Hasta La Creative!

BBH London has made some brilliant ads for British juice brand Robinsons over the years—notably, this Wimbledon spot and, of course, the famous “Pals” ad from 2013, which really is one of the great twist-ending ads ever.

Now, agency and client are back with a fun new :60 that uses some mildly freaky CGI to illustrate the new theme “They grow up fast.”

We open on a mom, dad and baby boy. But within seconds, he’s always getting bigger and bigger, and trying to run away from them. While some of the visual effects are maybe a little creepy in an Evian-like way, there’s enough humor here that the spot works—and ends up being endearing.

The tagline is, “Play thirsty.”

The campaign launched Saturday on Britain’s Got Talent. The spot will be supported by out of home, digital outdoor and online advertising.

CREDITS
Client name and title: Helen Gorman, Brand Director
BBH Executive Creative Director: Nick Gill
BBH Creative Director: Dominic Goldman
BBH Creative Team: Nikki Lindman & Toby Brewer
BBH Business Lead: Heather Cuss
BBH Team Director: Rebecca Levy/James Rice
BBH Team Manager: Louise Long/ Joanna Rose
BBH Strategy Director: Lilli English
BBH Strategist: Damien Le Castrec

—Film Credits
BBH Producer: Natalie Parish
BBH Assistant Producer: Sarah Cooper
Production Company: Park Pictures
Director: Tom Tagholm
Executive Producer: Stephen Brierley
Producer: Fran Thompson
DoP: Luke Scott
VFX: MPC
VFX Producer: Amy Richardson
VFX Supervisor: Tom Harding
CG Supervisor: Carsten Keller
Grade: MPC
Colourist: Jean-Clément Soret
Editor/Editing House: Stitch

—Print Credits
BBH Producer: Katerina Gharraph
BBH Designer: Rob Wilson
Animation: Smoke & Mirrors

State Farm probably still can’t believe how popular the “Jake From State Farm” commercial has become. It became a cult favorite almost overnight and has been parodied relentlessly on Vine and elsewhere. Recognizing the love for all things Jake, the insurance company even gave him a Twitter account, which now has more than 33,000 followers.

The ad—technically called “State of Unrest (Jake)”—continues to air, and by now many people know the dialogue by heart. The dialogue is so familiar, in fact, that most people (and certainly the brand’s social-media followers) can likely follow along with the remade version below, posted to Facebook today—with the narrative told totally in emojis.

Random Friday fun, and a great quick hit from the advertiser.

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Your life might not be quite like Game of Thrones, but you can still feel like a boss power broker if you drive a Chrysler, says a new ad from the automaker.

“Kings and Queens of America,” voiced by actor Peter Dinklage, who plays Tyrion Lannister on the hit HBO show, is launching just ahead of the fifth-season premier this Sunday.

The commercial, created by Wieden + Kennedy, builds on the great American myth that wealth and power are not a birthright, but rather simply there for the taking. That may be true, insofar as Justin Bieber, the Joffrey Baratheon of our time, didn’t inherit his fortune from his dad (even if both of them invaded from the North).

The 60-second spot even sports a soundtrack that references the theme music from the Game of Thrones’ opening credits.

On screen, a series of modern-day, ostensibly self-made warriors gird themselves for battle in designer glasses, high heels and blazers, and climb on their horses … or rather, into their Chrysler 300s. (Grand Maester Ron Burgundy can offer some wisdom on how many horses it would take to equal a Chrysler engine.)The faces featured include San Antonio Spurs assistant coach Becky Hammon; Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian; pro poker player Phil Ivey; photographer Kwaku Alston; and Los Angeles restaurateur Caroline Styne. They, and others, will appear in 30-second spots airing later this month.

Nobody, though, is shown viscously murdering his or her father, son-in-law, wife, brother or random stranger, for that matter.

CREDITS
Client: Chrysler
Spot: “The Kings & Queens of America”
CMO, FCA Global: Olivier Francois
President and CEO, Chrysler Brand: Al Gardner
Director, Head of Global Advertising, Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram: Marissa Hunter
Head of Advertising, Chrysler Brand: Melissa Garlick
Chrysler Brand Advertising Specialist: Danielle DePerro

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Aaron Allen / Kevin Jones
Copywriter : Alex Romans
Art Director: John Dwight
Broadcast Producer: Endy Hedman
Art Producer: Grace Petrenka / Amy Berriochoa
Strategic Planning: Cat Wilson / Sarah Biedak
Media/Comms Planning: Alex Barwick
Account Team: Cheryl Markley / Lani Reichenbach / Stephanie Montoya
Business Affairs: Karen Murillo
Project Management: Jane Monaghan / Annie Quach
Executive Creative Directors: Joe Staples / Mark Fitzloff
Head of Production: Ben Grylewicz

Production Company: HSI
Director: Samuel Bayer
Executive Producer: Roger Zorovich
Line Producer: William Green
Director of Photography: Samuel Bayer
Photographer: Samuel Bayer / John Clark

Editorial Company: Joint
Editor: Nicholas Davis
Assistant Editors: Kristy Faris
Post Producer: Leslie Carthy
Post Executive Producer: Patty Brebner

VFX Company: Joint
Lead Flame Artist: Katrina Salicrup
Flame Artist: David Stern
Smoke Artist: David Jahns
VFX Producer: Alex Thiesen

Songs: “Blood and Stone”

Mix Company: Joint
Mixer: Noah Woodburn
Producer: Sarah Fink

Some people complain that modern baseball games last too long, but the one in this Japanese ad for Toyota’s G cars will make you root for extra innings.

Salarymen and businesswomen push fantastical red “G” buttons positioned around midtown, and the action begins. Soon, balls are flying off bats toward skyscrapers, and office-attired players are diving across concrete (ouch!) to make dazzling catches. They use manhole covers for bases, and a traffic cop (I think) serves as an umpire. At one point, Warren Cromartie, a former star in the U.S. who was much more popular when he played in Japan, argues a call. You tell ’em, Cro!

The final at-bat features an airborne Prius in a grandstand play of epic proportions—truly a towering drive.

Dubbed “Baseball Party,” the film has deservedly earned almost 3.5 million YouTube views in Japan in two weeks. And there’s a behind-the-scenes clip, naturally.

Sure, the connection between the brand and baseball is tenuous, to say the least, but the two-and-a-half-minute commercial is such exhilarating fun, only a mean-spirited boo-bird would object. You might shout, “Let’s play two!” and watch it again.

Here’s a clever outdoor campaign from Publicis London for the homelessness charity Depaul that manages to tell two different stories with the same copy.

The ads are being placed on corners, with text on each side. If you read only the left side, the copy is all about the negative ideas people have about giving up a spare room to a homeless youth. But reading them in full, the ads actually argue for the benefits of volunteering.

“There’s another side to the story,” says the tagline.

Click the images below to enlarge.

Conceptually, the campaign is quite similar to BBDO New York’s award-winning ads for BBC America back in 2007. Those ads, also placed around corners, showed two sides of the same photo, with the tagline: “See both sides of the story.”

The clever use of text differentiates this new effort, though it will always be likened to the BBC work. See more from the campaign, plus credits, below.

CREDITS
Client: Depaul
Agency: Publicis London
Executive Creative Director: Andy Bird
Creative Director: Paul Mason
Art Director: Dan Kennard
Copywriter: Ben Smith
Head of Art and Design: Andy Breese
Designer: Dave Stansfield
Photographer: Mark Wesley
Account Manager: Tom Froggett
Head of Operations: Debbie Burke
Agency Producers: Steve McFarlane, Ed Page, Greg Collier
Art Buyers: Sarah Clifford, Claire Lillis

There was enough snow this winter, and spring, that agencies started making ads with it.

At least, Lapiz did in this fun campaign for the Mexico Tourism Board. After an unexpected springtime snowstorm in Chicago, the agency called on local street artist NosE Lanariz to make some outdoor ads from the stuff—as you can see in the video below.

The campaign hit three locations in the city, with headlines like, “Take Your Clothes Off”, “Come Melt Under The Sun” and “Beaches With Sand This White.”

CREDITS
Client: Mexico Tourism Board
Campaign: Snow Graffiti
Agency: Lapiz
CCO: Laurence Klinger
Executive Creative Director: Fabio Seidl
Creative Director: Carlos ‘Ia’ Murad
Associate Creative Director: Flavio Pina
Copywriter: Eduardo Vea Keating
Producers: Bobby Gruenberg and Aldo Gagliardi
General Manager: Gustavo Razzetti
Account team: Ernesto Adduci, Pablo Sabouret
Director and Editor (video): Ben Derico
Editor: Jonny Arcila
Finish house: Optimus
Artist: NosE Lanariz

Some long-awaited racially diverse emojis were added to iOS today, and all the world is happy. Well, the world was happy until it saw this Clorox tweet.

The brand sent out an odd message Wednesday evening featuring a bottle of its bleach made up of emojis, and the line, “New emojis are alright but where’s the bleach.” Given the timing, it set the Internet ablaze, with many wondering if Clorox meant the diverse emoji should all be bleached white. (There were no face emojis in the tweet, though.)

Despite intense criticism, Clorox left the tweet up, at least as of this writing, though it did follow up with a response, saying it just meant that emojis like toilets, bathtubs and wine glasses might need to be bleached at some point. Odd, then, that none of those emojis appeared in the original image, either.

Well, we’re not sure if Clorox knows how Twitter works, but there’s an easy way to “bleach away” a tweet—the delete button. Both tweets are now still there gathering comments.

And it’s isn’t pretty. Below is a sampling of reaction to the original tweet.

Plenty of birds can sing, but how many can dance the skank?

Well, none, probably. But the pigeon in this minute-long Virgin Money spot that just broke in Britain comes damn close, strutting its feathered stuff to The Selecter’s 1979 ska thumper “On My Radio.”

“We just thought banks are boring, mundane, normal at best. Virgin is cooler,” Gavin Torrance, a creative director at The&Partnership who worked on the spot, tells AdFreak. “So, we came up with the idea of taking something normal, and making it cool.”

That’s a real pigeon, and its movements are genuine, though creatively edited, of course, to construct the commercial. “It was a very tricky thing to capture all in-camera,” Torrance says. “That’s why we chose to work with [director] Andy McLeod at Rattling Stick. He had a cunning way to manipulate a real pigeon to get it to perform those intricate dance moves.”

Hmm. Did the dude squawk directions? Coo in the bird’s ear? Torrance isn’t saying. “It took a full day’s filming to capture all the moves we needed,” he says. Several pigeons were on hand, but the performance on screen comes from just one bird.

It’s no moonwalking Shetland pony, but what is, really? Besides, this particular rat with wings (no disrespect intended) gyrates way more realistically than that nag ever did, bopping its beak to the 2-Tone beat and tapping its talons on the sidewalk.

The film combines footage of an actual road with a stylized street set, and clearly, some other visual trickery was employed. You’ve gotta love the dance-club ambiance achieved by the flashing lights of a passing police cruiser and the smoky exhaust of a nearby car.

Leaning more heavily on effects would’ve simplified matters, but “we wanted it to look totally real and authentic,” says Torrance. “There’s no magic in seeing a CGI pigeon twerking. But a real one—now that’s sexy!”

With about 20,000 YouTube views in its first day online, the clip is no instant smash, but cats everywhere should be driving up those stats in short order.

CREDITS
Client: Virgin Money
Marketing Director: Paul Lloyd
Agency: m/SIX
Chief Executive Officer: Jess Burley
Account Director: Beatrice Clarke
Producer: Emma Hovell, The&Partnership
Creatives: Danny Hunt, Gavin Torrance, The&Partnership
Content Agency: AllTogetherNow
Chief Executive Officer: Conor McNicholas
Production Company: Rattling Stick
Director: Andy McLeod
Producer: Simon Sanderson
Postproduction: Big Buoy
Visual Effects: Jim Allen
Producer: Barny Wright
Music: The Selecter, “On My Radio”

Drunk-driving messaging is a naturally fruitful creative area for any taxi or car-service company, and Uber has produced a very cool campaign around the topic with this curbside breathalyzer in Toronto.

A sidewalk kiosk—dreamed up by agency Rethink and built by design and fabrication studio Stacklab—functions as a typical breathalyzer. You blow through a disposable straw for six seconds, and it analyzes the alcohol content in your breath. If you’re over the legal limit, it offers you a ride home. (The people seen in the video got free rides, in fact.)

“We want to ensure a safe, reliable and affordable ride home is available to everybody, especially late at night when drunk driving is most common and can be avoided,” says Ian Black, General Manager of Uber Toronto.

Lane Bryant’s new #ImNoAngel campaign is sexy as hell.

The video features gorgeous plus-size models sporting bras and panties from the new Cacique by Lane Bryant collection. The 30-second spot is done in black-and-white and without any music (it feels the tiniest bit empty without it), with a few soundbites from the models, who all declare that they’re no angels.

“The Lane Bryant #IMNOANGEL initiative celebrates women of all shapes and sizes by redefining society’s traditional notion of sexy with a powerful core message: ALL women are sexy,” the brand says.

It’s a direct dig at Victoria’s Secret, and social media is loving it. Women have jumped on the trending hashtag, posting their own photos and declarations with #ImNoAngel.

Ashley Graham, one of the stars of the Lane Bryant campaign (she was also in that Swimsuits for All ad in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue), posted this fun photo to Instagram yesterday, writing: “On the F train, literally. Can’t hide these curves!!!”
 

 

A photo posted by A S H L E Y ? G R A H A M ™ (@theashleygraham) on Apr 7, 2015 at 6:11pm PDT

 
Victoria’s Secret, of course, hasn’t responded—though its latest tweet reminds you that its models even have “angel” in their Twitter handles.

The @angelcandice wall at our NYC HQ! For more #InsideVS, go to Snapchat: VICTORIASSECRET. pic.twitter.com/QClKwC7iWj

— Victoria’s Secret (@VictoriasSecret) April 7, 2015