The battle of the sexes gets all literal on yo' ass in "Men vs Women" by 72andSunny. Propelled forth by the challenge of racking up the most kilometres for their gender, Nike-decked runners take to the streets in the playful spirit of competition. (We totally eat this stuff up. Remember those Mia Hamm vs. Michael Jordan Gatorade ads?)
Neat thing is, this isn't just an ad. If you're rooting for any particular team, and provided your knees are in fine shape, join in the fun at NikePlus.com. (Digital material by AKQA.)
Note how everybody seems to own a Macbook Pro. o_O Nike and Apple have collaborated before on a Nike + iPod clothing line, so it should come as no surprise they're still bedtime buddies. Song's cool, too: Run (I'm a Natural Disaster) by Gnarls Barkley.
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Skittles continues its mile-high "WTF?" spree with "Transplant," which illustrates a new pack of cross-breed candies with a guy who recovers from an operation -- only to find he's been crossed with a dude named Jose.
There's this weird moment where a pack of Skittles gets tossed hither and yon, then they eat them while facing each other and delicately licking -- kissing, really -- their own fingers.
By TBWA\Chiat\Day\NY. See its last little bit of magic.
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"A Lighter World," where a couple pops open a bottle of Mahou and does a gravity-defying dance, is deliciously infectious.
By Agosto; featuring a cover of Pump the Jam by Canadian band Lost Fingers. (I realize that sounds not-very-savoury, but with a guitar in the background and a tap-dancing featurette the song is surprisingly fresh.)
Tagline: "There's a lighter world" -- riffing off the Premium Light status of this particular Spanish bev.
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So who says this new-fangled social media, web 2.0 stuff doesn't work? Not Diggnation's Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht who, on January 16th interviewed Jimmy Fallon, will, in return, appear on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tonight.
Watch them. They're good. But if you miss it and are going to SXSW, you can see them do a live show at the Bigg Digg Shindigg at Stubb's Saturday night beginning at 6:30PM.
Thanksgiving. Christmas. Valentine's Day. *slap* Easter. Please, make it stop! It's like one holiday ends and another begins. So, yea, Easter's on the way and so are the Easter-themed campiagns like this one from Mars Canada for M&M. Created by Proximity Canada, BBDO Toronto and Firstborn, this one has been dubbed "Canada's most Speck-tacular Egg hunt."
With print, TV (see one of the spots here), POP and online, people are urged to collect M&M eggs hidden around the web (a virtual egg hunt!) and in stores with PIN codes to use as entrance to drawing to win a trip to New York, Las Vegas or Orlando.
There's a site, four minisites and banners on MSN.ca, Yahoo.ca, MySpace.ca and others all with PIN codes to hunt for. Have at it.
Here, Nordpol envisions a secret world populated by IKEA furniture.
Hrm. Wonder whose unfortunate job it was to parse out the setup manual for all those levitating lawn chairs. The spoon fish were neat, though.
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2K Sports promotes video game MLB2K9 with an ad where a Giants player schools his (adorably earnest) virtual self in both work and play.
It's witty work, a big plus considering there's no genuinely exciting way to hype a video game about baseball.
Agency: Ground Zero.
UPDATE: If you'd like a more mundane version of this piece, click here.
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Suicide Action Montreal needed to get its message of suicide prevention out to a jaded province. Faced with the challenge, the clever cats at Touche! phd, Sid Lee and Astral Media concluded there's no better way to illustrate suicide than to bring an abrupt end to things people like.
The campaign rolled out in two ways. To start, popular programs randomly went black to make way for the following (roughly translated) message: "Does this premature ending surprise you? Imagine if it happened to the life of someone close."
After a few seconds of darkness, the episodes started rolling again. Same thing happened with popular songs on the radio.
Refreshingly out-of-box. Check out examples of both the TV and radio executions (bad pun!) on the Touche! phd blog.
McCann Erickson/Madrid's "Encounter" is an increasingly emotional progression toward the meeting of a centenerian and a just-born child. The music, timely words and that final culmination -- wedding the tail-end of a life to the naissance of new -- brought us near tears.
And then we saw the Coca-Cola silhouette. And it was like, "Jesus Christ, this came from the same people that brought us Happiness Factory."
Nothing against Coke, whose ads are consistently good, but there has to've been a more graceful way to incorporate the brand into this message.
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To kick off its "engineering smiles for 50 years" campaign, PING puts founder Karstein Solheim on the platform. The work is a more bearable version of the sap-saturated Sprint/Dan Hesse material: it's just a simple, no-frills voiceover with product imagery.
Unpretentious, nice and neat. By The Martin Agency, whose class-act status was heavy on the spin last week as the result of news that it would lay off staffers -- and give competing agencies up to half the shafted Martinites' first month's pay in exchange for hiring them.
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