For EA's Hellgate London, Wieden+Kennedy, Portland enlisted production company Biscuit Filmworks to create these spots that remind us of both The Blair Witch Project and the death of LonelyGirl15.
Something about tearing limb from limb and not dying in here. Lots of camera fuzz and shakes. Each spot ends with the conviction-dripping statement, "I'm going to London." Ho hum.
Maybe it's just that threats made in English accents aren't super scary. Sure Snatch had blood and gore, but mainly it was rollicking laughs.
For Guinness, BBDO decided that instead of freely disseminating ads online or on TV, it would turn its media messages into prizes.
There's a Guinness ad hidden somewhere on the 'net and it is your job to find and launch it. ("Why us?" we wonder.) To do this, you have to unravel a mixed bag of clues, codes and puzzles.
The campaign involves a village of some sort. This is the mayor, Juan Ramon. (We like how you can hear sinister background laughter at the end.)
If the idea of hunting down a Guinness ad is irresistible and you're ready to jump on and go, you may also want to "peruse" (their words) this letter.
A college kid named Will is working with KFC to promote the company's Triple Dip Strips. See the challenges on Will It Spill.
The idea is the packaging will protect eaters from spills while enabling them to dip on the go. True to form, the package doesn't hold while Will rides a mechanical bull. Did we really expect it to? Well, kind of.
"Yup ... that's a spill," Will concludes, lying facedown and observing the mess he made all over the padded floor.
This is what Tupperware is for.
No, you don't have to move to Nevada. Durex is conducting a cattle call for condom testers, ostensibly -- MBP wryly adds -- to find out how its products are performing.
"Sexual intercourse enthusiasts" who volunteer at the Condom Tester site get a handy-dandy toolkit with vibrating rings, condoms and lubricants. One volunteer gets $1,000.
Try explaining that one to mom and dad.
Anyway, we of course have registered because we're always good sports where a noble cause is concerned. Post-registration, the brave are invited to The Pants Whisperer -- which we've seen -- and Propose the Ring -- which we wish we'd caught earlier, because damned if a vibrating ring isn't a better take on the De Beers manifesto.
To endear a "rising star" to the hearts of jaded Warriors fans, 72andSunny, LA gives us "Who is Monta Ellis?" for And 1.
Picture a grip of :30 and :15 second home videos of people unpacking your every childhood accomplishment. That's what this campaign is for Ellis, the point and shooting guard of our home basketball team. Filmed during a family reunion in Mississippi, the effort shines brightest when Ellis himself ruminates over his childhood tennis trophy and calls himself cold vicious.
Watch Quickness here. It's loaded with speculation among family and friends about where the kid got his slick from. You can almost feel that Mississippi heat. And while we still don't know too much about Ellis, we have a broader understanding of David Banner's state spirit.
MediaBuyerPlanner points us to a military recruitment ad campaign that accidentally appeared on GLEE.com (Gay, Lesbians and Everyone Else).
The armed forces still operate on a "don't ask, don't tell" basis, so it was with surprise when recruiters for the Army, Navy and Air Force discovered they've been pushing ads on a site so flamboyantly ... out.
The ads came from Community Direct -- GLEE's parent company -- as part of an alliance with Monster.com. Apparently the military buys some kind of package from Monster that grants their spots inclusion onto any of a number of represented community sites.
When military agents were told of the GLEE placements, they appeared astonished and pulled the ads.
Delivered with nary a wink, Reuters' Ian Sloan provides news coverage of Japan's Triumph-sponsored Show Me Your Sloggi Contest. Sloan's dry statement, "consumer priorities are shifting to different assets," leads to a woman explaining how everything has been done to breasts to make them more attractive and noticeable, interests are now shifting to women's backsides.
Triumph and Sloggi are well know for their cheekishly exploitive (did we just say that?) tactics for moving lingerie off the shelves. From No Smoking bras to Sloggi's pole dancers to Tiger bras to Sloggi's endless collection of stunts, the two companies are, for sure, fixated with the female ass.
Though very far from the likes of true ass queen, Vida Guerra, Kaho Watanabe is doing her best to uphold Japan's bottom line.
Subway is running a Seattle-based mobile promotion in tangent with Modiv Media. It launched at the Seattle Seahawks' home game yesterday.
Text-happy Seahawks fans had the chance to win a signed Seahawks helmet.
This does not make us want a sandwich, but we're overwhelmed by a craving for fish.
Here's an interesting premise for a movie: a kid who thinks he's from Mars and spends most of his time in a box. And who better to socialize him than John Cusack? Few adults suffer more adorably. For sex appeal, add Amanda Peet to the mix. How can you lose?
The film is called Martian Child, which you can learn all about at the Martian Child/Family Project website -- brought us by New Media Maze, Ltd.
The site lets families create time capsules -- er, "pods," to which they can add photos, videos and other documents. When you're done, your pod gets launched to virtual Mars, where other people can look through it.
We're going to guess that at the end of the film, irrefutable evidence will suggest that the kid actually is from Mars, and the grown-ups will have something to believe in again.
Final reactions to the last installment of the Crush, Toronto campaign for Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief:
- Roger, pt 3: If people wore costumes 365 days of the year, it wouldn't be cool, it would just be Second Life
- Bethany, pt 3: This clip was chillingly short. We think she is going to kill herself, or at least try, for attention's sake
- Glove Pond, the novel within the novel, pt 3: Gloria and her husband bond over dinner party sadism. We like where this is going
And we have no idea why these ads are now compelling us to buy this book. Maybe it's because we actually did wait anxiously for each installment. Or maybe the thought of poisoning people at a dinner party -- or at least making their tummies hurt -- is almost appealing. Or maybe, once upon a time, we did scribble Anarchy symbols onto office supply shop property with felt pens.
It's anybody's guess, really.
Catch parts one and two here.
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