After an assignment filming a hip-hop documentary in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn (better known as Haas&Hahn) decided to add their own flair to the neighborhood and help the community at the same time.
Want to know how paranoid you should be? Google's new toy lets you see how many times your government asked Google for private information. Citizens of Brazil, Germany and India: Fetch your tinfoil hats (chapéus de papel laminado)!
Posters for Cabana Cachaca, a brand of Brazilian rum that is determined to bully its way into the market through sheer advertising mass, are plastered all over Manhattan. But they're cropped so that the model is just barely free of nipple (a body part banned in the USA). But the posters direct you to the company's website where-in a keen display of digital marketing strategy-you can see the model's nipple (Copyranter made sure of it). I think they've hit on a solid online agenda here. Click through for the (NSFW) uncensored version of the ad. None of this contributes to high quality rum, as if you cared:
Tom Ford is using nudity in his advertising! Hard to believe, I know. Mr. Ford may be one of the world's most influential designers, but his latest ads have largely completed the evolution from provocative to simply boring. Which is a difficult stunt to pull off, considering the subject matter. But these three spots, starring Brazilian Alex Schultz, are so in-your-face that they lose the sense of allure which should, ideally, accompany any fashion ad—penis-showing or otherwise. Also hard to pull off when using naked people: making your target audience think about clothes. See the disconnect there? We're ready for the cultural needle to swing back towards fully clothed models, thank you. After the jump, the three ads—which are all, predictably, NSFW.
A Brazilian newspaper is running a series of ads with the slogan "Understand the real value of money." So what's the real value of a dollar? Apparently it's terrorism, pollution, the Challenger disaster, war, and tornadoes. Oh, and weed. They didn't forget the weed. I won't pretend to be able to identify the underlying philosophy here, but I will point out that even dumb people have figured out that using 9/11 in ads is a bad idea. The takeaway: Give all your dollars to me. Below, the full ad from the Brasilmofascist menace:
Felix Ximenes, Google's chief flack in brazil, yesterday gave the Brazilian government DVDs containing information on 3,261 allegedly child-lusting users of its social network Orkut. "With the information we have received, we will be able to strike a major blow against the pedophile network acting in the country," Brazilian Senator Demostenes Torres told the Wall Street Journal. Last August, the Brazilian government said Google refused to turn over information about users accused of hate speech and pedophilia. What's Google's excuse for taking eight months — they couldn't find the data?
While the Democrats continue to battle one-another in Pennsylvania, GOP presidential candidate John McCain has been touring the nation on his bus, in what he's framing as a personal, not political tour. But while the media was all over Barack Obama's vacation in the Virgin Islands, little has been reported on McCain's nine days in Rio de Janeiro. Though McCain himself has been remarkably open about the trip, describing his routine in Rio as "excessive drinking, nightclubbing and little or no sleep." The newly Rupert Murdoch-ified Wall Street Journal now tells us of McCain's whirlwind romance with a mysterious "Brazilian model."
When asked about his his $200 million investment in an ethanol startup in Brazil, where corruption is rife, labor standards lax and the environmental track record abysmal, investor Vinod Kohsla replied, "We have a very professional management team." Those responsible for actually cutting the cane might tend to disagree after being subjected to inhuman working conditions which some activists describe as "slave labor."
The Brazil Renewable Energy Company, or Brenco, was the target of the Brazilian Labor Ministry's slave-labor investigation unit last month. Brenco produces ethanol from sugarcane, which is more carbon-efficient than corn-based ethanol but incredibly labor-inefficient — cane farming is some of the hardest work on Earth. How did the company, backed in part by Vinod Khosla's VC firm, address this inefficiency? By paying workers less than a dollar an hour, packing them cheek-to-jowl in substandard living conditions, preventing them from leaving the unsanitary housing on their free time, feeding them poorly, and (rather ironically for an ethanol manufacturer) banning alcohol.
In Brazil, they do things a little differently. There, it makes perfect sense that Coke Zero is promoting itself by paying for free tongue piercings for anyone willing to be photographed with a Coke Zero-branded tongue stud [Adrants]. It's strategic, you see—Brazilian strategic. Any presumption on your part that this is not the work of a sly marketing genius would be xenophobic. Below, some pictures of Brazilian Coke fans who chose to partake of the free piercings, and a bonus Portuguese Coke Zero ad featuring talking, walking tongues. Do not view while on acid.
There is nothing even remotely interesting about the link at the end of this entry. Nothing at all. The only reason this post may, in fact, be notable is a piece of irony that's likely lost on everyone save your guest editor and his immediate family. Here's a little taste of what you're in for, should you choose to follow this post to its very sad conclusion:
