Hasta La Creative!

They make you hear voices in your head.

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Honda had a big debut on the Viral Video chart — its first since its 2012 Super Bowl outing — as it tried to remind consumers about its history of innovation.

The two-minute “Hands,” created by Wieden + Kennedy London, drew 2.5 million views last week, according to Visible Measures. “Hands” highlights the automaker’s history in segments from motorcycles and cars to planes and boats, and is an attempt to refresh a brand that’s become boring in both advertising and design.

The ad comes as Honda is losing ground to American and European competitors. While Honda sales are up 7% for the first six months of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012, according to the Automotive News Data Center, Cadillac was up 33% in the same time period, followed by Dodge (up 22%) and Ford (up 14%).

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The stats suggest you've probably watched this already, but here it is again—the official gameplay video for Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto V, coming Sept. 17. Gaming spots often blow up quickly online, but the engagement with this one since its release on Tuesday is staggering—7 million views already, and more than 230,000 shares, according to Unruly Media. It's an interesting spot, too, with a woman's voice narrating as we get a comprehensive look at the fully revamped game, which includes three lead characters, a more fully realized Southern California landscape, and a dual-environment structure that lets you toggle between heists and open-world exploration. The trailer is the perfect mix of informative and exciting. And the game quite simply looks badass.

Undeniably stupid, but worth banning? That was the tough call facing Britain's ad watchdog as it dealt with 176 complaints over the spot below, for soft drink Irn-Bru. The plot, such as it is, involves a mom proudly showing off her push-up bra to her son's friends—much to the acute embarrassment of the son, and the slack-jawed awe of the friends. The soft drink is positioned, also stupidly, as an antidote to the embarrassment. Each time the kid takes a swig, he becomes blissfully mellow again despite his dire circumstances.

The Ad Standard Authority's ruling? It cleared the spot on all grounds, saying the interaction between the mom and the friends did not constitute irresponsible behavior. "We considered that the action relied on the mum being confident and attractive, but not consciously or overtly behaving in a sexualized or flirtatious way," the ASA said. "We also considered that the focus of the ads was the son's embarrassment at the effect his mum's appearance was having on his friends. Therefore, and particularly in the context of ads intended to portray a surreal and lighthearted comedic approach, we did not consider that the action or depiction of the female protagonist was sexist or demeaning and concluded that the ads were not in breach of the code."

For its part, Irn-Bru maker AG Barr said it simply wanted the ad, created by The Leith Agency in Edinburgh, to "stay true to the traditionally cheeky and irreverent sense of humor" of its previous ads.

Mixionary est un projet de l’Agence de création australienne The Monkey en collaboration avec la société Diageo. Les cocktails sont transformés en affiches graphiques où les ingrédients deviennent des blocs de couleurs variant selon leur volume. Un hommage aux cocktails les plus célèbres à découvrir en images.

Facebook’s European policy chief said the social network’s philosophy is to allow people freedom “to be pretty offensive online” as it brings into place restrictions on the types of pages that can carry ads.

Morgan Stanley via The Martin Agency is repurposing the public works mural from the 1930s in order to promote itself and the same banking system that brought our nation to its knees.

According to Adweek, the brand’s new 60-second anthem and other elements in the campaign “echoes New Deal-era murals by artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera to illustrate, with a contemporary edge, Morgan Stanley’s approach to money.”

“The creative brief was to own responsible capitalism and connect that to Morgan Stanley and no one else,” said Martin creative director Alon Shoval.

Responsible capitalism owned by one irresponsible firm. Damn, that’s a big idea!

Martin also made a 60-second anthem to drill this idea home.

I will say I enjoy looking at this art, and I wish more ads were artfully rendered in this way. Sadly though, I look at the art and ask, “why place oil wells on the ridge, when wind turbines are clearly the “responsible” choice? Also, what are all those people doing standing around in the background?

The post House of Morgan Uses Socialist Imagery To Promote Responsible Capitalism appeared first on AdPulp.

This past Canada Day weekend, john st. teamed up with a new not-for-profit, Stop the Drop, to help raise awareness for the drop in Lake Huron’s water levels and drive government action. The result was a stunt that called attention to the plight of Lake Huron’s lowering water levels by placing hundreds of messages in bottles on the beach giving voice to a lake that can’t ask for help on its own.

Owners of Piccadilly Circus Lights, the outdoor advertising display at Piccadilly Circus, are revamping the site formerly known as the Piccadilly Lite and are likely to offer it up to a single advertiser later this year.

There’s probably more to come from Edward Snowden’s unfolding expose of U.S. government spying, but polls suggest that Americans are already resigned to trade some privacy in exchange for identifying terrorists. It’s a bureaucracy doing it, after all, so it’s probably done poorly, and it’s not as if the government doesn’t already scrutinize our tax records, register every piece of snail mail we post and, in some states, make us jump through extraordinary hoops to do things like vote and exercise rights otherwise guaranteed by the Constitution.

But what happens if consumers figure out how regularly, deeply and expertly we marketers track their behaviors, and in doing so blur the line between between convenience and manipulation?

Our snooping puts the National Security Agency to shame. From the level of the internet service provider, through to social-media platforms and websites, and including apps, ads and clickable content (like videos), we collect a vast amount of information on consumers’ online behavior (and their geophysical location), then use it to tee-up search results, info and ads to millions of people millions of times every day ideally to each one of them uniquely so. We don’t do it to keep anybody safe, however. We do it to sell stuff. It’s the mercenary make-money benefit we gain through all of that non-commercial friending and conversing we do with consumers.

Continue reading at AdAge.com