Titus -- whose luxury mountain bikes can range between $3370 and $7495 -- hopes to appeal to young, budget-taut users with a campaign tagged "It's worth a second job."
Each print piece manages to be slightly humiliating without leaving the kiddie park. A delicate balance. See variants:
o Phone sex operators
o Nude model
Food for thought: with $7495, you could buy three Macbook Pros, 32 iPod touches or 94 white earbuds. (Lisa Simpson would die of envy!)
Or, hell, you could get one of these.
Not that we care where you spend your hard-earned shekels; we're just putting it in perspective.
By TDA ADVERTISING & DESIGN/Boulder.
Here's a pretty idea. To drive donations to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, Leo Burnett/Chicago and Starcom remind shoppers that "food shouldn't be a luxury."
To illustrate the point, ordinary items -- soup, broccoli, PB&J sandwiches -- are positioned as luxury goods, languishing in the manicured hands of luxe porcelain models.
The bottom portion of each piece invites viewers to donate what they can to the Depository. "Text MEALS to 90999 to give $5," it adds -- simple enough to do on impulse.
If you're in the Chi, expect to see these on CTA buses and rail cars from now to December 31st.
Here's a confusing metaphor. B-list star Kristen Johnston poses as Lady Godiva -- who rode a horse naked through Coventry to win a break on her husband's taxes -- in order to raise awareness about the hazards of horse-drawn carriages.
"Don't get taken for a ride," the ad reads. "Horse-drawn carriages are cruel."
I guess. Good fodder for the portfolio though -- a Maraschino cherry topping fine oeuvres like Austin Powers: the Spy Who Shagged Me and Strangers with Candy.
And that's pretty much all the PR people have going for it. The idea behind "Recess is on" is for Morgan Hotel Group to look like a bad-ass place to party amidst the crippling buzzkill of a recession.
See minimalist rebel prints:
o Don't Jump. Dance.
o Fuck the recession. Powerful in brevity.
o Fuck the recession -- reprise. This ad also includes a letter written by Morgan Hotel Group to a personified Recession, flippantly declaring its intention to raise hell and whatnot. "Fuck off" is written at bottom in surprisingly girly script. (I think a sharp, all-caps and slightly Nicholson-esque "FUCK OFFFFFFFFFfff" would have done the job better.)
The website, linked above, also includes an epilepsy-inducing :60 video that'll be projected upon some unfortunate building. Or not. Word has it the creative will be changed and repeated use of "fuck" will be scrubbed.
"Whatever happened to defiance?" the rep from Pronto Stockholm asked us. Well, fuck if we know.
Remember The Wolf, the cool operative summoned in Pulp Fiction to clean up the remains of a guy who had his brains blown out in a moving car?
UK-based cleanup firm Clearway riffs off that unseemly scenario with the ad at left -- "No job too big, no job too awful" -- depicting bloody furniture and a distinctly man-shaped stain. Among other things.
The ad was banned for obvious (read: "excessively graphic, offensive and distressing") reasons. Obtusely defensive, Clearway insists the piece is "an accurate portrayal of the work they undertook on a daily basis."
Which I guess is one way of saying Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino -- or their gun-and-butcher's-knife-swinging muses -- get open tab when they're in town.
It merits saying that there are plenty of countries where people don't get as nuts as we do when ads zero in on race. But I still felt an "arrrg" rise to my throat when I saw these pieces for ChromaWhite TRX Skin Brightener, Dermalogica India.
The text at left reads "America's future looks bright, thanks to a black." Above the caption is the bust of a suspiciously white-washed Obama.
Thanks for the unsolicited commentary on our election, but what the fuck, guys? How does news of the States blackwashing the White House promote your skin whitening product?
Variant: "There are times when black can go to white." Okay, I'm not even touching that one.
Put together by the politically earnest cats at IBD Brands, India.
UPDATE: After this article had been live for a few hours, the guy who sent us this work apologized for any cultural misunderstanding and claimed the creative was just spec. And having sent us the material in the first place, he even tried insisting his agency didn't do it. (The creative credits appeared right below the work in the original email.) In separate IMs, he went on to say he doesn't work for the agency at all, and a mystery person from IBD sent it to him.
Dear IBD Brands Dude: We're typically really nice about this kind of thing, but you've done this more than once. If this was an honest mistake, here's a tip: don't get cocky and send us material your client hasn't approved.
If you simply can't take flak for doing a sub-par job, get the hell out of this business.
For Park Shore BMW, agency concerto conjured up a sneaky way to get people staring at rows and rows of BMW logos for a long, long ... long ... time. See variants 2 and 3.
"One of these is not like the others," the copy reads. "Find it and we'll not only offer you an incredibly low interest rate, we'll pay your 10% down payment on any 2008 model you want. You have until October 31st. So Go!"
The campaign ran briefly in Vancouver last month, after which Park Shore BMW was asked to pull the ads because they "contravene branding standards."
Wait. There are standards? Guess that sets Vancouver ahead of the pack. $10 and a warm cookie to whoever can score us Van City's Hallowed Book on Logo Etiquette.
Adrants reader Martha pointed us to this Nutrecan senior dog food ad by Gomez Chica/EURO RSCG out of Medellin, Colombia. Playing on the "senior" bit, caption reads "Adults only."
Gawker put it best:
Sex sells fruit. Sex sells condoms. Sex sells magazines. Sex sells charity. Sex sells cheap clothes and pseudocool clothes. Even child sex sells cosmetics. So people are pretty cool with sex, and its selling implications. But does dog sex sell? We can only hope.
Uncute. Come on, Gomez/EURO. Sex may sell coffins and cheese, but you gotta draw the line somewhere. Last I read, the job description for "man's best friend" didn't include a deep-throat clause.
In what I guess can be called a witty effort to explain the Collins reinsurance ad at left, a rep at Yamamoto Moss Mackenzie wrote us an email that began, "If you were going to do an ad for reinsurance brokerage, of course you'd think facial tattoos."
We were all, "Wait ... what?!"
Then we read the first line in the ad copy: "Everyone feels covered when we place reinsurance." And it was like, "Ohhhh."
Tagline follows: "Collins: predictability for a random world."
The UK's Gay Times recruited agencies and students to tackle an ambitious project: promoting the gay lifestyle to straight men.
James and Joe, two young creatives from Leeds, competed with Kings Arms Creative, Leo Burnett and iris, among other contenders, to accomplish the task in the manner most sassy. At left is what they came up with: a single dude making a distinctly vaggie shape with his mouth. (The grizzle helps.) Caption: "Anything she can do..."
Nice work. We're about 50% sold. Now let's see a chick make a shaft.
|
