Hasta La Creative!

Taco Bell earned quite a few chuckles this week for using real people named Ronald McDonald in the first ads for its new breakfast menu—prompting McDonald's to respond that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." But was Taco Bell's campaign even more of an imitation than we thought?

Turns out the "real Ronald McDonald" thing was done in 2002 by our other favorite clown and perennial underdog, Jack in the Box. "I think the Taco Bell-Ronald McDonald campaign is an attention-grabbing idea. That's why we did it 12 years ago," says Rick Sittig, founder and creative director of Jack's agency, Secret Weapon Marketing.

One difference: Jack's Ronald had an extra "a" in his last name, MacDonald. "We went with that Ronald MacDonald because he was happy to do it, good on camera, liked our burger and our attorneys didn't mind the slight spelling difference," says Sittig.

Deutsch declined to comment on the Jack in the Box ad.

Meanwhile, Taco Bell and Deutsch have responded to the McDonald's response with a new Instagram video, in which Ronald takes off his famous stripey socks to reveal some intriguingly fashionable new leggings beneath.

Taco Bell's foray into breakfast food has ushered in a new war—the war of morning fast food. It started this week as the 'Bell introduced a new menu targeted at people who have a hankering for waffle tacos. To promote this confluence of possibly absurd ingredients, Taco Bell unveiled several new commercials featuring real people named Ronald McDonald enjoying their new treats. 

This apparently ruffled the colored afro of the House of Clown itself, which responded on Facebook with probably the most gracious reply it could muster. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," it said, next to a photo of Ronnie petting a Chihuahua.

Of course, you could also interpret the photo this way: "Awww, isn't Taco Bell a cute, harmless little competitor?" Funny, too, that McDonald's still associates Taco Bell with the Chihuahua. The spokesdog, Gidget, bless her soul, died way back in 2009.

H/T: @SubtweetCat.

Some tactics to get you to go vegan can be cloying or altogether horrifying. Farm Sanctuary's new 30-second ad is neither. The stop-motion animation video, developed by One/x agency, is actually kind of cute.

By pointing out that a pig can beat a chimp and a toddler at joystick video games (and still charm the toddler by sweetly staring and wagging its curly tail), the ad aims to show that pigs are more than one-dimensional beings. That's brought home with the tagline (a variation on the rehabbing sharks' line in Finding Nemo): "Pigs are friends, not food."

We certainly get that Farm Sanctuary is trying to make it harder for people to justify exploiting pigs. If you can see something or someone as emotionally and cognitively complex, it's a lot harder to want to kill them.

But they're also arguing against bacon. Bacon.

CREDITS
Director: Melanie Mandl
Copywriters: Jean Rhode, Kelly Beck-Byrnes
Executive Creative Director: Jason Wulfsohn
Director of Strategy: Ben Tiernan
Junior Art Director: Belinda Sumali
Voiceover: Amanda Philipson
Color Correction: David Smith
Voiceover Recording: SonicPool
Production Design: Melanie Mandl
Set Decorator: Zarouhi Mazmanyan
Character Design: Melanie Mandl, Robbie Mehring
Model Makers: Zarouhi Mazmanyan, Henry Kamp
Lighting Designer: Mark Mervis
Animation: Melanie Mandl
"Farm Runner" Video Game Design: Henry Kamp
Compositing, Rotoscoping: Henry Kamp
Mixer: David Bach
Music Composition: J. William Adkins
Special Thanks: Somewhere Something, All Sets, Brandon Fusco, Dean Styers, Keystone Art Space, Victoria Foraker, Tommi Zabrecky

Berlin Cameron United's new work for Gilt.com is colorful, musical and stylish, but also grounded in a sales pitch.

The ads for the online hub for clothes, shoes and accessories unfold with a catch-me-if-you-can chase on a city street, such as when one woman takes a shine to another's bright yellow dress. The music is the power-pop song "Suit" from Boom! Bap! Pow!, which has been used in ads before, though less effectively. Super slow-motion filming adds style and ensures you get a good look at the clothes.

The yellow dress chase ends with the pursuer finding the item on a smartphone app and then clicking to buy it. Therin lies the sales pitch. To illustrate the immediacy of mobile shopping, the clothes instantly shift from one woman's body to the other, leaving the prey in her underwear. Nothing wrong with mixing some flight of fancy with reality, is there?

The ads go up on YouTube today and will spread to TV on Monday.

CREDITS
Client: Gilt.com
Chief Marketing Officer: Elizabeth Francis
Agency: Berlin Cameron United
Executive Creative Director: Roald Van Wyk
Creative Director, Copywriter: Kim Devall
Executive Producer: Jennifer Glendining
Account Director: Wynter O-Blanquet
Production Company: Good Egg
Director: Christopher Sweeney
Executive Producer: Julia Reed
Producer: Dawn Rose
Director of Photography: Robert Witt
Foreign Production Company: El Camino Films
Executive Producer: Nicolas Aznarez
Editing: Final Cut
Editor: J.D. Smyth
Executive Producer: Lauren Bleiweiss
Producer: Beth Fitzpatrick
Finishing: Significant Others
Visual Effects Artist: Cecil Hooker
Audio Engineer: T. Terressa Tate
Color: Color Collective

Burger King is like Ashley Madison for meat patties.

In New Zealand, the fast-food chain is encouraging consumers to "cheat on beef" with its new chicken burgers as part of a #MotelBK campaign. BK has taken over an actual motel in Auckland, outfitted the rooms with BK booths and is inviting people to book them and try the chicken burgers (and of course, share photos of their experience socially).

Because what better metaphor for the brand than a seedy roadside love shack for your stomach? It even comes with a hidden-camera-style ad about a man named Peter sneaking out on his beloved Whopper. (The idea isn't actually new, though—BK ran this motel-themed ad about cheating on beef in the U.S. and U.K. years ago.)

Still, BK's New Zealand agency, Colenso BBDO, is on a roll, serving up this work—salty, satisfying, not too nutritious—in the wake of its self-hating pre-roll ads and the crazy spot with the Russian bride.

Even if it is hard for any BK ad to use a grainy cam without smelling ever so slightly like the classic Whopper Freakout.

Credits below.

Apparently I'm about to cheat on beef..#motelbk pic.twitter.com/EHVIYLxMNx

— Hayley Holt (@theHoltBolt) March 19, 2014

@BurgerKing #motelbk @RogerFarrelly @Bryce_Casey #delish pic.twitter.com/w6jBP7EvpM

— Leah Panapa (@LeahPanapa) March 24, 2014

CREDITS
Client: Burger KIng
Agency: Colenso BBDO, New Zealand
Creative Chairman: Nick Worthington
Creative Director: Levi Slavin
Creatives: Brett Colliver, Simon Vicars
Group Business Director: Victoria Graves
Planner: Neville Doyle

It took a while, but someone has finally lampooned Cadillac's much-derided "Poolside" commercial starring Neal McDonough. And not just any old someone—Ford Motor Co.

Ford's agency, Team Detroit, shot the parody below, which stars the polar opposite of the McDonough character—Pashon Murray, the founder of Detroit Dirt, a sustainability consultancy and advocacy group. The Cadillac spot showcased the CLR luxury plug-in hybrid. The Ford video shows off the Ford C-MAX hybrid. But Murray's message about today's America is light years away from Cadillac's.

The spoof is posted on its own YouTube channel, not Ford's. But it has Ford's tacit approval. Speaking to the Deroit Free Press, Ford spokeswoman Sara Tatchio described the video as "lighthearted," and added: "I don't think we're mocking a competitor. We're trying to showcase positive work being done in our community."

Yeah, no mockery going on here. GM has not commented.

Break me off a piece of this awesome homage to Lego from the marketing folks at Kit Kat.

Chances are, whenever you eat a Kit Kat, you think to yourself, "Now if only I could deconstruct this candy bar and construct insane little creatures out of the pieces."

Well, your oddly specific dream can now be a reality. According to this flickr set, there are Lego people hidden inside the bars of chocolate, and you can make planes, beavers, dinosaurs, WHATEVER YOU WANT out of the pieces. The chocolatier notes this project is "a tribute from Kit Kat to Lego, builders of one of the best breaks ever. This is not an official Lego product."

Not shown is the process of putting the candy bar back together. Also not pictured: the extensive and warning labels and disclaimers that would be required, though the whole thing is sure to be safer than making figurines from empty cans of Lone Star beer. 

Via Neatorama.

 

 

 

Newsflash: Advertising is nefarious and manipulative after all.

Earlier this week, we saw the stock-footage realization of the cheeky anti-advertising manifesto "This Is a Generic Brand Video," which brilliantly illustrated how advertising's visual cues are all ham-fisted and transparent, so viewers really don't have anything to worry about except maybe getting bored. By contrast, here's a fun clip from BuzzFeed that digs into the details of how a competent marketer sneaks into your subconscious and tricks you, most subtly, into thinking nice things about it.

Because consumers are just wide-eyed, dumbly smiling, mostly right-handed little piggy banks waddling around waiting to be relieved of our cash.

Actually, that sounds pretty much dead on.

It's hard to imagine ad creatives so pointedly calculating the presentation of products like the dangling of puppet strings, but maybe that's what art directors are really doing when they're hovering. Or maybe the crazy last-minute changes clients always demand are to blame, and agencies should be thanking the gods for plausible deniability.

Just kidding. No one's innocent.

"Do you have what it takes to be the Creative Director of the world's No. 1 adult website?"

That's the ballsy challenge from Pornhub, which recently launched a contest to create work-safe ads for the adult video site. 

"Traditionally, porn has been a taboo subject—but the fact is, over 35 million people visit Pornhub.com every day," notes the challenge's creative brief. "How do we reach the next 35 million? We need a national advertising campaign that can be channeled through mainstream media."

All entries must be "G-rated" and safe for work, although the results so far have been so drenched in innuendo that they probably don't qualify as either, as bros around the world let their creative juices flow.

Check out the full gallery on the contest's (SFW) Tumblr page, or just browse some of the more interesting submissions below. It's going to be hard, but a few seem like they could go all the way.

 
—Bus stops are so hot right now.

—This looks hot. Like, fire hazard hot.

—Appealing to the thrifty pervert. 

 
—OK, this one's actually pretty good.

—CBS sitcoms have been based on less.

—Aww, these guys.

 
—The best secret cave in The Legend of Zelda.

 
—Clever use of shape and color.

 
—This is probably the smartest entry of the lot. Maybe too smart.

An outdoor ad campaign in San Francisco is trying something novel to stop people from texting and driving: public shaming.

Graphic designer Brian Singer has furtively been taking photos of people texting behind the wheel along the 101 Freeway and posting them to a website, Texting While in Traffic, or TWIT for short. (Singer says he's always a passenger, not a driver, when he snaps the photos.) Lately, Singer has been paying out of his own pocket to put some of the photos on billboards around town, Gizmodo reports.

He says the number of offenders is outrageous. "For every nose picker, there's 20 texters," he estimates. He's not bothered by privacy concerns, either. "I don't think people driving on 101 have the expectation of privacy," Singer says. "All I'm really doing is taking photos in a public place."

Singer tried to get a road-safety group to fund the project, but is going it alone for now with 11 billboards. He says he hopes the billboards freak people out enough to stop texting and driving—and even hopes other people start taking photos, which "could have a dramatic affect on people's behavior."