February 20, 2006
Get Me Off The List
Someone please fire the marketing team at Landmark Building Group. The marketers at this developer's have come up with this painfully obnoxious video advertising their lofts. We've seen better acting and production from late night spots and these ads simply scream gentrification. The video touts the location of their project (right across from the Drake) and has one of the most asinine slogans we've seen in recent memories ("Are you on the list?"). It's a slogan that reminds us of power-tripping bouncers at overpriced clubs on Richmond Street. Just wait until all those yuppies move into the neighbourhood and start complaining about the noise that bars like the Drake and the Beaconsfield make.
Also, Landmark is the same company responsible for the divisive Will Alsop presentation centre (pictured above). Christopher Hume writes about the presentation centre and makes this observation:
And so for the first time, a condo showroom has become more than the sum of its desires. Now it's the thing itself, a landmark, not a precursor, illusion or promise. Finally it's happened: a showroom that transcends itself, that doesn't need a condo marketing campaign to justify its existence. Already it is an icon, albeit a casual one, a harbinger of the new Parkdale.
Hume is right. The showroom really doesn't need the marketing campaign, no one needs this ad campaign. And if this advertising campaign is also a harbinger of the new "Parkdale" [ed note. Torontoist knows this isn't technically in Parkdale] we're scared, very very scared.
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Um...Isn't that area already gentrified? It's not like the Drake and the Beaconsfield and all the others have been there since the end of WWII.
The war against the "yuppies" was long lost on that stretch of road.
Yer welcome.
Didn't Torontoist already cover this?
Oh wait...I was thinking blogto. My bad.
Ugh, agreed, obnoxious video and web site in general. But you have to love those weird flashing green and yellow-tinted photos at the top featuring Hip Young People Displaying Attitude (TM) by extending their hands toward the camera in a McDonald's "I'm lovin' it" style.
The stacked townhouses this thing is meant to sell won't be terribly visible from the street. They'll be behind the Aristocrat lamps building, which itself will be demo'd and replaced with condos, the facade of which is actually supposed to be quite heritage-like.
We did cover this before, from a slighltly different angle. What hasn't changed is that it's still irritating.
I haven't seen this artist's rendering before. I LOVE the way it's pictured IN THE DESERT. Awesome for a building that claims to "take it's cues from the neighborhood." VERY convincing.
I love how they're actually brought to us by something called UrbanCorp! It's like a Mr. Show sketch come to life!!!
I'm exhausted...yet another condo project that will inspire thousands of us to contemplate how to have I-am-edgier-than-thou attitudes and bicker over noise complaints. Fear not: The condo market will crash one day and this new project will become a building full of ordinary people who once thought they were on the cusp of a pseudo-Parkdale revolution. We are a generation of people moving to live in boxes like hamsters. New condos are like smaller rental apartments. Oh sorry, unless you pay half a mill. for a spacious condo the size of a two bedroom rental at Yonge and Eg. No thanks...not for me!!
Goodwork boyreporter. Now we need another "Drake, you ho" graffiti.
little boxes, little boxes...and they're all made of ticky tacky....yeah, i wrote about this too back in december (click sookie to read the expanded piece)...the ads ARE pretty bad. hope there's more substance on the horizon.
Hmm....I too am exhausted. If we aren't rallying against the influx of condo density, we are rallying against the disaster of suburban sprawl.
Have cake, eat too.
On the top line of the article they have on their press link it reads the showroom looks like ‘an old age home for retired clowns’!!
that sums it up nicely.
Also doesn't it sound like 'are you on the lisp?'
I do believe that 'old age home for retired clowns’ was originally posted by a Torontoist commenter.
What I don't get, is why all these developments feel the need to call themselves lofts, when they're not actually lofts. At all. They're condos.
Are there seriously people out there dumb enough to fall for that?
I guess they must be the same people who desperately need to be "on the list."