(Disclosure: As I’ve mentioned before, I do social media consulting for Domino’s, but this clip is too amusing for me not to post!)

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New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less

H/T to Endless Simmer.

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Spotted on AdGabber.

Find more videos like this on AdGabber

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H/T to11 Points and their “11 Early Roles the Cast of Lost Wishes We’d All Forget.”

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All of the bread bowl pasta flavors being offered are the exact same flavors that were used when the Pasta Perfecta line was launched in the fall of 2008.  With plenty of people talking about the new bread bowl pastas, why do so few people seem to remember the launch of Pasta Perfecta? And why is Domino’s re-branding their pasta offerings and adding in bread bowls barely 6 months later?

Part of it might have to do with the ill-fated “Pasta Dude” commercial that Domino’s initially selected to advertise the Pasta Perfecta product.  The “Pasta Dude” commercial was pulled in certain markets shortly after it began airing. So why was it pulled?The Mo’Kelly Report suggests the reason is that:

Midway through it looks like he’s either smackin’ it up, flippin’ it and rubbin’ it down…or something else far more vulgar.

A user on Yahoo Answers seems to agree:

there is a piece in the original commercial where the Pasta dude makes a dance gesture like he has someone bent over and is slapping their behind

A commenter on Black Voices provides some confirmation of this:

They haven’t pulled it in my area, they play it like almost 7 times a day, they took out the scene where the little noodle was spanking the air, but that’s it.

Now obviously one blogger, a user on Yahoo Answers and a commenter on Black Voices aren’t the be all end all source of information for why the commercial was pulled, but it sheds some interesting light on the possible reasons. A lot of the original postings of the “Pasta Dude” commercial have been removed from YouTube, but you can still track down the videos in a couple places. Take a look for yourself and tell me what you think about the commercial.

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As a promotion for Cheeto’s newest product,  Giant Cheetos, Gizmodo was sent “the world’s largest Cheeto.” So what did they do with it? What else? They made a member of their team eat it over the worlds most expensive keyboard. Check out the video below:

H/T Gizmodo and Scandalist.

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As the intro to that ad notes, the “slow pour” theme goes all the way back to the 1960’s, when it was created by Heinz marketer Charles M. Berger, who recently passed away. Berger debuted the theme with this ad:

The “slow pour” theme has been a consistent part of Heinz advertising over the past 40 years – including in the 80’s, when a super cool, collar popping, pre-Friends Matt Leblanc starred in an ad based on the theme:

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“It’s difficult for ordinary people to get into famous restaurants. But how difficult is it for famous people to get into ordinary restaurants?”

What follows is an attempt to secure special treatment for celebrities at chains such as Olive Garden, Sbarro, Planet Hollywood and Red Lobster.

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H/T Serious Eats.

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The pitch  is that if you drink your soda slower, you enjoy it more. In a world where many of us chug soda to quench our thirst, and don’t appreciate the delicious, delicious flavor combinations some sodas have, this is a marketing campaign I can definitely embrace (disclosure: Dr. Pepper is, and has been for as long as I can remember, my favorite soda).

So does drinking soda slower really make it taste better, or is this just Dr. Pepper blowing smoke? I In the ad, Dr. J says, “Scientific tests have proven that when you drink Dr Pepper slowly, the 23 flavors taste even better.” Wait, really? There have been scientific tests about drinking Dr. Pepper at different speeds? Well, kind of:

The “scientific tests” Dr. J quotes was a study done by market research firm The Marketing Clinic in 2006, which has done research on the taste of food and beverages for marketers such as Coca-Cola, Mars and Procter & Gamble. On behalf of Dr Pepper, the firm asked about 50 people roughly 400 questions each about their soda drinking habits — and watched how they consumed the soda. Not only did the study find that slower drinkers enjoyed it more, but those slower drinkers tended to be heavier consumers of Dr Pepper.

Cool. As a Dr. Pepper drinker, I believe it. I really do think that I enjoy my soda more than you plebs who go around drinking whatever else your preferred flavor may be. That’s right, I’m a soda elitist, and in my mind, it doesn’t get any better than Dr. Pepper. In fact, I think I am justified in acting elitist, because the soda I prefer is, in fact, among the “elite” sodas available. The ad is below. Check it.

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Via Serious Eats.

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In my post speculating who was behind these videos, I wrote:

Perhaps this is a bizarre way to advertise for a new low-radiation cell phone?

While not 100% accurate, my guess (admittedly, one of several) was in the general ballpark….the ads were not for a low-radiation cell phone maker, but rather for Bluetooth headsets that claim to “reduce power output by 99%”

The operators of the YouTube account that posted these videos have updated the titles of the video to add the words “made by Cardo Systems.” Their website also now features a page with a new promo for their products and noting that their videos received over 4 million views.

Well played Cardo Systems, well played.

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A day later a version with some people speaking English appeared:

Two users, bobtel08 and benzin513, both of whom joined YouTube on May 28th, have now posted several different videos of people popping popcorn with a cell phone, some in French, some in English.

For the past few days, people have been speculating if the videos are a fake and if cellphones can really pop corn. They’ve debated if cellphones emit enough radiation to do so, if their is a hotplate under the table etc. This is not a discussion worth continuing. The videos are clearly fake, as several bloggers have pointed out. Their is no hotpad involved, and the popcorn on the table is not actually popping. It is purely an editing and camera trick, as you can see the kernels popping on to the camera from the bottom of the screen, and the other kernels next to the “popping corn” magically don’t move and are undisturbed by kernels popping next to them. Also, the people in the videos are also definitely actors.

This is a viral marketing campaign, plain and simple. Judging by the views on the videos (over 3 million views so far) it’s a highly successful one. But the question remains, who is behind it and what are they selling? If you are selling a cell phone, would you want to give people the impression that your product emits enough energy to pop a popcorn kernel? Perhaps this is a bizarre way to advertise for a new low-radiation cell phone? Seems questionable. Of course the possibility remains that these videos are only being used to get attention, and whoever is behind them is going to drop a video promoting something totally unrelated to the original clips.

This question has been driving me crazy all morning, so I’m going to throw out a few theories of who is behind these videos. Click below to read on about a few shot-in-the-dark guesses about who could be behind this.

1. Apple: The timing oddly matches up with the announcement about the new iPhone, with the videos first being leaked online a little more than a week before the announcement of the iPhone 2. There were rumors in March that an ad had appeared on Craigslist looking for “regular people” actors for an iPhone 2 commercial. The ad was quickly pulled from Craigslist and scrubbed from the AppleInsider site. Perhaps this ad was from Apple’s ad agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day? Interestingly, on the Macrumors site, one individual leaves a post titled: “iPhone 2 Short Film/Ad – It’s True” in which he writes that he thinks TBWA was working with video producing firm Smuggler to create an “Apple Short”:

I work in TBWA\Chiat\Day’s mailroom and I overheard Laurie Coots talking to some guys from Smuggler about “the Apple short”. We normally only handle production through big guns like Partizan, so the fact that Smuggler was in the office got me kinda suspicious. There is definitely something in the works.

There were also reports in April, that Apple’s ad agency was seeking “Asian men who speak Mandarin; Hasidic males fluent in Hebrew; a French-speaking cab driver; a pair of Jamaican (or West Indian) women who can ’speak with a thick patois accent’ and others.” We have seen versions of these popcorn cellphone videos in French and English, but no other languages – yet.

The use of popcorn could also be an angle in which to remind people you can watch movies on your iPhone.

Downsides of the iPhone 2 guess: First off, this isn’t really Apple’s style, they have a strong enough brand name they don’t need to generate buzz with viral campaigns. Second, I contacted Smuggler to ask if they were behind the cellphone popcorn ads – he denied they are behind these ads and I have no reason to assume he wasn’t truthful. Doesn’t mean they weren’t made by/for Apple, but if they were, it wasn’t by Smuggler – perhaps TBWA enlisted someone else to make these videos?

2. Net10: This cell phone company has already made the foray into videos of hazardous uses of cell phones, having posted a video of a cell phone being put into a microwave. A demon then climbs out of the cell phone and you are urged to visit the site no-evil.net. The site features other videos with titles such as “Is your cell phone company supporting deadly bacteria?” and “Is your cell phone company taking advantage of homeless dogs?” It sounds like this is the kind of company willing to make a risky video like the cellphone popcorn ones….maybe a play on the “your phone is evil” theme?

So could these popcorn videos be a part of their viral video campaign? The YouTube user who posted the cell phone microwave video just added one of the cellphone popcorn videos to his profile about 5 hours ago.

On the flip side, Smuggler confirmed to me that they DID produce this video (the microwave one), so they would have had to admit to making this one but not fess up to the cellphone popcorn ones.

3. A popcorn company. It just doesn’t make sense that a cell phone company would scare people about the harmful effects of cell phones with these videos. So why not a new kind of popcorn coming out? But from who?

Is it Orville Redenbacher? Act II? Is it Pop Secret trying to promote their Pop Secret Films? Maybe it’s the popcorn board? If I was forced to guess, I’d say Dale & Thomas – they probably don’t have the budget to do TV advertising, but they could afford something like this. If we find out in the next day or two that it was Dale & Thomas, it will coincide perfectly with their attempts to push sales of their gourmet popcorn for Fathers Day this weekend.

4. Florida Orange Juice. Isn’t it kind of odd that in one of the videos they are all drinking orange juice? Who eats popcorn with orange juice? And who serves orange juice in an open top pitcher like that?

5. Beer. In one of the videos with some French guys, one of the dudes is holding what appears to be a beer.

6. A company totally unrelated to popcorn or cellphones that is going to find a way to utilize all the attention from this to put out a final video promoting something totally irrelevant to these videos.

So those are some possibilities. Lets hope one of them is right, because theoretically there are hundreds of thousands of companies that could be behind it – guessing it right with just a handful of guesses out of hundreds of thousands wouldn’t be bad.

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