Hasta La Creative!

After three years and in advance of a relaunch at the end of this year, Pizza Hut UK and Wieden + Kennedy have left the dinner table mutually.

LONDON – The AA is offering free car washes for a year to prospective members as part of a drive to increase sign-up.

LONDON – Haircare brand GHD has created a loyalty scheme to run in salons, handing stylists sole responsibility for inviting members.

This very clever parody ad would convince you that Canadian men love their diapers – until the end of the commercials and you find out the need the diapers so they can watch the all horror channel, Scream TV. Fun kiddie music, men frolicking in diapers, what could be more fun? The commercial was pro…

Design Observer have been having a bit of fun with trying to suss out which actor should play which designer when designers get hep enough to warrant full length movies about their lives.

I can’t stop laughing, some of the actor+designer pairings are not only spot on physically but also a great fit for how these designers (and actors) are reputed to be (or typecast as). Benicio del Toro playing Neville Brody is too good to be true, please won’t someone make that film right now? Let it involve lots of cocaine, anarchy at Arena, someone sporting the original outrageous London wedge hairdo, clubkids that look like this and College of Communication students having sex parties, also, of course an all Depeche Mode soundtrack. I’d go watch that for the visuals alone.

Now, which actor would play you dear adgrunt, in a film about us?

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The Wall Street Journal reports today on the above TV spot, which has become the most reviled ad in China over the last month. (Ignore the first 10 seconds of video, which are from a previous commercial.) The spot, for Heng Yuan Xiang, a wool company, features a girl’s voice reading off the names of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac, and an adult voice repeating the company name over and over and over. “When they first saw the ad, some people thought their TV sets were broken,” says the story. “Viewers savaged the commercial in print media and online, some calling it intolerable or singling it out as the worst spot they had ever seen. … On Feb. 17, Heng Yuan Xiang called a press conference to explain that it had stopped running the commercial.” The piece suggests that the outrage means the Chinese are finally sick and tired of low-quality ads that “beat consumers over the head with the same message.” Then again, the Journal has written a whole story about it, and it’s spawned endless Internet parodies. Perhaps the company will soon switch to a new tagline: “Heng Yuan Xiang. Apply directly to the forehead.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Alaska Airlines is introducing a system to create unique ads for consumers. From The New York Times: “The company is combining data from several sources to paint a picture of the consumer sitting on the other side of the screen, clicking past the airline’s ads. Then, as each Web page loads, an ad is swiftly assembled.” This is literally rocket science, because the company’s online marketing guru is a former engineer at NASA. The space administration never has any problems with its flights, so I’m sure the Alaska program will go smoothly. An example of how it works: “Someone who had visited Alaska Airlines’ site frequently but then abruptly stopped visiting it might be greeted with [a] $200 Hawaii offer.” So, consumers like cheap flights to the the tropics, instead of, say, to Juneau or Nome. Did they really need high-tech individual profiling to figure that out?

—Posted by David Gianatasio

According to The Wall Street Journal, Heng Yuan Xiang Group, a top Chinese wool producer, wanted to celebrate its sponsorship of this summer’s Beijing Olympics. So the wool company began running a 60-second ad in February, during the celebration of Lunar New Year, China’s biggest holiday.

When the Chinese public first saw the ad, some people thought their TV sets were broken. Viewers savaged the commercial in print media and online, some calling it intolerable or singling it out as the worst spot they had ever seen.

The backlash suggests that increasingly sophisticated Chinese consumers are rejecting low-budget, low-quality marketing.

The arrival of foreign ad agencies in the 1990s, together with the rapid expansion of the nation’s middle class, altered Chinese consumers’ expectations, the Journal surmises.

LONDON – CNN International has extended its sponsorship deal with Danish energy company Vestas Wind to cover North America, as well as Europe.