This Zappos spot, where a smiling courier hand-delivers a little bit of happy to customers in a small neighborhood, is infectiously charming.
I like how it brings the brand offline and makes it feel down-home and local: it's your friendly online shoe conglomerate! This approach would ring disingenuous for most internet giants, but Zappos has a coupla things going for it:
1) Getting a package in the mail gives people warm tinglies.
2) Its service really is just that good. The first time I placed an order with Zappos, the shoes didn't fit, and they sent a replacement pair even before I returned the old ones. "Just drop them in the mailbox whenever you can," the rep said (I could hear him smiling!), and boy did that feel nice. Cartwheel-nice, even.
Read more about Zappos' ad efforts riiiiiiiight here.
- It's the best of this year's Plaid Nation tour! Diggin' the chick who says plaid is God's favorite color.
- Anna Kournikova's still around. I like how her Maxim bio reads, "Before simply being superhot, Anna was a superhot tennis player." Put "simply being superhot" on your resume next time you get shafted, then see who throws sponsorship money at you.
- Naked guy runs across America.
- Last Visa "Go World" spot by TBWA/Chiat/Day. Michael Phelps: he keeps going and going and going and going...
- Check out Google minus Google. Running a search without getting results from YouTube, Blogger, or Knol feels sort of ... fresh.
Imagine if the Coke Happiness Factory got hijacked by dancing Reds that prefer fruity vodka to sugar water. You're probably picturing "Airship," the latest spot for Stoli Blakberi, put together by Publicis/London and production company Stink/Psyop. Music by Prokofiev.
Part of what keeps me drinking Stoli is unwavering affection for its advertising. On TV or in print, it's always got the same feel: over-the-top, cartoony, propagandistic. Disney's "It's a Small World After All" meets the hoarse ballads and frosty grit of Moscow.
Stoli is a proud, heavy-handed romantic, and taking a swig is like surrendering to history: the beautifying dizziness, concrete on your lips, bile in your throat. It's a suffering, and a brand, baptized in nostalgia.
Who knew people still read TV Guide? Apparently enough still do to make it worthwhile for ABC to buy out all the ad space in the August 25 issue in advance of the upcoming fall television season. The network will buy 21 pages in the issue and insert a DVD for New York and Los Angeles subscribers and newsstand sales.
When a movie chooses not to preview for critics, it's almost a foregone conclusion the movie will be bad. Hopefully, that isn't the case with The CW's 90210 which has also decided not to screen the show for advertisers or the media.
"Classic" 90210 was a good show...for the first few years. Over time, it got worse but people kept watching. All the way through the cast's high school years, their college years and the first few years of their "real world" life. The cast became like Twitter friends. No matter how mundane their lives were, you simply couldn't turn of the "weekly update." It was an unhealthy addiction.
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Here's that Chevy Traverse ad that keeps playing during the Olympics. I sat through it twice yesterday and didn't really get the correlation between Shirtless Man Lovingly Laundering and Chevy Traverse with Folding Seats.
Twitter's not keen on it either.
Fortunately, there's YouTube. Scroll down to the comments. Past all the complaining about double standards and whatnot, someone explains that both the man and the Traverse are "beautiful, useful, and everything you ever wanted ... and them [sic] some."
Ohhhhh. Suddenly the tagline makes sense.
For client Little Debbie, Marcos Ambrose joins forces with a talking koala. They're so cute together, it's oddly gratifying to see them draw housewives' attention at the supermarket or co-pilot a race while koala eats Zebra Cakes.
"I thought you only ate eucalyptus leaves?" Ambrose demands, slightly miffed, right before he peels out onto the track.
Collective awwwwwwwww. Don't you just want to rub their tummies and feed them a Devil Square?
The spots went live in tandem with racing season. So far Ambrose isn't doing too terribly, no thanks to his choice of snack food, but a talking marsupial riding shotgun (think of the crumbs!) probably keeps things interesting.
See more of their routine on Little Debbie's Miles of Smiles website, put together by Luckie & Co., which also did the creative.
And unlike other cars, which wave their ostentatious extras in your face, you can't even see the excess tooshums. Because you know why? It's made up of service, so says the tagline: "The extra Volkswagen part on every Volkswagen. Volkswagen service."
Nice repetition of brand name!
By production firm Czar, NL and DDB for Volkswagen.
This new spot for Nissan (:30 and :60) immediately piqued interest: one car circulates a vinyl album. Interesting retro tones punctuate the background. The camera pans out, revealing many vehicles circulating many vinyls. It's an image that brings Warhol to mind.
What's going on? What'll happen next? Will Nissan pull a Dell?
Nah. One jalapeno-red maverick races off its track (cut to big Nissan logo!), encouraging others to do the same. (A vaguely familiar idea. Got a quote for me, Mazda?) They briefly fall in line, a tactic car advertisers seem to love, then park with a screech in haphazard fashion.
The 350Z, arguably Nissan's sexiest model, pulls abruptly into the foreground. The tagline follows: "Escape the pattern. Nissan."
Bleh.
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"After finding a Leatherman on the ocean floor, our hero transformed himself from clawless freak into BIONIC LOBSTER: the handiest lobster alive."
Awesome premise -- one-clawed lobster gets new lease on life -- by STICK and MOVE/Philly for client Leatherman. (If Finding Nemo taught us anything, it's that everyone loves a story about broken fish prevailing over life's hard knocks.) Happily, they went all the way with it: See spot where Bionic Lobster fends for his life, MacGuyver-style, in a seafood restaurant. And there are comic books! Three parts so far, and if you bother to download the PDFs, well-made and funny too.
Looking forward to seeing more stuff by STICK and MOVE.
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