Ads:
The New England Aquarium's "See Turtles" campaign is an appealing exception to the no-pun rule. (Also, we like an effort that doubles as justification to take hallucinogens.)
Variants include Droplet, Water Tower and Rooftop, which will appear in magazines and newspapers.
Online banner ads -- which are also cute, if a little Clip-Arty -- include Snowman, Cocoa and Car. (Forgive us if these links break; they're hosted by Mullen.) These are slightly different from their print counterparts: in them, ordinary things take the shape of turtles over time, taking advantage of the 'net's ability to seize roving eyes. Frankly, the print stuff is better.
Work by Mullen/Wenham, MA. There's also radio material, which we didn't get to hear.
One Chicago-based furniture store is happy to admit it sells more seats than Governor Blagojevich -- and at a better rate, to boot.
High-la-rious. But oh, does it beat Virgin Mobile's technicolor spin on Spitzer?
Here's an inventive online (and offline) creative implementation to promote heating device maker Gaz Metro. On the internet, the text surrounding Gaz Metro banners turns red when it the mouse is rolled over.
Offline in newspaper, ads at the bottom of the page were integrated with editorial so that text, as it was online, is altered to, in one case, turn red and, in another, blur as if heat were rising from the banner.
The agency, Touche PHD, tells us the altered text in the newspapers was part of the actual editorial rather than it being either a fake story or greeked.
- The Newspaper Association of America reports newspaper ad revenue fell 18.1 percent or almost $2 billion in the third quarter of 2008. Online newspaper ad revenue fell as well.
- AdGabber member Buddy Wachenheimer envisions what condom packaging would look like if it were sponsored.
- If your an agency struggling with workload after having laid off half your staff, check out YouIntern. It's always nice to, as YouIntern proudly states in its tagline, gain "freedom from coffee and coffee" so you can work on the more important stuff like sitting in a traffic meeting. Oh wait. Sorry about that. Bad example.
- IZEA is out with a blog campaign for Kmart which is getting a lot of Twitter buzz.
Under its classic slogan "There is always a clever mind behind it," German paper The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is running a campaign depicting various "clever minds." At left is UN Chief Inspector Mohamed ElBaradei in a state of exceptional transparency.
Hmm. What he needs is a red nose. Then we'd really have a party.
See variants for Billy Wilder, Helmut Kohl and Vitali Klitschko. All smart stuff, comparable to some of the better work we've seen for The Economist and BusinessWeek.
Photos by Nick Veasey. Curiouser still? See making-of and interview with ElBaradei.
As only Consumer Reports can do - being all unbiased and all - a new full page ad appearing in Monday's USA Today will inform shoppers "There is no 'bailout clause' in your credit card contract."
Damn, what a way to rain on the annual Holiday credit card spree! But with consumers owing upwards of a trillion dollars in debt, using cash to buy Christmas gifts this year might not be such a bad thing...or habit to get into as we all play out part in reducing America's debt. Which, by the way, we did to ourselves and should get out of ourselves without a government bailouot...which will only cost us later.
Admittedly, economics isn't Adrants' strong suit but it seems obvious if you can't afford to buy something you should just, well, not buy it. No matter how much you want it or how cheaply a bank will lend you money.
The economy shake-up means hard times for everybody, but print news weeklies are probably among the heaviest-laden. Few people are willing to wait a day to see news in print; fewer still have the patience for a week, not when they can load Google News and have at it instantaneously.
In a desperate bid at self-preservation, the LA Weekly has launched "LONG LIVE PRINT." Weeklyites invaded the Detour Festival in Downtown LA to wave signs, distribute bookmarks (cringe) and ink the message onto other people's shirts with a printing press (nifty!).
Other media ran on newsstands and in the LA Weekly itself. See the creative in all its grungy glory:
Cool work by Ignited LA. Painfully valiant though, given that we've never thought much about the LA Weekly, and now we associate it with the struggle of by-weeklies to remain relevant in an increasingly by-the-Tweet kind of world.
And that's pretty much all the PR people have going for it. The idea behind "Recess is on" is for Morgan Hotel Group to look like a bad-ass place to party amidst the crippling buzzkill of a recession.
See minimalist rebel prints:
o Don't Jump. Dance.
o Fuck the recession. Powerful in brevity.
o Fuck the recession -- reprise. This ad also includes a letter written by Morgan Hotel Group to a personified Recession, flippantly declaring its intention to raise hell and whatnot. "Fuck off" is written at bottom in surprisingly girly script. (I think a sharp, all-caps and slightly Nicholson-esque "FUCK OFFFFFFFFFfff" would have done the job better.)
The website, linked above, also includes an epilepsy-inducing :60 video that'll be projected upon some unfortunate building. Or not. Word has it the creative will be changed and repeated use of "fuck" will be scrubbed.
"Whatever happened to defiance?" the rep from Pronto Stockholm asked us. Well, fuck if we know.
Italian newspaper 'L'Unità', originally founded in 1924 by Marxist Antonio Gramsci as the official paper of the Italian Communist Party, has relaunched and rebranded with a new campaign created by "controversial" Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani who worked on the United Colors of Bentton campaign.
Some have labeled the ad sexist. Concita de Gregorio, first female head of the paper doesn't agree, saying, "I don't think it's right to use a woman image to sell, for example, cars. But in this case, I think it's perfect. Since two months, this newspaper is controlled by the body and the head of a woman, me, so in this case I think is pertinent to use a woman's image."
Hmm. Interesting logic indeed tying the mini skirted body of the woman in the ad to her position as "head" of the paper.
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Appearing today in USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, Stihl offers confidence to wary consumers that, of late, hear nothing but bad news about the economy. With so many portfolios in shambles, Stihl promises to be a sharp investment in today's crazy market.
Say what? Is that a chainsaw in the ad? So, like, the solution is to take a chainsaw to your portfolio and dramatically carve it up because, given Wall Street, anything less would be wimpy?
Oh wait, Stihl isn't a financial management firm. It makes power tools. And not just any crappy power tools like the ones you can find cheaply priced at Home Depot or Lowe's. Nope. Stihl is an investment, not an expenditure because, unlike the cheap tools you have you buy over and over because they always break, Stihl is a life long investment. Or so the ad would have us believe.
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