Questions Raised Over Whether Hillary Darkened Obama's Pigment

For all her noxious crying and whatnot, Hillary Clinton is a well-honed jungle predator. "Winning. Winning, winning, that's my measure of success -- winning," she barked recently.

Having demonstrated yesterday that she's still a viable contender for the presidency, the question arises: what does it take to win, win, win like Hillary?

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For Hardcore Green, Revisit Penguin Basics

To persuade people to Do the Green Thing, Play With Us put together this documentary about penguins in Antarctica. Except the penguins aren't penguins; they're naked people that seem at least partially catatonic.

All this to get us to huddle? We've seen cozier arguments.

Lightning Bolt Terrorizes, Body Spray Saves the Day

Check out this crazy Dove viral based on Japanese puppet theatre. It reminded us of that scene in Funny Face where Audrey dons black garb and does interpretive dance at the existentialist bar. Except imagine the protagonist is Ugly Betty, and body odor -- not materialism -- is the source of the world's problems.

Put together by Ogilvy Brazil for Dove Invisible Dry.

Funny How Different Things Look When It's that Time of Month

Always is running this campaign where it's printing feel-good phrases like "Have a happy period" over the wax paper on maxi pads. We didn't think much about it until we saw this letter, allegedly written to P&G by a woman gone totally apeshit over it. Her first thought upon tearing open a new pad and seeing "Have a happy period" was "Are you fucking kidding me?"

A really sunny excerpt:

FYI, unless you're some kind of sick S&M freak girl, there will never be anything "happy" about a day in which you have to jack yourself up on Motrin and Kahlua and lock yourself in your house just so you don't march down to the local Walgreen's armed with a hunting rifle and a sketchy plan to end your life in a blaze of glory.

We giggled about it.

And then it happened.

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Royal Enfield Brings the 'Tripper' Out in Everybody

We just got a ton of creative from a new Royal Enfield campaign in Delhi. It's called "Trip" -- not to be confused with what happens when you ingest too many of the wrong kind of mushrooms.

Pretty standard profile-of-a-user stuff. Each one has a picture of a dude, his name and his motorcycle, followed by a brief timeline of "whoa!" and "damn!" activities. Each timeline ends with "Tripping ever since," which refers to when they started riding Royal Enfields.

Profile campaigns are sort of like the Zodiac. If you add enough variation and disseminate the ads across enough media, you're bound to trigger an irrational "Hey, that's TOTALLY ME!" in anybody curious enough to linger on the copy.

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Coldwell Tries Funny with Founding Father Staring Contest

There are few things more lame than a competitive staring match between two non-blinking pros, unless those pros are also inanimate objects.

Watch helplessly as the portraits of Coldwell Banker's founding fathers, Colbert Coldwell and Arthur Banker, try to out-stare each other. Well, sort of. They're side by side, so they can't really stare.

It could be worse. (Imagine the moving-mouth and eyeball-hockey effects that challenged advertisers usually impose on stills.)

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Icons Transcend Time in Converse Sneaks

To celebrate 100 years in footwear, Converse is welding new icons to old ones in a campaign called "Connectivity."

According to Complex, "cultural heroes" like James Dean, Hunter S. Thompson and Sid Viscious will fuse feet (neat touch!) with Common, Dwyane Wade and Billie Joe Armstrong. Sort of like paper dolls.

See more here.

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GEICO Gecko Makes Cameo at Houston Zoo

Possibly because he proved such a smashing success in San Diego, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums has brought a man dressed like GEICO's Gecko to the Houston Zoo along with a live gecko exhibit.

Houston Zoo director Rick Barongi called GEICO "a great partner for zoos and aquariums." What?! GEICO on best behaviour amongst wee kiddies and disgruntled animals? We believe it. If we were the most visible insurance option at a zoo, we would be too.

On Fancy Feet of Foucan, KSwiss Hits the Running Scene

To promote its hot new Ariake running shoe, K-Swiss enlisted the face of Sebastien Foucan, the founder of free running. ("Free running" is when you go jogging and, instead of hauling ass around an obstacle, you do an impressive Ranma-style aerial flip over it. Seriously.)

The print ads are very Zen. There's no copy, just images of Foucan being Foucan and a small K-Swiss logo at bottom. They were put together by Perfect Fools which is based in Sweden and the US. The ads will be accompanied by a wannabe-viral (which we haven't yet seen) and a website.

See Foucan variant. We're not really sure whether people will put two and two together and go, "Okay, Ariake = running! Got it." Because we were all, "Acrobatic skater gear?"

Coke Zero Drags Cultural Differences Down to Lowest Organ Denominator

Here's another weird Coke Zero spot that elaborates on Coke's newfound fixation with body parts. (If you're all "huh?", see the Brazilian tongue spot we covered yesterday.) Just so you know -- if Coke Zero collaborates in ANY WAY with The Vagina Monologues, we're going on strike.

It's in English this time, so hurrah. The characters: a statuesque Coke Zero (sort of like a golden calf), an ornery French eyeball, a bull-headed British tongue and a pothead Californian finger.

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