After a decade of owning the internet, Slim Jim tries to portray cats as “uncool.”
You know what’s uncool? A VO that shouts about “meat sticks,” while headless people dressed in pastel, dance against a blue wall. That’s uncool.
Please don’t watch this video more than once, or you will want to gouge your eyes out. Because despite the stupid hipsterish loud VO screeching, this is nothing more than a comparison ad for gas station beef jerky.
The technology is there for a self-driving car. It’s just that, we’re not ready for it. That’s why there’s Centraal Beheer insurance. Very funny stuff. The CG needed a bit of work by the time we get to the traffic cop but still. This spot was cast well, too.
Russian app developers Heads and Hands have created something pretty neat for Grolsch. Namely, a movie unlocker.
This spec print campaign for Tennessee-based Harrison’s Bird Food comes courtesy of CEU Universidad Cardenal Herrera student Arturo Català. Since he did all the photoshopping and retouching, I’m assuming Arturo’s an art director.
So, I’m a sucker for a good taking to task as much as the next guy, but let’s be honest, calling people fuckheads and crapping on their vision of their life isn’t going to endear you to anyone, at least not people whose opinion you should care about. That said, likability clearly isn’t the aim here, and there’s a relevant point to the commentary. We need less self aggrandizement in general, and this is definitely one way to make that point.
The “Everytown for gun safety” pac wants you to text your senator to urge your senator to support legislation that will keep domestic abusers from getting guns, and with that save abuse victims lives.
On Tuesday, August 1st 1944, at 5 pm,The Polish Resistance fought back against the Nazis, in what would later become known as the the Warsaw Uprising.
Lil bub, Hamilton the Hipster Cat, Captain Pancakes and Princess Monster Truck and other internet celebrity cats star in this Greenpeace video that wants to draw attention to Cats save tigers.
After five years of obfuscation, it’s time for Foursquare to decide if it’s going to be a real media company, one worthy of marketers’ attention. The lesson for Foursquare and its peers on the sell side is simple: Be open and transparent if you want to be taken seriously.
Foursquare has refused to release its metrics on monthly active users (MAUs) since it launched in 2009. I should know, as I’ve asked them repeatedly while representing two different agencies. Then I had an exchange with Foursquare, which I told I was considering writing this column. I’m still no closer to an answer.
What prompted all this was a message Foursquare sent to its first million users about a forthcoming update to the app, described publicly on its blog. The missive noted, “You’ve seen us grow from a tiny project to a 50,000,000-strong community.” The zeroes seems to carry a hint of self-aggrandization, and something seemed off, as did its liberal use of the word “community.” Who is really using it now?
Over the years here at Ad Age, we’ve written many admiring things about Vice — like when we named its flagship monthly to our Magazine A-List in 2010, noting that the “ultimate glossy outsider has quietly spawned a global media empire while becoming an unlikely journalistic powerhouse.”
These days Vice gets as much attention for its bluster and seemingly endless ambitions (and supposedly ever-escalating valuation), but if you have any doubts about the organization’s commitment to hard-hiting international journalism, well, just watch this newly released trailer for an upcoming Vice documentary. Vice News journalist and filmmaker Medyan Dairieh spent three weeks filming alone, according to the trailer’s description, “inside the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State,” aka ISIS.
“He is one of the only journalists to gain access to the internal workings of ISIS as the group made its lightning advance across Syria and into Iraq,” according to Vice.
Buenos Aires innovation house +Castro lives its business model with a small core staff of about 15 senior people, plus countless collaborators, from architects to a cardiologist, recruited on a project basis. The agency even moved late last year to a former stable block for racehorses in order to share space with three other companies that are frequent collaborators, including co-founder Pedro Saleh’s integrated production company Sake.
The three-year-old agency works only on a project basis, and its biggest clients, who keep coming back, are Mondelez, Disney and Danone. Many of those projects involve inventing technology that didn’t exist, and +Castro likes to call its space “Buenos Aires’ miniature Silicon Valley.”
For Mondelez, +Castro has created “Fly Garage,” a program where Mondelez execs along with agencies and other creatives gather for up to two weeks to brainstorm about a brand and the creative process. The first one, for Trident gum brand Beldent, led to Beldent Random Fest and brought the idea of a mixed playlist to a live event. Four different bands appeared on four separate stages, but who would play was determined by a lighthouse randomizer in the middle of it all, sending audiences running in a mad frenzy across the venue.
As a company that believes innovation is the best form of communication, Deportivo lives up to its own hype. The Swedish agency invented a machine that turned sweat into drinking water for UNICEF; devised a social alarm clock for Philips; and integrated Facebook Graph Search into a campaign for MTV.
“We’ve found that businesses are prepared to pay to get people talking about their brands,” said Mattias Ronge, co-founder and chief strategy officer. “We always start with earned media at the core of every campaign, which is what distinguishes us from ad agencies. You can amplify a message by paying, but it has to be earned from the start or it won’t fly.”
This drive to find new ways to reach consumers reflects the PR and digital backgrounds of Deportivo’s three founders, all of whom are creatives by trade. Mr. Ronge started the agency in 2010 with his brother, Stefan, who is chief creative officer and describes himself on Twitter as “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.” The third partner, Anders Hallen, is head of innovation.
I’ve been a Levi’s guy for the majority of my adult life — always despite the advertising, never because of it.
That tradition continues with the latest campaign from the storied denim company.
It seems that upon winning the account, FCB was tasked with putting some distance between Levi’s and its previous “Go Forth” campaign from Wieden & Kennedy. You remember that one, right? The one that linked blue jeans to the American spirit via Walt Whitman. It was a very pretty campaign to look at. But it was such a bummer, what with its focus on rust-belt America and the economy. Gross.
“I like risk. I like doing things that haven’t been done before. It’s a fault. It’s a character fault, I think.”
Jane Newman made that statement with a laugh, as if she were quite willing to live with that little defect.
She’s taken a lot of risks in her life, and most of them have worked outto the betterment of the advertising industry and poor children in Africa.
Lately there’s been signage all over my neighborhood McDonald’s for the newish Bacon Clubhouse burger that includes this copy in giant type: “Artisan is how this club rolls.”
Listen, if the most mainstream, mass-market purveyor of fast food in the universe thinks it can get away with saying that the bread in its new artery-clogger (720 calories! 40 grams of fat!) is an “artisan” roll, it’s obvious that the word artisan has officially been drained of the last bits of aura and snob appeal it theoretically once had.
That said, it’s probably unfair to single out McDonald’s, because long before the chain’s marketing department got its greasy fingers on it, artisan had pretty much been beaten into submissive meaninglessness by overuse.
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