- David Armano has mapped the Agency Path to Enlightenment. From Cannes to creativity, it's all there.
- The economy's nosedive is taking a bite out of "experimental" media such as virtual worlds, mobile and widgets according to the Wall Street Journal.
- Economic negativity is now running rampant in advertising. Come on, people. A little "glass half full" optimism can't really be a bad thing, can it?
- George Parker is on a mission so save WPP by...um...buying it?
- McKinney has emerged triumphant from the agency smack down for the Sherein-Williams account.
- Repower America has sparked a heated debate on YouTube with its commercialhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmEUHeI7fzE urging us to break oils lock on government.
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If you're sick of Advertising Age's 3 Minute Ad Age, check out AgencySpy's The Week in Advertising in which Spy Matt Van Hoven, blogger you've never heard of, does a pretty good job thrashing recent events in our beloved industry. Love the supers and the visuals. We like it. Do you?
This is disturbing. Seriously disturbing. Like a scene out of a old Vincent Price movie, a talking mousetrap taunts a mouse on the prowl for the cheese bait atop the trap. With equal levels of confidence and outright psychotic insanity, the trap beckons to the mouse until...snap...the trap captures the mouse.
But that's not where the story ends. Oh no. As the trap continues to creepily taunt the mouse quietly listens then makes an important decision. It eats the cheese and, because this is a dairy product ad touting the category's strengthening qualities, lifts the mousetrap bar and scurries away to the dismay of the mousetrap.
There quote a few of these oddities over ar Must Drink More Milk.
Created by Tribal DDB Vancouver, the commercial is for the British Columbia Dairy Foundation.
In a new pro-Obama commercial from MoveOn.org which plays out like a drug PSA, Gossip Girl Upper East Sider Serena Vanderwoodsen feels so strongly about Obama she says, "if you're ever out somewhere and considering about voting McCain, just call me. I'll pick you up. No questions asked."
While it centers on the not so correct assumption all McCain supporters are old and all Obama supporters are young, it does do an effective job spoofing a genre that has become ingrained in the minds of the younger generation, many of whom would love nothing more than to have Serena not ask any questions while picking them up.
This may sound improbable, but "goddess of money" Ivanka Trump (don't you love PR people?) gives a damn what you have for lunch at work every day. Enough to blog about it, even.
She's partnering with ConAgra for something called the Lunch Trade. I'm not sure what it entails (Handi-Snacks but bigger? City-wide buffets? Mass sandwich-swap? Anything goes!) but it'll reportedly "impact" 15,000 employees across NYC and Chicago.
Wow. Sounds almost like genocide. Keep reading her blog for more details.
Jake of Zoomdoggle is scruffy and cute, so you must love him. Do everything he says. In this case, find the 8000 Indiana Jones hats he and his friends have hidden all over LA, and take pictures of yourself being just as animated and ironic as he is. (Don't forget to tag them!)
Adrants reader Jay notes this apparently casual scavenger hunt was announced the same day Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out on DVD, so he's pegged it as a below-the-radar marketing ploy. "Wonder what they're going to do with all the pictures," he ruminates suggestively.
I'm sure we'll all find out.
UPDATE: Cunning's 'fessed to using Jake and Friends as vehicles for an over-arching Indiana Jones promotion. (Not in so many words, but I feel my assumptions are safe -- or if not, they'll be corrected with lightning speed. See comments.)
Nice save.
Hayden Panettiere, the tortured chick on Heroes who can never die, joins an assembly line of celebrities hoping to affect your vote.
"There are three things think I all citizens should do: smoke cigarettes, vote for John McCain, and don't wear a seatbelt," she says with vigor, tossing in a few wild "FUCKs" for shock value.
You get the gist. Thank Funny or Die, creators of this and that high-larious Paris Hilton for President video -- another effort that makes Obama look incidentally good by making McCain look old and out of touch.
There's a lot going on in this NASCAR Sprint Cup promo. Atop a sea of mobile homes there's a barbecue...(short shorts)...a pool...(short shorts)...choreographed porta-potties...(short shorts)...an air show...(short shorts)...video gaming...(shorts shorts)...beer drinking...(shorts shorts)...dancing...(shorts shorts)...cheering...(short shorts)...lounging...(short shorts)...a pink flamingo...(short shorts)...and, of course, the NASCAR Spring Chase Cup. And shorts shorts.
Air New Zealand's running a new campaign called "Is it just a kiwi thing?", characterized by unusual guerrilla stunts. (See cranial billboards. Yes, the PR woman says, those are real tats. I'm shaking my head right now.)
To promote its launch, a B747 pilot alighted upon an unfinished billboard in London, sporting a paintbrush and some splashy blue paint.
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Maybe it thought "SFW XXX" gave people the wrong idea. Alongside new buddy the Accompanied Literary Society (which seeks to revive the culture of literary salons), Diesel asked celebrity authors to produce some short stories for its latest outdoor campaign.
The so-called "Flash Fiction" was broadcast on the face of One York Place, NYC, over the course of three days.
Totally falls into the shadow of HBO Voyeur (BBDO/NY). And while I like the idea of reviving the literary salon, I'm inclined to think people -- myself included -- are more receptive to illustrative storytelling. Especially when they have to read them off the side of a building.
By Idealogue and PanOptic Motion.
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Here's a spot comparing the Chevy Traverse to "a sudden downpour of shoes." It's the latest in a campaign that debuted during the Beijing Olympics. (Remember the ad with the half-nekkid man ironing shirts?)
Facile premise: the Traverse is everything you've ever wanted. To illustrate that point, stereotypes of everything "we've" ever wanted are used. Hot men that iron? A hailstorm of shoes?
If nothing else, this spot's more coherent than the last. In August, I spent at least eight minutes on Twitter trying to figure out Shirtless Man's relation to folding seats.
- AdFreak's Tim Nudd notes some think if DirecTV's Poltergeist commercial is in bad taste given that Heather O-Rourke who played Carol Anne died in 1988 at age 12.
- This BBDO-created Guinness commercial in which refrigerators are magnetically drawn to a Guinness truck is quite good.
- Here's eight steps to writing in narrative format which sells.
- Gamepolitics reports team Obama placed an ad inside the Xbox game Burnout Paradise. The game's maker, EA, will neither confirm nor deny whether or not money changed hands for the ad or if it's simply great Photoshop work.
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Belgian born Peter Forret, who recently took a trip to Bulgaria, noticed an ad campaign for Mastika, an aphrodisiac used as an ingredient in mixed drinks or in the yogurt drink Ayran. He remarked the standard of advertising in Bulgaria appears to be far different than that of his home country, Belgium.
The print campaign employs visuals of scantily clad women foisting their curvaceous features towards the viewer. A commercial has two guys ogling a girl who passes them by on the beach and casts a shadow on the sand suggesting a figure of, shall we say, larger than normal proportions. Sadly, the commercial employs the tired, much over used male arousal tactic.
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Oh wow. This ad, capturing the precious moment between two people when they decide to ask and answer one of life's biggest questions which, in a big way, will determine how they live the rest of their lives together, is, by far, one of the best we've seen.
With nothing but a ball of string and some ingenuity, one man expresses his eternal love for the woman of his dreams. Love does, indeed, rock.
Created by The Richards Group for Zales, this commercial features music created specifically for the ad by Robert Francis. The song is entitled Don't Forget Love and was produced by PrimalScream Music Creative Director and EVP Nicole Dionne.
Why does it seem every ad created in non-English speaking countries consists of nothing more than a big ass photo and tiny logo or product shot? Oh wait, we get it. They want us English speakers to understand their ads as well. Or at least be able to convey the message within countries that may have several different dialects making copy unable to be understood by all. Or maybe it's just laziness. Or a shortage of copywriters.
Mo matter. Many of these copyless ads are quite good and do a fine job at delivering their message without the unneeded baggage of overly pompous verbiage and self important overtones which do nothing but further confuse the message with needless puffery.
We didn't make it to Boston's Hatch Awards this year and therefore we missed this hilarious introductory video created by Fort Franklin. In the video, we see the desktop of a creative seemingly hard at work developing the voiceover for the Hatch video itself.
All seems to go well until the desktop explodes with activity not far from the reality we all experience everyday as we try to work on one thing while endless distractions such as email, IM, stupid YouTube videos, Skype, iTunes updates and stupid pictures begin to bounce incessantly along the bottom of the desktop making actual work impossible. Revision after revision fails.
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What better way to get self-conscious Millennials to the ballot than with a bunch of celebs being gratuitously cool, slightly ironic and occasionally almost (but not quite!) deep?
Look, look, it's Bill Maher in a blazer, prattling about elitists. It ends with "Vote for BBQ" -- except BBQ is written in a Mad Libs sorta way, so you know the "vote for" is open to whatever motivation, however bizarre or irrelevant, you've got.
Because hey, that's democracy.
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To promote Night of the AdEaters, a 40-country show that screens ads from around the world in a no-holds-barred atmosphere, Euro RSCG/London resuscitated some of the ad icons it helped create.
The idea was to convey what someone might experience the morning after an indulgent ad event. (Odd, DDB/Stockholm seemed similarly inspired for the Roy awards.) At left, see the Cadbury Gorilla at the end of a tooth-scraper. And here's Flat-Head Eric in the same context, and one variant depicts the Duracell Bunny on dental floss. (I haven't seen it. If you've got it, I'll link it.)
The shit people put in your drinks!
NIght of the AdEaters happens on October 16 at London's Bloomsbury Theatre. Tickets have sold out since the campaign started running.
Coffees of Hawaii put a floating coffee bar on the swim course at Kona during the Ironman Triathlon World Championship. (They did it last year too. See pics.)
To ensure nobody would miss the hype-heavy, espresso-peddling raft bobbing near shore, it targeted swimmers with ads on the sea bed.
Neat idea. Neater still: if the flyers were clues to an undersea treasure hunt, and if, at the end of the hunt, people found -- not dubloons! -- but hazelnut coffee bean samples. Their expressions alone would make the effort worth it.
Rumor has it yesterday was a holiday. Know what it was? ...No? Good rule of thumb: if in doubt, check Google.com to see what the world's most popular search engine did with its logo.
Those expecting to see, I don't know, an explorer rubbing his hands together, or the ominous silhouette of a ship, or natives cowering in fear, were vastly disappointed. Google has no love for the directions-challenged dude who mistook the Americas for India. And it's not alone: Berkeley observed Indigenous People's Day, and Venezuela celebrated the Day of the Indigenous Resistance.
What'd Google celebrate? Paddington Bear's 50th birthday.
A decidedly safe choice. Paddington never hurt anybody. Well, except for that one time he "poisoned" his birthday guests with Marmite. But even that rang cute, not devastating.
Weiden + Kennedy has created another beautiful commercial for Nike. This one is direct by David Fincher and illustrates the glory of life's successes and accomplishments by following the lives and differing skills of two child athletes turned NFL football players, LaDainian Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu.
Adding appropriate emotion to the commercial is a remix of Ennio Marricone's moving L'estasi Dell'oro from the classic film The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, a film everyone should see if only for its grandiose spaghetti western cheesiness. Not to mention Clint Eastwood in his early cowboy years.
There are so many reasons to launch a consumer-generated media campaign. They save money and think time, encourage brand appropriation, and are pretty easy to sell to a client. ("Think of all the engagement opportunities and cost savings!") Doritos alone has done it, like, four times (make that five!), all your friends did it, and hey, even Tide did it -- with reasonably good results.
Besides laziness and balls, what's keeping you from leaping aboard the Goodship CGM? ...A platform,* by gad! Because building grids where users can input their own content and browse through others' is hard, right?!
Waffle no longer, love. Photrade just launched a photo contest platform that enables anybody (even you!) to follow the well-trod user-generated media trail.
So what are you waiting for? Get out there and start ingratiating your unwitting client with casual photographers. Think of all the engagement opportunities -- and cost savings!
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You probably know Baz Luhrmann by reputation, if not by name. He directed Strictly Ballroom, a tribute to the art of dance; Romeo + Juliet, his altar to the written word; and Moulin Rouge!, a garish but dazzling musical homage to pop culture.
He's just completed his latest film, Australia. I don't know much about it, but -- here's an interesting twist -- he's promoting it through a tourism gig.
DDB Worldwide -- which represents Tourism Australia -- tapped Lurhmann for its "Come Walkabout" campaign, which is technically for Australia but also for Australia. In the debut spot, a mystical (and naked?) little boy encourages a stressed woman to defect from her unraveling life.
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- MySpace MyAds, live in beta.
- OMG Elle and Stardoll!
- Celebrating 10 years as pop star and leader of the new world order, Google walks down memory lane with some happy worker bees. I'm guessing that the gushers chosen weren't day care patrons. Or hungry.
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Why are these people staring off into space and accepting bribes in the form of Pepsi? Why do they look like they are somehow detached from the realities of their lives? Why is it so inconceivable to believe these situations would actually take place?
Oh wait. This is advertising. Reality is irrelevant. All that matters is cool art direction and great photography. For that we give thanks, or not, to CLM BBDO Paris for this Pepsi print campaign.
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