Dank!: Aesthetic Imperfections Cut the Pain Out of Price

Here's a clever little campaign for Dank! Second Hand Furniture. Each print zeroes in on a piece of furniture; whatever defect mars it visually also mars the ostentatious price that made the item unattainable.

Also see Table and Chair. By the clever visual acrobats at DDB&Co./Istanbul; via.

Gain: So Sweet-Smelling, You Might Attract Hop-Ons

This print effort for Gain could probably have done with better execution. I had to read the tagline -- "It smells that good" -- and even then I had to look hard. And it was like, "Oh, it would appear that there's a person stuck to that other person."

But it isn't immediately clear that they're trapped there because they're smelling, and not because, oh, they got sat on and taken-with when their host got up again.

Variants include Gallery and Airport. Work by Leo Burnett/Toronto.

Because Who Needs Hands...

...when you've got a bra that turns your mammaries into superclamps? And consider this: if women had more paws for shopping bags, they'd probably be a lot less depressed. For the next eight minutes, anyway.

Just another support-illustrating gem by Wonderbra (via y via).

Previous efforts to break the mold with basoomas have included the glass-breaking bus shelter ad, the extra caution line at metros, and the, uh, "we hold big boulders" approach.

Louis Vuitton Aligns Itself to Moonmen

Sally Ride, Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin bring stargazer's wonder to this piece by Louis Vuitton. Shot by Annie Leibovitz, the astronauts will grace July issues just in time to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

Antoine Arnaut, head of communications at LV in France, says each spacewalker donated a "significant" portion of their modeling fees to Al Gore's Climate Project. As for the bag at left, it's the Vuitton Icare -- an elbow ornament named after Icarus, an icon of Greek myth who dies after flying too close to the sun, losing his wings and plummeting back to earth.

Not the bag I'd've chosen to feature with survivors of a successful sky-bound mission, but hey, I suppose it's nice that Icarus, Aldrin, Lovel and Ride all have something in common: a lust for that final frontier.

Oh, yeah. You may have noticed Neil Armstrong is missing. This wasn't an oversight on LV's part; after an entreaty or two, "he thought it probably wasn't the right thing to do," Arnault admits.

IFF Boston's Print Work Just Pops.

Much the way the Vitruvian Man did. There's something about great film that slips under your skin, gets into the meat of you; and few film makers will argue there isn't a deeply physical urge that finds satisfaction in producing such work.

For the Independent Film Festival Boston, agency ISM/Boston manages to peg that perfectly. Tagline at left reads, simply, "Vision lives on both side of the projector."

See equally compelling variant: "Blood, sweat and tears meet lights, camera, action."

You have to be impressed by the efficiency, don't you? It seizes the eye and drives the point home, nice and clean, like a sandpapered stake.

Kia and Sheep. Wait, There's a Difference?

For the print component of the Kia Soul campaign, David & Goliath go an eye-catching, if tired, route: See pawns. See Soul. A new way to roll.

At first glance, we involuntarily thought, "Kia: synonymous with pawns." It took a few slow neuron-firings for us to be all, "Oh, wait. Kia: the break from the norm." And even then, we were like, "...nah."

Not super thrilling work. Then again, when was the last time a Kia got you hot? Variants include Sheep and Fish.

Pringles Molds Non-Edibles in Its Own Image

"Shaped for nothing else" is the premise behind this Pringles campaign, illustrated by Grey/Hong Kong with print imagery of objects bent into the shape of a Pringles crisp. In addition to the warped ping-pong table at left, feast your eyes on an unplayable vinyl record and a rubbery china dish.

"Simple, efficace!" gushes one commenter on fubiz. No better way to say it than that.

You know what's neat about Pringles? Its brand persona may be a little square, but it never mistakes itself for young flashy frat brands like Doritos. When all else fails ad-wise, it falls back on old faithful: its unique shape, which is part of the fun of eating them, one after the other, until your lips sting from the seasoning and you mildly hate yourself, because hey, you just ate a gigantic tube of chips.

Psycho Killer SocMedia, Twee-ality, in:fluencia Bounces Back

- Real housewives of intervention. =P

- What "Psycho Killer" can teach you (yes, YOU!) about social media.

- in:fluencia, a French ad/media/trends rag that used to send us awesome overseas campaigns (1, 2, 3), returns from a long hiatus with a snappy redesign. Even if you can't read French, the thumbnails alone are click-candy.

- Twitter reality show.

- Getty + Flickr: a match made in ... (Via y via.)

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Hitler Serves Rasayana Tea.

Ben Kunz over at Thought Gadgets drew our obliging eyes to the latest manifestation of Hitler. This time it's for Rasayana, the anti-stress tea.

It might be overstating it to suggest Hitler would've been a totally different dude if he were more of a tea drinker, but you never know. At least one blogger has suggested to us that clutching a hot beverage generally makes you nicer.

More pretty pictures at Ads of the World.

Visine Wrings Fresh Tears from Fairy-Tale Captive

Mix the charm of The Elves and the Shoemaker with the Napoleonic Lilliputians of Gulliver's Travels and you've got "Kitchen," the print piece by JWT/NY for Johnson & Johnson's Visine.

The visual relates a myth about how all those tears get inside a wee bottle of Visine. Look closely: tireless miniature men conduct tear-gathering work around the frozen face and body of a glassy-eyed woman of normal size. Cut onions litter the table before her; elsewhere, tiny labourers bear buckets. One leans over a giant funnel and pours the harvested fluid into a Visine container.

"Natural tears formula. Don't ask how," the piece reads, crimson scrawl on a well-worn hanky.

Dark and beguiling, like good fairy tales often are.