Hasta La Creative!

If tits could tweet, they'd probably have a lot to say; but since they can't, they'll have to settle for the next best thing: a tweeting bra. OgilvyOne Athens has created a bra that tweets every time it's unclasped, sending a titillating notification to a special Twitter feed. Greek actress Maria Bakodimou will wear the bra for two weeks, letting the world know each time the twins are unleashed. The tweets then direct people to the Nestlé Fitness website, where they can get tips on how to do a monthly self-exam. As you can imagine, the bra currently tweets a lot in Greek, but it contends that self-exams are still Greek to many women. Maybe next time they can team up with Durex's Fundawear team and add some electric tingles to the bra that can be remotely controlled by response tweets. C'mon, anything goes in the name of awareness! Via Mashable.

Late last week, a creative twist on print advertising became a global phenomenon, as the "Auto-Complete Truth" campaign for UN Women exploded across social media and generated worldwide discussion.

AdFreak's writeup of the campaign by Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai has been shared more than 116,000 times on Facebook alone, making it the most-shared item of the year on Adweek.com. The campaign has since been featured by hundreds of blogs, news sites and social media feeds around the world. 

"We have been overwhelmed by the instant enthusiasm and support that our campaign has received," says Ronald Howes, managing director of Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai. "This has encouraged us to develop it even further, after the global acclaim that is has received.” 

The client, of course, was ecstatic to see a relatively modest ad campaign spark the exact kind of international debate it was intended for. "UN Women is very heartened by the discussion the campaign has sparked," says Nanette Braun, communications and advocacy chief for UN Women. "Very obviously there is a demand for a global conversation on women’s rights, empowerment and gender equality, which is exactly what the ads were intended to generate.”

To learn more about the campaign and the vocal response it has received, check out our Q&A with the team that created the ads, after the jump:

AdFreak: How did this project come about? Was it intended to be a print campaign from the start, and will these ads actually be running in print?

Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai: This creative idea for UN Women began, as many searches naturally do, on a Google search bar. What we came across was simply shocking. The appalling global results to an auto-correct search of terms such as "women should" was something we felt needed to be shared.

The campaign was published earlier in 2013 in the UAE and became a viral success this week. UN Women plans to publish internationally in the future.

Many of the commenters and people sharing the campaign have been posting screenshots of their own autocompleted searches, with different results around the world. Was this something you hoped the campaign would spark people to try?

We have been pleasantly surprised by the viral success of this campaign. We wanted to start a conversation on the major barriers which are in place of women's economic, political and social empowerment across the globe—issues that UN Women is working to address. We hope that our work will go some way to help raise awareness of the sexist global attitudes toward women and will enable a dialogue to begin on the topic. We encourage people to join in the debate on Twitter with #womenshould, or on the UN Women website.

We are so pleased to see others are inspired by our work and witness the creation of their own versions of our campaign, which tackle other social issues.

Did you selectively edit the results of the Google searches you did for this campaign? Were some irrelevant suggestions tossed out to focus on the most egregious examples of sexism?

What makes our campaign so powerful is its truth and simplicity. None of the searches were engineered to produce these results; that's why we were so shocked to discover them. In order to raise awareness of the inequality women face, we did choose to highlight the most compelling answers, to deliver the most impact, however the search results from Google autocorrect were not falsified in any way.

Some have criticized the campaign by saying that Google autocomplete suggestions have been used in several marketing campaigns in recent years. Were you concerned about this approach seeming derivative or over-used?

Our campaign is not focused on Google autocomplete suggestions. The medium of Google search was merely a base upon which we were able to successfully illustrate our point. Google search is an iconic symbol in our digital world and therefore recognizable for millions of people, so we used this as a vehicle to express our ideas. The truth behind the search about people’s global perceptions is what our campaign focused on, not the technology of Google autocomplete.

Lots of people are debating whether you can actually change these kinds of search results. Do you think it's possible, or is it something that will have to change slowly over time as a barometer of equality?

We are aware that change of this magnitude will not happen overnight! However we hope that our work will go some way to alter perceptions by raising awareness of the issues which women face. 

A commercial nearly always has a leg up when it stars preschoolers in suits and wingtips spouting business-world cliches. Throw in hipster glasses, coffee mugs, co-worker trash talk and random firings? Winner!

Little Tikes helps kick off the flood of pre-holiday toy advertising over the coming weeks with a faux behind-the-scenes spot, created in-house. The full-length clip below is for online only, with a shorter edit running on TV.

Kids run the show at the Little Tikes factory in Ohio, according to the ad, though they're under the watchful eye of the company's CEO. (Insider tip: That's not really MGA Entertainment CEO Isaac Larian, he of the famous $300 million battle with Mattel over the Bratz dolls. It's just some white-haired dude with a posh accent).

And kids, of course, come up with the best ideas, including this year's potential hot toys: the ride-on GiddyUp N' Go Pony and fluffy Lil' Blabberz. So parents, you'd best familiarize yourself with these items, if you want to know what to dive for on Black Friday.

The past few years have seen many a regrettable tweet from supposedly professional companies, but this one just might be the most cringe-worthy of them all. This morning, the Atlanta Journal Constitution posted a tweet saying, "$1M GA Lottery winner Willie Lynch can get 40 acres and a whole lotta mules."

The tweet linked to a brief article on lottery winners, which did not include any sort of "40 acres and a mule" reference. The phrase refers to a post-Civil War proposal to help freed slaves begin new lives by giving them land previously held by whites. Such proposals became a source of bitterness among black Southerners when the policies were reversed shortly after the war.

New York magazine's website reports that the tweet was soon deleted and that "a spokesperson at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was unaware of the message and is now trying to figure out why it happened." An apology has been posted, which you can see below. 

Hey, bro … what's a deductible?

The Colorado Consumer Health Initiative and ProgressNow Colorado Education target young adults, including the oft-maligned and frequently wasted "bro" segment, in a series of shareable Web ads that milk the theme "Got insurance?" to promote access to Obromacare Obamacare.

The most outrageous ad in the bunch is "Brosurance," which shows "Rob, Zack and Sam—bros for life," in all their beer-fueled frat-house glory. Copy begins: "Keg stands are crazy. Not having insurance is crazier. Don't tap into your beer money to cover those medical bills. We got it covered." Zach and Sam also appear in an execution headlined "Club Med," which reads, "Yo Mom, do I got insurance? My girlfriend broke my heart, so me and the bros went golfing. Then my buddy broke my head. Good thing my mom made sure I got insurance."

The rest of the campaign is more conventional. One ad shows a very-expectant young woman "about to pop," while others feature a young mom with her daughter, a guy who was injured in a bicycle crash, a kayaker and a mountain climber. All ads use the #GotInsurance hashtag and point to DoYouGotInsurance.com for more information about signing up for Obamacare.

"We were trying to connect with young adults, and we thought, 'What are things that might connect with college-age folks?'" says Adam Fox, director of engagement for Colorado Consumer Health.

Some have blasted the "Brosurance" and "Club Med" ads as offensive, condescending or simply vapid, lamenting the party imagery and grotesque grammar. Others question whether targeting college-age people is wise, since the Affordable Care Act extends dependent coverage to adult children 26 and younger. That latter complaint seems mean-spirited, since not everyone that age has living parents, and even if they do, many young people, for various reasons, must insure themselves.

Moreover, the work is mildly controversial at best, and I think the nation's psyche is strong enough to withstand a little bro-needling for a good cause. The campaign is getting lots of media attention, which was clearly its aim, and hopefully that will lead the target audience to at least think about healthcare, however fleetingly, between rounds of golf and beer.

More shareable "Got insurance?" ads are on the way in coming weeks. And though she's not from Colorado, I'd like to propose Shelby Herring as the ideal spokesperson for this demographic. Having fun … that's her policy!

Slate's legal reporter obviously has too many friends and wants to pare down her social circle, because she recently decided to see what would happen if she wore Axe men's body spray for a week.

Inspired by her 13-year-old nephew, her own Axe-worshiping sons and the legion of other advertising-hypnotized young males out there, Dahlia Lithwick wanted to see how people would react if she slathered Axe products all over her "fortysomething" self and went about her day as a functioning adult.

The results of her odd experiment were mixed. On the one hand, she earnestly liked the smell: "I smelled the way an adolescent male smells when he feels that everything good in the universe is about to be delivered to him, possibly by girls in angel wings. I had never smelled this entitled in my life. I loved it. I wanted more."

On the other hand, and clearly disappointing for Lithwick, few people seemed all that bothered by it. "Almost immediately upon my arrival [at a staff party] I was accosted by three female Slate colleagues who spontaneously observed that I smelled completely amazing. … One colleague said it brought her right back to whatever it is that happened in the back of a truck when she was herself 14."

So there you have it—not-so-scientific proof that wearing Axe might help a single guy land either an underage teen or a cougar.

I was enjoying Telemundo the other day when Danny Trejo interrupted a trio of cellphone-using friends to save Miller Time.

I don't speak Spanish, but you don't need to in order to appreciate the presence of Trejo. Casanova Pendrill made an excellent choice by casting the toughest of toughs. Without nothing more than a stone cold stare, he castigates the inconsiderate friends who are paying more attention to their technology than to sacred beer time. He inclines his head slightly, his heavy-lidded eyes drifting downward in an unspoken threat. Drop the phones, his face says, before you disappoint me. All three quickly dunk their phones in the Miller Lite ice bucket. Trejo lets a smile flit across his face before turning, his hair whipping back in an unseen wind, presumably running off to protect Miller Time elsewhere.

From New Belgium's app that shuts down your phone when you're drinking to the Offline Glass, which stands up straight only if it's resting on your cellphone, bars and beer companies are taking a stand against social media's social-killing effect. Of course, none of them stand quite as tall as Trejo.

Holy licensing fees, bank man.

This new spot for National Australia Bank features an entertainingly bizarre array of pop-culture references, from Jaws and Gremlins to Scooby-Doo and OK Go. It's all set to the upbeat sounds of "Tightrope," the 2010 soul single from Janelle Monáe, creating a vibe that's fun, funky and many other adjectives you don't normally associate with a bank.

Sure, you could argue it doesn't really sell the specific benefits of banking at NAB, but then you'd sound like some focus-group poindexter who just wants to see interest rates and smiling people holding debit cards.

Plus, anything that puts a great white, a mogwai, Wile E. Coyote and Roy Scheider into the same 45 seconds is a winner in my book. Agency: Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne.

Is there anything even a mildly creative Craigslist ad can't sell?

Lauren Fahey is the latest person to spend more than three minutes crafting a Craigslist pitch, and is enjoying typically stellar results. After looking fruitlessly for a place to live in San Francisco, Fahey—an art director for a social-media company—designed an ad pitching herself as the perfect roommate. Posted to Craigslist, the ad is clever, almost sneaky, in the way it characterizes its subject. It features a pic of the super-cool Fahey in sunglasses, arms to the sky, as she carpe diems near the Golden Gate Bridge. It also includes quotes from Fahey's real-life friends back east, and they're almost too good to be true—wisely portraying the 28-year-old as fun-loving, outgoing and quirky, but in each case, not overly so.

"Lauren is a housewife trapped in a hipster's body… She knows how to seriously cook, clean and party," says a typical quote, from "Heather." The other friendship testimonials likewise play up Lauren's cleaning skills and ability to miraculously sense exactly when you want to hang out, and exactly when you need your space.

Fahey tells Good Morning America that she got 100 replies within the first few days of posting the ad, and is now happily living with two other women, who must feel like they've won the Lauren lottery. (Hopefully one of them is a copywriter who can help Fahey with her apostrophes, which are sometimes lacking.)

"The market here is so difficult," Fahey says of the Bay Area. "I really think you have to do something like this to even get anywhere. The other day I saw someone had posted a spot on their couch for $1,700 … to sleep on their couch in a studio. It's ridiculous."

See the full ad below.

R/GA London showcases a large, intricate retro-scientific device that mixes ingredients and pours a perfect glass of Baileys in this spot, which helps introduce a line extension infused with Belgian chocolate for the venerable Diageo brand.

The short online film, Liquid Alchemy—the Art of Baileys Chocolat Luxe, created without any CGI, channels the spirit of Honda's classic "Cog" ad from a decade ago. This machine/factory/Rube Goldberg-esque approach is overused in ads and a tad too familiar for my taste. Still, this one's stylish and could find an audience.

A trippy companion TV spot from ad agency 101 shows chocolate, cream and whiskey flowing and swirling, coalescing into an iPhone 5S—wait, sorry, no, coalescing into a wraithlike woman. It's visually impressive, though the female face that bobs amid the liquor and ice looks a bit like a drowning victim. Waiter, I'll have the Kahlua instead!