Hasta La Creative!

Hand out fliers about the dangers of osteoporosis pretty much anywhere and see what happens. Crumple. Toss. No one reads all those statistics. But chase those same folks with a remote-controlled wheelchair? Now you have yourself a public service campaign.

Never mind that it could spike some heart rates—why is that contraption following me?—it’s for the greater good.

The prank-style awareness campaign, from FCB Health for Crouse Hospital in Syracuse, N.Y., shares some fairly alarming data: About 54 million Americans have osteoporosis or low bone density, and one in two women over age 50 will break a bone due to osteoporosis. Recovery can be brutal, or nonexistent—hence the wheelchair as the central prop.

With slightly more ominous background music, “Beware the Chair” could double as an ad for a horror flick. (Put a creepy baby in it, and you have a Thinkmodo production.) Initial reaction seems to be pretty strong, judging from the video. Or maybe those people were already trembling?

The work will get print, outdoor and heavy social media distribution via Crouse Hospital’s Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. FCB is also offering it free to hospitals and health care groups across the country.

Ronald Ng joined Publicis Groupe’s DigitasLBi in January as North America chief creative officer. He came from Omnicom’s BBDO & Proximity network where he had been for more than a decade, having worked in its Malaysia, New York and Singapore offices. In 2011, while exec VP/exec creative director at BBDO New York, his team’s Kinect-powered interactive installation for Autism Speaks was added to the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

Ad Age caught up with him to this week and gleaned some fun facts for this week’s edition of Six Things.

1. He developed a pronounced case of sticky fingers at age four. Though his description of that phase goes back and forth between “kleptomaniac tendencies” and “I was just resourceful at a very young age,” one thing he’s not so fuzzy on is that he got caught. “Mom opened a can of whoopass,” he said. Two things were established that day — 1) that he would never take anything he didn’t actually work for 2) his perennial fear of his mother’s wrath.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

The Richards Group introduces the new Jeep Renegade with a 60-second spot, straightforwardly titled “Renegades.”

The broadcast spot, which launches today, was built around the song “Renegades,” the new single by Interscope Records’ X Ambassadors, which was chosen in collaboration with the label as the foundation for the campaign. As it turned out, X Ambassadors were working with Alex Da Kid on a song that fit the bill.

“Through this unprecedented collaboration with KIDinaKORNER/Interscope Records, X Ambassadors and Alex Da Kid to build a campaign around an original song, we’re staking a new claim to music and setting the stage for the Jeep brand’s North America marketing launch for the all-new 2015 Jeep Renegade,” said Olivier Francois, Chief Marketing Officer, FCA – Global, in a statement.

“Olivier came forward and challenged us to deliver a song for him that had the theme and the spirit of the new Jeep launch,” Steve Berman, vice chairman of A&M Records, told Adweek. “Sometimes you just get lucky in the timing of how things works. [‘Renegades’] was a piece of art they [X Ambassadors] were already recording.”

While the process of the song selection and its integration as a fundamental building block of the campaign may mark new ground, it’s certainly not the first time Jeep have built a campaign around a song. Last May, the brand released a spot from GlobalHue built around the posthumous Michael Jackson single “Love Never Felt So Good.” The new spot feels even more like a music video than that effort did, complete with text referencing the artist and song title at the beginning of the ad. Shots of the band are interspersed with shots of the new Jeep Renegade and footage of millenials (hello, target audience) doing renegade-y stuff like hopping fences, nightswimming (on what appears to be a quiet night) and skateboarding.

“If you look at the words of this song, if I had given an agency that brief, they would not have cracked a better script than X Ambassadors did,” Francois told Adweek. “The script of the song is totally on brief, it’s spot on…But what really made me feel that [the song] was the campaign was the way they speak of the millennials being the modern renegades. The genius here is that you tie the name of the car, which is ‘Renegade’ to the mindset of the target, which is the millennial target.”

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Vessel, the closely held video startup led by former Hulu chief Jason Kilar, has raised $57.5 million more to fund its new subscription business for short-form video, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The investment was led by Institutional Venture Partners, Mr. Kilar said in a statement announcing the funding round without providing a sum or valuation for the company. At $57.5 million, however, it brings Vessel’s outside funding to more than $134 million. The new round includes investors previously tapped by Kilar, including Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment company of Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos.

The company is trying to emulate Netflix’s subscription business with a focus on short-form video. That brings it into direct competition with Google’s YouTube, which is also developing a subscription product.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

W+K London introduces Icelandic yogurt brand Arla Skyr to the UK with the 90-second spot “The Messenger.”

The titular character is a young boy who delivered messages from the only telephone of a small Icelandic town in 1968. “Many say that the boy’s efficiency is the reason the town had only one telephone until 1978? the narrator explains. Blink and you’ll miss the first nod to the product the spot is promoting around the 40 second mark, as the boy takes a quick break for a bowl of yogurt before running off again. Near the end of the spot, the agency finally ties things together when the narrator says, “However far he went, he was never far from a bowl of skyr…and that’s just as true today,” as the next shot shows the boy as a middle aged man.

The spot’s whimsical narrative, dry humor and pastel color palette vaguely recall Wes Anderson, and while it takes its time getting around to introducing the brand, the prolonged introduction serves to reinforce the brand as “Iceland’s yogurt,” which is a large part of what makes it unique. “The Messenger” does a lot to build a charming portrait of Icelandic perseverance, one W+K hopes will stick with people when they’re in the grocery aisle.

For Groupon, it’s the Bunker that keeps on bunking (but not bonking).

The Banana Bunker, that famously suggestive-looking banana holder, is back “by popular demand” on the Groupon site this week. And given the success of its hilarious Facebook thread about the product last time (click here for a recap, if you were living in a real bunker at the time), the company had to do something special to celebrate.

So, it got some of its employees to read their favorite comments from the earlier thread.

Check out the YouTube video above. The video is also posted to Facebook, of course, which means there’s yet another comment thread. But Groupon is apparently not going to reply to everyone this time—just a few people (see below).

That’s understandable—it’s bunker-busting work.