Remember Boost Mobile, the Nextel spin-off that spent the last three years molesting street culture under the tagline "Where You At?"
Hip-hop's run out of milkable teats so Boost's taken shelter in the ironic, determinedly awkward humor of suburbia. And Skittles commercials.
"Coroner" and "Bicycle" explain how Boost Mobile rawks, not because the value proposition is good (would you rather have "no hidden fees" or play iPhone Ocarina?), but because some things out there are worse. The problem is, you're left with little more than nausea over the still-lingering memories of unkempt armpit hair and breakfast burritos a la Poe. You will have absolutely no memory of Boost's merits.
Which I guess is how it should be.
180LA's responsible for the ads, which fall under a campaign called UNwrong'D. AdFreak's right. That apostrophe -- the whole concept, really -- is like cyanide.
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YouTube's given rise to more than its fare share of pro-bono talking heads, so it's not often we watch any one "thought leader" video in full. But "The Command Economy," an ad manifesto from Carlos Mandelbaum's Carnival of Ideas, gave us pause. (He's got these expressions that grab you! And we love that musical text-reader gimmick.)
Listen with audiovisual fixation as he explains how the '80s ruined everything (which we already knew), and how advertisers' bad-ass commanding attitude have something major in common with the Berlin Wall.
It's tasty bait, and we wanna find out where he's taking us.
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It's called "Ken Block Gymkhana Practice." (But what is Gymkhana?, you ask.)
We didn't really get the big deal, but that was before we realized our fingers had burrowed into the glass tabletop. Then Ken Block did donuts around a guy on a Segway, and it was like, "Ohhh."
(It's racer porn. Plenty sexier than that one time you watched two Ford Fiestas tango in London. Even if you're not a speed junkie, the handling depicted in Gymkhana is fit to give you tingles.)
Mad Media put the video together in collaboration with Ken Block, DC Shoes and Subaru. Stats listed below.
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Adgabber's Elyse drew our attention to this fresh online ad for Audi, which features an extreme skier doing crazy shit all over San Francisco -- a city known for its treacherously steep hills, railed streets, and slow-moving, trolley-shaped obstacles. Oh -- and lack of snow.
The German ad is a promotion for Audi's quattro Gefuhl. We don't know how or why, but there you have it. Fun work by Kemper Trautmann.
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Okay. See the hands at left grasping greedily for the giant diamond? That's supposed to represent the mobile web ... and the faceless villains that will immediately try to exploit it.
This is the first of a three-part video series that explains the whole "4G=IP" thing to people that buy tech items, such as iPods, primarily because they like the pretty colours.
We're suckers for smooth animated magic -- and for Cisco in general -- so we kept our eyes on the piece, which was a comfortable length and not too stuffed with strange-sounding geek noises. It's possible we even learned things.
That squeaky Adventures in Odyssey-sounding narrator kinda pissed us off though.
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In this cockle-warming story about a hyperventilating geek who now wears onesies and gets his pick of trophies (both metal and collagen-enhanced), Tony Stewart reinforces the power of Swagger.* The Old Spice product previously de-geeked Brian Urlacher and LL Cool J.
Actually, LL Cool J's still pretty square. Sometimes getting all muscly to stop being square will only make you squarer.
But we digress. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the Swagger campaign. It's starting to feel a little less highlariously kitsch-tacular and more like Axe/Lynx. Which sucks because once upon a time, both brands were uniquely neat, and now they're almost exactly alike, except Old Spice is too red and Axe/Lynx is too potent.
Work by Wieden + Kennedy/Portland -- which succeeded, as always, in stimulating provocative discussion on YouTube.
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Feed Company sent us some online video magics for Frito-Lay, the good folks that bring you both Sun Chips and beef jerky. (They also own Cracker Jack. Now that's just impressive.)
Inspired, wethinks, by their own chip-and-dip combinations, the campaign premise is Made for Each Other. Each painfully adorable video features a piece of technology on that lonely and familiar quest for The One.
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Rebel Virals did something we imagined was impossible: it created a B2B online video for Microsoft that is actually funny -- not because it's sad, but because it's funny.
We're just happy we were alive to see it.
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Greek mobile phone network Cosmote is promoting its social merits with "Our world is you" -- shorthand for in our world, you can do whatever you want.
The ad aims to represent "the everyday as you see it," and is supposed to be a snapshot of the world from the perspectives of different individuals.
But mostly we just felt confused. A guy walks out into an ordinary street. Suddenly there are cowboys, and a space ship -- by gad, is that a giant disembodied heart?! -- then it snows, shortly before everything dissolves into a big awesome rave.
We did the only thing we could do under the circumstances: we tore out our brains and stepped on them.
Lively stuff, though!
Agency: Bold Ogilvy. Song: anti-war hymn "I'd Love to Change the World" by Ten Years After.
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Team One gave us a "YouTube sneak preview" (wait, what?) of its All-New! 2010 Lexus RX ads.
The theme of each is "driver inspired" -- think magical cranes pulling obstacles out of traffic, or an assembly line in your house. All this is to say the Lexus is a perfectly calibrated luxury instrument whose specs revolve around you.
Visually interesting and slightly surreal, as per usual. We really liked "Intersection."
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