Don't Mess With Mom at Checkout

Yea, we know moms (yes, we are making that assumption) can sometimes get violent at the checkout counter but these two women take violence to a new level in this Mountain Dew Level Up or Die spot for the brand's Game Fuel.

The work was created by BBDO New York with visual effects from Zoic Studios.

Someone Just Poured A Beer on Our Head!

Whoa. It's Tuesday morning. We love beer and all but we prefer to drink it rather than have it poured over our head (as one idiotic co-worker once did while at an end of the summer party). But we're not complaining. No. Not at all. Because the beer that was just poured over our head...is an ad. And we love advertising here on Adrants! And it's virtual so we really don't have beer all over our head right now (but did when that idiot did it in real life).

Yup. Check this out. See? Pretty sweet, right? No go here and Kraeusen your friend's site compliments of Old Style.

We love this stuff.

State Street Offers Dogs Dating Tips

Soccer ball? Nope. Stuffed animal? Nope. Baseball glove? Nope. Squeaky toy? Nope. Slipper? Nope? SPDR Bone from State Street? Yup.

Yes, this is how we explain the benefits of precision investing with SPDR EFTs,

And becasue this is advertising, the whole thing's an homage to the French film Breathless.

The Gate Worldwide created the work.

Creative Director Says 'Do Not Follow Me' With T-Shirt Line

After running into Keith Lane, a creative director at an agency I used to work at, Emerson Lane Fortuna, at the Boston AdClub Reunion, we did the required social media hook up on Facebook. Then, upon reading his Wall, I hilariously discover he's got as jaded a view of social media as I do. So much so, he's gone an created a line of CafePress-wear entitled the Anti-Social Networkers.

The line hypes what Lane dubs the three most overused words of the year: friend, share and connect. Headlines indlude Do Not Follow Me, Linked Out, Zero Connections, Do Not Follow Me and more.

And, yes, there's even a thong. On Facebook, Lane's Daughter Courtney commented, "friggin' genius!! but quick question: was it your idea to have thongs??" to whick Lane responded, "Validation from my first born anti-social child. Thanks, Court. You made my anti-social day. The thongs? No comment. Love, Dad"

Dad and daughter talking about thongs on Facebook. Bet Keith didn't foresee this when he held Courtney in his arms swaddled in a baby blanket.

Cannes Lions: Real Winnars in Cyber, Design and Press

Last night was the Cannes Lions awards event for Design, Press and Cyber efforts. As always, for the full list of winners, go hithery-dithery. But here are the Grand Prix winners for each category:

For DESIGN: "Paper Battlefield" for Nike Hong Kong by McCann Worldgroup/Causeway Bay.

For PRESS: "We Are Animals," that creepy bejeaned-human-meets-carnal-instinct campaign by FRED & FARID/Paris for Wrangler.

For CYBER: "Best Job in the World" -- which is seriously cleaning up this year -- by Cumminsnitro/Brisbane for Tourism Queensland.

"Eco:Drive" by AKQA/London for Fiat also scored a Cyber Grand Prix, as did "Why So Serious?" for Warner Bros.' The Dark Knight. The latter campaign is a typical piece of elaborate genius by the folks at 42 Entertainment/Pasadena, whose every project is not so much advertising as it is grand oeuvre.

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Say No to Plumping

Calling attention the to the practice of plumping, injecting chicken meat with salt water to increase size, weight and cost, Foster Farms has launched Say No to Plumping, a website that features two chickens, Betsy and Martha, talking to each other about plumping as if it were a botox treatment.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners created the work. The site also includes plumping facts and figures, how to detect a plumper, links to health resources and an interactive "Plumpinator" calculator to help site people calculate how much money they waste on saltwater from plumped chicken each year.

Seriously. If we all just stepped back and took a look at the idiotically stupid, inane and unhealthy things we do as humans simply to make an extra buck or two, we'd actually laugh. Seriously. Injecting chickens with water to make them...what...taste more like water and less like chickens? Are we really that idiotic?

Aaron Fotheringham Explains HowStuffWorks

If you think you have challenges in life, meet Aaron Fotheringham, a wheelchair-bound 17-year-old who's created a sport called hard core sitting. Basically, it's extreme skateboarding in a wheelchair.

Recently, Discovery Communications hooked up with Fotheringham who appears in a commercial, launching this week, for the Discovery Channel's HowStuffWorks website. Aaron has Spina Bifida and is the first person to perform a backflip in a wheelchair.

This latest work follows an initial campaign for the site which featured a scuba diving cat.

Cannes Lions: Going Gold for Georgia

At 72 Croisette (the so-called Gutter Bar) last night, Shannon Stephaniuk introduced me to the members of Ogilvy Stockholm, which won a Gold Lion for its work for UNA Sweden.

Their objective was to raise funds to support the war victims of Georgia (the country, not the state); and to do this, they spoke with the locals and gathered small, specific and personal items that belonged to people affected by the war.

See Shoes, Sweater and Sheet; I found the sight of those scorched, warped items physically painful, and the stories still more moving.

It's my strong feeling that the work deserved a Grand Prix, but apparently you can't win one if the effort is nonprofit. Weird logics. In any case, I hung out awhile and talked to the guys about the work, what they did and how it made them feel in general.

Video interviews below. Given that it's the Gutter Bar at 2:00 AM and not, say, an Embassy lobby, try to bear with the background noise. Better yet, imagine you're there, stumbling around with your third vodka tonic, playing guess-the-accent with your group of chums-for-the-week.

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You...Are So Much Better Than You Really Are

We could use a little Scientology right now. After all, according to the church's new commercial, "you are not your name, you're not your job, you're not the clothes you wear or the neighborhood you live in. You're not your fears, your failures or your past."

And there's more. "You are hope. You are imagination. You are the power to change, to create and to grow. You are a spirit that will never die. And no matter how beaten down, you will rise again."

Wouldn't it be nice to cast off the irrelevant, supposedly unimportant, aspects of your life - all that heavy baggage that drags you down - and just start over anew with hope, imagination and "the power to change." The only problem? You can't simply cast those things off because they are part of you and they do define you. They are your history. They are your personality. They are you.

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Mad Men Characters Conduct Online Survey

As part of his research project "about the future model of advertising" for thesis work at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, AlmapBBDO Creative Director Sergio Mugnaini created a Mad Men-themed online research survey that's very cool. The survey takes scenes from Mad Men and dubs the survey questions right into the scene. Way more interesting than page after page of plain text. Ingenious, actually.