Hasta La Creative!

Embattled Subway endorser Jared Fogle is suddenly so radioactive that even the glorious trashfest “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!” has to steer clear.

NBC Universal’s Syfy, which will premiere the sharks-and-meteorology TV movie next Wednesday, said Thursday that a cameo Mr. Fogle shot earlier this year has been excised. The decision to edit him out of the film comes after the FBI raided his Indiana home as part of an ongoing child pornography investigation.

Mr. Fogle has not been arrested or charged with criminal wrongdoing, but Subway suspended its relationship with its long-time spokesman shortly after news of the raid broke.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Olive Garden launched a creative review, which is being managed by Pile + Co. in Boston, Adweek reports. The brand spent $155 million in measured media in 2014, according to Kantar Media.

Incumbent Grey, who has handled creative for Olive Garden since 1986, will be defending in the review. Olive Garden executive vice president of marketing Jose Duenas confirmed Grey’s participation in a statement, adding that the agency has been a “tremendous partner and has played an important part in helping build the Olive Garden brand.” The review is currently in its early stages and expected to conclude sometime in the fall.

Olive Garden has been making changes to its marketing lately in an attempt to jump start its struggling business. Last March, Olive Garden unveiled a brand redesign, including a new logo that met with its share of criticism. Grey’s latest campaign for the brand, released in May, showed a change in direction with its reliance on home video footage rather than the more typical product-centric advertising Olive Garden became known for. Now it appears the brand is committed to taking the next step in reinventing itself, with or without Grey.

Back in April, Pereira & O’Dell launched its “Crossroads” campaign for Coca-Cola Latin America with a pair of lengthy online spots exploring themes easily related to by teens such as friendship and the damage caused by rumors while introducing the fistbump as the campaign’s visual metaphor of togetherness. Now the agency has rolled out what Adweek refers to as the campaign’s “crown jewel,” with “The Text.”

The ad, which examines the close friendship between two teen boys, does indeed seem to be a kind of centerpiece for the campaign, which explains why Coca-Cola and Pereira & O’Dell chose to release it well after “Crossroads” had established momentum. Directed by Dustin Lance Black (probably best known as the screenwriter behind Milk and J. Edgar), the spot takes its time in establishing the boys’ friendship, which viewers can imply is very close and goes back a long time. After establishing the relationship and hinting at secrets yet to be revealed, the spot reaches its dramatic climax when one of the boys goes to grab Cokes from the fridge while his friend sees a text on his phone from his boyfriend. The ad ends with the friends closer than ever, and engaging in the visual trademark of the campaign, the fistbump. While this moment seems a bit forced as a way to work in the gesture, as does working in going to the fridge for Cokes as the impetus for the spot’s climax, the ad does manage to believably portray the boy’s relationship and the way the dramatic moment unfolds is actually pretty believable.

Pereira & O’Dell’s previous spots for the campaign (which were also directed by Black) traded in teen melodrama, but “The Text” avoids seeming as over-the-top, and feels dramatic rather than melodramatic. While its lengthy runtime (it clocks in at over seven minutes) could probably have been cut a bit, the long buildup does work to establish the nuances of the boys’ relationship.

“‘The Text’ was perhaps the most personal for me to direct,” writer/director and LGBT activist Black told Adweek. “As an artist, I feel I have a responsibility to share the stories of who LGBT people truly are, in order to dispel any atmosphere of fear that might prevent LGBT people from sharing their lives openly.”

Credits:

Client: Coca-Cola Latin America
IMC Director LATAM: Marta Fontcuberta
IMC Director: Ismael Pascual
Content Excellence Director: Diego Bracamontes
Coca–Cola IMC Senior Manager: Eduardo Ruiz
Coca–Cola IMC Manager: Layla del Razo
Coca–Cola IMC Junior Manager: Adriana Sahagun
Coca-Cola Trademark Brand Director: José Luis Basauri
Coca-Cola Brand Director: Unai Alvarez
Coca-Cola Brand Manager: Valeria Lopez

Coca-Cola Design Team
Global Design Director: Rapha Abreu
Vice President, Design: James Sommerville
Senior Global Design Director: Tom Farrel
Global Design Project Manager: Craig Stroud
Global Designers: Chrsitine Lee, Megan Libby
Senior Design Manager: Aidee Rodriguez

Agency: Pereira & O’Dell
Chief Creative Officer: P.J. Pereira
Executive Creative Director: Jaime Robinson
Creative Directors: Rob Lambrechts, Rafael Rizuto
Senior Art Director: Luke Acret
Senior Copywriter: Omid Amid
Senior Designer: Moses Kelany
Chief Strategy Officer: Ana Cortat
Strategist: Sara Lezama
Vice President, Production: Jeff Ferro

Senior Film Producer: Victoria Whitlow
Co-Director, Client Services: Henry Arlander
Account Director: Mona Gonzalez
Account Executive: Rose Valderrama
Trailer, Interactive Editor: Collin Kriner
Senior Production Designer: Aaron Rodriguez

Vice President, Distribution: Josh Brandau
Project Manager: Lauren Parker
Agency Marketing, Public Relations: Molly Parsley

Business Affairs Director: Russ Nadler

Visual Effects: Laundry!
Editing: Umlaut Films
Editor: Alex Rodríguez
Poster Designer: Erik Buckham
Illustrator, Retoucher: Adhemas Batista

Theme Music: One Direction, “Clouds”

Music Supervisor: Aminé Ramer
Original Score Composer: Grayson Sanders, Music Dealers

Mother London launched a new, monkey-filled addition to its “The Wonderful Everyday” campaign for IKEA, entitled “Rediscover the Joy of the Kitchen.”

In the spot, directed by MJZ’s Juan Cabral, a group of monkeys discovers an IKEA kitchen in the middle of the jungle and have a lot of fun exploring, raiding and trashing it. The playful primates jump on light fixtures, play with water faucets, break dishes, discover a fridge full of bananas and make a mess while seemingly having a blast. The spot covertly shows off features of the kitchen while the playful primates’ entertaining hijinks play out. At the end of the ad, the tagline, “Rediscover the Joy of the Kitchen” makes for the implicit message that a new IKEA kitchen will make you as excited as the monkeys in the ad. There’s also an interesting moment where one of the monkeys presses the reverse button on the stereo and the action begins to unfold in reverse. The spot will make its broadcast debut on July 11, supported by digital, social media, OOH and print components.

Credits:

Brand: Ikea
Agency: Mother
Production Company: MJZ
Director: Juan Cabral
VFX: MPC
VFX Producer: Julie Evans
VFX Shoot Supervisor: Bill Macnamara
CG Supervisor: Fabian Frank
VFX Lead: Alex Lovejoy

Vancouver-based agency Wallop Film launched a campaign to boost tourism to the Los Angeles suburb of Claremont.

The spot champions the town, which has a population of 35,000, as “the best kept secret in L.A.” while touting its boutiques and culinary scene and working in its share of Wes Anderson-inspired quirk. Its allusions to the filmmaker, also seemingly the muse behind W+K London’s “The Messenger” for Arla Skyr, are quite intentional, as the creative team at Wallop brushed up on the director’s signature techniques before making the spot, with color palette selections and characters also clearly inspired by Anderson’s style. “Claremont has a certain charm and playfulness to it that we felt connected with the Wes Anderson aesthetic,” Wallop Film director Martin Glegg told Adweek.

Indeed, Wallop relied on some of the town’s citizens for the shoot, and found plenty of quirky locations to feature, such as the Folk Music Center which made for a very Anderson-inspired shot of a wall lined with string instruments. “We used a lot of the community in the shoot,” Glegg explained to Adweek. “For example, we used extras that were based in the town and also the local school marching band for the final street scene.”

Credits:

Creative Agency: Wallop Film
Director: Martin Glegg
Producer: Pippa Stowell
Executive Producers: Ryan Clarke and Stephen Saugestad
Agency Producer: Ron Antonette
Director of Production: Naim Sutherland
1st AC: Nick Forte
Gaffer: Paul Fabian
Grip: Oliver Lewis
Grip: Jefferson Strouse
Aerial Footage: Shane Latham
Composition: Charlie Jefferson
Sound Design: Jeff Yellen
Coloring: Rob Neilson

Here’s a fun stunt. To promote tourism, the rural Swiss region of Graubünden got an affable grey-bearded man to yell in real-time from a digital screen to passersby in Zurich’s main train station—trying to lure them with sweet yodeling and a free ticket to an impromptu vacation in a pastoral mountain town.

The take-it-now-or-leave-it twist is basically a local version of Heineken’s Departure Roullette campaign from a couple years back, which offered travelers already at the JFK airport a vacation to a unknown exotic location if they agreed to drop their existing plans.

Still, the Swiss video is a clever enough use of media, with the live dynamic playing on the expectation that the billboard will be comparatively static (in other words, it’s also another take on the intelligent vending machine). Plus, the invitation for an afternoon snack is pretty tempting, and the pitchman gets points for enthusiasm—he even goes so far as to offer to speak with one prospect’s boss, and actually dials another’s school to inform them the kid will be missing a day.

Then again, at the moment he actually starts greeting and shaking hands with guests, it suddenly looks an awful lot like the whole thing is green-screened. The trip from Zurich to Vrin is about 2 hours and 45 minutes by rail, according to Google Maps. So, it’s pretty suspicious that there’s no footage of the actual magical train that whisked people there—or their super fun adventures along the way (assuming Swiss train rides feature dining cars and high-speed wifi).

In fact, it doesn’t even seem like the brand and agency Jung Von Matt (which did a high-profile Facebook stunt for the Graubünden area back in 2011) even bothered to try to make it particularly convincing. For logistical reasons alone, it’s probable that they hired actors to play commuters, and shot the rest in a studio somewhere.

No matter, though, the major point holds. “Get away from the city and head to a relaxed mountain village,” reads the tagline. “[Or maybe just a computerized facsimile of one].”

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