Hasta La Creative!

Nike has pulled T-shirts reading “Boston Massacre” and designed to look blood-splattered from store shelves and online retailers in the wake of the terror bombing that left three dead and more than 200 wounded.

The “Boston Massacre” T-shirts were designed for New York Yankees fans before the twin bombings that caused chaos throughout Boston last week. They reference the Bronx Bombers sweeping the rival Red Sox during a key regular season series in 1978 and in the 2006 MLB Playoffs. The phrase itself was borrowed from the notorious 1770 incident in which British solders opened fire on civilian protestors in Boston, killing five and wounding six.

“The shirts being referenced are older baseball shirts that were predominantly being sold through our factory stores outlets,” said Brian Strong, a spokesman for Nike on Monday. “In light of the tragedy in Boston we took immediate action last week to remove this product from distribution.”

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Background: How to make Scribe, a Mexican notebooks brand with 50 years of tradition, become once more beloved by the people and, especially, the newer generations? By reconnecting with the adult consumer, awakening their inner child and starting a dialogue with the newer generations. With this thought, a new brand essence -“Spaces for your inspiration”- was created, and a new image and positioning consequently. We wanted the brand to become inspirational more than aspirational, and to bring the notebook’s consumers to the experience.

Case description: The ScribeBillboard was an interactive live action billboard located on one of the most important streets in Mexico City. It housed the artist Cecilia Beaven during 10 days, with the only purpose to transform a huge white canvas into a work of art filled with color and the ideas that she received from Twitter. Everything that happened during these days was available for tracking on social networks, a blog, webisodes and live streamings. Tv celebrities and other artists visited her, and Molotov (mexican band) played live from the billboard. As she painted, other billboards were completed at the same time all over the city. The whole story was also brought to movie theaters and television. Small billboard replicas were printed for those whose requests were drawn by Cecilia.

Results: In just 10 days, impacts on Twitter went over 100 million (resource: topsy.com), 12,000 drawings were requested, more than 65,000 users were logged at the same time for the live streaming and 99% of the conversation was positive. National and international media talked about the action and radio stations broadcasted from our location.

Advertising Agency: La Agencia Viva! & La Doblevida, Ciudad de México, México
General Creative Director: Juan Pablo Manazza, Manuel Camacho
Art Director: Roberto Flores, Xavier Fajardo, Ivan Mayorquín
Copywriter: Eduardo García, Carlos Perez
Account Services Director: Miguel Mendiola
Project Leader: Claudia Caballero
Illustrator: Cecilia Beaven (Billboard Artist)
Account Grouper: Ezequiel Daneri
Account Director: Pilar Gilbert
Account excecutive: Alejandra Vera
Producer: Nancy Vilchis, Iza Peñafiel
Digital Producer: Adriana Dreves
Planner: Ariana Gonzales

The Twitter experiment on Madison Avenue just got more serious.

While marketers are dabbling in Twitter’s real-time stream of 140-character missives, and some brands have built teams to interact on Twitter in real-time, investment of ad dollars has been relatively small.

Until now. On Monday, Twitter announced that it had completed multi-year deal with Starcom MediaVest Group, a unit of Publicis, the world’s third-largest ad holding company, which represents marketers like Procter & Gamble, Walmart and Coca-Cola, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

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The air of invincibility surrounding Apple could be unceremoniously shattered today (23 April), with analysts predicting the technology giant will unveil disastrous financial results.

Slightly similar to Kmart’s recent Ship My Pants word play comes this Ignited-created work for Fresh & Easy. A music video entitled f&easy (yes, it is supposed to sound like what you think it sounds like) touts the brand’s, well, fresh and easy approach to groceries. The song was written by Tony Award winning composer Jeff Marx and Julian Hornik.

It’s a catchy enough ditty but nowhere near as hilarious as Kmart’s Ship My Pants. The actors, however, are far easier on the eyes.

Additional campaign elements will include online, radio, outdoor, TV and mobile.

A&E Networks, the owner of cable TV channels including History and Lifetime, has named Nancy Dubuc its new president and CEO, the company said Monday afternoon. She succeeds Abbe Raven, president-CEO since 2005, who will assume the newly created role of chairman.

As president of entertainment and media at A&E Networks just since last September but president and general manager of History and Lifetime before that, Ms. Dubuc has been credited with turning History from the “Hitler channel,” as it was previously dubbed for its reliance on World War II documentaries, into a top-five cable network among adults 18-to-49, with reality fare like “Pawn Stars” and “Swamp People.”

She was also responsible for the revival of Lifetime, recent hits like A&E’s “Duck Dynasty” and History’s first scripted drama (“Vikings”) and miniseries (“The Bible”).

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