Hasta La Creative!

Using some replacement movie-trailer-guy voiceover and repeating “Owned” is a slippery slope of dumb comedy that risks making the product look much dumber than it should. That’s what we have here in “Own the Weekend,” created by BBH London for the Guardian and Observer weekend editions. There’s even a totally out-of-place intro from Hugh Grant that has nothing to do with the actual ad and makes this silly mess a whole lot messier.

To give a brief description of something that doesn’t have much coherence: the two British newspapers trademark the word “weekend,” presumably because their Saturday and Sunday papers are so wonderful that it’s hard to imagine the concept of the weekend without their titles attached to it. Various gags are built on this idea. The voiceover actor says “Owned” a lot. If the clip doesn’t make much sense to you, that’s because it doesn’t make much sense. How can this spot be so tone-deaf when the same shop and client produced an awesomely sharp spot about the three little pigs in 2012 that won a London International Award?

If you happen to watch the end of the clip – which runs too long at three minutes – you’ll even see an elevator scene that ironically makes the Guardian and Observer look even worse. Two guys are talking about their weekends, and one guy (sane) forgets to use the trademark gag. The other guy (dumb) won’t respond unless his weekend is addressed as “Guardian and Observer weekend.” The sane guy, who the viewer relates to, doesn’t get why everyone has to use the trademark, and the dumb guy laughs at him for not following the crowd. It’s the exact slapstick scene that would be used by some competitor to make the two newspapers look foolish and out-of-touch. Yet, it’s here, making the clients look foolish and out-of-touch, instead.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The new DreamTab tablet from DreamWorks Animation and Fuhu offers kids educational activities, email and chat functionality, web browsing and other features, all under parents’ control and limited in ways to protect young users. Websites must appear on a parent-approved white list, for example, in order for kids to visit them, and although ads on the sites render just fine, kids can’t click through. The DreamTab even offers a chores application, where kids can earn virtual coins (bought by their parents using real money) that are redeemable for content, games and physical products. But that wasn’t the only kids’ tech on display at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

For a fun New Year’s project, the folks over at Grain Creative “produced a brand image, guidelines and a short animation to introduce the ‘brand principles’ of Nature.” The project was inspired by David Bond and Project Wild Thing, which attempts to reconnect kids with nature. It reminds us, at times, of Quietroom’s imagining of Santa as a brand back in December, but with a good deal less snark.

The project appears to be an earnest attempt to get people to appreciate the outdoors, although it employs some light humor at times. Grain Creative seems to have had fun with the brand book, positioning Spring, Summer, Winter, and Autumn as Nature’s sub-brands, selecting a color palette and typography, logos, and brand applications. The above video should give you a good idea of the project, but if you’d like to view the entire brand book, you can download the PDF here. Enjoy, then bundle up and get outside.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

How do futuristic 3D printers and augmented reality translate to technology marketers can actually use? Joan Gillman, exec VP and chief operating officer-media services, Time Warner Cable, discusses how trends coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show may eventually be used in advertising campaigns.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Temperatures dropped dramatically in Chicago this week, and so did a pair of 16-foot-long, 400-pound flip-flops. They were kicked off, or at least looked to have been, by a bikini-clad vacationer soaking up the sun in a giant wallscape promoting Arizona tourism.

The casual footwear "crushed" two cars parked below. The installation at the corner of Randolph and Jefferson, designed to entice Chicagoans to book getaways to the Grand Canyon State, was created by ad shop Off Madison Avenue. Temps in Chicago have been so low, anyone stopping to admire the novel display risked freezing to the ground where they stood. Thankfully, the city will enjoy a high today near 30, and it could hit 40 tomorrow, making Chi-town feel like a tropical paradise compared to the sub-zero blast it just endured.

Who needs Arizona? It's time to break out the SPF 40 and surf Lake Michigan!

People are becoming more aware of the data being collected about them online. And that’s eroding the trust they have with collecting companies, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Asked which companies are the greatest threat to the future of privacy, 59% of 1,100 respondents cited Facebook and 40% said Twitter, according to a survey conducted by McCann. Thirty-two percent pointed to Google, almost doubling from the 18% who said as much when McCann conducted the same survey in 2011.

“It’s not necessary that people feel Google or Facebook has done anything bad with data to date. It’s what might happen in the future. It’s a nebulous fear,” said Laura Simpson, global director of McCann Truth Central, during a session on privacy held by Ad Age and IPG in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The Applebee's in Barrie, Ontario, has a Facebook strategy that's familiar for chain restaurants. It posts a lot of images of food and asks the blandest questions imaginable of its 2,000-odd fans. "Who is coming in for an Early Bird Special today? "Which of our burgers is your favorite?" "Happy New Years! Any resolutions that you care to share?"

Chip Zdarsky, a comic book artist, discovered the page when both of his parents liked the same photo of a hamburger, and found it endearingly sad. No one was replying to the questions. So, he figured he would step in and really make friends with the page. Of course, he was making fun of it—but what emerged over months of his "Applebee's & Me" project was a curiously affectionate relationship.

Read below to see the interactions, and check out Digiday's fun interview with Zdarsky, who admits the "politeness in every exchange was just strangely sweet."

Via BuzzFeed and Happy Place.

Ricoh is out with new apps for a technology called Clickable Paper. In a nutshell, it does away with the dreaded QR code by embedding hotspots directly into printed materials that are recognizable by an app.

Each hotspot can point to multiple links rather than just one as it is with QR codes. And since there is no ugly QR code gumming up the works, designers will love it. Of course, people will need some sort of indication that these hotspots actually exist on the paper in the first place.

The technology, out for a couple of years, is powered by Ricoh Visual Search, an image recognition solution that “establishes the relationship between information on printed paper with digital information and services on the Internet.”

What does this mean for marketers and publishers? It means print publishers may be given a stay of execution. It means marketers can offer a far more rich experience. It means print and online can literally be married. And, yes, we completely understand this could go the way of the Cue Cat but the technology does seem promising, not to mention user (and creator) friendly. Via.