Hasta La Creative!

If George Lois has yet to prevail upon you how much he hates Mad Men—and he's done so a number of times in the past few years, even though Don Draper was supposedly modeled on him—allow the 81-year-old advertising legend to do so in the video below. And then let him pitch you, somewhat randomly yet quite sincerely, on the talented folks at NYC editing company Madhouse. So, he hates Mad Men, but he loves Madhouse. Got it?

When you buy anything these days, from apple juice to an Audi A6, chances are good that at least some of your money is going to a parent company that might surprise you. It is a rare and inquisitive marketing mind that can actually remember these relationships, like the fact that Minute Maid is owned by Coca-Cola or Baked Ruffles report up to PepsiCo.

Think you've got the brand savvy to match up the marketing marionettes with their corporate puppet masters? If so, take Adweek's Brand Paternity Test below and gauge your talent for spotting consumer culture's family connections. 

Name the parent brand or holding company of …

Revenge billboards are getting to be a trend. Expensive but emotionally satisfying, they're great for anything from declaring spousal inadequacies to calling out cheaters. This one, in Greensboro, N.C., goes the extra mile by spoofing MasterCard's "Priceless" campaign. It reads: "Michael – GPS tracker – $250, Nikon camera with zoom lens – $1600, Catching my LYING HUSBAND and buying this billboard with our investment account – Priceless. Tell Jessica you're moving in! – Jennifer." Chad Tucker of Fox 8 News broke this story. Hopefully, he can track down Jennifer and film the fisticuffs we're all imagining.

The taxicabs in Denver are a bit hornier than usual, and it's all science's fault. Carmichael Lynch put ornamental mammoth tusks on a fleet of cabs to drum up attention for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's "Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age" exhibit. The cool thing about this idea is that when the exhibit ends, they can keep the tusks and do cab jousts for charity.

If your agency has a little extra desk space and would like to give it a higher purpose than storing empty binders, you might be interested in the Free Desk Here project. The international effort, created by the London-based Open Studio Club, provides aspiring creative professionals with free workspace at willing agencies. The squatter creatives do their own work, not agency projects. The goal is to give up-and-coming talent the facilities, tools and camaraderie to create professional-caliber work. Here are the rules:

    Desks are 100 percent free. There's no charge.
    Guests are there to work on their own projects, not the agency's work.
    Agencies can end things at any point.
    WiFi and other facilities like the kitchen, toilet and windows are included.
    The desk is available only during agency hours.
    Guests should not invite anyone into the agency.
    Meeting rooms are off limits to guests.
    Use of stationery, printers, telephones, etc., are not included.
    Guests might be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement.
    Guests shouldn't play their own music.
    Guests should respect the studio culture.
    Guests should not remove anything from the studio.
    Guests might be asked to meet the agency before being offered the desk.
    Guests should be open to share ideas and talk about their work.
    Guests should be actively working on a project and attend the agency daily.
    The free desk is not a short cut to getting a job at the agency.

Interested in offering up space or browsing for a desk to jockey? Check out the Free Desk Here website for details and photos of participating shops.

Floyd Hayes, the former executive creative director of creative agency Cunning, includes a quote from a 2007 AdFreak story in materials touting his new venture, the World's Fastest Agency—although when my colleague David Kiefaber described the guerilla advertising veteran with a penchant for self-promotion as "pregnant with marketing genius," it was with anvil-heavy irony, and perhaps some confusion about which gender is able to conceive. Back then, Hayes was offering to think really hard about a client's products at least once an hour for a week in exchange for $10,000. Now, he's hawking a quick-turnaround service—selling concepts for $999. Send that amount via PayPal, DM your creative brief to @FastestAgency, and he'll issue a 140-character response within 24 hours. "Make the logo bigger" and "Put the CEO in the commercial" easily fit the space and would probably satisfy most clients. But Hayes offers this example, based on a real project he helmed at Cunning in London: "Brief: Gain media and buzz for our park-anywhere small car. Idea: Attach replica cars to landmark city buildings." Hmmm, that sounds like a $997 solution to me. And I don't see anything about a money-back guarantee. The World's Smallest Ad Agency should piggyback on Hayes's publicity by offering next-day ideas for 99 cents. Via PSFK.

UPDATE: Hayes tells AdFreak that the nonrefundable $999 is actually a plus for clients because "they will be forced to FOCUS on their challenge and get the problem to its essential core. Yes, they could do this without paying but money makes it happen." (The emphasis is his, so you clients better FOCUS!)

Cookie or creme? Perhaps not surprisingly, Oreo says it's both. Following the "Whisper Fight" Super Bowl spot, the #cookiethis/#cremethis Instagram campaign, the Oreo Separator videos and the "Life Raft" TV spot, Wieden + Kennedy today wraps up its "Cookie vs. Creme" campaign with SuperImportantTest.com, an amusing grab bag of a website which makes it clear that there's no wrong answer to the question of which part of an Oreo is better. Submitting a vote on the site takes you to one of more than 30 silly videos—from 2-D horse animations to robotic cats and everything in between. Directors, production companies and YouTube personalities from "six different time zones" (!?) created the clips, the agency says. After each one, you can go back and cycle through the others. All in all, the campaign was a pleasant confection—six weeks of inspired silliness which proved that even with kind of a dumb premise, Oreo can still have plenty of fun. Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Oreo
Project: Super Important Test
www.SuperImportantTest.com

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Jason Bagley, Craig Allen
Digital Director: Matt O'Rourke
Copywriter, Digital Creative: Jarrod Higgins
Art Director: Ruth Bellotti
Account Team: Scott Sullivan, Jessie Young, Ken Smith
Broadcast Producer: Katie Reardon
Broadcast Production Director: Ben Grylewicz
Interactive Producer: Robbie Veltman
Executive Interactive Producer: Lori DeBortoli
Information Architect: Jake Doran
Digital Designer: Paul Levy
Creative Technologists: Ryan Bowers, Billy McDermott
Executive Creative Directors: Joe Staples, Susan Hoffman

Video Creators
Carl Burgess
Cat Solen
Tony Foster
Fatal Farm
Jimmy Marble
Max Erdenberger
McRorie
Power House
Agile BrandTelligence
Visual Arts and internal W+K resources, including W+K Motion Department and Don't Act Big Productions

Development Partner
Hook LLC

"Just because I fart at parties now and then, it doesn't make me a farter." That's how I plan to begin my memoirs, and it's also a key line in the Ontario Ministry of Health's "Quit the Denial" campaign from BBDO Toronto, directed by the Perlorian Brothers. We meet a gassy lass who lets fly when partying with friends, dancing or chatting up guys. She asks one dude coquettishly, "Do you want to go outside for a fart?" (Where's this noxious angel been all my life?) She is, of course, in denial, just like people who claim to be "social smokers" and insist they're not addicts. (A companion spot features "social nibblers" who mooch food from other people's plates. But there's no farting in that one, so who cares?) It's a splendidly sophomoric approach and definitely diverting, though I wonder if it's ultimately too light and insubstantial, lacking substance—like, oh I don't know, a passing wind, perhaps? Besides, if there were no more smokers, who's going to add some spark to these farty parties by lighting a match?

Nothing gets people familiar with a new social tool quite like making a competition out of it. And so, Dave Rolfe, head of integrated production at BBDO in New York, got almost everyone in his department to learn Vine, Twitter's six-second video app, by challenging them to create the best videos they could with it—for its first Vine Film Festival.

For Rolfe, it was a contest born from a certain amount of shame. "I joined Vine through Kate Upton," he tells AdFreak. "We were doing a shoot for Gillette with Kate Upton. And we were sitting there talking, and she was like, 'Are you on Vine?' And I was embarrassed because I was like, 'I've heard of Vine, but I don't really know what it is.' I had definitely heard of it, but I didn't use it. And here's Kate Upton telling me about a social-media platform."

Once he did get up to speed, Rolfe saw value in having the producers in his department learn it collaboratively in a fun way. So, he set up four categories: Sweet, Funny, Cool and Series. He got more than 200 submissions in all. "This is the epitome of conversational media," said Rolfe. "It's instructive in terms of how people share stuff, and how they'll do it on video, and it's also interesting to see how people create narrative around an intensely short-form format."

Check out the winners below. Now that the production guys have thrown down the gauntlet, BBDO's creative department will surely be next to give this a try.

 
#Sweet
Elise Pavone, "Baby"

 
#Funny
Daniel Blaney, "Single White Producer"

 
#Cool
Lawrence Chen, "Took a Fall in the Hall"

 
#Series
RaniV, "Concert Series"

 
Grand Audience Gold
Mike Gentile, "Park"

 
Honorable Mentions
Anthony Curti, "Get Back in There"

 Julian Katz, "Being Followed"

It's a big day for Samsung, which is unveiling the Galaxy S4 in New York City later today. But leave it to LG to preemptively let a little air out of that balloon—with this gloating billboard in Times Square, designed just like the Samsung one below it. "Be ready 4 the next Galaxy"? Well, the "LG Optimus G is here 4 you now." Bickering billboards, of course, are a time-honored tradition, from Newcastle's takedown of Stella Artois to the famous BMW/Audi spat out west. Via CNet.