Hasta La Creative!

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new and trending TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, a company that catalogs, tags and measures activity around TV ads in real time. The New Releases here ran on TV for the first time yesterday. The Most Engaging ads are showing sustained social heat, ranked by SpotShare scores reflecting the percent of digital activity associated with each one over the past week. See the methodology here.

Among the new releases, Google serves up an aww moment with a sleeping koala bear (to show off how easy it is to use the Google app to find out things like “How long do koalas sleep each day?”), while Jennifer Garner appears in another Capital One ad to plug the Venture card. (Watch the first spot in the campaign here.) And Ikea, fresh off of the success of its wry, highly viral “Bookbook” video, is running commercials that emphasize the utility of its products in helping families cope with domestic chaos — like, in this case, “life’s morning madness.”

As always, you can find out more about the making of the best commercials on TV at Ad Age’s Creativity.

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Apple has announced the launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, in what it believes is its ‘biggest advancement in the iPhone’.

Qorvis has a new campaign for Aamco, taking a more serious approach while touting the brand as the transmission experts.

The 90-second spot (which is also being released in 60 and 30-second versions), entitled “800 Pieces” highlights the transmission and its 800 parts. “That means there are 800 things can go wrong,” says an actor, while the camera focuses on a transmission coming apart in slow motion. “When the day comes when something goes wrong with one of those 800 pieces, there’s only one place to go: Aamco,” he says, before explaining that Aamco are the “transmission experts,” having fixed over 40 million of them.

While “800 pieces” takes a more serious tone, we can expect a more lighthearted effort to follow. “We are very excited about our two new campaigns. ’800 Pieces”’is serious with an educational tone and addresses the difficulty of understanding the transmission,” said Mike Ganjei, president of the National AAMCO Dealers Association and chairman of AAMCO National Creative. “At the same time, we will continue with our tradition of using humor in our creative, which our second campaign accomplishes.”

Aamco’s follow-up campaign is expected to debut before the end of the year. (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Even though summer technically hasn’t ended yet, fall is in full swing on the Visible Measures Viral Video Chart, tracking views through the week that ended Sunday. The No. 1 spot goes to a Google Chromebook ad aimed at students returning to school.

As the world waits with bated breath for news about the latest Apple products, meanwhile, Ikea’s clever send-up of the fuss surrounding tech sits in third place this week. To date, that video’s been watched more than 7.7 million times.

And there are six sports-related spots in this week’s top ten, with four coming from sports mainstays Nike, Adidas and Gatorade. But watchmaker TAG Heuer and Spanish fashion label Paco Rabanne turned in powerful sports-themed spots that involve unlikely athlete pairings too.

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