I’m sure you’ve seen them on sites like Craigslist and Kijiji: Ads that offer money for articles, people looking for freelance writers. Many of them will ask you for sample articles. Well it turns out that in many cases that those aren’t job postings. They are just looking for free content for other people’s web…
Truth: Microsoft Does Not Innovate
Microsoft has pretty much built itself on ‘borrowing’ other people’s ideas, and then when possible patenting them and gaining a monopoly. Here are few small examples but the internet is rife with examples, just Google it. Perahaps nothing more is needed to understand Mircosoft than their new ad campaign. Microsoft Oscar Nominated Short by Josh…
Indigo: Copyright is More Important than Literacy
Julie Wilson runs the brilliant blog Seen Reading in which she catches people reading books around Toronto, takes a good guess as to what page they are on and then reports it on her blog along with a short exceprt from the book. Because Julie cannot actually buy hundreds of books a year she does…
Truth: Sirius Doesn’t Think Much of You, or of Canadian Artists
Sirius Canada says that they want you to ‘discover music again’ in their ad. But the Truth is that Sirius doesn’t trust you to discover music on your own, or to choose your own radio stations. They, apparently, don’t think enough of Canadian music to think that it can survive if you have other options.…
Truth: Is There More to Being Canadian Than Geography?
There is probably no more famous commercial in Canadian history than the Molson, “I Am Canadian” ad. As a patriotic symbol it is up there with “O Canada”. But, in 2005 Molson merged with Coors. Merging with an American company makes Molson somewhat less Canadian but that is not the end of the story. You…
Tell Scholastic to Stop Shilling to Children
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is running a cross-border campaign to try and convince the Scholastic Corp. to put books back in their book advertisements to children. In case you don’t remember, Scholastic is the company that makes the flyers that your teachers used to give you in elementary school. You could pick out…
Truth: Cosmetics Will Not Get You Laid
The most frequent type of misleading advertising has to be the type that tries to convince you that using their product will increase your sex appeal or improve your love life. There is almost no evidence at all to suggest that any product – cars, clothes, cosmetics, soft drinks, etc., etc., actually make you more…
Companies Responsibility Rated with Scryve
Want to know what a company is really like before you do business? Scryve is a new web site/tool to help you find out. Scryve rates companies on a scale of 1 – 10 (10 being the best) on their environmental and community responsibility. So, for example Wal Mart rates a 3: “Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.…
Truth: Athletes and Soft Drinks
The first installment in the Truth series is so obvious it almost goes without saying but since it continues I’ll mention it anyway. High level professional athletes do not drink pop or eat fast food on a regular basis. This ad is particularly cute because it is, to an extent, downplay itself: The reality is…
Truth!!! Maybe, sorta, kinda
Many of you have no doubt seen the new ads being run by Advertising Standards Canada trying to get you to trust your local advertiser. The video ads look something like this (sorry it’s not embeddable). A full list of the ads they are running on television, radio and in print can be found at…