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For some, a dream has been realized: a slew of Seven Elevens have evolved into Kwik-E Marts for a month to promote The Simpsons Movie. The evolution has improved business for one Burbank, CA store by about 300 to 400 percent, according to AdCritic.
The metamorphosis includes changes to the exterior, interior and employee uniforms. The stores are also littered with myriad opportunities to snap a shot of yourself with a character from The Simpsons.
After years of less-than-tactful trashing on the show, we think it's a nod in the right direction for Seven Eleven to embrace its alter ego with such abandon.
We enjoy this print effort between Greek yogurt brand Fage and jewelry label Honora, in which the latter's pearls are given extra dimension by the parallel illusion of a dip into the rich Greek yogurt.
Fage may ring provincial, but its Ogilvy & Mather billing and collaborative dip-ins with brands like Honora suggest anything but.
The college dorm room. Ah yes. That tiny, not so personal space that sees more action in one semester than in the entire run of Big Brother. Is there anything that hasn't happened in a dorm room? Not anymore thanks to IKEA who's released a video in which heads randomly pop out of a dorm room's enclosed spaces and begin to beatbox. It's all to get people to head over to roommateliving.com on which IKEA hawks its college room-ready wares. And yup, there's even an IKEA College Night promotion from July 6-9 where college students and high school seniors can bring their IDs to IKEA stores for a chance to win free stuff.
We never get tired of a rip on boy bands, especially when the pith is as thinly-veiled as it is on Fruit Guy Fans, a site for a Fruit of the Loom-sponsored boy band whose costumes are just as fruity as its music.
The concept's actually pretty sound, resisting the urge to go over the top like so many other parodies (or not) tend to. Download MP3s for would-be one-hit wonders like "You Can't Overlove." Our favorite is "Dream."
Thanks Bill for the heads-up and the bad poetry.
This really takes egocasting to the next level. For those who find even virtual networking a problem, Brando gives you USB Virtual Friends, which enable you to invest a little plastic buddy with all the qualities you really need in a desktop partner. Including a photo.
Far from a mere memory-logger, these dolls give you a virtual world where you are master. Give them personalities and your choice of over 100 preprogrammed dialogues for communication.
Available in Virtual Boyfriend, Virtual Girlfriend ($17, respectively) or sets ($30).
Some people will go to great lengths to keep their beer cold. Other people, such as the chap in this M&C Saatchi-created Fosters commercial, are simply insane. Or, he have the ability to detect, perhaps, a tenth of a degree temperature difference that might be caused by the sun walking from the bar to his beach chair. While his buddies are ogling beach beauties, this guy is acrobatically following tiny bits of shade to protect his beer from the sun.
It seems Google's YouTube has debuted a new in-video style ad format. It's not pre-roll. It's not post roll. It's a transparent banner that appears on the bottom of the screen several seconds after beginning of the video which the user can either minimize or click on. If clicked, in the case of this example, the advertiser's video opens and plays within the same YouTube video window as the original content. Once the advertiser's video has played or if the close/minimize button is clicked, the original video commences playback right where it left off.
So it's a bit of a mashup between banner advertising and the standard :30 with a bit or user-controlled DVR-like behavior tossed it. It's certainly new. It's definitely different and we have to admit, we like it a lot.
Holy shit! It seems we've been targeted by a Miami serial killer according to a WBFX news report. Curiously, all five of the serial killer's victims have been male, in their 30's and work in the media industry. Chillingly, our name has been scrawled in blood on a wall in Miami and on a piece of paper found by the police naming us the killer's next victim. Even more chillingly, we were just in Miami for a conference.
In fear, we've barricaded ourselves into our offices with one inch thick back issues of Vogue and blocked the the windows with the hundreds of Casale Media bags we've collected at ad:tech conferences over the years. The police have been called and we hope the industry's prayers are with us.
OK, OK. It's all just one of those personalized video promotions, this time, for the Showtime series Dexter which will begin airing on FX in the UK.
We were screwing around on some foreign news site when we saw the banner at left and thought, "Hey, Smokey Bear! Can't believe that guy is still around."
Out of curiosity, we hit www.smokeybear.com and found a creepy video that involves a child singing some song about forest fires, coupled with imagery of a spark igniting stenciled animals and a forest.
Smokey's Vault is a feature that brings Smokey into 2007 with a bunch of hip little spigot-thingies. There we discovered that Smokey was an actual baby bear that in 1950 rolled charred (and orphaned) out of the forest after a (clearly unprevented) forest fire.
And that's way more about fire-shy Bear than we ever thought we'd know. Those spigots, or at least that Bambi-esque banner ad, are clearly very effective.
We felt pleasantly provoked by this ad for Marithe + Francois Girbaud, in which female models take up the mantles of Jesus and the Apostles for The Last Supper. There's also a man that we're guessing is supposed to be a Magdalene, or maybe a Judas, figure.
We love how the viewer is first slapped with recollection of the Da Vinci original, but beyond that the image merits a good long look. The facial expressions are wildly illustrative. And there don't appear to be chairs or table legs.
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