Hasta La Creative!

It’s a red box, but in some ways it’s more like a red carpet.

Ogilvy Cape Town has been giving a remarkable welcome box to employees over the past year. And now, it’s been shortlisted in the design competition for this year’s One Show. Deservedly so, as it’s probably the best agency employee welcome package we’ve seen.

The so-called “Induction Box”—made by Ogilvy’s RedWorks production arm (which was recently merged with its other production agency Hogarth Worldwide)—is based around David Ogilvy’s short book The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness and his famous eight habits of highly creative communities.

The box brings the concepts to life in a tangible way, making employees much more likely to read and absorb the philosophy underpinning the agency. Check out the contents of the box in the images below.

Click the images to enlarge.

We spoke to Ogilvy Cape Town about how the box came about, and how it’s been received.

What was the motivation for creating something like this?
The idea behind this is to give someone a piece of Ogilvy & Mather, because at the end of the day, the box represents who we are and what we stand for. It is easy to pull someone aside and say, “Welcome to the agency.” But with the Induction Box, we want to make people feel like they belong, like they have found a place here. Working at Ogilvy is so much more than just another job. We wanted to create something that reflects this.

How did David Ogilvy’s ideas inform the design of the boxes?
When you are hired by Ogilvy, it is because someone saw something great in you and that you would be a good fit here. There is a definite “Ogilvy Way” based on The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness (or Divine Discontent) and David Ogilvy’s 8 Creative Habits—Courage, Idealism, Curiosity, Playfulness, Candor, Intuition, Free-Spiritedness and Persistence. Getting new staff to understand and embrace all of this in a fun and engaging way was our main focus. The Induction Box solidifies the importance of what we stand for.

What was RedWorks’ role in designing the boxes?
Inspired by The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness, Redworks decided to unpack the eight habits by making them tangible. Their solution was a layered box containing interesting, fun, quirky elements representing the eight habits, accompanied by phrases elaborating on it. It not only reflects Ogilvy’s rich heritage, but also provides all the necessary information about the working environment in a visually stimulating way.

How do new hires generally respond?
The response has been well beyond what we could have imagined. It ties everything together beautifully. People light up when they receive them. We often get a nudge from existing employees asking if they can get one, too.

Have other Ogilvy offices shown interest in using the boxes, too?
Not only has the Ogilvy Induction Box been introduced to staff at Ogilvy & Mather Johannesburg and Durban, but O&M London and Australia have been working on their own adaptations to give to new employees.

Men, if you saw a door marked “Big Dick” and a door marked “Average Dick,” which would you walk through?

Two weeks ago, Dove released a new video in its long-running Real Beauty campaign where they put the words “Average” and “Beautiful” over doors and figured out which women lacked self-confidence and which were full of themselves. Just kidding, they tried to get women to see that they could choose to see themselves as beautiful.

The divisive video was greeted with booth cheers and jeers, caused a kerfuffle over at BuzzFeed, and like past Dove videos, was ripe for parody. And indeed, Funny or Die produced the little video below that suggests once again that men, at least compared to women, don’t have a lot of self-confidence problems.

Of course, in reality, men also suffer from self-esteem issues, but the parody brings up some excellent points that many detractors have leveled at the original video. Namely, what’s so bad about being average? And where in our culture do we draw the line between healthy self-esteem and being embarrassingly full of yourself?

The guys in this video run the gamut from full-of-yourself you’re delusional (“It’s a bit like Big Ben”) to depressingly desperate (“Have sex with me, please!”). When our society values both confidence and modesty, it’s hard for women or men to win the physical beauty game. The paradox is aptly put in the One Direction lyric: “You don’t know you’re beautiful, but that’s what makes you beautiful.” In other words, One Direction doesn’t think any of the ladies who walked through the beautiful door are actually beautiful.

Which brings about larger questions: Who’s the arbiter of beauty? Who gets to decide who’s beautiful or who’s dick is big? Are we talking length or width, inner beauty or outer? And of course, why does society prize physical beauty in women above so many other features—and big dicks for men above, say, the ability to actually please a woman?

But you don’t have to think about all that to enjoy the parody. All you need to know is: Ha ha, dicks!

If famous ad agencies were ice cream brands, what flavors would they be?

Aditya Hariharan and Joshua Namdar, a pair of students at the Miami Ad School in New York, took a swing at visualizing the answer with Agency Scoops, a Tumblr that features mockups of ice cream names and package designs for well-known agencies, themed around their more famous campaigns.

That means scary but tempting mashups like “Cookies ‘N Bacon” for 360i (for its well-known clients Oreo and Oscar Meyer). Other fun visuals include one of McCann’s “Dumb Ways to Die” blobs, who’s very plausibly eaten himself into an early grave by way of chocolate ice cream (the only flavor that really matters, in the end).

It’s a nice, simple job-hunting gimmick from Hariharan and Namdar, who are looking for summer internships. The front of the cartons also feature taglines that trend toward ingratiating, with some of them perhaps less flattering than intended. (DDB Lemon Sorbet, “a slow-churned classic agency with a hint of forward thinking,” might take exception to the idea that it’s only slightly innovative, like a 55-year-old VW Beetle with a new paint job, squeaking toward the future.)

Where real ice-cream might list ingredients, these cartons feature past creative highlights for each agency, as well as recent awards. There’s even a timely nod to the Mad Men craze, with a 10th design featuring fictional agency Sterling Cooper & Partners.

Ogilvy & Mather, represented as Coca-Cola, is maybe the only one that seems a bit off the mark, in spirit. Yes, the smash hit personalized bottle campaign originally came out of Ogilvy’s Sydney offices. And the “2nd Lives” campaign from China was a head-turner. But everyone and their mother has worked for Coke, somewhere in the world, and the agency’s brand might be more strongly associated IBM or Dove.

Then again, nobody wants to eat mint chocolate microchip or soap flavored ice cream.

See more at the Tumblr site.

Three strange storefronts have popped up in Omaha recently that you wouldn’t to enter—but they’re part of a PSA campaign telling residents that, unfortunately, sexually transmitted diseases are open for business in the city.

Omaha has had a shockingly high STD rate for over a decade, and it’s only getting worse. Cases of gonorrhea and syphilis are up by 15 and 23 percent, and Chlamydia reached an all-time high in 2014 with 3,390 reported cases.

The storefront campaign by Serve Marketing, timed to National STD Awareness Month, aims to get people talking about the crisis—and give them information to get checked. The campaign includes TV, outdoor, radio, social and digital banners for the fake businesses.

“This has been a closeted issue in Omaha for decades,” says Serve creative director Gary Mueller. “If we want to ultimately lower the STD rate and change people’s behaviors, we need to be bolder and more aggressive about getting people to talk about the issue. We think this will get people talking.”

The storefronts:

The outdoor ads:

The commercials:

CREDITS
Agency: Serve Marketing
Creative Director: Gary Mueller
Art Director: Matt Herrmann/Carsyn Taylor
Copywriter: Nick Pipitone
Account Executive: Heidi Sterricker
Social Media: Alex Boeder + Lauren Wagner
Producer: Jessica Farrell
Director Of Photography: Quinn Hester
Editors/GFX: Special Entertainment LLC (Bobby Ciraldo + Andrew Swant)
Assistant Editor: Jon Phillips
Audio: Peter Batchhelder
Production Manager: Rob Birdsall

Real audio of a 5-year-old girl calling 999 (Britain’s version of 911)—after her mother has had a seizure—anchors this compelling new PSA from Grey London aimed at getting more parents to teach their kids how to call the police in an emergency.

Elleemae Addison was home with her mother Loretta and her baby sister when Loretta had an epileptic fit in 2012. Luckily, Elleemae had been taught how to dial 999. Check out the how the call went here:

The PSA, supported by British Red Cross, is for parenting website Mumsnet. In a Mumsnet survey of 757 people, 37 percent of them said they had not taught their child to dial 999. Nearly half of them said it was because they didn’t think their child was mature enough.

“Nobody wants to think about the circumstances in which their child might need to call 999, but as Elleemae’s story shows, it can literally be a lifesaver,” says Mumsnet CEO Justine Roberts. “We hope this powerful film will encourage parents to take a deep breath and have a chat with their children.”

For visuals, the ad uses home movie footage of Elleemae and her family.

“Ads are glossy and distant. How we record our lives is awkward, beautiful, and constantly changing,” says Grey London chairman and chief creative officer Nils Leonard. “The black holes, mixed media, low resolution, distortion and awkward crops are the canvas of our real lives, and the craft leveraged here was all in service of amplifying this incredible phone call with as much emotion as possible.?”

Dinosaurs, fingerless gloves, punks, skateboards, hacking and traveling back in time to try to kill Hitler. It’s everything you ever loved about the ’80s in one film—now including David Hasslehoff.

Kung Fury is a film that was funded on Kickstarter and is due to premiere May 28 on YouTube. The epic trailer for the film is what got the project funded, so they haven’t released a new one. Instead, they’ve just put out a music video with David Hasselhoff who sings the lead track, “True Survivor.”

And it is going to make this film #TakeHoff.

Hasslehoff is resplendent in a mullet, fingerless gloves, Converse high-tops and a custom airbrushed Kung Fury letter jacket as he saunters, shoots, splits and sings his way through the epic scenes of the film.

The synth is strong with this one, and the time is right, as millennials have come to that point in their lives when they have money and are willing to part with it for anything that reminds them of their childhoods.

Even if Harrison Ford and David Hasslehoff happen to look really old now.

At the height of winter, a goofy costumed dude called “Mr. Sunny,” the official mascot of the Fort Lauderdale tourism, hung out at Pompano Beach and bantered in real time via satellite with people at snow-streaked bus shelters in Boston and Chicago as part of the “Hello Sunny” campaign engineered by Starmark.

The shelters were decked out like beach cabanas, complete with heat lamps, which probably saved the bikini-clad models on hand from hypothermia.

“The brutal wrath of Mother Nature—record-breaking snowfall and arctic temperatures in both Chicago and Boston—motivated us to deliver a little warmth and sunshine to our northern friends,” says Starmark CMO Lisa Hoffman-Linero. “It’s all about a positive brand experience. At the right, sometimes unexpected, place. At exactly the right time.”

This is the latest in a series of bus-shelter advertising stunts, and they’ve really run the gamut. PepsiMAX staged an alien apocalypse, Duracell encouraged commuters to join hands to activate battery-powered heaters, and a charity in Norway learned if people would lend their coats to a freezing child.

Those efforts were innovative and memorable. Alas—and here comes the pun—Mr. Sunny leaves me a little cold. He’s like a dimmer version of Jimmy Dean’s sun. (Now that dude’s chill!) Still, catching some rays inside a bus shelter beats pouring rain any day.

Does your dream wedding include getting married via webcam? You should sign up for Ikea’s newest service.

The Swedish furniture chain has launched “Wedding Online,” a (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek site that lets users pick a theme and setting—beach, boat, circus, forest, rooftop—and then hold a remote virtual ceremony by live-streaming their heads (and those of their guests) on to pictures of easily assembled wedding bodies.

“It’s love at it’s simplest,” says the launch ad. Which is true, in the same way that before the Internet, a drunken Vegas wedding with someone you just met was love at it’s simplest.

Don’t worry though, romance isn’t dead: The spot suggests you actually sit in the same room as your fiancé and the officiator—just put your laptops between you, and spare your family and friends the trouble of an actual destination.I

t’s not completely a gag. You can get married this way—for Swedish citizens, the site even supplies the proper paperwork. But mostly it’s a way to show off the brand’s products—you can click through items like bowls and light fixtures featured in the different settings to learn more and buy them.

If you do decide to tie the knot this way, instead of serving people real mediocre food, you can always just send them Ikea’s Swedish meatball emoticons.

Emoji product placement on Twitter just advanced a few light years today, as the social network—in partnership with Disney and Lucasfilm—unveiled Star Wars emojis at the Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, Calif.

There are three emojis to start: C-3PO, a Stormtrooper and BB-8—a new droid introduced back in November in the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII-The Force Awakens. It’s the BB-8 emoji, of course, that’s the best marketing for the upcoming film—to be released Dec. 18—as Twitter users who haven’t been following the movie’s news wonder who the hell the cute little bot is.

As Twitter explains, the characters won’t show up in your emoji keyboards. You have to use the hashtags #C3PO, #Stormtrooper or #BB8 on Twitter.com or in Twitter’s mobile app (not in third-party apps). More characters are on the way, Twitter adds, “including iconic legacy characters and a handful of new characters from #TheForceAwakens.”

In a move that in retrospect seemed inevitable, Tinder has partnered with Instagram. The dating app’s latest update allows users to link to their Instagram profiles. The last 34 Instagram photos pop up when you do, making it that much easier—or harder, depending on your level of cynicism—for users to swipe right. 

To introduce the partnership, Magna Carta, the production company behind many  of Tinder’s ads, made a dream-like 60-second spot that uses a POV technique to show how access to someone’s Instagram gives possible suitors a better idea of who might be a match.

“We wanted to explore the format of Instagram as a sort of social diary, co-written by your friends and family,” Maximilian Guen, founder of Magna Carta, tells AdFreak. “By treating the camera as a character, we had a lot of room for playful intimacy. I wanted audiences to be right there with Our Girl—to meet her, to fall for her.” 

It helps that 25-year-old Becca’s Instagram features shots of her in a bikini, a lovably scruffy dog and champagne, all with the backdrop of Los Angeles’ cotton-candy skies. 

CREDITS
Client: Tinder
Creative + Production Company: MagnaCarta.tv
Executive Producer: Maximilian Guen
Marking Director, Tinder: Josh Metz
Director: Matthew K. Firpo
Producer: Miranda Hill
Cinematographer: Jake Saner, Partos
Assistant Camera: Dan Marino
Art Director: Michael Gray
Sound Mix: Luciano Vignola
VFX: Matt Lincoln
Editorial + Color: Matthew K. Firpo
Associate Producer: Rosanna Bach
Song: “Get Gone” by White Arrows
Featuring: Clancy McLain + Jamie Eysenbach + Chloe Dworkin