Hasta La Creative!

Grey Canada offers its own unique touch in a new Volvo campaign with nary a Jean-Claude Van Damme appearance in sight.

To help the Swedish automaker roll out its new XC60 line and promote the SUV’s 60-some “feature innovations,” Grey’s Toronto-based office decided to tweak your standard YouTube pre-roll ads we’re used to seeing before every video by replacing them with brief clips touting various XC60 capabilities.

Some more screen shots:

Get it?!

In “6 Billion Hours”–named for the average amount of time humans spend watching stuff on YouTube over the course of a month–a Grey Canada team of creatives, media people and analysts apparently “worked together 24/7? to develop hundreds of XC60 feature pre-rolls.

They are contextually, albeit loosely, tethered to specific trending YouTube themes: twerking, a Justin Bieber clip complete with “make him stop” comments, various weather-related phenomena (hello, XC60 rain sensor!), et cetera.

Grey Canada’s pre-roll creations do a pretty good job of presenting the best and worst of what YouTube has to offer. They even remind us that some comment sections are worse than others…

In March, Campaign Brief reported that Jeremy Craigen, ECD at DDB London who led the Volkswagen account, would be leaving the agency after 25 years.

Now we know that he went to another auto-focused agency: Innocean.

Craigen served as global ECD on VW after joining the shop as a junior copywriter way back in 1990 and worked his way up to run VW.

Both More About Advertising and several of our readers believe that Craigen did not leave voluntarily: specifically, they name DDB’s Global CCO Amir Kassaei, who succeeded Bob Scarpelli in early 2011, a the key reason for his departure.

Prior to his promotion, Kassaei was CCO and partner at DDB Germany–and responsibility for the global VW account recently moved from the UK’s adam&eveDDB to the office formerly run by Kassaei. According to MAA’s sources, Craigen was not invited to move along with the account he led due to unstated disagreements with another office’s CEO.

Now he will run creative at Innocean, which MAA calls “Hyundai’s in-house agency.” This week Craigen received high praise from the Korea Times, which wrote:

“Innocean Worldwide, an advertizing unit of Hyundai Motor Group, said Tuesday it has hired a British national with 30-years experience in advertizing as its new global chief creative officer (CCO).

Craigen said he will do everything he can to improve the quality of Innocean’s creative output and expand its business.”

For the record, Craigen himself said:

“What I love about Innocean is their honesty about themselves and their ambition for the future. It is a great company, headed by great people. And this is exactly the opportunity I have been waiting for.”

He will continue to work from his home base in the UK.