Hasta La Creative!

Jim Elliott, the new global chief creative officer of Arnold Worldwide, and voiceover artist Paul Guyet made these two amusing videos (in what looks like Michael’s house from GTA5) explaining how to win a 2015 Radio Mercury Award—by demonstrating all the terrible radio ad clichés that will guarantee failure.

Elliott (who’s also the chief Mercury judge this year) even has a “NO” button to make his disapproval absolutely clear. Guyet is clearly having a ball with his impressions, and some of them are frighteningly accurate. Yes, nightclub ads really do sound that rapey.

The side effects portion of video No. 1 introduced the phrase “anal snoring” to my lexicon, which I consider a plus. Video No. 2 is more of the same, with Elliott and Guyet taking on AutoTune, bad writing and yelling, and long website URLs.

After all this, I’d be interested to hear what they like about radio advertising, because the tropes these videos are crapping on represent about 99 percent of it. Hey guys, how about some examples of what wins a Mercury?

Submissions are being accepted now through April 6 for this year’s Radio Mercury Awards. Enter at RadioMercuryAwards.com.

CREDITS
Client: Radio Advertising Bureau
Voiceover artist: Paul Guyet
Script: Robert Rooney, Creative Director, Y&R NY
Director Kevin R. Frech
Camera: Taylor Christoffel
Recording Studio: Sound Lounge
Recording Engineer: Collin Blendell
Production Company: Logical Chaos
Editor: Nick Fehver

The Oscars are just around the corner, so now’s as good a time as any to start amping yourself up by revisiting past highlights. And the show’s producers, with help from 180LA, are making it easy to get a quick fix with the four new ads below, cut together by Oscar-winning editor Kirk Baxter.

The first, “And the Oscar Goes to,” features a parade of stars—too many to name, though movie buffs might have a fun time trying to rattle them all off—doing their best victory dances. Their exuberance is pretty moving, even if it’s plenty vain, too.

A second, “Holding Oscars,” features the campaign’s most poignant moment—one second of Robin Williams looking around in breathless gratitude, a genuine scene that makes the loss of such a talent sting all the more in hindsight.

The third spot, a multilingual Kumbaya “Everyone Speaks Oscar,” can’t help but be a bit corny. (Sure, movies are a universal language, sort of, but really, where would most of us be without subtitles?) Still, the Academy deserves a nod in the Best Lie category for trying to pretend Hollywood isn’t a U.S.-dominated enterprise, and implying the winners are an ethnically diverse bunch—when in fact they’re mostly white.

The fourth ad, a Valentine’s spot featuring the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hanks kissing their wives at the show, is cute enough, set to the fairly obscure but anachronistically charming sounds of “Am I in Love” from 1952’s Son of Paleface, performed by Bob Hope and Jane Russell.

For good measure, 180LA also commissioned a series of 15 posters featuring the Oscar statue alongside various artists interpretations of imagination (a popular theme in ads because it’s hard to hate).

The results feature a number of nods to the award show’s roots in the Art Deco era, but the standouts are really the weirder takes—like Hattie Stewart’s leering, winking cartoon hearts, and Blastto’s surrealist eyeball sculpture. Because if those aren’t apt metaphors for America’s unhealthy obsession with celebrity, what is?

CREDITS
Client: Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
President: Cheryl Boone Isaacs
Chief Executive Officer: Dawn Hudson
Chief Marketing Officer: Christina Kounelias
Marketing Manager: Ford Oelman

Agency: 180LA
Chief Creative Officer: William Gelner
Creative Directors: Zac Ryder / Adam Groves
Copywriter: Christina Semak
Art Director: Karine Grigorian
Head of Production: Natasha Wellesley
Producer: Nili Zadok
Chief Marketing Officer: Stephen Larkin
Account Manager: Jessica DeLillo
Account Coordinator: Alexandra Conti
Planner: Jason Knight

Editorial _ HOLDING / GOES TO / VDAY
Editorial Company: Exile Edit
Editor: Nate Gross (HOLDING)
Editor: Will Butler (VDAY & GOES TO)
Executive Producer: Carol Lynn Weaver
Producer: Brittany Carson

Editorial _ FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Editor: Dave Groseclose (Foreign Language)
Producer: Brian Scharwath (Foreign Language)

Color/VFX/Finishing: The Mill LA
Colorist: Adam Scott
Color Executive Producer: Thatcher Peterson
Color Producers: Natalie Westerfield, Antonio Hardy
Color Coordinator: Diane Valera
Lead 2D Artist: Robin McGloin
Additional 2D Artists: Scott Johnson
Art Department: Jeff Langlois, Laurence Konishi
Executive Producer: Sue Troyan
VFX Producer: Kiana Bicoy
VFX Coordinator: Jillian Lynes

Recording Mix
Recording Studio: Eleven Sound
Date: Various
Mixer: Scott Burns
Asst Mixer: AJ Murillo
Producer: Dawn Redmann
Executive Producer: Suzanne Hollingshead

A creative team from DDB Sydney gives the Cannes Lions logo a sex change—and proposes a “Cannes Lioness” category—as a way of challenging the creative festival to reward work that reverses the trend of gender-based objectification in advertising.

The 90-second video below, “Sex Sellouts,” explains the idea, though the judging criteria for the proposed category are awfully vague. (We’re told the Lioness honors work “that changes the culture of objectifying women in order to sell stuff,” but that’s about it.) Still, using industry awards to inspire ad professionals “to go against the strategy that sells so many hamburgers”—and by extension, fuel a broader media-driven conversation in society—is ironically appealing.

The video was created in response to the brief “Change the conversation around sex,” and it won gold in the third round of Young Glory, an ongoing competition for advertising students and professionals. DDB worldwide creative chief Amir Kassaei evaluated the entries. Lest anyone think he simply tossed a prize to his own network, however, Young Glory maintains that the creators weren’t identified in the judging phase. (Nepotism in ad awards? Never!)

Philip Thomas, CEO of the Lions Festivals, appears to be a fan. “We love the thinking behind DDB Sydney’s idea,” he tells AdFreak. “The representation of women in this industry, and in society at large, is something Cannes Lions feels a responsibility to address. Last year, we launched the ‘See It Be It’ initiative to accelerate creative women’s careers in the industry. This year, we’ve been working hard, together with the industry, on a big idea that we’ll be ready to announce in the next two weeks. It’s really encouraging to see that the whole industry—veterans, rookies, male and female—is at a stage where we want to fight for the same vision.”

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for—the 2015 .GIFYS.

What are the .GIFYS, you might say? They are, obviously, an award show for the best animated GIFs on the internet—as nominated by a panel of GIF experts, insofar as such people exist—and ultimately decided by you, the public.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Los Angeles is the organizer. And now, in the competition’s second year, GIF search engine Giphy has joined as co-host.

There are awards for animal GIFs, and cat GIFs—a separate category, of course—and art, and music, and politics, and film and television. There are awards for GIFs that will hypnotize you (“Can’t Look Away”), and make you nostalgic (“Throwback”), and just kind of creep you out (“Weird”).

Some of the 55 nominees are excellent, like baby goats doing backflips off other baby goats, and a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon man swiping the face of a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon woman like an iPad, and a Nick Offerman head bouncing through a field gobbling bacon.

The judges who picked the nominees include writers and visual artists for news sites like Mashable, The Huffington Post, New York magazine, and, naturally, BuzzFeed, as well as execs from companies like Daily Motion and Reddit. Internet-famous cat Lil Bub is also somehow a judge, which seems perplexing, given cats thankfully don’t have thumbs.

If you like wasting your time looking at GIFs, it’s worth a gander at the full collection. Voting ends Feb. 22, and your voice could help decide which mini works of circular clip art earn the highly questionable honor of becoming “permanent fixtures in an Internet hall of fame.”

But you also know that when an ad agency creates, as a means of self-promotion, a crowdsourced competition celebrating snippets of self-referential web culture, that the award show glut truly has imploded into a black hole.

Parents who are perpetually late in dropping their kids off at school, take note. This new Famous Footwear video shows you how to arrive on time and in style.

It shows stuntwoman Shauna Duggins tearing through quiet suburban streets in her minivan—which happens to be customized with a 550-horsepower engine—to get her kids to a Famous Footwear store. It’s not just fast driving: She performs donuts in cul-de-sacs and weaves between recycling bins to complete her mission.

The video, created by digital shop Shareability, is called “Momkhana”—a parody of the intense driving style “gymkhana,” which was popularized by rally car driver Ken Block. (It’s not totally clear what any of this has to do with footwear, but then again, Block’s videos were sponsored by his own D.C. Shoes brand also.)

While the children in the video aren’t actually hers (and were replaced by mannequins for the especially dangerous stunts), Duggins was selected because she actually is a mother. It also helps that she’s got impressive driving skills and apparently no fear of high speeds. (If you want to see how the video was pulled off, check out the behind-the-scenes video below.) 

Needless to say, you shouldn’t start tearing through your own neighborhood like this. But if you see Duggins in your rear view mirror, you might want to pull over and let her pass. 

Making out-of-home ads that are hard for people to see sounds like a terrible idea. But Daiya Foods does just that with clever ad placements in a new campaign that plays off the line, “It’s easier to notice this ad than notice our pizza is dairy-free.”

Some ads are running where few people look (like on top of a bus), while others are almost too small to see (tiny stickers on benches, crosswalk lights, elevator panels, phone kiosks and more) or go by too fast to read (taxi tops).

The campaign, by TDA_Boulder, extends to digital and print, including full-page ads with tiny 2¼-by-¼-inch headlines in magazines such as Cooking Light, Every Day with Rachel Ray, Fitness, Health and Food Network Magazine.

CREDITS
Client: Daiya Foods
Agency: TDA_Boulder
AD: Austin O’Connor
CW: Dan Colburn
CD: Jeremy Seibold
ECD: Jonathan Schoenberg

Google Japan wanted to draw attention to a little Android app called Androidify, which makes tiny android avatars. So, it synchronized 300 Android devices, each with their own little avatar, to create a tiny android avatar chorus.

The digital choir was installed in the Omotesando Hills shopping center in Tokyo, where the little creatures flail their arms in time to the preprogramed music for the amusement of shoppers. Anyone brave enough can actually step up and attempt to “conduct” the tiny, tinny choir through a gesture-sensing program.

If you don’t want to travel there, you can enjoy the online videos of the choir performing.

Apparently the stunt is more than cool. It also has some relevance to the brand message of “Be together. Not the same,” since each little avatar is unique. Isn’t it nice when fun things actually support your brand message instead of getting shot down by the brand police?

Nice job, Google Japan.

You probably didn’t know bros were an endangered species.

Dairy brand Organic Valley is out with “Save the Bros,” a mock PSA asking for help weaning musclebound dudes from conventional protein shakes in favor of the company’s new Organic Fuel product—which it’s touting as free of “artificial flavoring, sweeteners, GMOs, toxic pesticides, antibiotics or artificial hormones often found in other ‘health’ products.”

The two-minute, tongue-in-cheek video, created by Humanaut, stakes out its position early, opening with the smirkingly ambiguous claim, “Bros are pretty amazing,” before proceeding to make a slew of other dubious arguments. One woman actually worries to the camera that in a world without bros, no one “would make comments about your physique that aren’t appropriate, but still appreciated.”

In other words, for an ad that, at moments, panders to its target by trolling everyone else, it’s pretty funny—deftly sending up cheesy public-service tropes, while also largely poking fun at the consumers it’s trying to woo. Ultimately, everyone is treated to images of bros doing yoga, bros looking at eggplants like they’re aliens (because, let’s be real, they are), bros meditating on mountaintops, and bros making pottery, as part of bros’ efforts to better themselves. 

There’s also an accompanying website that hawks “Save the Bros” paraphernalia, like T-shirts and duffel bags, and obviously, tank tops and trucker hats. (They might want to do a slightly tighter job of filtering the Instagram posts it pulls in by hashtag—on Monday night, one screenshot of an iChat, under #brolife, read, “Life is like a penis; it is simple, soft, and relaxed. Then women make it hard.”)

Luckily, you can rest assured that even if you don’t share the ad, the bros will be fine.

CREDITS
Client: Organic Valley
Product: Organic Fuel
Campaign: “Save the Bros”
Agency: Humanaut
Creative Adviser: Alex Bogusky
Creative Director: David Littlejohn
Associate Creative Director: Mike Cessario
Copywriter: David Littlejohn / Mike Cessario
Art Director: Stephanie Gelabert / Sean Davis
Production Company: Fancy Rhino, Chattanooga, TN
Director: Daniel Jacobs
Producer: Katie Nelson
Director Of Photography: Annie Huntington
Editor: Tyler Beasley
Production Designer: Chad Harris
Music Company: Skypunch Studios
Composer: Carl Cadwell

Ever since Microsoft introduced Cortana, its personal assistant for the Windows Phone, it’s been slamming Siri for her vanity and uselessness. Now, for Valentine’s Day, it’s proposing that you give Siri the old heave-ho for good—and begin a torrid affair with her archrival.

Check out the two new spots below, from m:united. The second one has a particularly cute subtext, although Siri would tell you to watch out—that this is one suitor with a menacing agenda under all the sweetness.

CREDITS
Client: Microsoft
Agency: m:united
Co-Chief Creative Officers: Andy Azula John Mescall
Executive Creative Director: Yo Umeda
Senior Copy Writer: Thom Woodley
Senior Art Director: Trinh Pham
Director of Creative Technology: David Cliff
Head of Integrated Production: Aaron Kovan
Executive Producer: Carolyn Johnson
Junior Producer: Monique Fitzpatrick
Managing Director: Kevin Nelson
EVP Group Account Director: Tina Galley
SVP Group Account Directors: Darla Price, Jason Kolinsky
Account Director: Melissa Trought
Account Supervisor: Greg Masiakos
Assistant Account Executive: Emily Glaser
Project Management: Stella Warkman
Production & Post-Production: CRAFT
Director of Photography: Larry Kapit
Editors: Nate Troester Carlos Hernandez
Music: “Big Top Polka” Erin Gemsa
Media Agency: EMT

Beauty is in the eye of the … um … sorry, I lost my train of thought. While I try to remember how that saying goes, enjoy “The Ugly Couple Song,” a Valentine’s Day music video by RPA for XO Mints.

Unlike Cartier’s pretty posers, who pine for love, XO presents some hairy, less-than-hunky, socially awkward dudes who look like refugees from cover bands and sitcoms. (The guy with the curls resembles “College Ted” from How I Met Your Mother. He’s even got the “spectacles”!) They lip-sync along with the titular ditty, a folky number performed by Run River North, about finding that certain special someone no matter how unattractive you are.

“She’s got a heart that’s bigger than her hair/She might never be a model, but who cares?/She’s one cloud and some wings from being an angel/And who knows, we might make—something beautiful.” (Aww … isn’t that nice? #SomethingBeautiful is also the campaign’s hashtag.)

Frankly, the guys aren’t all that homely, and I expected a wacky payoff, like maybe they’d all marry each other. Instead, the clip stays minty sweet and low-key, gently poking fun at social stereotypes as it invites us to hum along.

Of course, fresh breath as a requirement for romance is also a stereotype. Still, it never hurts, and the brand’s heart is clearly in the right place.