Hasta La Creative!

Colangelo's new TV ads for Trojan are refreshingly quiet and subtle, with adults and a male teenager alluding to sex without snickering or blushing. That said, the subject behind the dialogue-driven ads, which break today and were directed by Gavin O'Connor in his commercial debut, is never in doubt.

In "Big Date," the teen, in an interesting role reversal, plants a condom in the shirt pocket of his middle-aged dad who's leaving for a date. "Miss You" shows a boy longing for his traveling dad as much as his mom misses her man, only to smile when she finds a Trojan present from him in a dresser. "Happy Birthday" is the only ad set in bed, with a thirtysomething couple celebrating some early morning action. But hey, they're relaxed about it, so you don't feel creepy watching them.

Indeed, this campaign is more mellow than naughty, so much so that TV networks will air the ads earlier in the evening than they have in the past, according to Dave Clemans, Colangelo's executive creative director.

The tagline, underscored by three simple piano notes, is "Real. Good. Sex."

CREDITS
Client: Church & Dwight
Brand: Trojan
Agency: Colangelo
Executive Creative Director: Dave Clemans
Creative Directors: Chris Stevenson, John Wagner
Art Director: Wendy Shapiro
Agency Executive Producer: Ilene Richardson
Managing Director: Jim O’Neill
Group Account Directors: Elizabeth Geary, Dan Liu
Director: Gavin O’Connor
Production Company: Saville Productions
Executive Producer: Rupert Maconick
Head of Production: Michelle Traviniski
Producer: Jay Spangler
Director of Photography: Mandy Walker
Editorial: The Cutting Room Films
Editor: Brian Sanford
Editorial Executive Producer: Melissa Lubin
Editorial Senior Producer: Eytan Gutman
Color: Light of Day
Colorist, Online Editor: Joe Wenkoff
Flame, Visual Effects: Colin Stackpole
Sound Mixer: Walter Bianco

Super Bowl halftime sponsor Pepsi decided to get an early start on Sunday night when the gridiron met the Grammys for an NFL-style extravaganza featuring the musical stylings of football stars.

"You music artists, you're always giving football the best halftime shows," Deion Sanders announces to a faux Grammy crowd. "So tonight, football is paying music back." The result, from agency Scratch, is about as over-the-top and occasionally cringeworthy as you might expect, with performances from Terry Bradshaw, Shannon Sharpe, Mike Ditka and more.

Maybe we'll get lucky and this Sunday's halftime show, featuring Bruno Mars, will pack all of its anticipated insanity into a mere two-and-a-half minutes as well.

Pepsi is expected to air a single 30-second spot, created by ad agency Mekanism, during the Super Bowl broadcast.

You are a digital idea ninja, innovating where branding meets emerging technologies. That is to say, you are an aspiring ad creative who likes shooting videos of yourself with your smartphone. That is to say, you are an aspiring ad creative. Rejoice! Now your favorite hobby may actually bear fruit.

DDB Oslo invites you to Snapchat yourself talking about your own genius. You have 10 seconds to sell an idea. That is to say, you have 10 seconds to sell yourself. If a bunch of idea ninjas—i.e., the creatives at DDB Oslo—like your pitch, they will fly you in for a job interview. At one-third the length of your traditional elevator pitch, that may seem like a lot of pressure, or like it would invite a lot of simplistic drivel. But really, we have to credit DDB Oslo for figuring out a way to make sure the spiels stay brief. And if Miller High Life can do it in one second, you can do it in 10.

Then again, the agency is mostly selling itself here. As such, it probably should have followed its own rules. The video explaining the campaign is an exhausting 42 seconds long.

Via Adrants.

If there was one big winner at last night's Grammy Awards that was even more surprising than Daft Punk getting Album of the Year, it was Arby's scoring the tweet of the night.

The sandwich chain's post about Daft Punk collaborator Pharrell Williams' sartorial selection ("Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back?") was a responsive-marketing coup de grâce, with 75,000 retweets and more than 40,000 favorites by Monday morning.

Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs— Arby's (@Arbys) January 27, 2014

To be sure, jokes about Pharrell's hat, which looked borrowed from Smokey Bear, had been flying around Twitter for more than an hour before Arby's made its post. But man, what a post.

Many marketers attempted to tie their brand messaging in with the Grammys, but as you can see in Digiday's roundup, few succeeded. Arby's even merited praise from global brands like Pepsi and Hyundai, which is an odd new level of meta marketing.

#Win RT @Arbys Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs— Pepsi™ (@pepsi) January 27, 2014

Well played, @Arbys. Well played. #GRAMMYs #HyundaiTweetAwards pic.twitter.com/xGBT3lmPbm— Hyundai USA (@Hyundai) January 27, 2014

But when it comes to responsive marketing to celebrity antics, the best a brand can hope for is a response from A-lister him- or herself. And that's exactly what Arby's got in the early hours of this morning, when Pharrell asked on Twitter, "Y'all tryna start a roast beef?"

Y'all tryna start a roast beef? "@Arbys: Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back? #GRAMMYs”— Pharrell Williams (@Pharrell) January 27, 2014

UPDATE: Throwing around words like "uncensored" and "banned," SodaStream has now posted the original cut of its Super Bowl spot on YouTube. Watch it below.

In what has apparently become an annual tradition of feigned outrage, SodaStream says its proposed ad for this year's Super Bowl has been rejected for mentioning Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

The marketing team behind the do-it-yourself soda brewing machine tells USA Today that Fox is forcing the advertiser to remove a scene in which celebrity spokeswoman Scarlett Johansson says, "Sorry, Coke and Pepsi." A similar demand was made by 2013 Super Bowl broadcaster CBS, leading to the removal of all Coke and Pepsi logos from last year's SodaStream ad.

As with last year's spot, SodaStream will still appear in the Super Bowl but will need to provide an edit that doesn't mention competitors by name.

Advertising icon Alex Bogusky, who has been working on this year's Super Bowl spot for SodaStream, tells the newspaper he's disgusted "that Fox protects its big advertisers to the detriment of the environment and consumers." (Known these days for his vocal social consciousness, Bogusky has a soft spot for SodaStream because it produces less plastic waste and uses less sugar than traditional sodas.)

One could reasonably infer that the decision was made by Fox as a favor to halftime sponsor Pepsi. (Coke says it did not request any limitations on competitor ads.) And while SodaStream is right to be annoyed, it's also a bit silly to hear the brand's CEO, Daniel Birnbaum, sounding shocked, SHOCKED to find that his attempt at prodding competitors failed for the second year in a row.

Birnbaum even went so far as to tell USA Today, "If I could get my money back, I'd be happy to be out of that deal." Right. I'll believe that when Scarlett Johansson shows up at my house to make cranberry sodas and talk trash about Dr Pepper.

Booking.com recognizes that people have various preferences (and borderline fetishes) when it comes to hotel amenities, a fact highlighted in the site's incredibly goofy but totally likable new ad. 

Each scene shows a vacationer really, really enjoying some mundane hotel perk, like free ice and all-you-can-eat scrambled eggs. Backed by a dramatic score and the booming narration of Futurama's John "Bender" DiMaggio, the spot takes great joy in nonsense words ("Maximum plushosity!" "Airborneness!") and solid slow-motion acting. Props to the teenager struggling with the five-pound barbell and the man blowdrying his glorious mane, along with the lady who squeezes lemons with euphoric abandon.

It's a fantastic follow-up to last year's "The Delight of Right" campaign, and now I'm absolutely ready to book some "aggressive relaxation." 

CREDITS:

Client: Booking.com
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam
Executive Creative Director: Mark Bernath
Executive Creative Director: Eric Quennoy
Creative Director: Genevieve Hoey
Creative Director: Zach Watkins
Art Director: Kia Heinnen
Art Director: Cari Vanderyacht
Copywriter: Zoe Hawkins
Copywriter: Siavosh Zabeti
Head of Broadcast Production: Erik Verheijen
Broadcast Producer: Elissa Singstock
Production Company: Traktor
Director: Traktor
DOP: Bojan Bazelli
Producer: Rani Melendez
Editorial Company: Ed Line at Final Cut
Editor: Edward Line
Audio Post: Grand Central Recording Studios
Audio Mix/Sound Design: Raja Seghal
Music Company: Anthem- Massive Music Amsterdam
Post Production Company: MPC
VFX Supervisor: Franck Lambertz
Colorist: Jean Clement Soret
VFX Producer: Julie Evans

In America, you'd need to have a rich, overindulgent father to have the lifestyle of your average Swedish worker, says a bizarre new ad from a Swedish trade organization. 

TCO, an umbrella confederation that includes a number of unions, presents to you "Like a Swede," a three-and-a-half-minute ode to the many benefits—like long vacations and employer pensions—enjoyed by Swedish employees. 

The story is told, quite surreally, through character Joe Williams, a resident of Beverly Hills. His dad, also his boss, treats him to six weeks of annual vacation and six months of paternity leave. Williams all-around enjoys a life of opulence thanks to his decision to live "like a Swede."

For the uninitiated, living like a Swede means using your friskvårdskbidraget, a Swedish health-care stipend, to hire a celebrity personal trainer—but only for a few minutes a year, because, you know, such social support only goes so far. It also includes playing kubb, a Swedish lawn game involving the tossing of wooden sticks; drinking nubbe, a Swedish liquor; and, we're told, singing a song about how the Swedish labor negotiation model is the greatest.

In other words, Swedes are, in a roundabout way, poking fun at Swedes for being spoiled. Credit for their advantages, the spot sort of explains, goes to the Swedish model of labor negotiations, which depends on a high level of collaboration between workers and employees groups and limited government involvement. 

If you're still totally clueless as to what the hell is actually going on, a spokesperson for TCO sheds some light on the campaign in English-language European publication The Local. "It's to make the Swedish Model more visible in a different way. People often know very little about it, which makes it harder for the unions to justify their own existence," says the spokesperson. "The Swedish Model means that the two parties can talk about what is needed in that particular industry, and be supple, rather than have very rigid legislation that we don't think is good for the Swedish economy."

The spot is one of the most intricately produced awareness ads you'll ever see. But if you're a non-Swede like me, by the time you're done unraveling it, you'll probably be too exhausted to laugh.

Via Ads of the World.

If there's one thing that can finally bring America together on this whole abortion issue, it's definitely a blasphemous video of Sarah Silverman hanging out with her feminist bestie, Jesus Christ. 

In her new five-minute clip, Silverman bonds with Jesus over an NCIS marathon, a sinfully good back rub and a few zingers, like when the Messiah quips that life doesn't begin at conception, but at 40. 

The video promotes "V to Shining V," a national reproductive-rights pride day scheduled for Sept. 28. Rallies are planned for all 50 state capitals, with Silverman appearing in Concord, N.H.

Silverman has tread this progressive political path before, appearing in outrageous clips that draw predictable, polarized responses. Her screeds continue to spark indignant hand-wringing from conservatives, and she seems to be emboldened by her critics each time.

No matter how disrespectful her presentation (and really, in a world of South Park and Family Guy, this stuff is pretty tame), the coverage and commentary she receives in conservative quarters can be so hateful that it makes her content look all the more benign and compelling by comparison. Ironically, the blowback bolsters these campaigns; each anonymous anti-Semitic barb or crass expression of "regret" that Silverman herself hadn't been aborted serves to strengthen her hand.

Of course, her controversial approach ensures she'll always just be preaching to the choir. Believing she'll gain many (or any) converts would take a great leap of faith.

Via Mediaite.

Warning: Some language in this video is NSFW.

Perhaps known as well these days for her heartbreaking animal PSAs as for her 1990s hit singles, Sarah McLachlan shows in a new Audi Super Bowl ad teaser that she doesn't always take herself too seriously. 

Audi has been teasing an odd creature creation called the Doberhuahua, which appears to be the star of the automaker's upcoming game-day ad. (You can see reactions to the crossbred canine in another clip below, called "Dog Show.")

In a video released today, McLachlan croons for the misunderstood animal, with "a heart as big as your head." Check it out for yourself:

After being called racist for portraying Westerners as big-nosed blond men who aren't afraid of hugs, Japan's All Nippon Airways has promised to edit the offending scene out of its commercial. 

In the original spot, shown below, an All Nippon pilot (played by a popular comedian) attempts to "change the image of Japanese people" by donning a long, fake nose and a blond wig. The airline began receiving complaints in social media that this portrayal was insulting to Westerners.

What's more apparent to me is the self-deprecation on display here ("such a Japanese reaction"). In fact, I'd dare to say this ad isn't particularly offensive, especially when compared to all the other stuff one could say about Americans. Hell, the fact that we aren't being depicted as fat oafs who smell like grease and milk is a step toward progress.