Kathlyn Clore

Think legacy media brands are not reinventing and repackaging themselves?

Check out some video and print ads I’ve found online promoting news products from Russia Today to O Globo (Brazil) and TV3 (Estonia).

A slick Simpsons parody advertises Estonian news (Thanks for the tip, RFE). I was told via Twitter that the ad was very believable in its portrayal of Estonian life (kidding!).

In Belgium, this quirky ad showcases an artist frying a steak to promote cobra.be, a culture site with content from Belgium’s state broadcaster. The theme in this campaign seems to be that whenever someone famous in Belgium - like actress Marie Vinck - Cobra.be will be there to cover it.

These nice videos (with subtitles, helpfully!) come from Brazil, where they promote O Globo. It is the biggest newspaper in Brazil.

This one is my favorite. I love the action of the “mouse” picking up trash or helping students. The ad shows the paper as a partner for motivated citizens.

This one promotes O Globo as being more than “just the paper” in a newspaper

This cheeky ad comes from France, where it advertises Le Monde Magazine. The tagline is “Bring the world into focus.” It seems to be a big hit online; the two YouTube versions of it that I’ve found each have more than 50,000 views.

Finally for now, these ads promoting the international TV channel Russia Today are causing a stir in the United Kingdom. The theme here is promoting Russia Today as a channel whose journalists ask tough questions and challenge commonly held beliefs.

I love the “Get the lab” remark at the end.

Problem is, this is just a cute skit. What does it have to do with Jim Beam?

Scroll through the comments at this AdAge brief. They indicate Jim Beam has terminated its contract with the agency that produced this.

I clicked on this France24 video hoping it might reveal something useful for me to think about when I take pictures.

It didn’t.

But the fashion photographer who was the central character in the video did say one quote that resonated with me:

“There is no such thing as a naked body. Even in the nude the body is decked with signs and conventional codes designed to reveal it, tell a story and reproduce it.”

I agree based on my handful of nude beach/sauna experiences (it’s amazing how much personality and individualism people can (consciously or unconsciously) project even without clothes!) and the times I’ve spent in bustling city centers.

When you’re surrounded by advertising all the time, like in London, Brussels or Chicago, it really grates on you, starts to impact your perspective.

Only when you then escape, retreat away from the city noise to the country, do you realize how bombarded you were. Doing things like going from having a television to not having a television also helps.

Still, I think once people live through a time in which they are heavily bombarded by images, they are always impacted by this experience. This quote speaks about that (to me at least).