Hasta La Creative!

We started the week with cats, and we’re ending it that way, too.

There’s no better time than a Friday afternoon to check out this ad for Japan-based international delivery company Yamato Transport starring a series of black cats dancing, DJing and posing seductively while riffing on a simple piano ditty played by millions of children around the world.

The cats in this spot are fairly impressive. To start things off, our furry protagonist finally achieves what distant cousin Tom never could over hundreds of episodes—entering the mouse hole and experiencing the overdressed wonders within. 

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Here’s a pretty great out-of-home execution for Oliver Stone’s upcoming film Snowden, about the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—a billboard that’s been spying on pedestrians in Toronto and streaming footage of their movements on the street.

Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, of course, raised troubling questions about mass surveillance. And the billboard—timed to the Toronto International Film Festival, where Stone’s movie premiered—itself embodies those very issues.

DentsuBos and Elevation Pictures set up surveillance cameras with motion tracking technology around Dundas Square. The cameras tracked pedestrians’ movements and livestreamed them onto a giant video board.

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“You think things are gonna stay the same, then one day, boom, 25 million hits in two days.”

The Tyrannosaurus Rex is real. And we have ruined his life by teasing him, en masse and without shame, over his useless little arms. “I became a laughingstock,” our friend laments. (To be fair, we thought he was extinct, but maybe that’s a callous excuse.) “I lost the lust for life that I had. I just couldn’t go out anymore.” 

This unexpected heartbreaker of an ad goes on to explore the depths of T-Rex’s debilitating depression. He stares dejectedly out the window and spends all his time in bed. Sports don’t help, and basic homemaking is just too difficult. His pillows are covered in deep slashes, like the shredded portrait of the bereft prince in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. 

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Travel has become more accessible for Londoners, thanks to easyJet, whose latest “Why Not?” campaign by VCCP has a pretty basic premise: It’s the story of the many adventures awaiting a woman whose flight is about to take off. 

Strange little details give the ad unexpected vivacity. It opens with a molting man made of flowers running across the runway like Alice’s White Rabbit. He’s late, he’s late! Suddenly our heroine is yanked right out of the plane and into the hangar, where tropes of a European vacation—open-air markets, street artists—are given the Gulliver’s Travels treatment, transforming the exotic into the surreal. 

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In the mid-aughts, Motorola’s Razr was the it phone. Until the iPhone came along.

So, it’s easy to imagine Motorola’s excitement when the competitor that knocked it down seems to be faltering, and it can jump at the chance to fight back. That’s exactly what Motorola, now a Lenovo company, has done with a full-page print ad from Ogilvy in The New York Times. 

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Among Hollywood’s few remaining household names, Tom Cruise is famous for acting like a robot, Tom Hanks for doubling as everyone’s next-door neighbor, and Nic Cage for freaking the hell out. But can any living human truly reproduce the former Nicolas Coppola’s unearthly wail or his uncanny ability to convince viewers that things are not quite right beneath what’s left of his hair?

Cage’s famously horrifying voice has yet to replace the Wilhelm Scream as the industry’s go-to shriek. But a few German creatives recently teamed up to make a site that not-so-scientifically gauges one’s ability to match his volume and intensity.

The Nic Cage Rage Page asks, “When push comes to shove, when shit hits the fan, could you do it? Could you Rage Like Cage?”

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Have you ever heard what people say about Latinos? They’re intense, passionate and “macho”—a quality that’s often seen as protective.

Obviously, these are stereotypes. Another side of the “Latin man” is that he can be sensitive and expressive. But embracing “machismo” for its good qualities, without examining the bad stuff, can have unpleasant cultural side effects—like controlling behavior, which can lead to femicide, not to mention relatively unpunished rape. 

(Hey. Sounds familiar.)

To show its support ahead of an Aug. 13 protest in Peru, Grupo el Comercio-owned newspaper Peru 21, one of the most popular papers in the country, tossed its cover pages into the ring. With help from McCann Lima, the paper converted its front and back pages into signs that protesters could grab off newsstands, flip open and carry in the streets. 

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Oh, the places you’ll go!

In 2013, Heineken scored a bronze Lion at Cannes with “The Candidate,” an internship contest that generated a whopping 1,734 global entries. 

Now, the brand is back to recruiting with “Go Places,” led by a musical Dr. Seuss-ish video inviting talent to respond to 12 questions, which must be answered in three to five seconds. Based on the Enneagram model, the results give you a personal profile, which must be sent along with your résumé when applying for your Heineken dream gig on LinkedIn. 

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A lot of people wanted this billboard about Donald Trump to become a reality in New York City. Instead, we got the one above—a masterpiece of unintentional camp that is running on a digital board in Times Square through Friday.

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Be careful: If you buy a designer dress and a leather biker jacket at British discount chain T.K. Maxx, you’ll soon find yourself regularly practicing ballet on a motorcycle—just to match your beloved outfit.

It’s the absurd, entertaining conceit at the heart of a new ad for the retailer (known as T.J. Maxx in the U.S.) created by Wieden + Kennedy London. A young woman daintily balances on the tail of her heavy black bike while popping a wheelie and spinning circles in slow motion. All the while, an elderly woman named Doris plays an art deco organ that sounds an awful lot like a piano—a service that, according to the protagonist, is quite expensive.

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