Attention ad agencies. Don't DON'T. DO NOT DO THIS. Do not create a video where you publicly masturbate, backslap and attempt to hipify yourself with viral goodness in front of the industry all in the name of cool factor and winning new business. Watch this video so you'll never do this to yourselves. Agency.com created a video of themselves pitching the Subway business as the pitch itself and uploaded it to YouTube. Everyone in the industry needs to watch this. Not because it's good but because it makes ad agency people look dumb and sound really stupid. It's filled with mindless business blather, self-important ad speak, fist bumps, fashionably un-tucked shirts and way too many utterances of the word "dude." It's painful to watch.
UPDATE: This work is for a sanctioned agency pitch. Agency.com Communications Manager Dan Cordella tells us, "SUBWAY Restaurants SFAFT Group is currently conducting a search for a new interactive agency. They gave all participants, including Agency.com, the option to submit a short video of the team/company, which is a fairly standard procedure in an agency review process. Agency.com wanted to show how viral could work instead of just telling them about it in a video or written response."
UPDATE II: And the blog.
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Hey, the guys over in Dolce $ Gabbana land must have thought enough time passed since the famed PUMA blowjob ad to reprise it for themselves. Although, this time, its sans bodily fluids and it's gay-themed. We've all got to get it somehow and there's noting wrong with getting it while your D&G's are down around your ankles and some random guy it kneeling in front of you.
We never thought we'd say it and it's probably because it looks nothing like one but this MySpace page, sent to us by Adrants reader Ariel Waldman, from Sunsilk which features three Queer Eye For the Straight Guy-like guys promoting hair care products and dispensing "hairapy" is actually good. The site has a few "tutorial" videos, one of which, "Haunted by a Booty Call" is kinda funny. The page also points to a Hairapy page on which you can talk to the Hairapy guys, read them dish about celebrity hair styles and. get product info. Each of the three guys have their own MySpace pages as well.
While certainly creative in one sense, the brains behind this German spot for TCOM - like T-Mobile here in the U.S. - certainly spent a ton of money to deliver a simple message: TCOM offers both home and mobile phone service. In the spot, the city of Frankfurt is transformed into a living room to illustrate TCOM's phone service is available where ever you go. With all kinds of live action photography and CG work, Zoic Studios brought the living room to the mobile populace. Or the mobile populace to the living room. Or, something like that.
Now that one newspaper has done it, they're all going to do it. Just like an agency account director who tells her AE, "Ah, fuck it. Just add another $20K to that quote. They'll never know the difference," the LA Times is getting greedy (or needy) and will now accept ads on the front pages of many of the paper's sections. The paper hasn't completely bent over to advertiser's wishes though - which is the reason Publisher Jeff Johnson is giving to the paper's employees versus the truth: the paper needs more money - and will not yet accept ads on the front page of the paper as some other papers have. That move will take some serious lubrication.
In this post-9/11, knee-jerk world, it's probably best not to leave props that look like bombs laying around unoccupied floors of your building. Apparently, that's what one agency in Atlanta's Proscenium building at Peachtree and 14th did which, yesterday, caused the building to be briefly evacuated while a bomb squad was called to check it out. The package had in it eight red cylindrical objects, with the word "dynamite" on their sides, attached to a device that looked like a timer.
For all the head bangers out there, hard rock magazine Revolver is running a promotion alongside the Unholy Alliance Tour which is headlined by Slayer and includes Lamb of God, Children of Bodom, Mastodon and Thine Eyes Bleed. Not exactly the sort of music the local church would be interested in but, then again, there's only so much organ music one can take. The magazine has created a Guide to the tour and anyone spotted at the concerts with the Guide and wearing a Lamb of God T-shirt will get the chance to go backstage, meet the band and listen to the band's new album, Sacrament.
