There's nothing like the reality and freedom of series cancellation to get the creative juices flowing. For sure, FOX's The O.C. was heading for shit and deserved to be canceled but in the past few weeks the show has gone through a dynamic rejuvenation worthy of re-instatement. The show has been turned on its head with Ryan's transformation from brooding, tough guy loner to active participant in the human race, Taylor's morph from cartoonish high school caricature to smart girl with feelings, Seth and Summer's maturing relationship, Julie Cooper's shift from vapid bitch to love struck nice girl (even if she doesn't really love the Bull oops...Bullet...or stay with him...shouldn't write while drinking a martini), Kaitlin Cooper's change from stuck up, ego-centric mean girl to supportive daughter and Sandy and Kirsten Cohen's transition from perfect couple to even more perfect couple.
FOX, you ought to reconsider your cancellation. Or, at least threaten all shows with cancellation in order to achieve improved creativity. And yes, we admit we watch the show.
With live concert, billboards everywhere imaginable, a big pretty theme park and yada yada yada.
So ... Vista's still trying to be down with the homies and Second Life's still trying to colonize reality and the internet, all at the same time. Ho hum. Get a first life, Vista.
Agency BBDO Italy is to blame for this fiberglass life-sized Mini Cooper that actually does bob up and down like a yo-yo. We like Mini's forays into the whimsical to illustrate its compact size and playful personality, but the fact that it's slightly more wee than a regular car probably doesn't comfort those driving under the billboard.
More images here.
Isn't it beautiful what hands can do? That's the question VW asks at the end of this Phaeton ad by Grabarz & Partner Werbeagentur out of Hamburg. With a playful instrumental and impressive handplay, Volkswagen draws attention to the potential of hands to do more than grope, play games and spread the flu. This is meant to showcase the notion that the Phaeton is as elaborately handmade, though we're hard-pressed to imagine a set of European craftsmen sitting around adding final details to a VW.
We agree with Motionographer that it's probably not the most effective ad. It's a long, patient watch and these are not prized audience characteristics. But we like the thought, talent and attention to detail that went into putting it together. If ads are the art that will speak in years to come for society today, we'd rather it be Volkswagen's elegant handplay than, well, this.
It's not often you're rewarded for your dirty fingernails. Discovery Channel Sweden aims to change that with Dirty Jobs, a contest for consumers who have the filthiest jobs imaginable. A winner is picked each week for five weeks, and each gets 1000 Euros to spend on a vacation away from the latrine they're wallowing in.
The contest is promoted on custom printed toilet paper, courtesy of Miami Guerilla Agency in tangent with Discovery Channel's Zenithmedia. At the outset we considered trashing the firm for being just the umpteenth to think wiping one's ass on the company logo is a good idea, but we find the use of toilet paper apt for their purposes. Right now big contenders for the prize are nurses, pig farmers and heavy divers. It might do well to enter Chuck McBride into the mix, as he seems to be the only one happily at work in his plasma-splotched mass murder scene of an office. Oh wait, he left. Never mind.
New York Magazine is reporting what we all already know. New York Magazine tells us Wal-mart has proof Julie Roehm had an affair with Sean Womack, writing us, "Wal-Mart has told New York Magazine exclusively that it has 'irrefutable and admissible evidence' that fired senior vice-president of marketing communications, Julie Roehm, had an affair with Sean Womack, a vice-president who reported to her. Roehm is the subject of an upcoming piece in the magazine by Steve Fishman. Wal-Mart had remained nearly silent since the firing of Roehm and Womack on December 4."
We're not sure we want to know what that "irrefutable and admissible evidence" is because, well, that sort of thing is just gross. Kind of like a President's "fluid" on an intern's dress. Ew. Roehm isn't taking it lying down telling New York Magazine, "I guarantee there is nothing because it didn't happen. I know what they have, and it's not evidence of an affair. It's irrefutable evidence that we're really good friends. He's like a brother to me." Even more ew!
Can we just get past all of this?
Candies's love celebrities. From Hilary Duff to Jenny McCarthy to Kelly Clarkson to Ashlee Simpson Destiny's Child to the Dixie Chicks, it's all celeb, all the time. Now the fashion brand is hooking up with musical artist Fergie (Stacy Ann Ferguson) for its spring 2007 campaign which kicks off with a spot during the February ll broadcast of the Grammy's. Print ads will appear in Teen Vogue among others.
Every year we have to endure the painful submit, reject, submit, reject saga GoDaddy forces us to live through as it tries to get the network to accept its commercial for the Super Bowl. No one's in the dark here. Everyone knows Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons is submitting ads he knows will be rejected simply to get the press that rejection generates. And, dammit, he has us doing it too with his latest reject, a Basic Instinct-style spot in which Candice Michelle does the Sharon Stone leg cross thing while some dude voiced by Philip Baker Hall. Oh the pain Parsons puts us through. Oh wait. Candice is kind of interesting to watch.
The Flea and JND Technologies in Mumbai join forces to create an allegedly creative marketing campaign for client Travelport Holidays.
The campaign is a hark back to Evian Detox, which promoted purity by overwhelming websites on which its clean glacial banners sat, except it's much lazier.
The Quietest Place on the Web brings you to a white screen with the following sentences: "Welcome to the quietest place on the Web. The next time the noise of life gets to you, do drop by for a little bit of peace and quiet." The wandering eye then meanders down to the bottom of the page for lack of anything else to do, where it finds a link to Travelport India, another website that's not terribly stunning.
Unless Travelport has a huge demo of people seeking to visit the Tibetan monks or the inside of a padded room, we're just not seeing how this initiative will help them draw vacation clients.
We're under the impression that the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty was meant to change existing standards about beauty by bringing real women to contrast. We're just not sure whether the debate portion of the campaign, in which we're asked to tick off whether a given woman is "wrinkled" or "wonderful," really continues down that vein. Isn't it just putting women back on the platform they strove oh-so-hard to part with?
Oh, well. Maybe consumer-generated ads will save the day. It usually does.
- Advertising Age shifts into high Super Bowl gear with its Full Coverage section of Super Bowl Ads 2007.
- Google's quarterly profits have tripled. Funny how AdSense publishers' profits haven't tripled as well.
- BlogAds has introduced a new ad unit that receives part of its content from an RSS feed. New, fact, figures, product, info and basically anything can be fed into the ad unit in a continually updated manner.
- Yawn. Yet another Grounghog Day promotion.
OK, so this isn't exactly a Super Bowl ad but it's kinda fun. Adrants reader Benjamin George tells us it's a "parody of the 1985 Chicago Bears' Super Bowl Shuffle with Yogi, Boo Boo, Smokey, Pooh, and other cartoon bears." For anyone that was around in 1985, we suppose it'll bring back some memories. Or nightmares. Called Super Bear Shuffle, it was created by Big Game Hunters.
It's bigger. It's better. It's voyeuristic. There's no harness. It's smoother. There's more to touch. There's less crying. There's no waiting to get in. It pumps you up. It can never be too big. It's more satisfying. No, you perverts, we aren't sharing with you that second time we hooked up with that cute freshman red head in the back of the parent's station wagon. It's Comic Con, silly. More precisely, a video that expresses just how much more fun it is to go to the comic book convention Comic Con a second time. And yea, it's the well-worn "let's make it seem like we're talking about sex but not" approach but it still works. Maybe that's because the topic of sex never gets tired. Oh wait. Maybe that's just us. Sorry. Pardon the interruption. On with your work day
Adpunch points us to this clever campaign by Bic, who's attempting to break into Sharpie territory by pushing its own permanent marker.
Premise: that Bic sticks so well the ink will follow you into your next life. Copy: "Permanent. Even in your next life." We can only imagine what kind of guy the frog was. There's a snake variation too.
This reincarnating ink thing is something we've never considered before, and it might actually yield the answers to questions we've had for a long time. Like, perhaps the inked "MONKEEEEY WAS HERE!!!!" scrawled all over our ass is not from a drunken night we don't remember. Perhaps it's from a previous life as a less responsible person. That takes a big weight off our minds.
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