Hasta La Creative!

Vanessa Bayer comes on to everyone in an elevator in Audi’s Fifty Shades of Grey spoof. http://adweek.it/17mGIgB

A Twitter hashtag game like #WhatIsLoveIn4Words is irresistible to brands. It’s easy, and the answer is simple: With only a few exceptions, they love themselves first.

Check out a slew of brand posts around the hashtag below. Beats by Dre gets our grudging respect for being so uncreative, they were actually creative.

 
Have the first breadstick #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/BU1zqGlLYI

— Olive Garden (@olivegarden) February 11, 2015

 
Here, have my #SNICKERS. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words

— SNICKERS® (@SNICKERS) February 12, 2015

 
A sailmate for life. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/ICQQ126GiY

— Royal Caribbean (@RoyalCaribbean) February 12, 2015

 
Here, have some fries. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/jFEA54HLiT

— McDonald’s (@McDonalds) February 12, 2015

 
#WhatIsLoveIn4Words: Love has no labels. pic.twitter.com/rs8YTFF8sp

— Ad Council (@AdCouncil) February 12, 2015

 
Don’t drop the ring. http://t.co/rQoZ5CaGHP #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/luHcA0UxPl

— YouTube (@YouTube) February 12, 2015

 
#WhatIsLoveIn4Words: Thanks for rescuing me ?? pic.twitter.com/YDMvznDoss

— PETA (@peta) February 12, 2015

 
Sports. Sports. Sports. Sports. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words

— NBC Sports Network (@NBCSN) February 12, 2015

 
Sharing Wisconsin Cheese Curds #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/rZWU7ZGB5E

— Culver’s Restaurants (@culvers) February 12, 2015

 
Picking up some Charmin. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words #NoMoreCrappyTP

— Charmin (@Charmin) February 12, 2015

 
Here’s your Red Bull. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words #OverlyAttachedGirlfriend pic.twitter.com/krv5ldDQRQ

— Red Bull (@redbull) February 12, 2015

 
You know my password. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words

— Surface (@surface) February 12, 2015

 
These Mozzarella Cheese Sticks. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/L42zVurAOr

— Applebee’s (@Applebees) February 12, 2015

 
Chocolate and Peanut Butter. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/EW1g9VoyGC

— REESE’S® (@ReesesPBCups) February 11, 2015

 
You + Me + Our Nissan #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/I9XpWc2s7h

— Nissan (@NissanUSA) February 11, 2015

 
#WhatIsLoveIn4Words: “Let’s go All-Natural.”

— Carl’s Jr. (@CarlsJr) February 11, 2015

 
Any pair. You pick. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/EwcHlBVu5a

— Christian Louboutin (@LouboutinWorld) February 11, 2015

 
You, me, and these #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/hxipXPCE0e

— Chester Cheetah (@ChesterCheetah) February 11, 2015

 
Diamond stitched designo leather. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/GMkopV2wM6

— Mercedes-Benz USA (@MBUSA) February 11, 2015

 
#WhatIsLoveIn4Words Last slice is yours.

— DiGiorno Pizza (@DiGiornoPizza) February 11, 2015

 
Center of the Roll. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/VQpS6GRIAq

— Cinnabon (@Cinnabon) February 11, 2015

 
#WhatIsLoveIn4Words Sharing the last slice.

— Domino’s Pizza (@dominos) February 11, 2015

 
Cute pugs and subs #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/BqVmAQSQ9Z

— SUBWAY® (@SUBWAY) February 11, 2015

 
Your breath’s totally fine. #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/JUbjOcjERr

— Petco (@Petco) February 11, 2015

 
Beats by Dr. Dre #WhatIsLoveIn4Words pic.twitter.com/Gl9P23q6ow

— Beats By Dre (@beatsbydre) February 11, 2015

For those of us who’ve spent too many hours digging through YouTube trying to find good-looking versions of classic ads, this is quite a treat: As part of its 50th birthday celebrations, Gatorade has digitally remastered its classic “Be Like Mike” commercial with Michael Jordan after almost a quarter century.

And it really looks good. The old Bayer Bess Vanderwarker spot is completely cleaned up, so you can enjoy seeing Mike play cute pickup games with kids and laugh ridiculously with his actor-teammates like it’s 1992 all over again. (Except for that hashtag at the end!)

Gatorade is doing a whole bunch of “Be Like Mike” stuff around the NBA All-Star weekend, including a “live event experience” in New York featuring Dominque Wilkins and Horace Grant, who will “help visitors do their best impressions of Jordan by ‘Shooting like Mike,’ ‘Dunking like Mike’ and ‘Striking iconic poses like Mike.’ “

The sports drink will also be selling special bottles of Citrus Cooler (Mike’s favorite) with a retro label starting at the end of March.

In fact, the only thing missing from return of “Be Like Mike,” it seems, is present-day Mike.

The remastered ad is cool, though—almost as good as the 1979 Pabst Blue Ribbon spot with Patrick Swayze that was likewise cleaned up a few years ago. Can we do this will all the great spots from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, please?

The end of RadioShack is nigh. And in John Oliver’s fantasy world, the 94-year-old brand wouldn’t sputter out gracefully. No. It wouldn’t even be passive-aggressive about its slow decline. It would be straight up aggressive-aggressive, blaming America for its failure.

Oliver calls out American media for the gleeful tone it’s taken while discussing RadioShack’s demise, noting that the brand should be hurt by the level of disrespect. 

He also made the parody ad below, which he freely offers the brand to use. It quickly shifts from sweet and sentimental to angry to full-on hurtful in mere moments, with the voiceover artist working in kind, sounding all the more sinister by the second.

Here’s an oldie, but new to us: The Anatomy of an Agency infographic from Grip Limited, offering pretty spot-on portraits of agency people (art director, copywriter, account person, developer, finance person) based on their peculiar tastes and habits.

This infographic was done by Julia Morra and Trevor Gourley. Via Design Taxi.

Right Shark and Left Shark had great time at the Super Bowl in Arizona. (Well, one of them had a better time than the other.) But now it’s back to the grind. And that means returning to the ESPN offices in snowy Bristol, Conn., and getting back to their day jobs—next to every other athlete, mascot and halftime-show dance partner in the world.

And here, we even get to see who’s underneath those suddenly famous fish costumes.

Wieden + Kennedy New York’s “This Is SportsCenter” campaign is always pretty fresh and memorable, but it’s great to see them jumping on this topic—which fits the campaign’s goofy humor so well.

Snickers and BBDO New York have followed up their brilliant “Brady Bunch” Super Bowl ad with an inspired print piece—taking over the back cover of Sports Illustrated’s new Swimsuit Issue with this fantastic “You’re not your when you hungry” ad.

Hannah Davis, of course, is on the front cover of the magazine. But on the back is a much less traditionally attractive female—Medusa, in fact, whom models apparently act like when they haven’t had a Snickers in a while.

Cynics will suggest models are always hungry, and wouldn’t be caught dead rectifying that fact by wolfing down a Snickers bar in public. But leaving aside the issues of verisimilitude, this is a pretty great ad and media placement. The recasting of Sports Illustrated as “Super Irritated” is a particularly nice touch.

See the front cover, and credits for the Snickers ad, below.

Front cover:

CREDITS
Client: Snickers
Ad: Medusa

Agency: BBDO New York
Chief Creative Office, Worldwide: David Lubars
Chief Creative Officer, New York: Greg Hahn
Executive Creative Director: Gianfranco Arena
Executive Creative Director: Peter Kain
Senior Creative Director: Danilo Boer
Senior Creative Director: Grant Smith
Executive Art Producer: Betsy Jablow
Account Director: Josh Steinman
Account Manager: Dylan Green
Planner: Alaina Crystal

Photographer: Vincent Dixon

CGI: Parker & Biley
Production Company: Jake Mills Productions

Rag & Bone designers David Neville and Marcus Wainwright opted to eschew the usual runway show and instead showcase their fall 2015 collection with a short film. Why? Because “runway shows don’t resonate with the regular guy,” Wainwright told WWD. 

They wanted to make something memorable, so they tapped Mikhail Baryshnikov, 67, and Lil Buck, 26, to model and dance in the ad, directed by Georgie Greville.

While the pairing itself is attention-grabbing, what makes this choice masterful is the way the film is edited. The duo’s movements are paused, repeated and slowed down, hitting the beats of Venetian Snares’ “Ongyilkos Vasarnap” in a way that beautifully highlights the brand’s specific design strengths.

Check out the three minute spot below.

You know you’ve designed a good Oculus Rift virtual reality experience when people emerge from it squealing in delight and with their knees trembling.

Hiking boot brand Merrell did one such activation at Sundance last month, partnering with Rolling Stone magazine to create the Merrell TrailScape—an immersive journey that had people feeling like they were walking around crumbling ledge and over a treacherous wooden bridge high in the mountains.

The experience—which Merrell says was the first commercial use of “walk around” virtual reality—was created by Merrell agency Hill Holliday and designed by Framestore. The latter is the Oscar-winning effects house that worked on Gravity and also famously did the Oculus activation for HBO’s Game of Thrones at South by Southwest last March. (It later opened up a whole VR and immersive content studio.)

Check out the experience below, which was timed to the introduction of Merrell’s most technical hiking boot to date, the Capra.

brightcove.createExperiences();

You probably remember McDonald’s famous, Grand Clio-winning sundial billboard, created by Leo Burnett almost a decade ago, which used the sun’s shadows to suggest what you should be eating and drinking at certain times.

Now, here’s a kind of sequel—a McDonald’s billboard from Canada that’s likewise in harmony with the movements of the sun. It’s a digital billboard for the Egg McMuffin, which rises into view just like the sun in the morning.

Cossette in Vancouver created the board, and tells us it started out as an entry in an out-of-home contest called Carte Blanche. (Creatives propose ideas for real clients; the winning team gets a trip to Cannes, and the winning client gets $50,000 worth of free media space in their respective city.) The Cossette/McDonald’s team won the contest, and then executed the ad for real.

“The digital board was synced to sunrise times over the course of the buy, with each frame lined up as best as we could get it,” a Cossette rep tells us.

A bright idea, indeed.

CREDITS
Client: McDonald’s
Agency: Cossette, Vancouver
Creative Director: Michael Milardo
Art Director: Cameron McNab
Copywriter: Kate Roland
Director of Brand Services: Anne Buch
Brand Supervisor(s): Melissa Guillergan, Karen Babiak
Director of Production: April Haffenden
Production Supervisor: Sue Barteluk

Truth is out with a new anti-smoking ad, and it’s a long way from stacking body bags outside the offices of tobacco companies.

“Left Swipe Dat,” created by 72andSunny, features a parade of young pop stars and YouTube personalities singing a novelty song about rejecting people on the dating app Tinder for featuring cigarettes in their profile pictures. Singer Becky G anchors the video, with X-Factor-born girl group Fifth Harmony handling backup. Comedians King Bach and Timothy DeLeGhetto act as hype men. Harley Mortenstein of Epic Meal Time, Grace Helbig of it’sGrace, and AlphaCat each spit a guest verse. There are also cameos from Anna Akana, Jimmy Tatro and Terrence J.

In other words, if you were born before 1992 and don’t spend all of your time on YouTube, it’s exactly the right thing to make you feel old and confused and terrified.

Back in the late ’90s and early ’00s, teenagers smoked even though they knew it was bad for them, because the cool thing to do was not caring that it was bad for them. In fact, this video is exactly the kind of thing that would have made a teenager want to smoke, because a distant slow and painful death would have seemed preferable to the shame of being in any way aligned with such an earnest train wreck of an attempt to make something seem cool or not cool. Teens used to be smart, and dumb, like that. So, putting piles of dead people on screen was, like the other melodramatic but statistically driven scare tactics of the classic Truth campaign, in those days a much better bet.

Now, who knows?

Over-the-top crazy antics, bubblegum pop and exploding rainbows are what the kids are into these days, right? Also smartphones and Tinder? Or is all that stuff passé? It goes almost without saying that any teen anti-smoking message is a good message (assuming it doesn’t send them running in the opposite direction). It’s good, even if it is a bald-faced play to make teens think smoking means they won’t get laid, which is probably pretty scary for a lot of teens, too. Though ostensibly this is also aimed at millennials? Or are they just like overgrown teens? Questions abound.

Some Becky G fans, and Fifth Harmony fans—Harmonizers, as they call themselves—seem to like the clip, when they’re not busy hating it, and each other, for the perceived slight that their preferred stars didn’t get enough screen time. Others seem baffled, too, but they watched, for their idols.

So it maybe the whole thing is pretty sensible. Or maybe it’s better described as Satan-spawned earworm with a heart of gold.

Either way, after watching it, you’ll need a drink.

CREDITS
Client: Legacy
CMO: Eric Asche
VP, Marketing: Nicole Dorrler
Marketing Director: Mary Dominguez
Marketing Brand Manager: Jasmin Malone
Agency: 72andSunny
CCO, Partner: Glenn Cole
GCD: Mick DiMaria
GCD: Justin Hooper
Writer: Rebecca Ullman
Designer: Sarah Herron
Group Brand Director: Judson Whigham
Brand Director: Kristine Soto
Brand Manager: Everette Cooke
Brand Coordinator: Chelsea Gilroy
Chief Production Officer: Tom Dunlap
Director of Film Production: Sam Baerwald
Senior Film Producer: Marisa Wasser
Film Producer: Esther Perls
Director of Business Affairs: Michelle McKinney
Group Business Affairs Director: Amy Jacobsen
Business Affairs Manager: Amy Shah
Group Strategy Director: Matt Johnson
Strategy Director: Kasia Molenda
Strategist: Josh Hughes
Jr. Strategist: Spencer Adrian
Production Co.: DNA
Director: Director X
Partner: David Naylor
Executive Producer: Missy Galanida
Producer: Clark Jackson
DP: Omer Ganai
Casting: David Kang
Art Department: David Courtemarche
Editorial: Arcade Edit
E.P. Managing Partner: Damian Stevens
Executive Producer: Nicole Visram
Post Producer: Kirsten Thon-Webb
Editor: Nick Rondeau
Editor: Dean Miyahira
Assistant: Ryan Andrus
Post: Timber
Creative Directors: Kevin Lau & Jonah Hall
Executive Producer: Chris Webb
Managing Partner: Damian Stevens
Producer: Lauren Loftus
Digital Effects Supervisor: Nick Hiegel
Flame Artist: Miles Kinghorn, Lisa Tomei
Nuke: Josh Bolin, Krystal Chinn, Nick Hiegel
Roto/Tracking: Dylan Holden
Telecine: The Mill
Executive Producer: Thatcher Peterson
Colorist: Gregory Reese
Audio Mix: Lime Studios
Executive Producer: Jessica Locke
Mixer: Dave Wagg
Assistant Mixer: Adam Primack
Composer: Adam Schlesinger
Music and Talent Supervision: Jash
Executive Producer: Doug DeLuca
Executive Producer: Daniel Kellison
Executive Producer: Mickey Meyer
Executive Producer: Ty Braswell
Producer: Nick Veneroso
Producer: Celeste Hughey