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Wednesday May 20, 2015

Wednesday May 13, 2015

Editorial cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday May 20, 2015

Employment minister Pierre Poilievre won’t say sorry for ‘vanity videos’

Employment Minister Pierre Poilievre won’t apologize for using taxpayer dollars to produce YouTube videos of himself promoting the universal child care benefit.

Poilievre insisted Friday he’s simply using innovative ways to inform Canadians about the newly enriched and expanded child benefit.

But opposition MPs denounced the “vanity videos” as a new low for a government that has a penchant for producing partisan advertising on the public dime.

And the Canadian Taxpayers Federation agreed.

“The bottom line is that taxpayers should not be forced to pay for partisan advertising masquerading as information-based government advertising,” said Aaron Wudrick, the federation’s federal director.

The latest examples “highlight the need for an independent third party” to vet all government advertising, he added.

One of the videos shows Poilievre explaining the child benefit to shoppers at a children’s consignment clothing sale in his Ottawa riding. It was filmed on a Sunday by two members of the Employment department’s in-house creative production team, which has an annual operating budget of about $50,000.

A departmental spokesman said the Sunday shoot took two hours, which was paid overtime for the two videographers involved. Editing was done in-house during regular work hours. (Source: Toronto Star)

Published in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, National Newswatch, The Regina Leader-Post, NUPGE drawing conclusions, and The Woodstock Sentinel Review

 

Wednesday May 21, 2014

Wednesday May 21, 2014By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday May 21, 2014

Ontario campaign ads set to hit airwaves as ban ends tonight

After two weeks of TV and radio silence, Ontario voters will start to see and hear a lot more from their party leaders as a ban on paid advertising ends at midnight Tuesday.

Imposed by Ontario’s chief electoral officer, the ban put a moratorium on paid print and broadcast ads but did not apply to online messages, where the parties have been posting video ads since the campaign kicked off.

Such bans are imposed in snap elections and are intended to prevent the incumbent government — in this case, Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals — from having an advantage over the other parties. Without such a ban, the party in power could prepare ads in the days and weeks leading up to dissolution, leaving opposition parties with no time to catch up.

Sitting governments already have an advantage in the timing of ads, often using them to burnish their image as needed during a mandate. The Liberal Party aired ads depicting a purposeful Wynne walking on suburban streets defending her government in the weeks before the moratorium began two Wednesdays ago.

With the lifting of the ban, Greg Elmer, a professor of media at Ryerson University, expects the parties will start with a few hard-hitting ads right off the bat, while keeping some messages in reserve to see how the campaign unfolds.

“All of the parties are trying to judge the electorate, to see what the other sides are putting out and respond in kind,” he said.

Elmer said online political ads are well-suited to “rapid response” messages because they can be produced and posted quickly. They work well in a back-and-forth battle with an opponent’s campaign, almost like a debate.

But online ads also have their limitations. They tend to reach people already closely invested in the campaign. Many of these people can be highly influential — such as media types with thousands of social media followers — but online ads tend to be missed by voters who choose not to follow every twist and turn of the campaign.

TV ads, on the other hand, “tend to speak to broader swaths of the electorate,” said Elmer. (Source: CBC News)

SOCIAL MEDIA

Published on the french language website HistoireEngagée.

Posted to the Yahoo News Canada cartoon of the day.

Tuesday, January 9, 2013

Tuesday, January 9, 2013By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday, January 9, 2013

Consultant’s PR gaffes spur online ridicule

It almost looks like a toy. A city engagement campaign botched at the launch by an Ottawa-based PR firm will be reviewed “in due time,” according to one city councillor.

“The problem is that we apparently retained an agency that is a stranger of competence,” says Sam Merulla in an email Tuesday night. “And we will be reviewing this issue.”
Merulla doesn’t indicate when a review might begin, only saying staff needs “to assess the continuation of the present course expeditiously.”

It started Monday afternoon, when the city launched “Our Voice, Our Hamilton” to gauge Hamiltonians’ views about civic services. The city hired Ottawa-based public engagement firm Dialogue Partners Inc. in April 2012 to lead the $376,000 campaign, which includes a website and online survey and a Twitter account.

But at 9:30 Monday night, “Our Voice, Our Hamilton” made its first gaffe. Responding to a question posed on Twitter about the HSR – one of the very services it is charged with reviewing – the campaign responded “Thks for the comment – what is “HSR” just so we can accurately capture your comment 🙂 Thanks!”

Hamiltonians soon spotted other discrepancies about the firm’s knowledge of the city. The main photo on the campaign’s website was quickly revealed to be a bike trail in Ottawa, not Hamilton. Several posts on the campaign’s Pinterest page – a website that acts as an online bulletin board – included photos of the courthouse in Hamilton, Ohio, and promotional T-shirts from Hamilton, Wash. (Source: Hamilton Spectator)

SOCIAL MEDIA

February 28, 2007

There’s nothing new about drawing parodies of common logos and advertisements. The most popular thing to do these days is to satirize well known current movie logos and add a humourous political or social twist. The most recent parody I drew came when the mostly forgotten remake of that campy classic movie the Poseidon Adventure hit the theatres. With regard to ad parodies, off the top of my head I recall Osama de Toilette products, and East End Hamilton cereal.

I couldn’t help but recall as I drew today’s parody of Downy Fabric Softener some stickers that I vaguely remember as a kid growing up in the 70’s. Until I did a Google search using keywords like ‘sticker’, ‘ad’, ‘parody’, and ‘1970’s’, I never even knew that the things I was recalling in the deep recesses of my childhood memories actually had a name: Wacky Packs. Here are some examples:

Yep, cheesey, gross, kinda dumb, but a nice introduction to innocent youthful rebellion against mass marketing in the 1970’s. And there are hundreds of them, many of them created and drawn by an artist working for the Topps bubblegum company — Art Spiegelman — which quite frankly, is news to me.

From the website, wackypackages.org, there’s a reprint of an article in the Oct. 1, 1973 issue of New York magazine which best describes what Wacky Packs were all about. Here’s an excerpt:

What are Wacky Packages?, you may well ask. Putting it simply – too simply in fact – they are a new twist on the classic bubble gum card, that hoary ruse created to sell the uneatable to the unbearable. They are also, in a time when polls show public belief in institutions at an all-time low, seedling skepticism in its purest form. If a stick-on bubble gum card can take an old faithful cereal like Cap’n Crunch, change it into Cap’n Crud, and become the Munchkin madness of the year, maybe somebody up there better take a long look at what’s turning the kiddies on – and off.

In their minor art form, Wacky Packages are revolutionary. Gone are the jocks and rock stars, the traditional card ploys. Wacky Pack puns are the Mad magazine effect leaking sideways into the under-culture. Yet when they were tried out by the Topps Chewing Gum Company six years ago, under the guidance of former manager of product development Stan Hart (a regular contributor to Mad), they went nowhere. Now the times are obviously right. Watergatian Weltschmerz is nibbling the collective unconscious, and Wacky Packages are selling rampant with their put-downs of products that kids have had thrown at them and into them daily by TV and Mom. From air-ball breakfast cereals to dishwashing detergents that make ladies beautiful, familiarity seems finally to be breeding contempt – and a generation of gripers.

Be sure to checkout the many more examples of wacky packs / vintage ad parodies on the Internet.

FEEDBACK

Holy cow, Mr. Mackay, I didn’t realize how much you have veered to the right.

Your accusations of Dion being “soft” on terrorism are the exact same perceptions of the opposition that Mr. Harper has been propagating ad nauseam. Not only are these perceptions extreme, but the imagery you have chosen in your cartoon is intensely personal and vile. You should join Ramirez, the neocon American editorial cartoonist, as an embedded mouthpiece for entrenched conservative policies.

No, I am not a Liberal.

– A. Abbott (March 2, 2007)

——

I used to skip lunch and buy wacky packs. Those were the days, I guess I had about 350 of them. Not including the ones I stuck on the walls, car, bikes, school hallways. bathrooms. They were great. Of course I bought the whole new set from an e-bay auction, they are still cute, but nothing can compare with opening a new pack of wackey packs hoping to complete the set.

– dwells (March 6, 2007)