Hasta La Creative!

The Wienermobile is one of the world’s most revered vehicles, seemingly capable anything, except for one pretty major flaw: It doesn’t actually deliver hot dogs.

Which is part of the reason why Oscar Mayer just created a miniature version called the Wiener Rover—a tiny, indestructible beast that will roam the country delivering a “precious cargo of warm, ready-to-eat hot dogs to fans wherever they find it.”

The Wiener Rover is one-seventh the size of the Wienermobile. It’s 23 inches tall by 43 inches long—or using the Oscar Mayer measurement system, about four hot dogs by eight hot dogs. It is battery powered, travels up to 20 mph and can hold up to eight hot dogs, plus condiments.

“We consistently hear that people are hungry for a hot dog after they see the Wienermobile, but we have never been able to offer them the deliciousness they desire,” Corey Rudd, senior associate brand manager at Oscar Mayer, said in a statement. “We developed the Wiener Rover to go where no Wienermobile has gone before to surprise and delight our loyal fans at their local parks, beaches, festivals and beyond.”

Watch out, though. As you can see in the video, the Wiener Rover—which made its debut in New York City on Thursday, which was National Hot Dog Day—appears to have a mind of its own. It may, given the opportunity, jump up on your picnic table and just mash right through your carefully arranged picnic place settings.

Bringing in artists to design limited-edition shoes is a no-brainer. But an architect and a photographer? That makes things a bit more interesting.

Pharrell Williams, who was named to Adweek’s Creative 100 this week in part because of his fashion design savvy, just announced a new extension of his Superstar line of Adidas shoes. It’s called Supershell, and features designs from four disparate creators:

• Architect Zaha Hadid, an internationally recognized designer once selected by Time as one of the most influential people in the world. Her work includes China’s Guangzhou Opera House, the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games, and the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. 
• Japanese contemporary artist Mr., who brings an anime-inspired style to a wide range of artistic mediums and is, says Williams, “a master of depicting innocence.”
• Photographer Cass Bird, who shoots fashion for a variety of major publications and has directed several branded videos for J.Crew, Wrangler and others.
• New York contemporary artist Todd James, whose career began with graffiti and grew into frequent gallery exhibitions and high-profile collaborations.

The shoes aren’t available for sale yet, but there’s a placeholder page on Adidas’ site, and you can get a sneak peek in the photos and videos below.

The popular knock against the lottery is that you can play it, but you’re an idiot if you do, cause nobody ever wins. But a new campaign for the New York Lottery is about a different kind of problem—someone who actually won, but who’s yet to claim the $7 million prize, and almost a year later, is about to run out of time.

McCann New York has posted street fliers in Canarsie, the Brooklyn neighborhood that’s home to Milky Way Deli, where the winning ticket in a Cash4Life game last summer was bought. A sketch of the ticket and the headline “Have You Seen Me?” adorns one flier. A stick figure smiles dumbly on a second with the headline “Is This You?” The subtext of both is: Are you the fool who’s about to let seven figures slip through your fingers?

In other words, the whole thing is devious and hilarious because it’s playful and it also reinforces the perception that people actually win—and invites everyone who sees it to imagine how much smarter they would be if they did.

Of course, it doesn’t really seem like the New York Lottery’s heart is really in the mission of finding the lucky lost soul. The winner, whoever he or she is, bought the ticket last July 24 (and needs to come forward by the same date this year, or the money goes back into the pool). But the lottery only started its canvassing campaign yesterday (July 22)—and the super high production values of its posters pretty much say it all.

Maybe the whole thing is a grand hoax—and the organization has the really winner stashed away somewhere, to roll out at the last minute—or there’s no winner at all. Then again, none of that really matters in the end, because whatever $4 million lump sum pittance would be left after taxes still isn’t enough to live in New York anyway.

If you want to see your next selfie brought to life as a real-time mosaic of moving thread, Forever 21 and Breakfast are happy to help—and the results are pretty stunning.

About a year and half ago, the Los Angeles-based clothing retailer hired the Brooklyn agency to build from scratch a giant, digitally synced adjustable billboard made of cloth, wood and aluminum, to name a few materials—the contraption includes some 200,000 parts, with 6.7 miles of fabric. And now, it’s is ready to launch.

Now through next Tuesday, the machine will be up and running 24 hours a day, rendering versions of Instagram photos hashtagged #F21ThreadScreen while cameras stream it live at f21threadscreen.com—and send users auto-edited clips of their photos being recreated.

Here’s the live stream:

The mechanics alone are wildly inventive, if not borderline insane—6,400 wooden spools feature rainbow ribbons that spin to change among 36 colors, according to computerized directions, with each spool ultimately serving as a single pixel in an 80-by-80 “pixel” image. Ultimately, the renderings themselves are just shy of hypnotizing, with the shifting palettes creating an iridescent effect as the images morph.

“Forever 21 was looking to experiment with something quite different than what they’ve done in the past,” says Breakfast co-founder and chief creative officer Andrew Zolty. “They gave us a rather open brief, and from the start we knew we wanted to build a web-connected experience that anyone could try from anywhere in the world.”

He adds: “We focused on thread, with it being the most basic element of fashion and quite versatile. We also focused on Instagram, as it’s the most artistic/creative of social networks, and Forever 21 has a massive following on there. [With 7.5 million followers, it’s 45th most followed account.] The idea developed from there.”

Here’s the behind-the-scenes video:

In broad terms, it’s familiar territory for Breakfast. Three years ago, the shop built a black-and-white pixel-based street billboard that silhouetted passersby for TNT. It’s also no stranger to building unique hardware with social media tie-ins—it created Instaprint, an event photo booth business that prints Polaroid-style photos based off Instagram hashtags, and offers to hand-craft bigger mosaics out of the individual prints. And in 2014, the shop picked up an Innovation Lion at Cannes for Points, its Internet-smart street sign.

But the F21 machine—11 feet high, 9 feet wide and 3 feet deep, with several times the number of parts in a modern automobile, all custom designed—is its biggest build yet.

“If we designed a car, we could redesign a single part and replace it if necessary,” says Zolty. “With this screen, when a part didn’t turn out quite right, we’d be sitting on 10,000-plus of them most often. You also may not know there is a problem until 5,000 have been installed. Re-creating and installing that part isn’t really an option, so you have to figure out a way? to keep moving forward while also solving the problem.”

To stand out in the piles of applications DDB Istanbul received when it was looking for an art director, Canhür Aktuglu sent out an SOS and presented his portfolio as a message in a bottle. They hired him, so obviously they like the Police as much as he does.

“After that my life changed and it was guaranteed no more boring!” he writes on Behance.

The idea was a clever one, and well executed. The cover letter was sealed inside an empty glass bottle, while his résumé and portfolio were stored on a USB stick in the bottle’s cork.

DDB Istanbul had better make good use of Aktuglu while he’s there. On Behance, he also mentions that he wants to see kangaroos and go surfing—and might look into approaching DDB Sydney next. He could even use the same bottle.

Via Design Taxi.

A year ahead of its centennial, footwear brand Keds is launching a global brand platform and fall 2015 ad campaign around female empowerment, and has gotten one of the world’s great trailblazing women, Taylor Swift, to headline it.

Print ads from kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners show the pop star, 25, posing against artistic backdrops with headlines like “All dressed up with everywhere to go” and “There’s no such thing as an average girl.” The tagline is, “Ladies first since 1916.”

Click the ads to enlarge.

“A new generation of women has been leading an exciting cultural shift redefining the conversation about equality and female empowerment,” Keds president Chris Lindner said in a statement.

“Keds was originally created in 1916 to provide ladies with accessible, fashionable footwear to allow them to be who they wanted to be, and go where they wanted to go. ‘Ladies First’ is a celebration of amazing women like Taylor Swift who are blazing new trails every day. From CEOing to BFFing, these ladies are doing it all.”

The campaign features other female talent, both on and off camera. In addition to a few other models, the ads employed notable female artists to make the backdrops—including illustrator Priscilla White, surface artist and pattern designer Kendra Dandy, and street artist Paige Smith.

Keds said the combination of poppy, street-style photos and empowering headlines is meant to deliver a “one-two punch of fashion and emotion” and capture “what is means to be a lady in 2015.”

The media plan combines retail, social, print and digital (with publishers including Nylon, Paper, Interview, Refinery29 and WhoWhatWear) with wild postings, bus wraps and subway media “in many of NYC’s most artistic neighborhoods.”

To sell tickets to its first-time event, the Transylvania-based Untold Music Festival is working the Dracula angle. In partnership with Romania’s National Blood Transfusion Institute, it has launched “Pay with Blood,” a campaign that lets you buy a day pass with plasma.

“We were talking about how to incorporate Dracula into our festival, and after seeing the numbers and how behind Romania was in blood donations, we had this idea,” Untold PR manager Stefana Giurgiu told the Guardian.

About 1.7 percent of the Romanian population are active blood donors, lower than anywhere else in the EU. (Vampire mythology probably doesn’t help.) And to justify its existence, the Untold Festival needs hundreds of thousands of attendees to fill both its paid and free venues.

Assuming you’ve got time to spare and blood to give, Untold takes place from July 30 to Aug. 2 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Through this Friday, people who give blood at centers in Bucharest and Cluj will get one-day tickets; those who register to give blood online will get 30 percent off.

By noon on the campaign’s first day, 45 people—many first-time donors—registered and gave blood. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but Giurgiu adds, “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing since we announced the campaign.” (Hopefully those are donors, not rubbernecking journalists.)

While the Transylvania connection gives Untold’s campaign special credence, this isn’t the first time blood has been used to draw eyes elsewhere. In partnership with the American Red Cross, the Saw movie franchise launched “Give ‘Til It Hurts,” a Halloween blood drive that ran for six consecutive years, yielding nearly 119,452 pints of blood in all. Creative featured the nurses from the films.

In 2006, Lionsgate produced 1,000 limited-edition posters for Saw III splattered with the blood of Tobin Bell, the actor who plays Jigsaw, for the benefit of the American Red Cross.

Dracula, wherever he is now, is slow-clapping—unless he’s seen the creative above, because that probably just confused him. Do vampires have blood to give? Actually, hold that thought.

AT&T’s “It Can Wait” texting-and-driving campaign from BBDO New York has included many notable executions, including the painful Werner Herzog documentary from 2013. And the latest spot is no exception, featuring quietly gripping storytelling from Anonymous Content director Frederic Planchon that suddenly explodes with horror.

The almost four-minute film is remarkable. (It’s supported by three 30-second spots, one of which will run on TV.) Slow-motion cinematography, shot at 1,000 frames per second, captures the brutal consequences of taking your eyes off the road to glance at your smartphone, even briefly. The footage then plays in reverse, ending on the cause of the terrible crash.

That cause, notably, isn’t that the driver was texting. The “It Can Wait” campaign has always focused on texting, but it’s is now evolving based on new research that revealed the prevalence of drivers engaging in other smartphone activities, like social media, web surfing, video chatting and more.

The campaign is evolving in other ways, too. AT&T, working with Reel FX, has developed an app called the It Can Wait Driving Simulation that uses virtual reality to give an immersive view of what it is like to text, post or video chat while driving. The VR simulator is freely available for iOS and Android and works with Google Cardboard.

A souped-up version of the simulator—running through the Samsung Gear VR headset, with premium sound from Bose QuietComfort 25 acoustic noise canceling headphones—will soon go on tour, visiting schools, fairs and partner companies in 100 U.S. cities.

CREDITS
Client: AT&T
Title: Close To Home

Agency: BBDO New York
Chief Creative Officer, Worldwide: David Lubars
Chief Creative Officer, New York: Greg Hahn
Executive Creative Director: Matt MacDonald
Senior Creative Director: LP Tremblay
Senior Creative Director: Erik Fahrenkopf
CD/Art Director: Grant Mason
CD/Copywriter: Kevin Mulroy

Director of Integrated Production: David Rolfe
Group Executive Producer: Julie Collins
Executive Producer: Dan Blaney
Music Producer: Melissa Chester
Senior Integrated Business Manager: Cristina Blanco

Managing Director: Mark Cadman
Senior Account Director: Brian Nienhaus
Account Director: Gati Curtis
Account Manager: Johnny Wardell
Account Executive: Sigourney Hudson-Clemons

Production Company: Anonymous Content
Director: Frederic Planchon
Executive Producer: Eric Stern
Producer: Paul Ure
Director of Photography: Jody Lee Lipes

Editorial: WORK Editorial
Editor: Rich Orrick
Assistant Editors: Adam Witten and Trevor Myers
Executive Producer: Erica Thompson
Producer: Sari Resnick

Visual Effects: The Mill
EP/Head of Production: Sean Costelloe
Line Producer: Nirad ‘Bugs’ Russell
VFX Supervisor : Gavin Wellsman
2D Leads: Gavin Wellsman; Krissy Nordella
2D Compositor: Michael Smith; Chris Sonia, Keith Sullivan
2D Assists: Heather Kennedy; Sungeun Moon, Yoon-sun Bae, Marco Giampaolo
3D: Yili Orana , Corey Langelotti
Pre Vis Artist: Jeffrey Lee
Editor: Charlotte Carr
Designer: Clemens den Exter

Color:  The Mill
Colorist: Aline Sinquin

Music House: Grooveworx
Executive Producer: Dain Blair
Sound Design: Brian Emrich
Original music composed by Rob Simonsen

Sound: Sonic Union
Sound Mixer: Steve Rosen

Motions Graphics and Titles: Polyester

Is Geico’s “It’s What You Do” campaign on life support? Not yet, but it’s been hospitalized with a severe case of the non-sequiturs.

I’m not a huge fan of the insurance company’s “It’s What You Do” ads from The Martin Agency—there’s just not that much tension in the idea that getting Geico insurance is a given, and the other givens in the spots often feel too random.

This one, at least, provokes a chuckle with the appearance by a certain Hasbro game. Great pacing and direction, and the mini punch line is funny enough. The ad has almost 2.5 million YouTube views, though the vast majority of those came from its prime placement in the YouTube masthead last Saturday.

As for the campaign as whole, well, the patient is certainly on the table…

CREDITS
Client: Geico
Vice President, Marketing: Ted Ward
Director, Marketing: Bill Brower
Senior Manager, Marketing: Melissa Halicy
Marketing Supervisor: Mike Grant
Marketing Buyer: Tom Perlozzo
Marketing Buyer: Brighid Griffin
Marketing Buyer: Katherine Kalec
Marketing Specialist: Julia Nass

Agency: The Martin Agency, Richmond, Va.
Chief Creative Officer: Joe Alexander
Group Creative Director: Wade Alger
Group Creative Director: Steve Bassett
Creative Director: Sean Riley
Senior Copywriter: Ken Marcus
Executive Producer: Brett Alexander
Senior Broadcast Producer: Heather Tanton
Junior Broadcast Producer: Coleman Sweeney
Group Account Director: Brad Higdon
Account Executive: Allison Hensley
Account Supervisor: Josh Lybarger
Business Affairs Supervisor: Suzanne Wieringo
Financial Account Supervisor: Monica Cox
Senior Production Business Manager: Amy Trenz
Senior Project Manager: Jason Ray

Production Company: Hungry Man
Director: Wayne McClammy
Managing Partner/Executive Producer: Kevin Byrne
Executive Producer/Head of Sales: Dan Duffy
Executive Producer: Mino Jarjoura
Executive Producer: Nancy Hacohen
Producer: Dave Bernstein
Production Supervisor: Shelly Silverman

Editorial Company: Rock Paper Scissors
Editor: Christjan Jordan
Assistant Editor: Pieter Viljoen
Executive Producer: Angela Dorian
Producer: Jared Thomas

Telecine: MPC
Colorist: Ricky Gausis

Animation/VFX: MPC
Executive Producer: Elexis Stearn
Senior Producer: Juliet Tierney
Junior Producer: Nicole Saccardi
Creative Director: Paul O’Shea
CG Supervisor: Zach Tucker
Flame Lead: Blake Huber
Nuke Artist: James Steller
Flame Artist: Ben Persons

Music Company: HUM
Executive Creative Director: Jeff Koz
Sound Designer: Dan Hart
Music/Composer: Haim Mazar
Creative Director: Scott Glenn
Executive Producer: Debbi Landon
Producer: Caroline O’Sullivan

Audio Post Company: Rainmaker Studios
Engineer/Mixer: Jeff McManus

If you ever wanted to see a musical set in a McDonald’s, your ship has come in.

McDonald’s lead Hispanic agency, Alma in Miami, on Friday will roll out “A Little Lovin’,” a three-minute bachata musical starring the 20-year-old Dominican American singer Leslie Grace. At the beginning, she is seen sitting in McDonald’s with a case of writer’s block, but a McDonald’s employee (played by Daniel “Cloud” Campos, who also was the director and choreographer) soon inspires her to find “A Little Lovin’ ” all around.

As musicals do, it gets wildly and ridiculously energetic from there.

Alma repurposed Grace’s “Solita Me Voy” song for the spot. “About a year ago, Leslie was warming up for an interview and reminiscing about her happy childhood and going to McDonald’s with her dad, which was down the street from her mom’s salon,” said Luis Miguel Messianu, president and chief creative officer at Alma DDB. “She didn’t know she was being recorded, but my friend from Sony shared the sound byte with me and we’ve been working on an idea for her to partner with McDonald’s ever since.”

CREDITS
Talent
Leslie Grace: As Herself
Danny: Daniel Cloud
Dad: Cris Judd
Daughter: Tatiana McQuay

Film Crew
Director: Daniel Cloud
Executive Producer: Danielle Hinde
Producer: Courtney Davies
Production Supervisor: Rose Krane
Assistant Production Supervisor: Josh Reed

McDonald’s Marketing Team
VP Brand & Marketing Content: Joel Yashinksy
Director of Hispanic Consumer Marketing: Patricia Diaz
Manager of Social Engagement- US: Jenina Nunez

Alma Agency
President/Chief Creative Officer: Luis Miguel Messianu
VP Executive Creative Director: Alvar Sunol
Creative Director: Iu La Lueta
Associate Creative Director/Art Director: Beatriz Torres-Marin
Senior Art Director: Luis Aguilera
Art Director: Andres Schiling
Director of Production: Adrian Castagna
Producer: Diana De La Parra
Account Director: Karen Udler
Account Supervisor: Cristina Lage
Senior Strategic Planner: Tamara Sotelo

Sony Music Entertainment US Latin
Senior Director of Business Development: Melissa Exposito
Business Development Analyst: Isabelle Duran
Manager: Jose Behar
Management: Lorena Fusilier
Management: Larissa Leal
Road Manager: Francisco Martinez