Hasta La Creative!

A new Orville Redenbacher campaign from Venables Bell & Partners takes the importance of popcorn to new levels. A lot of people simply can’t enjoy their entertainment unless they’ve got a giant tub of popcorn in front of them. Us, on the other hand, realize popcorn — and, sadly, pretty much every other piece of manufactured food — is just a collection of chemicals unfit for human consumption.

But we’re not here to debate the finer points of nutrition. We’re just here to highlight an interesting approach to pimping popcorn. One that plays on the above-mentioned truism that popcorn a become an integral component of the couch potato lifestyle.

hey, we all have to die of something, right? We might as well go eating popcorn and watching our favorite movie.

Here’s a really strange — but intriguingly unique — campaign from Madrid-based Lola/Lowe and Partners for Kiss TV which aims to take on music piracy. Three videos feature songs performed without music by PSY, MIA and LMFAO. The three music videos end with the tagline, “If you take out the music, you take out their meaning.”

Will they be as popular as the originals?

If you’re the sort of marketer who’s up on all the latest trends and cutting-edge communication tactics, you should, by now, have constructed a real-time-marketing war room.

Now that you’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in real-time marketing, you’re ready to join the ranks of … well, give me a minute. Let me check my notes here.

I’ve got Oreo for making a joke about the lights being out in the Super Bowl way back in February. And, uh, that seems about it.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

In a stunt only true beer lovers could love, Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand teamed with a man’s best friends, a group of beer technicians and a plumber to prank a man and his wife by re-plumbing their entire house with Tui beer.

When the man and his wife arrive home, they can’t quite figure out what’s going on when every faucet in their house is running with cold beer . Even the shower.

Of the stunt, Saatchi Creative Director Corey Chalmers said,”Tui drinkers are clever schemers, and up for a laugh. We also know the boys wouldn’t buy into faking it so we needed to be authentic. We one hundred percent did this for real, and it shows. Luckily, our hero Russ was a master hardcase himself so once the deed was done, he was completely into the idea.”

The stunt has garnered 1.8 million views on YouTube since its release September 16.

Draftfcb San Francisco went the live-action route to show the immersive nature of the new free-to-play (up to a point) massive-multiplayer online game Star Wars: The Old Republic.

The whole thing looks more like a movie trailer than one for a video game. Groups of people gradually take to the streets, wielding familiar Jedi/Sith weapons, using mind control and otherwise looking fierce/menacing while drums pound in the background. A voiceover declares, “We are no longer friends, or neighbors: today, we choose a side and join the battle,” as a melee breaks out.

The live-action nature of the spot (which even foregoes including actual gameplay footage) underscores the immersive nature of Star Wars: The Old Republic, which puts players “at the center of [their] own story-driven Star Wars saga,” which takes place over 3,000 years before the original films. Players can choose to play not just as Jedi or Sith, but also as a Bounty Hunter, or from other iconic roles. Players can enjoy the story-driven game up to level 50 for free (with restrictions), or choose to become a subscriber for unlimited game access. So, to be fair, this isn’t exactly a “free game” as there are serious restrictions to the free-to-play mode and it’s used more as a way to ease gamers into paying for a subscription if they want to finish the game and enjoy all its features.

Nerds everywhere are seemingly eating this spot up right now, and those faithful to the franchise are undoubtedly going to play this game, but some of the non-Star Wars-obsessed gaming crowd might be left wondering if the gameplay-averse spot is hiding flaws with the game itself. Feel free to check out more and “join the battle” here.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today the Association of National Advertisers announced the winners of the 2013 Multicultural Excellence Awards. The Awards recognize ANA member companies and other marketers who produced outstanding multicultural advertising campaigns between June 2012 and June 2013.

The 2013 grand prize winner in each category will be announced at a ceremony during the ANA’s 15th Annual Multicultural Marketing & Diversity Conference. The event will take place November 3-5 in Los Angeles, CA at the JW Marriott Los Angeles.

The brand and agency winners in each of the nine categories are:

African-American
Chrysler 300 (Chrysler, LLC), GlobalHue
Miller Lite (MillerCoors), commonground
Walmart, Liquid Soul

Asian
AT&T Mobility, interTrend Communications
Marine Corps Recruiting Command, Uniworld Group
Wells Fargo, DAE Advertising

Digital Media
Lucky Charms (General Mills), Inc., McCann New York
Marine Corps Recruiting Command, Uniworld Group
Tide (Procter & Gamble), Burrell Communications Group

General Market
Jeep OSR (Chrysler, LLC), GlobalHue
Cheerios (General Mills), Inc., Saatchi & Saatchi
Wells Fargo, Acento Advertising, Muse, UM/MRM, DDB

Hispanic
Got Milk (California Milk Processor Board), Grupo Gallegos
Got Milk (California Milk Processor Board), Grupo Gallegos
PAMPERS (Procter & Gamble), Conill Advertising

LGBT
Allstate Insurance Company, Leo Burnett
American Express Company, Grand Central Marketing
Lucky Charms (General Mills), Inc., McCann New York

Print
City Year, Inc., Allen & Gerritsen
Indio Beer (Heineken USA), iNSPIRE!
U.S. Bank, Globalworks

Radio
Tecate (Heineken USA), iNSPIRE!
Obama for America, DOVE Marketing

Significant Results
Lucky Charms (General Mills), Inc., McCann New York
Miller Lite (MillerCoors), commonground
Toyota Avalon (Toyota), Burrell Communications

Sponsored by the ANA Multicultural Marketing & Diversity Committee, the awards were created to help raise awareness and recognition for the outstanding work being done in the areas of African-American, Asian, Hispanic and LGBT advertising. A portion of the proceeds collected will help fund scholarships for high-potential multicultural students who plan to pursue careers in advertising and/or marketing.

Scroll through Rolling Stone’s digital feature “The Geeks on the Front Lines,” and your point of view zooms into a computer screen and onto a multimedia story about hackers engaging in simultaneous cyberwars.

It’s the kind of immersive storytelling publishers and advertisers dream of, and it’s made possible by HTML5, the coding language long considered the future of web design. But “Geeks” was also made possible by Intel’s HTML5 Hub, which picked up the web-design cost for the multimedia story.

Intel hired digital agency Banyan Branch to maintain HTML5 Hub, an online community dedicated to pushing the boundaries of web publishing, and seek partnerships with publishers interested in incorporating HTML5 into feature packages. David Kang, chief digital officer at Rolling Stone publisher Wenner Media, thought it was a natural fit for the title’s coming report on a simulated cyberwar conference in Miami. Banyan Branch hired HTML5 Hub member Todd Motto, 23, to help Rolling Stone build the story for the web.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Mikado, the biscuit brand owned by Mondelez International, is relaunching across Europe with an idiosyncratic first campaign from its new creative agency, Fallon London.