Hasta La Creative!

Here's the setup: A brawny dude's in the shower, and his wife tells him how Summer's Eve cleansing wash is specifically formulated for a woman's "V," and he's like, "Huh?" And then (gasp!) she asks him if he knows he's using it. Cut to a look of horror on his face. He turns the bottle around for a product shot, and then we're into a montage of him doing the manliest things he can think of to preserve his threatened masculinity. He chops logs, breaks boards, tows a car with his teeth and crushes a beer can with one hand, all set to a rockin' manly track.

Now, you might infer from this that he believes nothing could be worse than the thought of becoming feminized through accidental ladybit-formulized body wash contamination, in which case it's the brotastic asshole who's being the real douche. Or you might just think, "LOL! HE TOTALLY WASHED HIS NADS WITH LADY WASH. HAHA, LOSER!"

Either way, you've probably missed the offensive part to me, which is that a woman doesn't get to be the star of an ad ostensibly about ladies and their vaginas.

Here's my hunch about why: "Feminine care" products are divisive among women and practically loathed by many feminists, who feel the products exist solely to thrive on manufacturing a sense of shame about women's privates. So what’s a marketer to do? Go with the one safe trope that everyone seems to agree on: Guys are dumb.

A lot of people will agree with it, and this spot will probably play great on prime-time TV, where people don't want to hear about lady wash and none of the networks will let you use the word "vagina" anyway.

So sorry, dudes, your gender remains the butt of the joke. You may be depicted as an eternal manchild unable to cope with reality and feverishly concerned about your gender identity, but c'mon, don't you just want to LOL when he rides around on the lawnmower in the Spartan helmet? 

With so many clickbait headlines flooding social media these days—promising to blow your mind, make you cry or change your life forever—have we reached a point where people will literally believe anything?

That's the question behind Headlines Against Humanity, a quiz that asks you to guess which of two Upworthy-esque headlines is real. Here's a sample comparison: "A Three-Hour Orgasm Sent This Woman to Hospital" versus "New Study: Apricots May Help Cure Glaucoma." (Spoiler alert: The orgasm was real.)

The quiz, named in a clear homage to popular game Cards Against Humanity, was created by the team at CentUp, a sort of tip jar/share button combination that lets readers give a few pennies to their favorite websites, which split the contribution with a charity.

In explaining Headlines Against Humanity, CentUp says it wanted to highlight the silly, often-disingenuous approach many sites now take in repackaging vapid content to get maximum clicks.

"Clickbaity headlines are taking over the Web. Today, publishers make more money from quantity than quality. They're incentivized to manipulate lots of people into clicking on a headline instead of getting engaged readers," CentUp stated. "The average pageview today is worth .003 cents. Maybe instead of paying this minuscule amount for crap we don't really care about, we give a few cents to stuff that we do?" 

Objectification and rape go hand in hand—it's easier, after all, to take advantage of a person if you don't see her as a person. But what if you catch a glimpse of yourself in the act of objectifying someone? Would you like what you saw?

A recent spot from India titled "Dekh Le" (meaning "look" or "see" in Hindi) suggests that maybe if men saw how creepy (and stupid) they look when ogling a woman, they'd try to be less creepy.

The video, already viewed nearly 2.5 million times, was uploaded by Whistling Woods International Institute, an arts and film school in Mumbai, on Dec. 16. That date marked the one-year anniversary of the fatal Delhi gang rape that touched off a firestorm of protest all over India, a country that has some of the worst violent sexual crime stats in the world. (Just this past New Year's Eve, a woman in West Bengal was set on fire and killed after filing charges against two men accused of raping her on two consecutive days.)

It's key that Whistling Woods isn't just showing matronly women being ogled, but a woman in a short skirt on a moped and a woman with a tattoo over her butt, which we in America like to call a "tramp stamp." The progressive ad suggests it's not OK to perv, even if ladies choose to dress provocatively or tattoo their lower backs with butterflies.

So will this video make a difference? It's hard to say. It's a worthy cause, but it's also up against a deep-set, worldwide issue that many men will continue to believe is harmless. In a similar effort, U.S. photographer Hannah Price tried the same tactic of showing men how foolish they look when they cat-call and made headlines by turning her lens on the same men who made her feel exposed. But as headline-grabbing as the stunt was, Price has said she doesn't think it will make any of the men change their behavior.

As for Whistling Woods' piece, I'm surprised at the fact that the only kind of unwanted attention depicted in the ad is creepy staring. There's clearly something wrong with my perspective and our culture if these guys seem fairly harmless to me in the face of the cat-callers and the booty-grabbers. I guess it's not just those guys who need to look at themselves; it's all of us

In one way, it's successful because it brings up so many questions. Why do we accept sexually aggressive behavior on a daily basis? Why is it so prevalent in our society? And do I really look that stupid when I stare at dudes with nice abs?

When Nissan offered to sell its Versa Note on Amazon last fall, it promised to ship the cars to three lucky buyers in actual Amazon boxes. Well, this weekend it was delivery day!

A Reddit user on Monday posted this photo from Madison, Wis., noting: "What's the largest item you can have shipped from Amazon? Because I think my neighbor just got it." A commenter soon pointed out the Nissan partnership, which seemed to be the most obvious explanation of such an epic delivery. AdFreak then reached out to Nissan, and Erich Marx, the automaker's director of interactive and social-media marketing, confirmed that the Redditor had captured the delivery—which was meant to be kept under wraps until a video could be released next week.

The original idea, he said, came from Nissan agency TBWA\Chiat\Day. "They mentioned it, and we all kind of laughed and thought, 'Wouldn't that be funny?' " said Marx. "But over the course of a few days, we kept coming back to it and said, 'Why not deliver a car in an Amazon box?' … It's never really been done. I think the visual is pretty hilarious. Everybody knows the Amazon box. We thought it would capture people's imagination. It certainly captured ours." In the end, Marx added, Nissan decided to deliver just one Versa Note, not three as originally planned.

The Redditor's photo, which hit the site's front page on Monday, came as a surprise to Nissan. "We were filming the video this weekend and a neighbor noticed what we were doing and posted what amounts to a spy photo," said Marx. "The best laid marketing plans, right? We were going to do a press release and a video and this whole thing next week. But the photo got out there, and people started buzzing about it. So we had to scramble."

The first 100 people to order the Versa Note on Amazon got $1,000 gift cards. Nissan contacted many of them, and then chose the Madison customer as the winner. "Quite frankly it was the enthusiasm of this winner—they were so thrilled and thought it was hilarious," said Marx. "We were all voting for someone in Hawaii. We were like, 'Madison, Wisconsin, in January? That's going to be cold.' But this winner was so into it, we knew it was going to be great."

Nissan is keeping the winner's name private for now. He or she will be revealed in the video, which is still set to be released next week. "We wanted to keep some of our original plan intact," said Marx.

Does Marx envision a day when a Nissan could be delivered by a fleet of Amazon drones? Laughing, he replied, "No, I think this a really fun onetime execution. We have a great dealer network, and we want our dealers to be involved in the marketing and delivery of our cars. We certainly don't want to step on their toes."

More photos below.

Raise a giant Cherry Coke and toast Denny's for this great tweet after the BCS title game—offering distraught Auburn fans a road map for where they can comfort-eat their miseries away on the long drive back home to Alabama. It's great partly because it could have so easily been killed, for perhaps being a tad scornful and for sort of making fun of Denny's as well. In other BCS news, Charmin posted the tweet below—apparently having made peace with almost-profanity after getting spooked by its own famous "Asgard" tweet back in November.

Wow. We have a feeling there are lots of college football fans about to sheet their pants right about now..

— Charmin (@Charmin) January 7, 2014

The Tonight Show is moving from one smug cultural petri dish to another, thanks to Jimmy Fallon, who will be taking the show back to NYC when he replaces Jay Leno next month. To commemorate this historic shift into reverse gear, NBC has released a print ad of a snappily dressed Fallon walking the edge of a high-rise building in Manhattan. I have to say, it's weird to see Fallon looking directly into a camera without corpsing like an amateur. It's a pretty standard ad for this sort of thing, but it gets the point across and the skyline is cool, which is all they need to prompt New Yorkers to pat themselves on the back about yet another thing. Below is the first TV promo, which features all the past hosts of the show—even, for literally half a second, Conan O'Brien.

You guys remember that blog post about that ad that did a familiar thing in a fresh way? When a creative team took a clichéd trope and offered a meta commentary illustrating how hackneyed it was, but tied it to the client anyways? When it left at least one viewer with a smile on his face, and a vague sense of unease about what it was actually saying? That's what happens with this Canadian spot, featuring a coach appealing to his players by referencing a rousing, generic locker-room speech from a movie on Netflix. It's a fun idea. Too bad it sells the product as nondescript. Then again, nobody watches a sports flick looking for anything but the same old warm and fuzzes anyways. Agency: DDB Vancouver. Director: Michael Downing of Partners Film.

Today in crazy Russian advertising news: A restaurant in Yekaterinburg decided to promote its flame-broiled steaks by flame-broiling its billboard as well. It is a pretty hot idea, if maybe overly literal. Russians, of course, love insane outdoor advertising, from horrifying drunk-driving billboards to parasailing donkeys. They also get pretty worked up about cooked meat generally, as we saw in this classic Burger King ad. Via The Denver Egotist.

On Jan. 1, Colorado became the first state to allow the sale of recreational marijuana to anyone 21 or older. Sales have become so successful that stores are unable to keep up with the demand. Ben & Jerry's acknowledged that with a tweet on Thursday.

It was retweeted close to 10,000 times, and we're surprised more brands haven't addressed Colorado's newfound freedom. It seems like an appropriate time for Kate Upton and Snoop Dogg's weird Hot Pockets' commercial—full of references to marijuana "I bake everywhere!"—to get some extra play in the Centennial State, or for Taco Bell to revive its "Late Night Munchies" jingle.

And Doritos, Cheetos and Funyuns—we're waiting, you guys.

Via Mashable.

Mercedes-Benz USA puts the "demo" in demolition derby for this fun 60-second spot by Merkley + Partners touting the latest high-tech safety features of the automaker's M-Class vehicles. All hell breaks loose when a woman drives her shiny silver SUV into a crash-crazed competition of mangled metal and screaming steel. Smash! Bang! Screeeech! This particular carmageddon, pulse-pounding but also played for laughs, was impressively staged at an old California factory where the final confrontation in Terminator II: Judgement Day was shot.

Naturally, the M-Class emerges unscathed and its driver unharmed. Her ordeal was fiery and fierce, but notably less stressful than the wars waged for parking spaces at malls across America on any given Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!