Hasta La Creative!

(TrendHunter.com) Fitness watches are a great accessory to have, but the truth of the matter is that people aren’t going to make use of such wearable fitness devices unless they’re fashionable and enhance…

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.

Brands are cranking out new spots with athletes. Among new releases, Foot Locker’s “It’s Really Happening” has immediately become the most digitally-engaging spot, supplanting a Nike commercial that was getting a lot of plays and shares online. In Foot Locker’s new ad, Manny Pacquiano gets confused about whether his upcoming match against Floyd Mayweather is really happening — because it seemed to be happening in a Foot Locker commercial last year.

Oklahoma City Thunder star Kevin Durant, meanwhile, “slushes” two guys in a one-on-one (on one) match to promote Sonic’s Kevin Durant Candy Slush drink.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Google’s efforts come less than two weeks after the European Commission filed antitrust charges against the company and before new potential problems for the company in Europe.

Ogilvy Hong Kong decided to tackle Hong Kong’s littering epidemic by holding those personally responsible accountable for the act.

To do so, the agency came up with a high-tech solution: using Snapshot DNA Phenotyping Analysis to identify offenders by the litter they left behind. Representations of those individuals’ faces were then posted on digital billboards on the Hong Kong transit system, as well as on social media and in print publications, as “The Face of Litter.” Thecampaign reminds those who see the images not to litter, lest their face be the next one people see. It’s a pretty unique way to address what is often seen as an anonymous crime, and the fear of litter shaming could actually change behavior, although the methods used also raise some serious ethical and legal questions.

“This campaign is one of a kind,” Reed Collins, chief creative officer at Ogilvy Hong Kong, told Adweek. “It’s interactive. It’s innovative. It’s our own science experiment that we’re using to create social change. Litter is such a major problem in Hong Kong, and thanks to technology, we can now put a face to this anonymous crime and get people to think twice about littering.”

Grey New York makes a ton of gun violence PSAs—from the famously brutal (and award-winning) “Ed” spot in 2013 to this year’s stunt in which it opened a gun store in the middle of New York City. But this new project might be its craziest yet.

Millennials apparently love the combination of music and severed fingers, because that’s the target market and the theme of this new video from Women Against Gun Violence.

It was directed and animated by Johnnie Semerad of Quiet Man, and is set to a folk song (that might remind you a bit of “Dumb Ways to Die”) scored and performed by singer/songwriter Stephen Krauss.

WAGV says the gun violence prevention movement doesn’t have the attention of millennials right now, but the group believes this video could change that.

“This may not be your dinner table video but it gets the point across, and it gets people talking which is the ultimate goal,” says Josh Stepakoff, gun violence survivor and WAGV’s youngest board member. “I want my peers, the millennial generation, to use their power to affect change, and I believe this PSA will help get them engaged in the conversation.”

And if nothing else, all these cleanly severed fingers might also serve as a reminder to be careful around knives, too.

CREDITS
Advertiser: Women Against Gun Violence
Spot Title: “Keep Your Finger Off the Trigger”
First Air Date: 4/28/15
Agency: Grey NY
Worldwide Chief Creative Officer: Tor Myhren
Deputy Worldwide Chief Creative Officer: Per Pedersen
Chief Creative Officer: Andreas Dahlqvist
Executive Creative Director: Stephen Krauss
Executive Creative Director: Ari Halper
Singer/Songwriter: Stephen Krauss
Creative Director: Marco Pupo
Creative Director: Joao Coutinho
EVP Director Broadcast Production: Bennett McCarroll
Director of Audio Services/Sound Engineer: Dante Desole
VP Account Director: Elizabeth Gilchrist
Account Supervisor: Katie Stirn
Business Manager: Cecilia Critchley
EVP Director of Music: Josh Rabinowitz
VP Director of Licensing: Amy Rosen
Project Manager: Emma Tonetti

Production Company (location): Quietman
Director/Animator: Johnnie Semerad
Executive Producer: Carey Gattyan
Associate Producer: Clare O’Brien
Editor: Morgan Mitchell
Flame Artist: Stephanie Greenberg

(TrendHunter.com) The Qoros 2 SUV PHEV is a concept vehicle unveiled by Chinese-Israeli automaker Qoros at the Shanghai International Auto Show. This vehicle may have a brutal, even monstrous appearance but it…

China’s Great Firewall already prevents most people on the mainland from accessing Facebook. This week, China’s internet has been behaving bizarrely, leading to questions about whether Chinese internet regulators are tackling Facebook from an unusual new angle.

Starting this weekend, people on the mainland suddenly couldn’t navigate to many common websites, including gaming sites and news outlets like CNN.com and dailymail.co.uk. Instead they were redirected to totally unrelated pages — a site for open-source software called wpkg.org and a Polish couple’s travel blog, ptraveler.com. (This happened several times to Ad Age’s reporter in Shanghai, though the situation seemed to improve Tuesday.)

What does that have to do with Facebook? The redirection occurs when people try to reach websites that use a Facebook Connect button, which lets them log on using their Facebook account. A Facebook spokeswoman based in Asia said the company was investigating the situation.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The fashion and lifestyle media company is now valued at about $300 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.

(TrendHunter.com) Ikea’s Concept Kitchen 2025 is a project that envisions the future of cooking in a technology-obsessed world, while also making people more creative about food and encouraging them to adopt a…