joshsmith’s Comments

• Jun 14th, 2009 @ 10:14pm

  (untitled comment)

  on New Automotive Advertising Strategy: Hook 'Em Really, Really Young
  With captive audience advertising dying out (slowly, in some cases), advertisers have increasingly been adopting new strategies to convince people to buy their products. The automotive industry has often been the most creative in experimenting. From Lexus’ plans (nearly six years ago!) to let people make their own commercials to Lexus (again) doing a contest with TiVo to get people to watch commercials to BMWfilms to Honda’s famous cog commercial — there have been tons of experiments. It appears that Toyota (which, of course, is part of the same family as Lexus) is now trying to hook kids at a very young age — well before they’re driving. For years, automakers have been putting their cars in video games, but those games tend to be car racing video games (makes sense, right?). Toyota, though, is shooting for an even younger demographic, by dumping references to their Scion brand all over a children’s “interactive community” with the belief that it can (a) get kids to influence their parents’ car buying choices or (b) get the kids hooked on the brand at a very early age. In fact, Toyota claims that the effort is already a success — with the word Scion being mentioned thousands of times in chatrooms and “virtual Scions” being bought plenty of times within the community. Of course, you might also say that it’s a success in teaching kids that product placement should be expected absolutely everywhere — even supposedly educational community websites. suzuki grand vitara
• Jun 1st, 2009 @ 10:57pm

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  on Judge Apparently Thinks He Can Tell Newspaper Which Photos It Can Use
  TechDirt - Judge Apparently Thinks He Can Tell Newspaper Which Photos It Can Use Romenesko points us to the news that a judge is considering barring news organizations from showing photos of a handcuffed local legislator, Roger Corbin. Corbin was arrested on tax charges, and (not surprisingly), local news sources have shown photos of him in handcuffs. This seems both accurate and newsworthy. However, the judge seems to think that these photos could bias the jury, saying that it was “troubling” to him that the news organizations used the handcuffed photos rather than photos of Corbin back when he was an upstanding legislator. Of course, as the lawyer for the news organizations pointed out: “Courts do not get [into] telling the media what to publish.” The judge then apparently compared the handcuff photos to child porn in explaining that the First Amendment wasn’t absolute, and the gov’t could restrain the use of certain photos (apparently skipping over the incredibly high barrier normally used to justify anything of that nature). The judge hasn’t made a final decision yet, but even the fact that he’s considering telling newspapers that they can’t publish photos of a guy in handcuffs seems troubling. real estate