Hasta La Creative!

If virtual reality is going to change everything about the world, its impact will be felt first in the video game industry. It seemed in recent months that the battle lines were becoming clear as competing headsets were being built by Facebook-owned Oculus, HTC and Valve, Sony, and Microsoft, with the first commercial release dates set for 2016. Now Microsoft has suddenly thrown in its lot with Oculus.

Oculus held a press conference on Thursday to fill in a few key details about the headsets. The company said it would begin selling the devices by the end of March 2016, announced a $10 million fund to help independent developers make Oculus games, and demonstrated prototype controllers that players will hold in each hand to navigate virtual environments. Brendan Iribe, the company’s chief executive officer, said that the headsets will ship with Xbox controllers, and he described how Oculus will have a “tight integration with Windows”. He said players will be able to stream Xbox One games onto the Oculus headsets.

It’s not yet clear how developments in the virtual reality industry will play out. Customers and developers have yet to cast their votes as to which headset should win. Tim Merel, managing director of Digi-Capital, a firm that advises companies on augmented and virtual reality, says the current landscape “feels a bit like the smartphone market before the iPhone.” A collaboration with Microsoft could tip the scales further in Oculus’s favor. Developers tend to want to build applications for the widest possible audiences, and Microsoft’s audience will be a big draw.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Gawker Media, which says it’s doing fine, faces a lawsuit and is confronting the same challenges as a lot of establishment media companies.

We have no official confirmation at this time, but sources tell us that the latest winner in Sprint’s ongoing relaunch/review is Miami-based Hispanic agency Alma DDB.

As we know, Marcelo Claure became president/CEO of the phone company last August–and since then he has taken the traditional new executive route by tweaking everything about the company he runs, including its relationships with all of its agencies.

One aspect of his “rollout” was a campaign created by Dallas-based Inspire, which won the sprint advertising and PR accounts in 2012. The ad, which ran on Univision, marked the company’s attempt to peel a larger share of the Spanish-speaking market away from its key competitors Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.

The spot starred Claure, who used the opportunity to introduce himself to Hispanic audiences and review his accomplishments as “not only the first Hispanic CEO of Sprint, but the first foreign-born Hispanic to lead any major U.S. telecommunications firm.”

Here it is via AdAge:

A spokesperson for Sprint told us today that the company has “nothing to announce at this time,” and DDB also declined to comment.

This is not particularly surprising. We broke news of Deutsch LA’s pending victory over Arnold in the Sprint creative review last November nearly six weeks before the client gave the “exclusive” to AdAge.

Updates when they come in.

Nascar Senior VP of Marketing, Kim Brink, has joined WPP’s dedicated Ford agency, Team Detroit, as chief operating officer, the company said.

Team Detroit’s CEO, Satish Korde, had stepped in to manage the team during the search to fill the position after COO Mark LaNeve took a position with Ford in January as VP of U.S. marketing sales and service.

Ms. Brink has led all marketing initiatives at Nascar since 2011, spearheading the launch of Nascar’s current Hispanic outreach efforts, as well as the development of its youth marketing platform, Acceleration Nation. She also led a review that resulted in the selection of WPP’s Ogilvy & Mather as agency of record .

Continue reading at AdAge.com

This week, Grey Group named Peter Viento to the ECD role at the New York offices of GreyShopper, its shopper marketing unit.

Viento was previously ECD at Colangelo Synergy Marketing in Connecticut, but in recent years he also spent time as a creative director with Ogilvy and Saatchi & Saatchi X, another shopper operation. (After leaving Saatchi in a wave of layoffs in late 2011, he told us that he’d landed at the New York offices of MARS.)

Viento is not the only creative to leave Colangelo in recent months: in February, we reported that Dave Clemans–formerly of CP+B, GS&P and more–would no longer be the agency’s ECD. At the time, tipsters told us that Colangelo’s creative department was going through an upheaval of sorts. Sources now claim that Viento’s move coincided with budgetary issues and that ECD Ben Applebaum, who has been with Colangelo for more than a decade, will be running creative operations in its Darien, Connecticut office following his departure.

Here’s the memo on Viento’s from Grey Global CEO of Shopper Marketing Joe Lampertius.

Please welcome our newest addition to the GreyShopper team. Peter Viento. ECD for GreyShopper NY.

He’s a creative guy who is all about the work that drives brand love & effective results. Sound familiar?

His primary role is to build a world class shopper creative team integrated within Grey NY & Global for the P&G Grooming business.

He will work closely with Leo & Jeff in Grey NY, Matt in Grey Shopper London and other key offices to ensure our creative teams work seamlessly across markets.

Throughout his career he has been fortunate enough to work on the most iconic brands in the world at some of the best creative agencies in NY. He joins us most recently from Colangelo, an Omnicom shopper/activation agency. He led through-the-line initiatives for every DIAGEO brand in North America, Imperial Tobacco, and Church & Dwight.

Before that he worked at Saatchi X on P&G and General Mills brands and at Ogilvy Action on Unilever and J&J brands for a number of years. He started his career at J Brown which became G2, so just another example on how circular the world can be. We’re very fortunate to have such an awarded shopper creative person join our NY team.

Please welcome & congratulate Peter to the Grey team!

Finlandia is gunning hard for the title of most inspirational vodka commercial ever.

A new two-and-half-minute ad, “1,000 years of less ordinary wisdom,” features offbeat heroes like a drag wrestler and reindeer racer offering tips on how to make it in the world, like “Be nobody’s bitch but your own” and “You’re only as fast as your reindeer.” In other words, a lot of the advice is, in spirit, not really that different from standard motivational fare, even if it comes from unusual sources and their unconventional contexts (though fashion icon Iris Apfel is not exactly out of the spotlight these days).

As for the title, the 1,000 years refers to the sum of the ages of the people in the commercial. A number of them are long in the tooth, which is cool, because listening to one’s elders is generally a good thing—they’re often less boring and clueless than young people. But the spot also makes sure to feature more sprightly accomplished types, too, like a prima ballerina and volcanic scientist (because it can’t really exclude representing the money demo, too).

Created by Wieden + Kennedy London, the spot relies heavily on a driving (mostly) instrumental version of the song “Undeniable,” by Donnie Daydream featuring Richie Sosa. That strings together the disparate footage from director Siri Bunford (though it might be worth mentioning that Adidas also just used the record as a soundtrack for its own sports-themed montage-qua-anthem).

Game of Thrones fans might enjoy that, as Fast Company notes, the strong man—Hafthór Júlíus Björnsson—is also a actor on the show. (He’s the latest in a string to play “The Mountain” Gregor Clegane, largely absent this season but for the occasional twitch from under a blanket on a laboratory table, the pseudo-zombie experiment of some sinister wizard. P.S.: If that’s where drinking Finlandia leads, no thanks.)

In all seriousness, though, the concept is pretty moving—a nice snapshot of various walks of life, with some clever and charming moments. Overall, it might even be convincing, except what drinking vodka really makes people want to do is drink more vodka and then pass out hard and sleep in the next day—not a great way to tear through that bucket list.

CREDITS
Client: Finlandia
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy London
Creative directors: Scott Dungate, Graeme Douglas
Copywriter: Paddy Treacy
Art director: Mark Shanley
Executive creative directors: Tony Davidson, Iain Tait
Executive producer: Danielle Stewart
Group account director: Paulo Salomao
Account director: Matt Owen
Account manager: Sophie Lake
Head of planning: Beth Bentley
Planning director: Martin Beverley
TV producer: Michelle Brough
Production company: Knucklehead
Director: Siri Bunford
Executive producer: Matthew Brown
Director of photography: Ben Smithard
Editorial companies: Lucky Cat, Whitehouse Post
Editors: Xavier Perkins, Lucky Cat; Adam Marshall, Whitehouse Post
Post producer: Anandi Peiris
VFX company: MPC
VFX supervisor: Bill McNamara
Flame artist: Bill McNamara
VFX producer: Anandi Peiris
Grade: MPC
Colorist: Matthieu Toullet
Titles/graphics: Ryan Teixeira
Music/sound company: Factory
Sound designers: Anthony Moore, Phil Bollard
Song: Undeniable, Richie Sosa
Interactive producer: Dom Felton
Director of relations: Marta Bobic
PR manager: Charlotte Corbett