Hasta La Creative!

We may be nearing peak emoji, as Chevrolet has become the latest brand to play around with the familiar icons—writing a press release almost entirely in emojis to announce something (who knows what?) about the Chevy Cruze.

The automaker explains: “Words alone can’t describe the new 2016 Chevrolet Cruze, so to celebrate its upcoming reveal, the media advisory is being issued in emoji, the small emotionally expressive digital images and icons in electronic communication.”

Chevy is challenging people to decode it. You can see the whole thing below. Or you can wait until 2 p.m. EDT today, when it will be decoded for you. The hashtag—because emojis sometimes just aren’t enough—is #ChevyGoesEmoji.

If you were wondering what the frontman of ’80s Canadian rock back Loverboy is up to these days, the answer is second guessing the lyrics to “Working for the Weekend” in an ad for job listings site Indeed.com.

Mike Reno anchors the commercial—from ad agency Sleek Machine, with 30-, 45- and 60-second cuts—explaining that, thanks to the recruitment company, more people are happy being at the office. (The short version is punchier, but the longer ones have the sharper kicker—that now, the right idea would be “more like everybody’s really enjoying their time at work, and when the weekend comes, that’s fine too.”)

The band, for its part, is still working (for whatever reason), with a new album out last year, and tour dates scheduled through up to October.

It’s not clear, though, whether Chippendales is standing by the song as the ideal tie-breaker for ridiculously close auditions.

CREDITS
Client: Indeed
Agecy: Sleek Machine, Boston
Chief Creative Officer: Tim Cawley
Senior Integrated Producer: Ben Ouellette
Senior Copywriter: Jeff Mariois
Senior Art Director: Jessica Ruggieri
Music: “Working for the Weekend” by Loverboy
Talent: Mike Reno
Director: Darcy Van Poelgeest
Production Company: Circle/Vancouver
Editor: Kat Baker/Element

The well of inspiration apparently never runs dry for Denver Water’s long-running “Use Only What You Need” campaign. And while Sukle Advertising’s lauded conservation initiative often features eye-catching public installations, this year’s installment is brimming with artistry.

The agency used diverse materials such as colored pencils, Post-it notes, clay, crushed soda cans, Legos, yarn and string to create 10 original piece of art. Each depicts water in various forms, such as drops, splashes, cascades, showers and spray. The work adorns bus shelters around Denver, as well as print and online ads. The headline, “You can’t make this stuff,” drives home the message that water is a non-renewable resource.

Most of the results are quite splashy. For example…

I’d love to see this “fluffy” Lego cloud hovering over my block:

These pencil-tipped waves make a good point:

Someone should put a cap on this knitted-yarn faucet:

Here’s a fresh take on string theory:

This Post-it note poster is good to the last, well, you know:

“Consumers often see conservation as a sacrifice, something they have to give up, which they often aren’t willing to do,” says agency founder and creative director Mike Sukle. “We have, instead, used the approach of ‘not wasting.’ Consumers see waste differently than conservation, so the messaging of ‘Use Only What You Need’ follows the mind of the consumer that wasting is wrong.”

Water use in Denver recently hit a record low, so it appears the campaign, now in its ninth year, is having an impact. Alas, a local Lego shortage looms large, as Sukle reports using 6,000 of the colorful plastic bricks for the new ads.

Check out more executions below.

One month after a Florida newspaper called its gun show ad placement over murder coverage a “regrettable coincidence,” Charleston’s Post and Courier has trotted out the exact same excuse for a similar judgment error.

In today’s example, the South Carolina newspaper ran a sticky-note ad for a gun store over its coverage of Wednesday’s horrific killings of nine church-goers at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. 

“The front-page sticky note that was attached to some home delivery newspapers on the same day as this tragedy is a deeply regrettable coincidence,” the paper told a Facebook commenter, according to Poynter. “We apologize to those who were offended.”

These apologies (especially those that seem quite literally copied and pasted from previous instances of ridiculous ad placement) do little to appease critics and, if anything, highlight the newspaper industry’s repeated inability to show common sense when it comes to ads that are 100 percent guaranteed by their very nature to appear over high-profile news stories.

While it surely wasn’t an intentional act of malice, these errant ad placements are clearly avoidable and even predictable. They’re absolutely bound to happen, and preventing these gaffes should be a daily aspect of putting out a responsible newspaper.

Accentuating the irrationality of the Charleston news, the paper puts an ad for a gun shop on the front page today. pic.twitter.com/GyAW4EcKF1

— Jonathan A. Neufeld (@jneuf) June 18, 2015

Tylenol is continuing its celebration of diverse families with a new commercial from J. Walter Thompson in New York featuring same-sex and interracial couples.

Titled “How We Family,” the ad is part of a broader effort to to challenge conventional—that is to say, conservative—definitions of family. Tylenol launched the campaign last fall by repurposing the classic holiday dinner scene in Norman Rockwell’s painting “Freedom from Want,” to profile contemporary families, including a lesbian couple who work closely with one woman’s ex-husband to raise the children from both relationships.

Sure, the tagline is a little clunky. And the cultural tides on LGBT issues have been shifting for a while now (a majority of Americans expect the Supreme Court to allow same sex marriage in the court’s imminent decision, and support it; brands have been increasingly open in embracing the LGBT community). So it’s a question of degrees as to how much Tylenol is pioneering, and how much it’s capitalizing.

But that also almost doesn’t matter. In a marketplace where some consumers still lose their minds over a Cheerios commercial with an interracial couple, and where the heads of reactionaries similarly explode over Tylenol’s decision to feature a same-sex couple in an ad, the brand deserves credit for using its ad dollars to spread a message that’s in exactly the right spirit … even with a desire to profit (and a considerable opportunity to do so) at the heart of it.

And while the topic might seem a bit far afield from the brand’s core business, it’s actually pretty appropriate for a product that makes pain go away.

I asked Havas Worldwide Chicago to #GimmeAnIntern for this post.

They sent me three.

Along with honing their skills in various agency departments, the 14 lucky folks in Havas’s 10-week summer internship program are being “loaned out” to local businesses, cultural institutions, sports teams and celebrities—anyone, actually, who makes a strong enough case on social media using the #GimmeAnIntern hashtag or via email. The interns are sharing their adventures in real-time video via the agency’s Periscope account and elsewhere on social media.

Coffee and danish runs for the ECDs just won’t cut it anymore, I guess. (That said, the Havas 14 are also required to spend time sitting on display in the agency’s street-level lobby, in full view of the public. So the time-honored tradition of humiliating interns by giving them stupid stuff to do isn’t dead yet.)

“In order to create campaigns that drive cultural conversations, you have to be immersed in culture,” says Celia Jones, Havas group brand director. “That means not only being exposed to the thinking and creativity within the walls of the agency, but also giving interns an opportunity to gain hands-on experience out in the world.”

I always thought folks went into advertising to escape the real world to a fantasy-land of brand worship where everyone eventually wins an award. Luckily, these plucky wannabes aren’t tainted by such cynicism. Yet.

Christina Muth, one of the interns, who graduated from Mount St. Joseph University with a business degree, enjoyed her first out-of-agency experience—working at a food blog. She says she leaned a lot about how media sponsorships work.

“I can’t wait to do it again,” she says, “especially if it involves food for a second time. But next time, I’d like to assist in the eating.”

Another intern, Chicago Portfolio School student Jeff Polaschek, was assigned a test-riding task at Divvy Bikes. Of the Havas program, he says, “They are just trying to keep us out of the agency because we are too good.” (If you guessed he’s a copywriter—bingo! He’s also branded himself as the “oldest intern ever” on Twitter.)

Can they ride over on the @HavasWWChicago bike desk? https://t.co/olJBcNgHQH

— Divvy (@DivvyBikes) June 16, 2015

Carina Sherman, who graduated with a B.A. in communications and English from Andrews University, hopes her first real-world posting involves music. “I don’t want to brag, but I make the best playlists,” she says. “Making music playlists for local businesses, road trips and even dinner parties is something I feel I’d have a real knack for.”

As an English major, she will need some other work skills to fall back on.

All kidding aside, #GimmeAnIntern sounds like an engaging way for the participants to learn about advertising and lots of others stuff, too. Plus, as Muth notes, “it also broadcasts to the world what Havas has to offer.”

Indeed, #GimmeAnIntern serves as a fun self-promotion. Havas says the social-media-based competition to select the 14 interns was so popular, it boosted the agency’s Instagram following by 12 percent. Now, in addition to media coverage, Havas is getting the word out via Popular Plays, offering hour-long intern assistance to Chicago Instagrammers with more than 50,000 followers. (The shop has done some innovative, high-profile intern stuff before, including last year’s Winternship initiative.)

So, what do the #GimmeAnIntern recruits plan for their professional futures?

“In the short time I have been here, I have realized that I would love to work as a digital strategist for great American brands,” says Sherman.

“I have this little dream of building something from the ground up—whether that’s a product, an event, or even an app,” Muth says. “I would love to be behind something that I could call my own and something that others can also share. Being in an environment of thinkers and creators only helps me to grow, and I feel very fortunate to be here. Maybe one day, my big idea will hit me, but until then, I am in love with being around individuals that inspire me to be better than who I was yesterday.”

And Polaschek? “I would love to be a creative director at an agency like Havas,” he says, “but more than likely I will die from indentured servitude here first.”

Here’s an ad that might make you question the nature of the Internet, who you are and what makes you happy. OK, maybe not all that, but it does touch on those themes. And it includes man-on-man suckling action.

The spot, created by London agency AMV BBDO, is for a company called Thunderhead, and to the average consumer it might not be clear what the company actually does. To anyone in the marketing technology space, it’s fairly obvious: Thunderhead helps advertisers understand their customers.

It can help businesses deliver relevant messages to clients using accurate traits. That explains why the salesman in the ad fails at the beginning, thinking he knows all about the consumer, only to find he’s getting everything wrong.

Then things get weird. The salesman regroups, seeking help from a wrestler-looking muscleman whose nipples seem to be the source of perfect consumer insights. After nuzzling close to this warrior’s breast, the salesman can close the deal because now he knows exactly what the woman wants.

Thunderhead is the kind of software service that brands use to manage these customer relations and know who is on the other end of a phone call, online chat or ad. And now it’s known as the company with the weird suckling scene.

Transgender issues have been front-page news all summer, though brands have clearly had a hard time knowing what their role should be in the conversation. But now Google—one of the world’s most powerfully visible corporate LGBT advocates—is out with a new spot for Pride Month that tells the deeply poignant story of a transgender man and the small business that helped him during his transition.

The first half of the spot below focuses on Jake, who was born female but identified as male from a young age. The second half introduces City Gym in Kansas City, Mo., which has given Jake a place where he can feel comfortable getting to know his changing body and find support for him and his friends. (Another gym’s tagline, “No judgments,” would be much more apt at this place.)

It’s a wonderfully made spot. The story is skillfully and evocatively told, and never feels exploitative. The inclusion of YouTube videos in which Jake shows his transition are particularly resonant in describing his journey (and yes, Google’s ongoing behind-the-scenes role in it).

It’s also unapologetic about the business tie-in—the spot promotes the Google My Business tools for small businesses—which is a good thing, as it doesn’t feign disinterested altruism and presents a very tangible case for supporting LGBT-friendly businesses.

Google has done meaningful work in this space for years. Once again, it’s leading by example.

I love Johnny Cash. I love Mass Effect. But man are those two great tastes that taste weird together.

The next iteration of the epic sci-fi video game series was announced today via a first-look trailer at E3, and there’s clearly a lot to look forward to with Mass Effect: Andromeda.

That said, let’s talk a bit about the soundtrack selection: Cash’s rendition of Western classic “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Specifically, let’s talk about the fact that it was a dumb pick.

Joss Whedon’s Firefly may have sold us all on the mashup of interstellar travel and cowboy culture, but Mass Effect certainly isn’t Firefly.

The Mass Effect series’ cerebral tone and gravitas have largely been fueled by its music, from the original Vengelis-inspired score in 2007 to the more orchestral theme of the 2010 sequel to the Hans Zimmer-esque braaaaaaaaam of 2012’s Mass Effect 3.

You can revisit all three scores in this handy YouTube clip:

Personally, I was a bit sad to see the games move away from the minimalist, Blade Runner-reminiscent sound of the original, but it’s hard to deny that the shifting score reflected the increasingly high-stakes and galactically sprawling atmosphere of the game.

But now, on the eve of relaunching the series into a new galaxy (the titular Andromeda), our first audio experience with the new Mass Effect is a crunchy bit of rootin’ and tootin’ that creates the impression you’re not so much saving worlds as you are wandering around and starting gunfights over range disputes or whatever it is that makes gunslingers sling guns. 

To be clear, Johnny Cash’s music certainly can be used in dramatic and unexpected ways. My favorite example of this kind of masterful genre-blending is the opening credits of 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake:

So with Mass Effect: Andromeda, am I overthinking the choice of a soundtrack to an admittedly early teaser trailer? (The game won’t be out until late 2016.) Yes, probably, but I’m not nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking.

Bioware and Electronic Arts have a lot of ground to regain with Mass Effect. The third installment left many of the series’ passionate fans baffled and frustrated by serving them up an ending that pleased almost literally no one. 

Thanks to a hastily revised and expanded finale that was later patched into the game, along with a few well-crafted bits of downloadable content (along with the passage of enough time for frustrations to fade), much of that fan backlash has dwindled. However, the series has to rebuild its goodwill anew, and every single piece of marketing matters between here and there.

It’s been a full century since Coca-Cola approved the Root Glass Company’s contour bottle design that would become the soft drink brand’s trademark. So, to pat themselves on the back, Coke is teaming up with Italian fashion house Trussardi for a limited-edition collection of stylish aluminum cans and glass bottles.

I hadn’t heard of Trussardi before this, mostly because I don’t have $927 to throw at a leather jacket. But they’re a pretty big deal as far as high-end fashion goes, and have Lady Gaga and Katie Holmes wearing their clothes and designer bags and stuff.

The Trussardi cans will officially be introduced to the world at Expo Milan 2015. Maybe soda bottles aren’t the best case to show off haute couture aesthetics, though, because these designs aren’t any more impressive than the specialty street art/graffiti-inspired stuff Coke has put out in the past.

Maybe if they’d used their Hawaiian shirt pants as inspiration, I’d be more impressed.

Via Design Taxi.