Apparently, it's just us but we really like that house campaign Advertising Age is running which features media planner Nicole Lee who babbles on endlessly in that typical valley girlish accent about her inebriated night with some creative at Nobu. To hear it you have to visit Adverting Age and reload a few times to get the banner to appear. If any Adrants reader thinks they can create an equally interesting or even more entertaining ad that centers on why people read Adrants, we wouldn't dissuade you from sending it in and perhaps running it on the site. Or if your feeling witty, create a spoof of the Advertising Age campaign and we'll have fun with that too.
 For years. we've seen the very utilitarian ads for that closet shelf company, California Closets. That utilitarian approach always seemed appropriate since closet shelving is, well, utilitarian. It seems someone over at California Closets got bored just showing pictures of their shelving in ads which were usually placed unceremoniously in the back of many newspaper's Sunday magazine. A frustrated California Closets marketing person apparently stood up and said, "Dammit, we want some far forward right hand page action!" to which the Sunday magazines replied, "Dammit, we don't want any crappy utilitarian closet shelving ads ruining the front of our preciously wannabe culturistically fashionista-like magazine pages" to which California Closets screamed,"Dammit, we need to get ourselves some hip, vapid looking, ridiculously dressed models and drape them across the ad and, like, just kinda show our shelving in the background" to which the Sunday magazines said, "Cool, we'll take your money now for this ad we know people are gonna look at and go 'what the fuck are they selling here?'" To which we say, well, we've said enough.
OK. Think Mentos. Think Doublemint Twins. Think Mr. Charmin. OK. Got it? In the right mood? Now you're ready to view this new cheese-fest campaign from Duval Guillaume celebrating the return of Bazooka Bubble Gum. It comes complete with TV commercials (which you can see on the website), a music video by Brooklyn-based music group Tha Heights, a website, online, events and viral marketing. The campaign centers on the song, originally called "Choo'n Gum" recored by Teresa Brewster in the fifties, which has, for years, been popular with summer camp girls who changed the lyrics to "Bazooka-Bazooka Bubblegum." Since we never went to a girls summer camp - other than to sneak in once to visit that cute girl we wished we'd had the nerve to ask out when camp was over - we've never heard the original song and we have no idea how cool or uncool it was and, well, is. Any camper girls out there? Let us know.
more »
Advertising for Peanuts has launched Ad Mashup, a site where Art Directors can throw the creative brief and the client out the window, mashup various ads into their own personal works of art and share the results with the rest of the ad community. This is a great site to play around with while listening to your traffic manager drone on about what's due when knowing full well nothing will ever be delivered on time.
Apparently, as indicated by this very sparsely attended ad:tech Chicago 2006 session, not many people are intrested in listening to creative types hyping their most recent creative endeavors. Moderating the collection of creatives, Click Here ACD Brian Linder, DesignKitchen CD Sam landers, Arc Worldwide Group CD Tim Irvine and AvenueA Razorish Disciplne lead (whatever that is) Brooke Nanberg, was Program Partners SVP David Hutchinson.
Landers, the most "creative looking" of the bunch, took the audience though the very Flashtastic work he had done for Motorola to promote the brand and, well, I'm not sure what else. The most telling bit of education here was the utterance by Landers, "oh, it's still loading." Linder shared the work his agency did for high end tequila Patron. Unfortunately, the campaign consisted mostly of low brow humor - not exactly the approach to position a high end brand. His agency also created a site, simplyperfect.com, that carried the campiagn's theme of debate but enabling people to take two side of an issue and post it for others to comment upon.
Irvine shared work for Cadillac that attempted to take the "old" out and inject the car with some "badass" as one critic said while describing the new Cadillacs. Irvine created a fairly cool online car racing game that appeared to be engaging. Within the first month of the campaign the site got 170,000 page views, 57,000 visitors and 150,000 downloads. Nanberg, in explaining her work for AT&T's Digital Lifestyle center - a site that illustrates how AT&T integrates with life, suffered the unfortunate side effect of Flashturbation. Pages took forever to load. Pages hung. Pages froze. And the kicker is the site actually has a Troubleshooting link right up top as if it was in the plan that many people would have trouble viewing this site. The one shining nugget she left us with as if it were an earth shattering insight was "creative is non-linear." Um. OK.
more »
Here is, perhaps, one of the most uninteresting car commercials we've seen in, well, ever. Trying to highlight the engineering feats of the new Lexus ES 350, Team One Advertising, along with Digital Domain, have created spot with an oddly mismatched voiceover, awkward pacing and the inclusion of special "computer aided design" effects intended to reinforce the spot's concept but, at least to us, don't. No doubt the digital effect and production of this spot are impressive but they can't make up for the less than exciting message the spot tries to convey.
Slathered in self adoration and needlessly explaining its creation, this Nike site that captures Tiger Wood's golf swing while providing links to the products he's using would be a far better experience if it didn't take over 30 seconds explaining how it was created in a remote (somehow better than a non-remote) sound studio using a military defense camera that shoots 4,000 digital stills per second. Crap. Just film the fucker with a video camera and be done with it. And leave the preening self-glorification and self-congratulatory back slaps for those all important "concepting" session while playing foosball and trying to pick up this week's hot intern.
This Land Rover spot is actually pretty good but we had to watch it a few times to make sure the fast paced message drilled its way into our skull. The spot highlights the vehicles features in s manner that is far more interesting than some spokemodel pointing them out of some baritone announcer listing them off while the camera pans over the car doing these things all by itself. It just seems this spot puts a bit more reality into the car's features. Although, it's unclear just how long all those people could last stuffed into the vehicle. Unless you're a kid, there's not a vehicle out there that has seats other than the front that are all that comfortable for long periods of time.
There's nothing like a campaign focused towards women in mini skirts laying drunk on the sidewalk with their panties exposed to get the world writing about it. Yup. The Suffolk (England - the only place this kind of campaign could happen) police, continuing their "Lock Em' Inn" campaign which urges people not to misuse alcohol, have published a Conde Nasty-like magazine called Safe! that, through its tongue-in-cheek lifestyle editorial approach, continues to urge women not to drink too much, not to wander around alone and to make sure they get home safely - with their pants on.
more »
Slingbox, a device that allows you to watch anything from your home-based cable box or DVR while anywhere in the world through an Internet connection, has a new competitor. Sony is launching Location Free which pretty much does exactly what Slingbox does. Unfortunately, Sony's website for this product doesn't do a very good job explaining the product whereas Slingbox does. Sony's site is heavy on Flash and light on clear product description. Slingbox provides a simple site with a simple to understand (albeit a bit informercial-ish) product tour video that clearly explains exactly what the product does.
more »
|
@adrants
@stevehall
|
