Hasta La Creative!

Oh no, Mr. Tickles!

Digital agency space150 launched a campaign for 3M’s ACE brand (you’re probably familiar with the bandages), centered around a spot featuring a stuffed pink bear floating downstream, soggy and cold instead of enjoying a trip with his family. You see, dad was too distracted by pain to notice when Mr. Tickles fell out of his daughter’s backpack. The spot delivers the story from the perspective of the stuffed bear, who apparently refers to himself in the first person.

The spot concludes with Mr. Tickles opining his lack of verbal communication skills, which would have allowed him to tell dad about ACE’s wrist brace. It’s perhaps a bit of a long walk (or float down the river, as it were) to get to the “Don’t Be Distracted by Wrist Pain” tagline at the end of the ad, but there is a connection to the product’s purported benefits. According to a release, it’s based on the insight that “chronic pain keeps you from being in the moment – and that can have some consequences.”

In addition to the full-length spot above, running on digital and social channels, a 30-second version of the ad will run on broadcast. And this won’t be the last we see of Mr. Tickles, who will reportedly appear in future creative, as well as in further digital and social content for the campaign and in-store marketing. The campaign aims to reintroduce the ACE brand to consumers as it approaches its 100th anniversary, showcasing products beyond the brand’s well-known bandages.

3M has made some changes to its advertising recently, selecting Veneables, Bell & Partners as its lead creative agency (and ending a 21-year relationship with Grey) in March, following a review launched in November. Digital strategy and creative duties for the ACE brand, however, reside with space150.

The agency has undergone some recent changes itself, with the promotion of Dutch Thalhuber to the role of president the most recent.  Thalhuber’s promotion followed the arrivals of Ulli Appelbaum as executive vice president, strategy and Stan Fiorito as executive vice president, client and brand development last summer and Char Roseblade as senior vice president, account services in October. 

Credits:
Client: 3M ACE Brand
Agency: space150
Brock Davis, Chief Creative Officer
Brian Ritchie, Executive Creative Director
Alex Dubrovsky, Group Creative Director
Shealah Cocherell, Art Director
Tanner Uselmann, Copywriter
Henni Iwarsson, Producer
Jenna Martin, Account Director

We’ve said before that Domino’s won’t stop until you can order a pizza just by thinking about it. Until that day comes, the pizza chain–which is as much of a tech company as a food maker these days–continues to innovate the ordering process. And now, it’s getting your whole Internet of things involved. The brand,…

Remember Lou Bega? His re-write of Dámaso Pérez Prado‘s “Mambo Number 5” was one of the more obnoxious ear worms of 1999. It was also an international hit on such a scale that Bega is still receiving substantial royalty checks for it.

That’s the basis for Bega’s appearance in “Lou Bega Sings The Praises of Annuities,” the latest in the “Be Good at Life” campaign Anomaly launched for New York Life Insurance last September, with another odd celebrity appearance, after winning creative duties back in November of 2015.

Bega appears on a sunny beach somewhere, sipping a cocktail and extolling the virtues of “getting checks on a regular basis” after retirement. While Bega can’t go anywhere without receiving checks because he wrote a “masterpiece” (insert pause for laughter), New York Life also offers an income annuity that results in monthly checks post-retirement. You can be just like Lou Bega! (Minus the legal battles with Prado’s estate.)

“We were thinking about the consistency of paying the checks month after month, and this was similar in our minds to royalty checks,” New York Life’s head of marketing, Kari Axberg, explained to Adweek. “Musicians receive [them] over the years, and consumers could understand that.”

Anomaly global chief operating officer Karina Wilsher added that Bega was the right fit because he exemplifies “what being good at life means. It’s having things in perspective and being able to focus on the important things.” She then cited the “positivity and optimism he has, naturally.”

Bega, the brand’s first choice, was impressed enough by the script he received that he opted in.

“I was approached by New York Life, [which] sent over the script—and I’ve read a lot of scripts—but that script was so funny and on-point,” he told Adweek via phone from his native Germany.

“I don’t know how long my body will hold up for 60 gigs a year and traveling and jet lag and all of that,” he added. “Getting an annuity check provides the peace of mind—so I do recognize the value of it.”

Antiquated? Maybe.

But the upfronts are no joke.

There is some $20 billion at stake in the annual marketplace, with broadcast TV networks selling upwards of 75% of their upcoming commercial inventory, and cable channels selling more than half.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Ad Age “Media Guy” columnist Simon Dumenco’s media roundup for the morning of Friday, April 28:

Summer is seriously here — e.g., the temperature’s supposed to hit the high 70s today and low 80s tomorrow in America’s media capital (I’m typing at you from lower Manhattan) — so I won’t blame you if you scroll right past the Trump-related items (Nos. 1, 2, 3) below as well as the digital-media-retrenchment items (Nos. 4, 6) and the media-about-media-about-media item (No. 5) to jump straight to the beach-related item (No. 7). Anyway, let’s get started …

1. In a guest post on The Hill this morning under the headline “Why the polls are wrong about Trump. Again,” Mark Penn (managing partner of the Stagwell Group, former pollster for President Clinton and co-director of the Harvard-Harris Poll) reminds us of all the media organizations that predicted a Hillary Clinton presidency, writing,

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Domino’s is out with its latest move to associate its brand with tech innovation, a partnership with the IFTTT platform that lets customers use and create delivery-timed “hacks.”

IFTTT, which stands for “If this, then that,” makes connections between unrelated digital devices and services using what it calls applets. One applet from Weather Undergound, for example, lets users set their web-enabled WeMo light switches to turn off at sunrise every day.

Chief Digital Officer Dennis Maloney said last year that Domino’s has gone from being a pizza company that sells online to an e-commerce company that sells pizza.

Continue reading at AdAge.com