Hasta La Creative!

With the arrival of the MLB season, Hill Holliday launched a new digital camapign for John Hancock featuring former Red Sox slugger David Ortiz.

It may be the agency’s last work for the client, as John Hancock parent company Manulife launched a creative review last month and Hill Holliday is not participating.

“The Retirement Rookie” finds Ortiz with a lot of time on his hands following his retirement…and not quite sure what to do with himself. At the end of the spot, Ortiz asks viewers to comment or tweet ideas, promising some will be selected for future videos.

The spot follows early efforts featuring Ortiz that similarly wondered what he would do post-retirement, such as MullenLowe’s “David Ortiz vs. Piñatas” for JetBlue and 72andSunny’s effort for SportsCenter at Night last July which saw Ortiz considering Papi branded food products. While the approach is similar to those spots preceding his retirement, Hill Holliday’s approach is centered around asking viewers for help in figuring out how the former Red Sox star should spend his time now that he is retired, in an attempt to engage audiences on social media.

“At John Hancock, we’re committed to helping our clients plan for the road ahead,” CMO Barbara Goose, who joined John Hancock last October, said in a statement. “Whether you’re a three-time world champion or in spring training, we can help you hit a home run when it comes to your retirement goals.”

Eddie Huang didn’t see himself as a likely candidate to be an underwear model. “My manager told me, ‘They want to put billboards of your husky ass in their underwear,’ ” says the chef and food personality in a new video. “I couldn’t believe it.” Nonetheless, Huang is gracing a series of ads for online…

The National Organization for Women called for his firing and three more companies said they were pulling their advertisements from his show.

It’s been almost a year since the folks over at Venables Bell & Partners won the creative review for Starwood Hotels & Resorts’ Sheraton and Westin brands.

We’ve seen the Bay Area agency’s first work for Westin, which aimed at business travelers looking to maintain their health and productivity regimens under the “Let’s Rise” tag. The new Sheraton work, though, focuses on reaching those who travel with a bit more baggage (in the good way!).

The theme of this campaign is “Go Beyond,” as in “even the lowliest Sheraton employees will go beyond the requirements of their jobs to serve you, customer.”

Case in point: this very British-looking man.

The copy reads, “What drove this fully uniformed associate to dive in and propel his way to the deep?”

It wasn’t the promise of a bonus, readers. And it didn’t involve any potential “The Night Manager”-style adventures with balding, international men of mystery.

There’s a behind the scenes video for this campaign, but you really need to check out the print executions first to get all the variations on the “Go Beyond” theme.

Now here’s some making-of action.

That was indeed a wrap on advertising imitating life. But we didn’t see any Venables people in that short…

You saw this coming, right?

Per a Comedy Central press release out this morning,

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Jonathan Monk, Waiting for Famous People (Marcel Duchamp), 1997. Photo: Galleri Nicolai Wallner

Aéroports / Ville-monde, an exhibition open until 21 May at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, invites visitors to look behind the sanitized, codified and paranoid facade of airports and ask themselves whether airports are harbingers of a new order or microcosms of their own.

In an advanced globalized era, the airport is a lab for our contemporary life. It echoes and fixes all the major themes that rhythm life in our societies: mobility and surveillance, immigration and consumption, terrorism and globalized connection. Linked from one another by a uniform protocol, from Marseille to Yellowknife, they might be today the suburbs of an “invisible world capital”, foreseen by the SF writer J.G. Ballard, the tarmac of a global village, the doorstep of an artificial and virtualized world.

Hiraki Sawa, Dwelling, 2002

The exhibition recreates some of the key moments of your passage through an airport terminal: you get a boarding pass at the entrance, walk through Matthias Gommel‘s queue management system, stop at Marnix de Nijs‘ security portal equipped with a biometric software that will probe your facial features and matches them to famous characters (i tried several times and was ‘recognized’ as an actress of erotic horror movie, thanks!), etc.

The exhibition is entertaining without ever verging on the funfair. It has depth, insights and the ambition to make us see airports as more than icons of non-places and glorified shopping mails. Airports are symbols of globalization, territories of hyper-controlled behaviour, gateways to movement, etc. And as recent events in the U.S.A. have demonstrated, they’ve also become spaces for civic expression. When Trump’s travel ban blocked entry of migrants from 7 Muslim countries, including green card holders, people flocked to airports with signs and messages of solidarity to demonstrate their opposition to the policy.

Matthias Gommel, Untitled (Passage), 2011. Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

Marnix de Nijs, Physiognomic Scrutinizer, 2008-2009. Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

Aéroports / Ville-monde is designed like a temporary airport terminal that gets more intriguing and troubling as you move from one artwork to another. Here’s a very quick walk through some of the works i found particularly interesting in the exhibition:

Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporeana, 2007. Photo via artslife

Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporeana, 2007

Adrian Paci’s work highlights the repercussions of conflicts, social revolutions and soon i’m sure the effects of climate change that will transform many of us into environmental migrants. In our capitalistic society, goods are free to travel, human bodies are not if they don’t have the ‘right’ documents. The video Centro di Permanenza Temporeana (Center of Temporary Permanence) shows people stepping onto boarding stairs. Once they’ve reached the top, there is no cabin for them to enter. The planes slowly pass behind them and these people remain standing with dignity on the pitiful platform, excluded from the economy of movements and from the promise of a better future in another country.

Paci’s exploration of migration issues echo his own experience. In 1997, the artist had to leave Albania with his wife and two daughters and settled in Milan. At the time, his country was in a state of crisis and protests bordering on civil war.

Cécile Babiole, Couloir Aérien, 2016. Couloir Aérien, 2016. Installation view at La Gaîté yrique

Cécile Babiole, Couloir Aérien, 2016. Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

Cécile Babiole’s installation Couloir Aérien makes loud and intrusive the civilian air traffic flying over and around the building of the Gaîté Lyrique. The system detects the ADS-B (Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast) signals emitted by aircraft and amplifies them. Sounds of otherwise unnoticed flyovers suddenly invade the space according, while a video screen visualizes the source of these otherwise unnoticed sounds: flight name, altitude, latitude, longitude, speed.

Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon, Psychoanalysis of the International Airport – Museum of Terrorism

Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon, Psychoanalysis of the International Airport – Museum of Terrorism. Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon, Psychoanalysis of the International Airport – Museum of Terrorism. Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

Artists and researchers, Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon present the airport as a museum of terrorism, a place characterized by the coexistence of the fantasy of the disaster, of the absolute surveillance, of the omnipresence, of unlimited shopping.

The installation Psychoanalysis of the International Airport – Museum of Terrorism at the Gaîté takes the form of a long table where people sit down and read the booklet Psychanalyse de l’aéroport international in which Degoutin and Wagon have compiled evidences that airports operate as space where bodies made transparent are shifted through ‘autistic architecture’, where threat is over-dramatized and surveillance is becoming increasingly arbitrary.

The book manages to be both hilarious and thought-provoking. Every single visitor who sits down to briefly browse through it ends up being glued to their chair.

Discovered in the book (sorry i couldn’t resist):

In 2012, John E. Brennan got naked while going through a checkpoint at Portland airport as a protest against invasive Transportation Security Administration procedures, such as body scans and pat downs

Joseph Popper, The Same Face (installation detail), 2015

Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

The Same Face plays on the similarities between flight simulation video games and drone command centers. Both exploit digital technologies but only pilots of drone control rooms can wreak havoc and kill real human beings at a distance. The work takes the bombing of Brighton’s Grand Hotel by the IRA in 1984 as a point of departure, where the location of the event is one of a series of landscapes reimagined from 5000ft high.

David Thomas Smith, Anthropocene Series, 2006 (Beijing International Airport, Beijing, People’s Republic of China)

David Thomas Smith, Anthropocene Series, 2006 (Las Vegas, NV, United States of America)

David Thomas Smith takes screenshots of Google Earth aerial images and organizes them into complex tapestries that visualize the elaborated structures of global capitalism’s centers. “I would like people to come away with a sense of the scale on which the world operates,” the artist explained in an interview with Canadian Geographic. “The power that mankind has at its finger tips, and then, hopefully, they may begin to question how that power is used.”

Masha Shubina, Lost and Found series, 2016

Masha Shubina’s self-portraits are printed on aircraft security cards. She’s defiant, hiding her face behind a balaclava or a traditional Ukrainian scarf, brandishing a Molotov cocktail and displaying behaviours that could get her arrested. Especially in an airport.

Jasmina Cibic, JC01 – Lufthansa, 2006

JC01-Lufthansa is part of a series of photographs representing the inside of the cabin of an aircraft that was under repaired at the Ljubljana airport in Slovenia. The artist took advantage of the fact that the planes were immobilized and emptied and she decorated them with hunting trophies collected by a Yugoslavian general. Two worlds collide in this image, Western Europe’s capitalist vision and the rugged terrain of Yugoslavian history.

More images from the show:

Hiraki Sawa, Dwelling, 2002

Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

Aéroports, Ville-Monde, exposition à la Gaîté Lyrique du 23 février au 21 mai 2017. Photo: © vinciane lebrun-verguethen/voyez-vous

Aéroports / Ville-monde is at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris until 21 May 2017

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Ad Age “Media Guy” columnist Simon Dumenco’s media roundup for the morning of Tuesday, April 4:

Will you take the oath to get used to Oath, the new name for the combined AOL-Yahoo under Verizon? Or will Oath bug you forever and ever, like Tronc? And Oath aside, should Verizon entirely do away with the AOL or Yahoo brands? (Take Ad Age’s poll.) Also, when Tronc and Oath merge, should the combined company be called Troath? Wait, sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Anyway, let’s get started …

1. “President Donald Trump on Monday signed into law a controversial measure repealing online privacy protections established by the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama Administration,” Time’s Katie Reilly reports. “The rules, which would have taken effect in December, required internet service providers — including Comcast, Verizon and AT&T — to obtain permission from customers before sharing personal data like their web-browsing history. The rules were aimed at preventing internet providers from selling that data without permission.”

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Ad Age today launches a revamped Ad Age Datacenter, offering a more graphical approach to industry rankings and data.

The new Datacenter home page, accessible to subscribers at AdAge.com/datacenter, features a graphics-driven design with data visualizations of rankings for the largest advertisers and agencies. Data also can be seen in table form.

For the first time, Datacenter subscribers can download agency rankings — agency companies, agency networks, agencies by discipline — as Excel files. More Excel downloads will be added to Datacenter going forward.

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