Hasta La Creative!

With online retailers like Amazon competing for shoppers, creating a physical brand experience is more important than ever, an Advertising Week audience heard Thursday.

Consumers want more from brick-and-mortar stores than they can get online, where shopping is faster, easier and often cheaper, members of a panel on retail. They’re looking for human interaction, said Rachel Shechtman, founder of Story, a boutique in Chelsea. “The future of retail is about entertainment and community,” she said. “It’s really about the surprise and delight factor.”

Her shop, Story, experiments with retail as a media channel, and is managed like a magazine, according to Ms. Shechtman. It has sponsorships, like magazines have ads, and it’s completely redone every few weeks with new products and designs. Most of the shop, Ms. Shechtman says, is pure experience, with a smaller portion where customers can shop.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Anna Garforth est une artiste basée à Londres qui s’inspire de la nature pour en capturer les détails les plus esthétiques et les transposer en art. En utilisant de multiples outils, l’artiste nous offre ici une série éclectique, exprimant à merveille sa créativité et sa polyvalence. Typographie, maquettes, et illustrations sont à découvrir dans l’article.

We’ve received several tips over the past week or so about San Francisco agency DOJO.

First, we heard that former GS&P account lead Marty Wenzell, who joined DOJO  in July 2012 and most recently held the president/MD title, was out. Then we heard that the agency — founded in 2009 by veterans of SF shop Fancy — would cease to exist at the end of this month.

Way back in January, we did confirm that Chris Masse, the DOJO art director turned creative director, had departed.

We didn’t hear much more from the shop until last week, when we got our first tips about Wenzell. We reached out to the agency’s contact email but received no response — and yesterday the listed phone number stopped working.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It’s hard to eat healthy. If you’re the type of person who’s looking for inspiration to start putting better things in your mouth, you’re not alone. Sometimes we just need a little nudge in the right direction. 

The Thug Kitchen Cookbook might just be that shining beacon of motivation to get you going in your quest for wholesome living. According to this amusing ad for it, it’s “full of delicious, plant-based recipes” designed to set you right. 

The fine print says the food was tested by experts: “The effectiveness of the Thug Kitchen Cookbook was tested rigorously by us and our friends. It was scientific as hell. We made graphs, charts, diagrams and all kinds of shit. We even bought lab coats to make it feel more legit. Product results were consistently tasty and in rare cases, leftovers were produced.”

The book will be published by Rodale later this month. But if you want a taste of what’s to come, there’s a website (heads up, it’s laden with profanity, but hysterical) and an Instagram feed.

Check out the spot below, but fair warning: The language is extremely NSFW, so put your headphones on now!

Via Ads of the World.

CREDITS
Production Company: Process
Director: Daniel Schechter
Director of Photography: Chris Hamilton
Executive Producer: Tim Perell
Producers: John Lang, Greg Gilreath, Adam Hendricks
Editing Company: Whitehouse Post
Editor: Sam Puglise-Kipley
Assistant Editor: James Donahue
Executive Producer: Lauren Hertzberg
Senior Producer: Melanie Klein
Sound Design: Dig It Audio
Supervising Sound Editor: Tom Efinger
Music: Sam Retzer
Color: Color Collective
Colorist: Jeff Altman
Executive Producer: Claudia Guevara

This minute-long BBDO spot for Viagra is, apparently, the brand’s first to show only a woman, and its first to use the word “erection” outside of the description of side effects.

Here, an attractive woman in a slinky blue dress poses on what appears to be an unmade bed or some sort of mattress, assuring us, “Plenty of guys have this issue—not just getting an erection, but keeping it.” She’s got an British accent, so you know she means business. An agency rep says it’s a new direction designed to focus on the partner’s point of view.

That’s a big change from past campaigns, which told men’s stories and kept women in the background, if they were shown at all. “The intensifying of the marketing message makes sense, considering Viagra’s patent expires in three years, along with its monopoly,” NBC’s Today points out.

Viagra ads used to be about as chaste and subdued as they could be while advertising boner pills. For example, this spot from a couple of years ago keeps the focus on some guy and his sailboat. No women in that dude’s crew. Not even a mermaid off the starboard bow.

That traditional level of restraint makes the new ad (also awash in nautical imagery, by the way), well … stick out, and not in an altogether positive way. It feels tacky, and could almost be viewed as an exercise in objectification: Take Viagra, and claim your prize!

Plus, some elements seem like overkill. She says “erection.” Do we really need the ship masts in the distance, rising straight and tall? Or that long pier jutting into the briny deep? And flagpoles planted in the sand?

Ladies, bikini season may be over, but Subway wants to remind you that sexy Halloween costume season is still nigh.

In a somewhat awkward spot built around the idea of modeling your “sassy” and “foxy” outfits for co-workers over lunch (as one does), the chain ends on the note, “Whatever you’re staying fit for, start at Subway.”

I guess in a world where Sexy Olaf is a sell-out Halloween sensation, this is the Subway ad we deserve.

Via Adrants.

Usually if something sounds too good to be true, you can bet dollars to donuts there’s going to be a catch. Well, what if I told you there’s an ad featuring an Irish dude dressed in a homemade Batman costume busting moves to a karaoke track of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” in a shop that sells fancy tire rims?

“Aww, hell no, Alfred! That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” you’d say.

Well, lo and behold, fake Irish “Billie Jean” Batman.

In the ad below, for Kingdom Alloys, an Irish purveyor of alloy tire rims, this joker dances around and air-humps to a slightly off karaoke version of MJ’s classic track. The punch line/tagline borrows the lyric “Don’t think twice,” which appears onscreen as the fake caped crusader stops dancing and turns away, leaving us wishing for more. 

At the risk of tossing some guano in the punch bowl, it’s hard to imagine DC Comics liking this as much as we did. The advertiser knows this, saying in the YouTube description: “Our Look-alike character is dressed in a custom ‘fan-made’ Costume, to resemble that of the film version. We are NOT affiliated with, DC comics or any other entertainment company or their affiliates. The music used is a ‘fan-made karaoke’ version to resemble that of the real version of the track. We are NOT affiliated to any music entity or label.”

So, take a look at the most absurd minute of advertising you’ll see today before it gets cleansed from the Internet.

Twenty years from now, I’ll be a silver-haired fox and speak with a British accent, judging from this “Future Self” campaign created by Publicis Conseil and Jam3 for European telecommunications giant Orange.

Upload a photo of yourself, and the software creates an interactive 3-D model of how you might look two decades hence. You can ask questions of your future self using your computer’s microphone or keyboard.

Of course, these are canned responses, but most of the exchanges I sampled were amusing, and a few even felt kind of profound. When I inquired about my (his? our?) finances in 2034, Future Dave explained that money as I know it no longer exists, that it’s been replaced by a system of commerce in which nobody feels short-changed.

The initiative marks Orange’s 20th birthday, and it’s designed to position the marketer as hip and innovative with the millennial crowd. (Yeah, I’m sure the whole emphasis on aging will have exactly that effect.)

It’s livelier than Merrill Edge’s somewhat similar “Face Retirement” campaign, and more fun than this site, which emphasizes an aspect of the future I’d just as soon ignore.

Credits below.

CREDITS
—Orange
Deputy Director of Communications: Béatrice Mandine
Brand Director: Thierry Marigny
Head of Corporate Communications: Anne Imbert
Corporate Communications Manager: Joanna Gaumet
Corporate Communications Assistant: Charlie Lévêque

—Publicis Conseil
International Creative Director: Steve O’Leary
Copywriter: Méric Settembre
Art Director: Thomas Bernard
Worldwide Account Director: Cécile Lejeune
International Account Director: Guillaume Foskolos
International Account Executive: Laëtitia Mulinazzi
Digital Strategic Planner: Benoit Candelle
Creative Technologist: Julien Chaillou
Digital Consultant: Paula Petrucci
Special thanks: Benjamin Sanial, Isabelle Appé

—Digital production – Jam3
Creative Director: Adrian Belina
Executive Producer: Graham Budd
Producer: Sumit Awjani

—Video Production
Producers: Pierre Marcus, Thierry Delesalle (Prodigious)
Director of photography: Joël Labat
Post-production: Reepost
Sound design vidéos: Pink Factory

—Dialogues
Benjamin Euvrard, Ingrid Morley-Pegge, Benjamin Dumont, Charly de Witte, Romain Grandsire

—Sound design experience: Apollo Studios
Executive Producer: Bénédicte Leclere

—Website: futureself.orange.com

—Media plan: banners (Le Monde, YouTube, Le Bonbon, Orange.fr, Dailymotion, Deezer, Vice…)

Facebook plans to keep experimenting with how its service affects users’ behavior — just more responsibly.

The social network said in a blog post yesterday that it’s giving its researchers clearer guidelines to follow when studying sensitive topics, such as users’ emotions. Facebook said it has also created a board composed of members of its legal and privacy teams to review proposed projects.

The changes follow a controversy in June over a 2012 mood experiment that influenced what almost 700,000 Facebook members saw on their news feeds, which the company didn’t publicly disclose until this year. Facebook has repeatedly had to respond to concerns about how it handles data on its members, which now number more than 1.3 billion worldwide. Last month, the company prompted users to review their privacy settings, taking a proactive step to assuage such concerns.

Continue reading at AdAge.com