Toyota wants to be your friend. It wants to lavish you with gifts, invite you into its inner circle, suckle from your ideas. From now until September 10, members of its social network HEYA can pitch the company their :30 ad ideas.
And no, the HEYA thing has nothing to do with Andre3000's frequently mashed-up hit. "Heya" is Japanese for "room," and Toyota thought it would be a good name for an intimate, join-the-round-table! kinda social network.
Sign up here. (Damn, that's a lot of questions. Toyota's not fuckin' around!) Once IN!, you're free to submit write-ups or storyboards for a :30 ad concept. The top five will be chosen, and members vote for the best one.
Finalists are announced September 16; the winner is named September 22. In addition to airtime, the grand prize includes a Flickr Pro account membership. (Diggin' how it knows what people want.) Runners-up get a 1GB iPod shuffle.
Still others can be used as weapons for the defenseless. That's the impression we got from this ad by Amnesty International, which is admittedly about a year old and maybe 1:30 too long. The animation and the idea are good though, and I like the sound of the scribble over the music.
Walking in the footsteps of Jay-Z and Nelly, Justin Timberlake is backing a line of expensive but delightfully ass-perking denim wear: William Rast, launched in partnership with Trace Ayala. (The brand is a combination of their grandfathers' first names.)
I haven't seen any TV ads, but the site's hosting trailers about the life of fictional character William Rast, played by Justin Timberlake. Mostly he's seizing the opportunity to forget shaving, play with make-up and explore self-fellating videocam angles. Oddly (or not so much), they made me think of Tila Tequila's video blog.
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It's always a little irksome when a film boasts an "all-star cast," because if THAT'S the card it's playing, there's probably not much else going on.
The Women, a remake of a movie from 1939, has just such a cast. Think Candace Bergen! Annette Benning! Jada Pinkett-Smith! Meg Ryan! Bette Midler! Eva Mendes! It's a walking, talking line-up for the cover of next month's Vanity Fair.
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- Because what the world needs now is a hot blogger calendar.
- The CW's decided to let advertisers see snippets of 90210's content after all. I guess this means the PTC will be throwing itself a self-congratulatory cocktail party.
- OMG, OMG, a Facebook movie? ...by the co-creator of West Wing? Does that mean there's a parity of significance between Mark Zuckerberg and the ruler of the free world?
- MySpace was the top display ad publisher in June; Microsoft the top display advertiser. Most of its ads were for Live Search.
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For some, imagery of schoolgirls (or any female for that matter) in pleated, plaid miniskirts presents an irresistible urge to let fantasy fun rampant and to, well, just be really, really bad. While that imagery may not be what Marc Jacobs, who signed Russian duo t.A.T.u. (Lena Katina and Yulia Volkova) to front his fall fashion campaign, intends to foist on the public, one does wonder just how he will present the fun-loving couple in upcoming campaigns.
The pair have been out of the limelight for a while but that won't really matter. Marc Jacobs will doll them up (or down) and present them in a deliciously delectable manner easily obsessed over by all. Lesbians. Rocks stars. What's not to love?
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Never mind petitions, Greenpeace wants PICTURES. The organization's asking community members to submit photos of dearly-loved things being threatened by global warming. Users are also invited to write a tear-jerking message explaining the photo. All photos and notes will be sent to the Representative for your district.
There were only a couple of submitted photos when I clicked on the link above, and at the time it seemed like it would be hilarious if a bunch of people got together and deluged the site with shots of their ice trays. Then I choked on some tea, and I'm over it now.
Sadly, for some, the LA County Fair bimbos (1, 2) have been retired after a two year run bringing attention to that annual geographical anomaly, the LA County Fair. For others, the appearance of Obama and McCain in the campaign will be a welcome change. And for bovine lovers...and 14 year old boys, well, farting cow jokes are always welcomed. The work comes from The Rogers Group and Ideology Advertising.
The three (out of a total of ten) executions are here, here and here.
When it comes to getting yourself tested for certain kinds of STDs, you can be reasonably sure the tested parts are your own and you have a pretty clear history of the part's activities. That is unless you are Frankenstein about to have unprotected sex with his first love in this Danish commercial.
Now if I could only remember that "detachable penis" song from like 20 years ago.
Ever watch a horror movie and begin to scream at the screen because the bubble-headed, big-breasted, airhead insists on answering the phone or opening the closet door rather than just...um...just walking away? Or some other totally illogical idiocy? Of course you have.
You'll want to do it again when you watch this DDB Stockholm-created commercial for McDonald's. You will scream, "Just lift the fries up to your mouth, you idiot!"
Logic. Who needs it in advertising?
Walking through the Mall of America, there are, no doubt, plenty of distractions. Sound good. Some bad. This new ad technology from Modernistic used by Best Buy to promote their new store in the mall falls into both categories. It's bad because who wants a holographic projection talking to you and youu walk through the mall. It's good becasue al you have to do is walk to the side of it and it disappears. Something for everyone. What's not to like?
In its continuing quest to transform the tragically unhip into something, well, not quite hip but into something people will at least consider using. Weiden + Kennedy is out with two more commercials illustrating the transformative powers of Old Spice Swagger (seriously? Swagger?). One features Brian Urlacher. The other, LL Cool J. The basic message? Even manly dudes like Urlacher and LL were losers until...they began using Old Spice products.
Funny thing. They probably were using their dad's Old Spice back in the day and that didn't seem to help. Perhaps, once again, it's advertising that's the transformative thing in people's lives.
After viewing these commercials hyping The Big Ten Conference, one is led to believe the great American sport of football is running scared fearing of the "real" game of football everyone else in the world plays could jeopardize the sport. A drive by any field in any town in America reinforces that fear to some degree. It seems every kid in every town across the country is playing soccer. Well, maybe not in Texas but everywhere else, it seems.
Could soccer - called football everywhere else in the world - ever come close to unseating American football? Not likely but a drive by all those fields makes one wonder once in a while.
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We know there are a lot of soccer...uh...football stars out there who can manipulate the ball in ways you never thought a ball could be manipulated but we haven't yet seen a manipulator who can get all the balls in one pocket all at the same time. What we really want to know is: did that hurt?
There's always a new way to sell underwear, isn't there?
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