Hasta La Creative!

Bacon doesn’t make everything better. Hughes Carwash “wanted to capture the emotional relief one feels after having their car washed.” So TAXI Vancouver took that idea and ran with it — all the way to crazy town.

Their four new spots for Hughes Carwash — “Bacon Underwear,” “Rabies Shot,” “Nose Hairs” and “The Internet?” — all feature a couple coming clean with each other about various things they’ve been keeping secret. Three of the four spots open in the same way: with the woman revealing she’s not a natural redhead and the man revealing that the necklace he bought her (and that she is currently wearing) is actually just a string of sausages. That should give you an idea of the crazy brand of humor that fills out these spots. One of these thirty second ads contains a full 25 seconds of the man laughing. So clearly over-the-top is what TAXI was going for here.

While the campaign as a whole may not be laugh out loud funny, they do have a certain meshugana charm to them, and the actors portraying the couple do an admirable enough job. The exception being the one that wastes most of its thirty seconds on the man laughing. If you don’t already know the concept behind the spots, the idea may not make sense until the end of the ad, with the “It Feels Good to Come Clean” tagline. Without such an excellent tag to tie things together, it would be easy to forget why we’re watching these crazy people in the first place. All four of these spots will air during Canadian coverage of the Super Bowl. Click through for “The Internet?” and credits. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

New York magazine will reduce its frequency from 42 issues to 29 — effectively going from a weekly to biweekly — in a move that reflects shifting reader habits as much as it does the economic realities of putting out a print magazine, the company said Monday.

The magazine will save $3.5 million in manufacturing costs because of the shift from weekly to biweekly, according to Larry Burstein, New York’s publisher. And even though it’s reducing frequency, the subscription price will remain the same — resulting in an increase in the cost per print issue for readers. The newsstand price will also increase to $6.99 from $5.99.

Adam Moss, editor-in-chief of New York, said he plans to reinvest those dollars back into the magazine and its website, bulking up some of its coverage and adding staff.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Today is Cyber Monday.

Online sales could reach $2 billion today, but that figure is but a tenth of the revenue earned by traditional brick-and-mortar store sales on Black Friday. Walmart alone said it sold 2 million TVs during its Black Friday sales this year. The retailer also sold 2.8 million towels, 1.9 million dolls, 1.4 million tablets and 300,000 bicycles.

Perhaps, Cyber Monday can’t compete with Black Friday because no matter how hard you try, you can’t see this kind of action in an online store.

Hold it, that was pure fantasy delivered to you by a fashion brand.

Let’s look at the real life Black Friday action for a minute.

Clearly, malls and big box stores in America are no longer just for shopping.

Retail space is the new entertainment complex. In fact, auditions were being held throughout the country last Friday for a new reality series. The series will be called “Black Friday Bombers.” Participants on the show will use mixed martial arts to improve their Black Friday shopping experience.

The fighter/shopper with the greatest number of dollars saved wins.

The post Shop Your Screens For Bruise Free Cyber Monday Deals appeared first on AdPulp.

Well, this is news to us but it appears that Judith Carr-Rodriguez has joined the executive team at Figliulo & Partners, the agency launched this past summer by former TBWA\Chiat\Day NY creative chief, Mark Figliulo. Prior to her new gig as president/founding partner at F&P, U.K. native Carr-Rodriguez spent several years at LBi, eventually serving as president of its US operations (as well as MD of the New York office) and then in the same role when the agency became MRY earlier this year. No word yet on who else has landed at Figliulo & Partners, which as you may know just landed its first notable client in Sprint. As mentioned previously, F&P will focus on broadcast efforts for the brand.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

UPDATE: Well the whole thing was a prank played on Kyle Kinane by fellow comedian Randy Liedtke, host of the Bone Zone prank podcast. So at the end of the day, it was just two comedians having fun at the expense of the rest of us. And Campbell’s Soup has confirmed @Pace_Foods (which has been active since August…talk about a long con!) is not a Campbell’s or Pace Foods Twitter account. Kinane says he was not in on the prank but we don’t know what to believe at this point.

Original Story:

This, bay far, has to be the worst (best) Twitter-based brand implosion we’ve ever seen. Over the weekend, Twitter user Kyle Kinane (@kylekinane) struck up a conversation with Pace Foods (@Pace_Foods) and things quickly turned ugly. Kinane taunted the account to prove it was simply a bot responding to tweets. Then some humans on the Pace side of things became involved. And it got even uglier.

The story has everything a great thriller would have. Account impersonation. Account hijacking. A fake account created by Pace Foods to try to get an employee fired. Lying. Deception. Humor. A brand suspending its Twitter account. Everything you could ever want in a social media flame out.

Rather than recreate the entire conversation here — after all why duplicate efforts when you can just link…which, of course is the beauty of the internet — you can read all the delicious details and peruse a timeline of events over at Huffington Post.