Ad land has this incredible talent for bastardizing beautiful things, and doing it in a way where we're like, hey, that's kind of cool.
That's the feeling you get when you watch "Burger Grease Art," where a guy uses the grease from non-Arby's burgers to create a giant reproduction of Da Vinci's enigmatic lady.
Across the bottom of the video -- which we really couldn't help sitting through, even as we clutched our stomachs and began to dry-heave -- is a link to burgergreaseart.com, which tackles your line of sight with three appealingly matte Arby's Roastburgers. (For some reason, we kinda hoped for an Etch-a-Sketchy painting game, except with grease, but no dice.)
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American Apparel peels its sleaze off for a second to make a public service announcement: "American Apparel is ... Jobs."
This crucial message is illustrated by a muscly bald dude who appears to be in the stock room. Which begs the question: where'd all AA's eye candy go? In a clime this dire, is all that tap-worthy ass just unwilling to lift its own load?
Dockers finally produces an ad that enables you to realize a fantasy you've probably had more than once: the ability to shake the living crap out of it.
The ad features urban street dancer Orbitron (Dufon) of Circle of Fire. He'll appear in iPhone games "iBasketball," "iGolf" and "iBowl," as well as lifestyle application iTV, AdAge says. At various intervals, users have to shake the iPhone to get Dufon to bust a move.
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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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For client Puma, Droga5 produced "Lift," an ad in which an avatar-like couple engages in a sultry courting ritual where nothing's really what it seems, and everything changes, and expectations between man and woman differ -- and it's all out there for you to see, projected on the walls and riffing off their bodies.
Didn't do much for us. If you wanna play girl-meets-boy, you'd be better served by the naughty-naughty Levi's or even childlike, slightly macabre Scion.
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Musicians Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon joined forces under the name NASA (North America/South America) to release their first album, The Spirit of Apollo, which has been in-progress since '03.
Promotion strikes me as general and disorganized, but the pair has many talented hands behind it. According to the pressie, the Apollo album was conceived "with the righteous goal of bringing people together through music and art" -- as a result, it's heavy with surprising collaborations and interesting visual media.
Tom Waits growls over Kool Keith, Karen O taunts while Ol' Dirty Bastard gives shout-outs to Wu Tang and N.A.S.A from the grave, and David Byrne, Chuck D and others expound on the evils of "Money."
Other collaborators include Method Man, Seu Jorge, Kanye West, Santogold, George Clinton. Then there's the charmed director team: Syd Garon, Paul Griswold, 3Legged Legs and Flourescent Hill.
Artists that donated paint and pens to the animated music videos include Shepard Fairey, Sage Vaughn, The Date Farmers, Mark Gonzales, Marcel Dzama and Splunny. Some also contributed original album cover designs, so CD buyers get five interchangeable covers per copy.
I realize this is a lot going on so I'm gonna just show you stuff. Here's the latest release, People Tree with David Byrne, Chali 2na (from J-5!) and art by Marcel Dzama. It's magically delicious.
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Riding Ad Land's current obsession with breaking into Guinness, Cricket has just produced the world's largest cell phone -- a gigantosaur Samsung Messager composed of "wood, metal, lights, wizardry, and love."
Video here.
The phone -- so big you risk cardiac arrest if you happen to be lying on it in vibrate mode -- kicks off Cricket's Get Some Respekt campaign. See it in person through March 15th in Chicago; the monster of mobile hits Philly on the 20th.
Orchestrated by Seattle's Cultural Engineers and events firm NEVERSTOP.
We've all heard the legend that JK Rowling sketched the birth of Harry Potter out on a diner napkin while scratching by on welfare. The iconic "I Love New York" campaign was supposedly conceived in similarly humble circumstances -- on somebody's crumpled serviette.
To leverage the power of this unlikely muse, the School of Visual Arts re-imagines diner napkins, toilet paper, sugar sachets and other incidental scraps as college-ruled paper.
Across the bottom of each sheet is the message, "Think. School of Visual Arts." Nice, simple and instantly-engaging. We wish we had some doodle-worthy napkin now, and we're not sure we even remember how to use a pen.
Work by Knarf/New York; more photos at Toxel.com.
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.
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