Apparently, it’s only in English and aimed at the British market, surely a substantial amount of their business. At 25 euro (!) a night, I’m not surprised.

So basically, if you’ve checked into the worst hotel in town, you can’t complain afterwards. And according to the NRC newspaper, if you plan to get very drunk, you can ask to have your arm stamped with a map showing the location of the hotel and the words: “Please return me to the Hans Brinker.”

If that’s not service, I don’t know what is!

(Link: nrc.nl, images: Hans Brinker hotel )