Unless one was there, one can't really imagine what life was like in South Africa during Apartheid. But Wieden + Kennedy hopes to bring one fact to light. During 30 years of imprisonment, political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, on Robben Island formed a soccer league. And that fact became the genesis of a commercial for the 2010 FIFA World Cup on ESPN.
ESPN Marketing Director Seth Ader explains the campaign saying, "Our goal with this spot is to educate people about the historical significance of the World Cup being played in South Africa."
The initial spot will be followed by four other which will roll out prior to the start of the World Cup on June 11.
Kind of powerful when you take it all in.
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TBWA Toronto is out with a decidedly different car commercial for the Nissan Sentra SE-R. No more windy mountain roads. No more 360 showroom shots. And no more talking cars with German accents. Nope. Now we have Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift in the suburbs.
Very cool actually as the 1/10-size Sentra was filmed using another miniature vehicle and a miniature helicopter.
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As thanks to those who will attend the Tribeca Film Festival this year, Ogilvy & Mather put together this ad showing us just how difficult it would have been or them to bring the conference to us had we not attended. It's even got Robert Dinero (Yea, we know it's De Niro Apparently, no one got the joke). Of course, it doesn't look like he would have come to us even if we had wanted him to.
CommunityAmerica Credit Union is out with a new Callahan Creek-created campaign. Using live action, motion graphics and computer animation, the campaign aims to set the credit union apart from your average bank. Three commercials feature fictional CommunityAmerica members, as if they are speaking to a large group at a town hall meeting.
After we got over the fact the one entitled "Sarah" wasn't an homage to another, slightly more (in)famous Sarah of the political variety, we came to enjoy the down homey-ness of the messaging. And while one might think for a minute these people are about to launch into an, "I'm Sarah and I'm an alcoholic" soliloquy, each of the three personalities does a nice job explaining the benefits of Community America.
The campaign will run through 2010 on local and cable stations throughout the Kansas City area.
Oy. Sometimes it's just really hard to start work in the morning. Oh wait. It's the afternoon now. See what I mean? Anyway, no one cares about our work habits so let's talk about a new Old Spice commercial from Wieden + Kennedy for Odor Blocker Body Wash.
The commercial features another retired football player, Terry Crews who, most recently, played the Julius character in Everybody Hates Chris. There's three commercial in all. One, called Flex, has Crews in the shower doing a Mr. T routine to illustrate the odor blocking qualities of the product.
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- Southwest and AirTran continue to taunt each other. This time with cow suits.
- Cramer-Krasselt overshares letting us in on the fact Crocs have a kinky foot fetish.
- And in the over-thinking category, a sweet little Folgers ad is sexist. Shut up. Just shut up.
- For its eightieth birthday, Ad Age asked VCU Brandcenter students to re-imagine its logo.
- SapientNitro is out with a new site for Coca-Cola's Powerade. Using "deep-dive" technology, viewers can interact with the movie and find points where they can see inside the minds and bodies of each character in the story about a football match.
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"These streets are reflections of ourselves." That's a line in one of the commercials from a new LevLane-created campaign for the Philadelphia Recycling Office. There are five spots in all. Each is the result of a 75-person audition of word performances from Philadelphia area artists.
With the tagline, Un Litter Us, the campaign aims to get people to care about their neighborhoods by informing them they are what the residents make of them.
In addition to TV, radio, transit and, the campaign will also include street poetry events, Facebook and Twitter presences, signage-designated "Litter Free School Zones," and block-by-block community mobilization drives.
Three of the commercial can be seen here, here and here.
Um. Where is the logic in this spot? Guy sits on dock. Guy chants, "Cigarette. Cigarette. Cigarette." While chanting, shark jumps out of water and begins to tear guy's arm off. Guy continues to chant, oblivious to shark tearing his arm off. That is until he pops a Nicorette lozenge which, one assumes, helps him stop obsessing about smoking a cigarette. So he can realize a shark is tearing his arm off.
Of course, by the time this idiot realized he was obsessing about a cigarette while a shark was attacking him, quite a bit more than his arm would have been torn of.
OK, yea, we get the whole cigarette obsession thing. It's over-powering. It distracts. It's a desire that must be met. And Nicorette is supposed to help assuage that desire ostensibly so you can come to the realization your arm is being torn of by a shark.
Of course in a scenario like this, you'd be dead before you came to that realization.
When you move to the middle of upstate nowhere, you become privy to some seriously wacky shit. Like yesterday's Live Bait vending machine sighting. And the daily onslaught of local Hyundai car dealer Billy Fuccillo. Maybe you've already caught these over the years but everyday the man barks into the camera and utters his long-time catchphrase, "It's HUUUUUUGE!" And he really does say it that way. Actually, he says ,"It's HUUUUGJA!" You just have to see it to believe it.
Of course it's no surprise car dealers are famous for this sort of idiocy. But, as with all advertising, if you can latch onto something memorable, you might as well go for it. And in acknowledgment of Fuccillo's pervasiveness, his advertising has spawned many a parody. There's Fuccillo Blow. No One Likes Billy Fuccillo. There's Ka-Bam from a competing dealership. There's Fuccillo-style bible sales. And then there's the HUUUUUGE outtakes. And make sure you don't miss the HUUUUUGE mistake he made on air when he said, "Go fuck your wife." No, seriously.
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Looking as out of place as a polar bear on the Lost island, the King is, along with MTV, making his way to Spring Break to hang with the hotties, the hunks and the rest of the idiots who will, no doubt, drink themselves into a stupor and cause their parents to wonder what the hell they were thinking when they sent checks for tens of thousands of dollars to institutions of higher learning.
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