Back in May 2011, Canadian camera shop The Camera Store released a humorous advertisement that quickly went viral, amassing millions of views. Here’s the sequel to that video, showing another violent engagement between two groups of well trained photographers.

Polaroid and Chase Jarvis teamed up to create this “Will It Blend“-style advertisement for the the Polaroid Z340 instant digital camera. It’s a clever idea, but poor cameras!

As newspapers and magazines struggle to keep eyeballs from turning to the free world of the Web, more and more blogs are rising up to fill the niches once dominated by print. Despite the changing landscape, magazines are still able to command high advertising rates that blogs can’t match (yet). Wanting to find out whether magazines or blogs provided the best bang of each advertising buck, photographer Trey Ratcliff recently spent $26,000 placing ads in three major photography magazines, comparing the results to his online affiliate ad returns. His conclusion?

If I was consulting for one of these product companies that puts significant funds into magazine advertising, I would challenge them to try something new for six months: Try taking 50% of that money and put it into several hundred blogs, podcasts and review sites and measure the results. Cut the worst performers and find new ones.

Only one of the three magazines actually made Ratcliff money (the other two lost over ten thousand dollars) — the one that included an online ad rotation as part of the package.

Stop Advertising in Photo Magazines – Head West to the Web [Trey Ratcliff]

Thanks for sending in the tip, Troy!

Japanese camera ads are sometimes very different from those you might see in the US. We’re still trying to figure out whether this is a commercial for the Fujifilm X10 or a trailer for an upcoming horror movie…

You can find a 60 second version of this same ad on Fujifilm’s Facebook page.

(via ecpz)

Here’s a “2 minute love story” Canon commercial that aired in Thailand. In other parts of the world, this would probably be categorized as a “thriller” rather than a “romance”. The comments for the video on YouTube are dominated with the words “creepy” and “stalker”.

(via Pixiq)

Here are some fantastic compliations of commercials promoting Japanese camera companies. They aired from the 1970s to the 1990s. The video above is the Canon collection.
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Some Atlanta-based photographer posted a humorous Craigslist ad on Monday highlighting the fact that people often assume that photographers will be happy to do work for free.
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In this social media age, companies are constantly dreaming up all kinds of random ideas for demonstrating the benefits of their products, and hoping that the videos will go viral (an example would be this bulletproof glass CEO that literally stood behind his product). A couple of years ago, Phase One wanted to demonstrate the durability of its digital backs for medium format cameras, so they came up with the “African Elephant Durability Test.” The test proved conclusively that if you’re going into environments where elephants might be looking to stomp on your camera, don’t bring along your $14,000+ Hasselblad back — bring a Phase One back instead!

Camera review sites should start subjecting the latest DSLRs to this test. It’d certainly be an interesting addition to camera reviews.

(via Fstoppers)

Samsung made this creative paper camera ad a couple years ago to promote its WB500 compact camera. The magical pencil in the ad would be one heck of a camera accessory.

(via Foto Actualidad)

Film student Zach King and his sister made this creative mock commercial for the Macbook Air using a Canon 5D Mark II, some string and a lot of imagination.
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