Hasta La Creative!

Halloween is always a good time for frightfully dark ad campaigns. And Wieden + Kennedy in Amsterdam has delivered one of the most gorgeously creepy efforts this year—a series of movie-style posters for Booking.com that dare you to stay at seven of the most haunted hotels in America. The properties, listed below, are all apparently inhabited by ghosts—and all get amazing hand-painted posters courtesy of renowned illustrator Akiko Stehrenberger.

• The Queen Anne Hotel in San Francisco
• The 1886 Crescent Hotel in Eureka Spring, Ark.
• The Gettysburg Hotel in Gettysburg, Pa.
• Hotel Galvez in Galveston, Texas
• The Historic National Hotel in Jamestown, Calif.
• The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo.
• The Vinoy Renaissance Hotel in St. Petersburg, Fla.

The posters will roll out in movie-theater lobbies across the country beginning Oct. 25. The copy at the bottom of each ad, designed like movie credits, is wonderfully written, too—see larger details of those blurbs, along with the full posters, below.

There's also a TV commercial focusing on the Queen Anne Hotel, where room 410 is supposedly haunted by Miss Mary Lake, the headmistress of a school that used to be housed at the property. An online partnership with Fandango extends the experience.

"From The Shining to Psycho, accommodations have played a key role in the cinematic history of horror," said W+K executive creative director Mark Bernath. "It was important for us that the work stay true to the genre and pay homage to the content and design that horror fans crave. It takes a really brave client to make a truly scary advertising campaign—one that I hope will be appreciated by a very specific audience who have already opted into having the daylights scared out of them."

A closer look at the "credits" sections of the posters:

CREDITS
Client: Booking.com
CMO: Paul Hennessy
Brand Director: Cort Cunningham

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Amsterdam
Executive Creative Directors: Mark Bernath, Eric Quennoy
Creative Directors: Zach Watkins, Gen Hoey
Art Director: Craig Williams
Copywriter: Zach Watkins
Head of Production: Erik Verheijen
Agency Producer: Elissa Singstock
Planner: Daisy Andrews
Group Account Director: Jordi Pont
Account Director: Courtney Trull
Account Manager: Alex Allcott
Art Buyer: Maud Klarenbeek
Digital Producer: Matthew Ravenhall
Project Manager: Jackie Barbour
Business Affairs: Justine Young

Media Buy: Wieden + Kennedy, New York

Production Company: Concrete Films
Director: Mark Bernath
Director of Photography: Maxime Alexandre
Producer: Hani Salim

Editing Company: Wieden + Kennedy
Editor: Julien Maingois

Audio Post: Grand Central Recording Studios
Sound Designer, Mixer: Raja Sehgal

Sound Design: Grand Central Recording Studios
Artist, Title: Raja Sehgal

Postproduction: MPC, Amsterdam
Flame: Lise Prud-Homme
Telecine: George K
Producer: Gerben Molenaar

Illustrator: Akiko Stehrenberger
Agent: Helene Polverelli, H Represents

File this one under "unwise ways to announce your startup."

UNC student Taylor Robinette recently launched his new social networking app, Bevii, via email blast to his fellow students. Which might have been fine, except that the email was sent from unc@alertcarolina.com and made to look like a campus shooting alert from UNC's crisis information site, Alert Carolina.

"At precisely 10:01 am yesterday," the email stated, "in broad daylight, shots were fired on Franklin Street." The email goes on to explain that “The victim is being described as a blue, outdated social network.” The perpetrator, of course, was Bevii.

The founder says he felt an immediate pang of maybe-that-was-a-bad-idea. "As soon as the email went out, we contacted the proper outlets and apologized," Robinette said in a phone interview with AdFreak. UNC, however, reacted to the marketing stunt by blocking the Bevii website and posting a "beware of fraudulent messages" alert.

When asked if any students were alarmed by the email, Robinette said, "To the best of our knowledge, nobody thought they were actually in danger." He says the Bevii team has seven developers, eight angel investors and about $300,000 in funds raised so far. Despite the email gaffe, he's confident he will have plenty of support to continue launching the app.
 

Most of us can spot Comic Sans a mile away (or at least in an email forward from Aunt Connie), but now there's a video game for those who truly get worked up about typography.

Essentially a puzzle platformer, Type:Rider takes players on a journey of fonts and beautiful graphics. Each level is designed thematically based on different typefaces. For example, the Gothic stage has a Gregorian soundtrack and stark backdrops. As you maneuver your colon (the punctuation mark, not the organ) through each level, you discover the history and legacy of each font. There's even talk of a secret level featuring the aforementioned, widely hated Comic Sans.

Although a feast for the aesthete, the game does not come without complaints. Several iTunes reviewers have criticized the app for frequently crashing, but others say occasional bugs shouldn't deter the graphic designer or history lover from dropping a few bucks on it ($2.99 for iOS devices, $3.64 on Android). Hat tip to Adverve.

Hopefully Ole Miss is prepared for a spike in enrollment and a corresponding dip in GPA, because the university just received one of the best unsolicited party-school endorsements of all time.

In a recent gameday interview with TexAgs.com, University of Mississippi student Shelby Herring stole the show and became in instant celebrity of the Southeastern Conference. Downing champagne in mid-interview, carving out gems of alcohol-infused wisdom and then literally dropping the mic, Herring definitely earned her viral fame, and she's almost certainly being flooded with job offers as we speak.

Total Frat Move, the leading source of bro-centric news and opinion, puts it best with this rhetorical question: "Did drunk brunette girl just shut down the entire Ole Miss marketing department with this flawless sales pitch?"

Be sure to watch the full clip below for Herring's best one-liners, such as: "I love school spirit, but let's not get me wrong, I wouldn't have school spirit without a couple vodka waters;" "When you go to a college, you're going to make the grades, blah blah blah, as long as you get a 2.0 … It's more about the experience;" and this classic self-deprecating salesmanship, "Ole Miss, we may all have lower IQs … I have a higher IQ than most people but … well no, that's a lie." 

Ten days ago, she was another mostly unknown actress in New York City. Since then, 40 million people have watched her scream her lungs out and lift a grown man halfway up a wall with her telekinetic powers. Now, USA Today has tracked down Andrea Morales, the star of ThinkModo's super-viral coffee-shop prank for the horror movie Carrie. She's obviously over the moon about how the video has taken off—in her words, it's been "absolutely insane." Here are a few excerpts from the Q&A:

On the audition:
The title of the audition notice online was just "a marketing video for an upcoming movie." And it didn't say what it was for or what movie it was for — nothing. My agents were leery, because it was very vague. It's because the company that made the video, ThinkModo, they pride themselves for keeping things very under wraps — very secretive until the video launches. Then everything goes insane, which obviously works very well for them. They were like, "We're sorry, we can't tell you what this is for. … Just pretend you're really upset, and just scream for us for a really long time."

On her scream:
That's just how I scream. But I went to grad school [at the University of Missouri-Kansas City], and we had, interestingly enough, a segment on screaming — learning how to scream properly, learning what different screams could mean. So if you're on a roller coaster, your scream tends to go way up in register, and if you're really upset, you tend to go lower. So I channeled my lower register scream. And they were like, "Can you scream for, like, 15 seconds … I mean, for a really long time?" And they weren't kidding.

On her victims:
What would happen afterward is, James [Percelay], one of the directors, would yell, "Cut!" And then everybody, including myself, would clap. And the customers would be like, "Oh, my gosh! That's crazy!" It was almost like the TV show, Punk'd. Most everyone laughed or stayed … and chatted a bit. Then they'd sign their nondisclosure [agreement] saying they wouldn't tell what happened in the coffee shop. To my knowledge, everyone left happy [and] thought it was great, that it was hilarious. They were really great sports about being scared for a little while.

Read more about Andrea on her website.

There's a lot for Star Wars fans to love—and for nerdy parents to envy—in this new Halloween-themed spot from mcgarrybowen for Verizon. The highlight is definitely the eccentric costume selection, proving this family is more than your average Star Wars-crazed clan. Dad is nearly devoured by his Jabba the Hutt costume. Their youngest is strapped to dad's corpulent form, kitted out in the smallest, most adorable slave Leia outfit ever designed (let's not think too hard about the implications there). Mom has chosen a deluxe Chewbacca, because she’s not the sort of woman confined by gender norms. Her daughter, likewise, thwarts convention and goes as a walking Death Star. Her brother looks ready to destroy his sister in his rebel pilot outfit complete with X-wing. Even the family dog is dressed up as Darth Vader. There’s some poor timing on the punch line, but the joke still makes it. Still, there are so many Star Wars-related misses in the dialogue. Why doesn't the young boy suggest the dentist's house is a trap? Why not have the teenage daughter suggest they all look about as scruffy as nerfherders? Then again, I guess if the dialogue were good, it wouldn’t be Star Wars.

"So, what do you do?" It's the perennial cocktail-party ice-breaker. But in an age of budding tech startups and buzzy digital marketing firms, what used to be a simple, straightforward question has become, well, a bit more complicated.

This new video from YouTube comedy channel Slacktory called "Concept Space" pokes a little fun at the stereotypes that dog this new crop of marketing shops. It's unclear whether the characters in the video actually work in any traditional sense—but they certainly "curate," drink fancy bottled water and write on whiteboards.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Optical-illusion masters Brusspup buddied up with Ray-Ban for this anamorphic illusion video to show off Ray-Ban's Clubmaster line of sunglasses. Anamorphic illusions are made with objects or images that have skewed perspectives but look correctly proportioned from certain angles, and the effect works especially well with round objects. Could Ray-Ban turn this into a series? I'd love to see what they could do with an Ames room.

Every now and then, a story is so remarkable that it leaves you speechless.

Saroo Brierley was lost at age 5, separated from his family in India with no clue how to get home after accidentally boarding a runaway train. He was adopted by a family in Australia. For more than 25 years, he searched for his Indian family. With nothing more than a visual memory of where he grew up, it was, he says, like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Enter the uncanny technology of Google Earth. Searching outward from the train station where he was found, Saroo logged countless hours virtually touring the streets of India—until he miraculously found the place where he grew up. From there, he found his way back to his childhood home and was reunited with his mother and his siblings.

The entire story is told in Brierley's book A Long Way Home. But c'mon, what are the odds? It's almost uncanny. You will cry. You will forget that it's an ad for Google. You will also forget about Google's privacy concerns and how eerie it is that your blind date can see every detail of your house before you meet.

One minor quibble: They subtitled the video Homeward Bound—you know, like the Disney movie where the three talking pets cross half a nation to be reunited with their family? Yeah, Brierley's story is a billion times cooler than those dogs.

The PlayStation 4 launches next month, and Sony is feeding the frenzy with its new "Perfect Day" commercial from BBH in New York. It's a follow-up to the widely popular PlayStation 4 trailer from June, and it coincides with the launch of Sony's "Greatness Awaits" website. In the ad, two young men role-play battle via scenes from the Elder Scrolls Online, Driveclub and Killzone: Shadow Fall, all to the tune of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day."

The song juxtaposes nicely against the battle scenes, and although Reed is not actually singing it, the actors belting it out off-key while fighting make for a fun spot. Reed spoke positively about the ad industry at Cannes earlier this year, which makes a lot of sense now that he's profiting off it (though still not profiting off iTunes, apparently). Is that a touch of irony in the song selection, too, since it's allegedly about addiction?

UPDATE: As Pete Shelly reminds us, Reed's original version of "Perfect Day" has been used in advertising before—in the beautiful AT&T spot below with Gretchen Bleiler, by BBDO New York and director Peter Thwaites, from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

CREDITS
Client: Sony PlayStation 4

Agency: BBH, New York
Chief Creative Officer: John Patroulis
Executive Creative Director: Ari Weiss
Interactive Creative Director: Tim Nolan
Creative Directors: Gerard Caputo, Chris Maiorino
Lead Senior Producer: Jennifer Moore Bell
Senior Producer: Kate Morrison
Head of Integrated Production: Justin Booth-Clibborn
Head of Account Management: Armando Turco
Account Director: Melissa Hill
Account Executive: Jon Moll
Senior Broadcast Business Manager: Sean McGee
Copywriter: Ian Hart
Art Director: Dave Brown
Visual Designer: Rahim Masunu
User Experience Designer: Kelly Bignell
Lead Producer: Martin Mlekicki
Digital Producer: Victoria Fishel
Chief Strategy Officer: Sarah Watson
Strategist: Kendra Salvatore
Strategist: Angela Sun
Head of Comms Planning: Julian Cole
Comms Planner: Ben Zoll

Production Company: MJZ
Director: Matthijs Van Heijningen
Director of Photography: Joost Van Gelder
Executive Producer: Scott Howard
Producer: Donald Taylor
Production Designer: Robin Brown

Production Partner: HAUS
Creative Director: Rasmus Blaesbjerg
Technology Lead: Dino Petrone
Senior Producer: Claudine Nichols
Digital Producer: Tracey McAvoy

Editing: Union Edit
Executive Producer: Caryn Maclean
Senior Producer: Sara Mills
Editor: Jono Griffith
Assistant Editor: Megan Swados

Visual Effects, Finishing: The Mill
Executive Producer: Sean Costelloe
Senior Producers: Charlotte Arnold, Will Mok
Assistant Producer: Juan Handal
Color Producer: Heath Raymond
Shoot Supervisors: Gavin Wellsman, Joji Tsuruga
Colorist: Fergus McCall

Music: Lou Reed
Additional Music Arrangement: Human
Sound Design: Human
Mix: Sound Lounge
Mixer: Tom Jucarone