Hasta La Creative!

Adidas would like to introduce you to the official 2014 World Cup stalker ball.

The brand, with help from TBWA, has put six cameras inside a very special version of its official game ball for the tournament, and will send it on tour to places like London, Munich and Madrid, filming ball's-eye footage of soccer scenes and releasing video episodes in the run-up to this summer's games in Brazil.

This way, you can appreciate what it feels like to look at star players like Xavi Hernandez and Bastian Schweinsteiger in the face, and then watch them wind up to kick you in yours.

Lest you escape unscathed, the campaign comes with a pun—the camera-ridden ball is a "brazucam," a play on the official ball's name, "brazuca" (a word that refers to both Brazilian national pride and Brazilian expatriates).

You can follow @brazuca for updates, because it's always fun to give inanimate objects social media profiles.

"As we stand on the edge of possibility, we choose the path less traveled."

Set to to the grandiose tune of Richard Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," aka the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, this new Lurpak butter ad from Wieden + Kennedy London (and Blink director Dougal Wilson) takes place in a world that looks like the love child of Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas.

Advertising the brand's new Cook's Range of oils and butters, the ad transforms ordinary (yet dramatically lit) kitchens into basically the entire universe. 

Of particular note is the GoPro-meets-lunar-landing slo-mo shot of a woman dropping a yolk on an extraterrestrial landscape of beautiful flour. There's also an otherworldly shot that transforms a gas stove into rocket burners and a carrot into a spaceship. This is so cool.

Lurpak and W+K have a long history of doing food porn together, and have a couple of gold Lions in Film Craft from Cannes to show for it. (Their first collaboration that we covered, in 2011, was "Kitchen Odyssey," which we called "the kind of commercial Stanley Kubrick would make if he were still alive." So, they're certainly consistent.)

This new ad, though, is a close encounter of the nerd kind. So say we all.

If you love nerding out about social media almost as much as you love nerding out about Game of Thrones, then have I got the video for you.

Social media management service HootSuite created the astoundingly well-produced promotional clip below, called "A Game of Social Thrones" and crafted in the style of HBO's opening sequence for the fantasy epic, returning to TV this Sunday for its blood-drenched fourth season.

In HootSuite's version, the Seven Kingdoms are reimagined as the major social networks, with Facebook's high walls and Twitter's tower encircled by chirping fauna. Digital wonks will especially enjoy how each company's related services (YouTube for Google, Instagram for Facebook, etc.) are arranged like nearby bannermen.

Most self-promotions are works of attention-seeking desperation. This one's practically a work of art.

UPDATE: HootSuite tells us the video was largely an in-house production, with the help of an outside motion designer and composer.

CREDITS

Producer/Director: Evan Aagaard, HootSuite
Lead Animator/Motion Designer: Clément Morin
Music Composer: Etienne Forget
Executive Producer: Cameron Uganec, HootSuite
Concept: Evan LePage, Hootsuite

Also worth checking out again: HootSuite's "Social Media Winter Is Coming" infographic from last year—"a visual representation of the quiet battles being fought between many social networks, who were building walls and blocking access between their respective sites and apps." That's posted below.

I'm positively floored by the fun series of Web videos by Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners and Tool of North America introducing the BMW Mini Cooper Hardtop.

Client and agency asked real Mini owners to think up creative "test drives" to showcase the vehicles. After receiving 800 submissions, they produced 10 videos. The work strikes a happy balance between user-generated content and traditional advertising, with the owners' ideas sparking consistently entertaining, engaging and, in some cases, surprising results.

Running between one and two minutes each, and starring the owners who proposed the concepts, some of the vignettes are simple, others quite involved.

But there's isn't a lemon in the lot.

Highlights include "Getting Medieval," which shows heavily armed and armored knights jousting in their Minis; "Midnight Black Light," with LED headlamps replaced by black lights that cut through a dazzling landscape of fluorescent paint; and my favorite, "Sex Appeal," a tongue-in-cheek, Burt Reynolds/Cosmo-style photo shoot with scented candles, a spray-on tan, bulging obliques—and probably a car in there somewhere, too.

"I was very happy to play the fool—it was supposed to be a spoof and purposely goofy—and the crew were impressed with my willingness to look like an ass," Thomas Lhamon, a chemistry teacher and the star of "Sex Appeal," tells AdFreak of his racy test drive. He wanted to see how many Facebook likes he could generate by posing with the Hardtop, and his video highlights the car's connected apps.

In fact, all mentions of specific brand attributes feel unforced and logical. For example, "Parallel Universe" has Minis squeezing between elephants, shopping carts and even planets to showcase parking-assistance technology, while "Foot-to-Pedal Style," all about shopping for cute shoes, touts cargo space.

Though each is amusing in its own right, the 10 videos, posted below, work especially well when viewed as a series. There's also a whole microsite here. All told, these owners did a fantastic job of generating ideas. Maybe they should shift into advertising. Actually, with this campaign, I guess they have.

Marketers who make ads about inclusive families these days need a battle plan for how to deal with the haters. And it's as much an opportunity as a crisis.

It began, of course, with Cheerios, which was surely legitimately surprised last year when its ad with the interracial family was flooded with racist comments on YouTube. General Mills' reaction was complicated. First it shut down the YouTube comments, then it slowly embraced what quickly became an outpouring of support—and finally it aired a brilliantly subtle sequel on this year's Super Bowl.

Advertisers who do this kind of progressive marketing are surprised by the haters no longer. In fact, I'd be willing to bet Honey Maid and Droga5 already had a plan in place for the video below—a response to the haters (and supporters) of its ultra-inclusive "This Is Wholesome" ad—before the first spot (which now has more than 4 million views) even aired.

Is that a cynical way to approach inclusive messaging—to calculatingly harness the hatred against it to sell more stuff? Perhaps. Still, it's quite amusing to see the haters turned into pawns who can be played for extra exposure.

Here's the original ad:

Nick Kroll really wants to play in the NHL—so badly, he'll steal the Stanley Cup and hold it hostage.

At least, that's the premise of this long-form ad for NBC Sports' coverage of the hockey league as the playoffs approach. Kroll and his henchmen get up to predictably idiotic but entertaining antics. That includes, naturally, eating out of the trophy—first salad and then fondue. Kudos to them for keeping the meal balanced.

The ad was created by the Brooklyn Brothers, which is carving out a specialty of pairing comedians with sports leagues—it also turned Jason Sudeikis into a soccer coach for the Premier League on NBC last year. The network also airs NHL games, and reportedly recommended the agency for the hockey work.

NBC's own talent also makes cameos in the ad, including Jim Cramer—the perfect choice for a spot that shouldn't be taken seriously.

After running one of the most widely reviled ads in recent Super Bowl history, Groupon today launched its first TV spot since 2011. 

Created in partnership with crowdsourcing agency Victors & Spoils, the new work is quite a bit more straightforward than the faux charity ad that starred Timothy Hutton. That spot, "Tibet," was one of four in a campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, but it was Hutton's smarmy dismissal of Tibetan independence that sparked the most outrage. Some even attributed Groupon's rapidly declining sales in that period to the ad's rancorous reception.

In the new ad, we see Groupon customers delighting in their great deals on blenders, sushi, yoga and flight lessons. (As a longtime Groupon subscriber, I have to say this is possibly the most accurate list of its offerings ever assembed.)

The new spot likely won't incense any angry mobs, but will it recruit a new crowd of customers? Watch it below, along with the 2011 Super Bowl spot, and decide for yourself.

Via Mashable.

Gary Busey's at his manic, unhinged best in WongDoody's spot introducing the $99 Amazon Fire TV set-top box.

Everyone's favorite gnarled, Oscar-nominated lunatic begins, "If you're like me, you like talkin' to things." The actor says hello to his pants and a lamp before thanking the fish for living in the sea. He rings a bell, and as the tone resonates, he vibrates his head and mugs for the camera. Classic Busey!

Bedeviled by a Roku streaming player that won't obey his verbal commands, he snarls, "It's frustrating when things don't listen. Especially high-tech things." Mr. B. then demonstrates a key Fire TV attribute. He voice-queries the device—searching for himself, naturally—and spits out a hammy, celebratory "Yes!" when a menu of his movies appears on the screen.

Actually, it's one of his saner, more restrained performances. Dude's usually way more bizarre than this. 

Hiring celebrities to model for fashion ads and then rendering them unrecognizable is all the rage.

Not long ago, we saw a very ambiguous Jennifer Lawrence pose for Dior. Now, Nicole Kidman stuns in her latest campaign for pricey shoe brand Jimmy Choo. But she could easily be mistaken for somebody who is not Nicole Kidman, what with her looking like a platinum blonde teen model rather the perfectly beautiful natural blonde 46-year-old she was last week.

The video, meanwhile, is your run-of-the-mill, dripping-with-atmosphere fashion spot.

Even setting aside the debate over whether and/or to what degree this was Photoshopping, it still seems pretty self-defeating to pay for an A-lister and then hide them. Or maybe it's a brilliantly subtle way to sell the you-could-look-like-this-too fantasy while also trolling the indignant Internet hordes for extra attention.

Or maybe it really just is shallow.

You wouldn't think Jesus would be too concerned about his investment portfolio these days, but online trading service Kapitall has tapped Him as a spokesman anyway in a campaign featuring "revolutionary" historic figures.

In a series of spots that went live today, Jesus cracks jokes about crucifixion while Che Guevara cooks frittatas and Genghis Khan showers himself with coins. Backed by a $1 million media spend, the online ads also include Leonardo da Vinci (with nude lounging boy toy) and Cleopatra (with frond-waving boy toy).

But clearly it's the depiction of Jesus that's bound to arouse the most consternation. In a second spot, not yet posted, Jesus says he learned about Kapitall when God found the site and yelled "JESUS CHRIST!"

"Kapitall, and our newly launched advertising campaign, is about being revolutionary," Kapitall CMO Pascal Ehrsam tells AdFreak in an email. "The brand campaign is not meant to be offensive, but to give a nod to some of history's notable icons. Comprising many ethnicities and religions, Kapitall is made up of people from all over the world. We have great respect and admiration for all, even as we strive to entertain."

The campaign was created by agency Swell, with media planning handled by PM Digital. It will run through the summer on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and Gawker Network, generating an estimated 50 million impressions per month.

Check out the first Jesus spot below and more from the campaign after the jump.