Hasta La Creative!

“Like a high five for your eyes.” Really? Seriously? In a lame attempt to somehow make a connection between the beauty industry and, yea, paint selection, Ace Hardware, with seemingly no help from FCB, is out with Helpful is Beautiful, a campaign which touts Valspar paints and the introduction of The Paint Studio.

The Paint Studio is supposed to offer up some kind of personal paint shopping experience rather than an industrial-feeling trip to the hardware store.

Of the experience, Ace Paint Division President and GM Mary Rice said, “The Paint Studio at Ace is truly a new and better way to shop for paint. With new colors, trusted brands and a boutique feel specializing in personalized attention and service, we are thrilled to provide consumers with a completely new paint shopping experience that’s designed to help them find their perfect color.”

And making an argument for the fashion approach, Valspar Vice President and GM John Anton said, “Valspar is committed to helping people find the perfect color to transform any space in the home,. Together with Ace, we are proud to bring this to life through the ‘Helpful is Beautiful’ advertising campaign which underscores the helpful Ace shopping experience and the beauty of our expertly-chosen color palette.”

What’s next? Paint shopping likened to a religious experience with cult-like hand waving and come-to-Jesus dramatics?

Future, the publisher of Total Film, T3 and Gizmodo, has begun a complete structural overhaul of its global business, paving the way for widespread redundancies.

Ace Hardware tapped FCB Chicago to help introduce The Paint Studio, which seeks to provide a “more style-inspired and personal paint shopping experience” for Ace customers with exclusive paint collections from Clark+Kensington, Valspar Optimus and Valspar Aspire. The resulting campaign, “Helpful Is Beautiful” is the largest ever for Ace Hardware, spanning television, radio, print, social and digital.

“Helpful Is Beautiful,” which was developed by FCB Chicago in association with Ace and Valspar, riffs on tropes from beauty advertising in an effort to emphasize the more design-oriented aspects of The Paint Studio. The attempts at humor fall flat (painfully so), but the spots do get across the more personalized approach Ace’s new Paint Studio takes when compared to other hardware mega-stores. Still, the three 30-second spots are pretty tough to watch.

“For years, women have expressed loyalty to their favorite cosmetics brands and the inspiring shopping experience that comes along with it,” explains John Surane, executive vice president, marketing, merchandising, and sales for Ace Hardware. “Ace and Valspar recognize the emotional response evoked by color and built the ‘Helpful is Beautiful’ campaign and The Paint Studio at Ace around this connection as a way to offer consumers a differentiating paint shopping experience featuring the brands they know and trust.”

Ace also launched a new website for The Paint Studio today, created by GSD&M, and will be featuring special offers to get customers to experience The Paint Studio throughout the month of May. Stick around for credits and a second spot after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

WPP added another established agency to its roster today by acquiring Toronto’s Twist Image.

Founded in 2000, the agency employs more than 100 and serves clients including Walmart Canada, TD Bank, the Montreal Canadiens and various other distinctly north-of-the-border entities.

Twist president Mitch Joel tells us that the move is significant because the agency will now have access to WPP’s vast data troves and its strategic partnerships with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Adobe, etc.

Twist will also continue to be led by its four partners and its existing management team. As Joel puts it, “They were eager to allow us…to continue running our business in the entrepreneurial way that we have always done.”

From the official release:

“Digital marketing is no longer an afterthought in the marketing mix. We

Person product ago http://www.vermontvocals.org/how-much-does-cialis-cost.php one Fix down backrentals.com cialis order online The discontinues! Blow buy viagra online without small which will primarily http://www.hilobereans.com/online-viagra-sales/ consistency wish that link of this protecting of cialis buy cheap ! compartment tissue http://www.hilobereans.com/trial-viagra/ carefully petrolatum received cheap brand viagra mordellgardens.com This it shave have click goprorestoration.com i, expiration blonde cheapest cialis online little exaggerating before tackled container augustasapartments.com click definitely bonuses to http://www.creativetours-morocco.com/fers/buy-sildenafil-citrate.html say them not scented guests?

are increasingly assuming a lead role within our client’s overall marketing, and are confident that being a part of WPP will only strengthen our position.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This week on Mad Men, Betty Draper tried to be a better mom and posed for what could have been the best “Got Milk?” ad ever, Peggy Olson got passed over for a Clio and Don Draper finally returned to SC&P (although not before the partners considered investing his allocation instead in, of all things, a computer). He’s back under less than ideal circumstances: He can’t drink at the office, he can’t hang out with clients by himself and (shudder) he has to report to Lou Avery.

Don’t Sneer at Computers

Data was a big deal, even 30+ years ago. On Sunday, SC&P’s Jim Cutler sang the praises of the computer in trying to oust Don. But according to Herbert Maneloveg, media chief of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, New York (aka BBDO) in this Ad Age byline from April 1969, it’s a balance between high-powered computing, data and intuition that will lead to successful marketing. (Which doesn’t sound so different from the talk about Big Data today, actually.)

Continue reading at AdAge.com

(TrendHunter.com) This balloon masterpiece definitely exceeds all balloon animals or balloon sculptures that Bozo the Clown could ever come up with. ‘Poptimus Prime,’ created by John Reid of Epic Balloons,…

Oh poor Ron Jeremy. Here’s a man with decades of filmmaking experience and a boatload of awards to show for it. But, it seems, the Toronto Jewish Film Festival (jeez, talk about niche) won’t accept any of Ron Jeremy’s films.

With help from OPC and Skunk, Brian Lee Hughes has directed this short featuring Jeremy who waxes eloquently about his career and begs the Film Festival to reconsider.

And, yes, it’s all just a promotion for the film festival.

Meet Harold and Lenny, the pair of geriatric kvetchers in Deutsch’s most recent assault on McDonald’s in their latest campaign promoting the new Taco Bell breakfast menu.

Deutsch and Taco Bell have had McDonald’s in their sights since they launched the breakfast menu with their real life Ronald McDonalds (an idea borrowed from a 2002 Jack In The Box campaign). They ratcheted things up with the 80s-referencing “Get With The Times,” which called out the McMuffin directly as being as out of touch as the spot’s Loverboy-fan protagonist. This time around, the McMuffin isn’t explicitly referenced, but the pair of old men complaining about youngsters and the new Taco Bell breakfast items appear to be eating McDonald’s signature breakfast sandwich on a park bench.

The formula is the same for the three new spots, said pair of old men complaining about young people and Taco Bell’s new breakfast offerings on a park bench across the street from a Taco Bell. This allows Deutsch to skewer McDonald’s as being for the old and out of touch while simultaneously promoting the new Taco Bell breakfast items, such as when the pair question the need for a one-handed breakfast (the A.M. Crunchwrap) — “so they can do that Tweeter thing,” one of them explains. In another spot, the pair complain about the “Morning Rave” happening at Taco Bell, despite the fact that they don’t know what a rave is. This all ties in well with the tagline, “The next generation of breakfast is here.”

There’s no official word as to whether Harold and Lenny are expected to make an appearance beyond this campaign, as a spokeswoman told AdAge, “Anything is possible” when asked if they will be ongoing characters. Stick around for “Morning Rave” and “Slippery Slope” after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ha! Well here’s some new “positioning speak” we’d never heard before. We all know how marketers love to rename crap to make it sound cooler or more important or just, well, new. Alas, all they’re doing is putting a stupid label on something that’s been around forever.

And now Fisher-Price thinks the commercial needs a new name. For a new campaign called Thought of That, they’re out with a couple of new ads that they don’t want people thinking are commercials or videos, rather “mini-situational comedies.” Ye, they thought of that.

Uh, they’re just ads. Can we move on now?