Hasta La Creative!

When you’re preparing to party, naturally you need to make sure there’s enough beer. And what’s worse than grabbing a bunch of different six-packs and trying to accomodate everyone’s annoying snobby beer palate?

The dudes at Austin Beerworks have considered your feelings and made it easy for you. They’ve introduced Peacemaker Anytime Ale, which they describe as a “sessionable” beer (meant to drink over a long period of time, anytime) and have packaged it in the world’s first 99-pack of beer. 

Yes, this miracle of beer actually exists. From the website: “It’s not only real, it’s an amazing deal: ninety-nine beers for $99. That’s 82 pounds of craft beer! Over seven feet of crisp, flavorful Peacemaker!”

Find out if it’s available in your area on the website and using the #AnytimeAle hashtag. And take a look at the promo video below. I’ll be reconsidering my religious beliefs, as my prayers were just answered. 

Via Gizmodo.

John Malkovich plays a vampire in this amusing, cinematic spot from Buzzman promoting French streaming video service Canal Play. His character is also a bank manager. The fangs work either way.

You don’t need to understand French to get the message: This toothy dude loves movies and TV shows, and Canal Play delivers them via mobile or desktop.

The Oscar-nominated actor’s bald pate, pale complexion and powerful yet goofy presence lend themselves well to his prince of darkness portrayal, though he seems to have no qualms about stalking around in broad daylight. What joie de vivre! Or perhaps, joie de la mort!

His résumé includes Shadow of the Vampire, an art-house/horror hybrid from more than a decade ago, though he didn’t play a Nosferatu in that one.

Canal properties have produced some notable ads, most famously “The Bear,” a 2012 Cannes Grand Prix winner from BETC. The new 90-second spot doesn’t quite rise to those comic heights. Still, a campy script, glossy effects and the star’s idiosyncratic turn really bring this sucker to life.

Everyone can recall the palm-sweating bumbling of trying to kiss a date for the first time. But Toyota TogetherGreen, a partnership with the National Audubon Society that supports community-based conservation projects, is betting it’s not as uncomfortable as knowing your carefree day at the beach may have caused irreparable harm to wildlife.

The group tapped Modern Family star Nolan Gould and actress Danielle Soibelman to share helpful tips on how to clean up after yourself at the shore. Instead of delivering the info straight, they present the suggestions through the lens of budding teen romance.

It’s usually a red flag if your date responds to your story about fishing with your dad by saying it probably resulted in the slow, torturous death of a seal. But in this case, it’s sort of adorable—and sends a necessary message about conservation.

Craigslist is not a place where you tend to find beautiful, creative, compelling advertising. It’s almost all amateur ads, after all, and created within a fairly limiting framework.

Still, we’ve seen what can happen when people do put a little effort into it. Whether you’re pitching yourself as the perfect roommate or selling your crappy old Camry, a little ingenuity goes a long way in helping you stand out in Craiglist’s mind-numbing sea of sameness.

The recently opened Classify Advertising is dedicated to doing just that. It will take your terrible Craigslist ad and make it a brilliant Craigslist ad—for free!

Classify, which bills itself as “the only agency that started with 80 million clients already,” was started by three agency interns. Here’s how they describe the business: “Classify moves products out the door. We turn your used junk into a pile of sweaty, hot lucre. It’s not our business what you do with all that bread. We transform Craigslist posts from boring, ineffective ads into dynamic cash cows. Cows that you can milk—for money.”

They’ve got a few before-and-after examples posted on the site. (We’ve posted some of them below.) We also caught up with the founders to ask how the service works—and what their plans are for ramping it up.

Where did you get the inspiration for this?
As ad school students, we were always told to make campaigns that sell real products. We just took it literally.

You must feel aesthetics is a big part of the selling process.
Not exactly. Strategy plays a big part in our startup. We take a client’s request and transform it into a real brief that points out the qualities and flaws of a certain product. Making things visually attractive is equally important to strategy and attractive copy.

Millions of things are bought and sold on Craiglist every day. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
We agree that there’s a big amount of transactions, and technically it’s already successful, but there are a lot of people who can’t get their product sold, and they come to us every day since we started Classify asking for help. We’re not trying to improve Craigslist. We’re improving the way people communicate to sell their own products.

Isn’t there a purity about how low-fi Craigslist ads are? Aren’t you just putting lipstick on a pig?
Craigslist ads are low-fi until people have to sell something there. A car, for example—they will wash and wax the car just to take tons of pictures of it to put it on the ad. They’ll write a long description telling how resistant the car is and the mileage. Then that link will be everywhere on their social media, email, etc.

Tell us how the process works. Can consumers approach you with their ad, and you make it sing?
On our website there’s a section where people can request an ad. We look at those requests and we transform it into a creative brief that will be given to a creative team. In some cases the post already exists, so we just create something based on that post.

What’s the turnaround time, and what’s your fee?
It takes one to three days to make a picture, a headline and body copy, and we do it for free.

So, how do you make money? Or is it not a moneymaking venture?
Craigslist doesn’t make any money with [most of] its transactions, either. It wouldn’t be fair to charge people.

Are you making any money in other ways through this business?
We’re not making any money for ourselves. Some brands and business people approached us to present a business model that can work for us, but we’re still just talking.

Can the seller critique your designs and request changes?
We don’t usually do revisions unless there’s an actual mistake in the ad.

Do you have paying clients yet?
The examples on the website are ads we proactively sent to people on Craigslist, but now we’re getting around 30-plus ad requests a day.

Are there are guidelines or limitations regarding items you can or can’t sell?
Each case is different, but we base it on ethics. We’ve got request from a guy selling a Civil War collectible gun. It would be pretty cool to sell it, but then we found out the gun still works and we decided not to make an ad for that person.

There’s a Careers section on your site, which suggests you expect to grow quickly. How will you do that?
The Careers section is a place where volunteers can sign up to make ads to help people. We already have around 25 volunteers who signed up, but we selected only six for now who are getting briefs and helping us to deliver those ads to the clients.

What’s your dream Craigslist product you’d like to sell?
A school bus. It’s something huge that costs a lot of money, and it’s a weird vehicle to own. We’d love to make a huge integrated campaign with videos, posts and even a microsite for something like that.

Via PSFK. Top photo via Flickr.

Here’s the newest example of a clever invention that shouldn’t have to exist.

Undercover Colors is a line of chemically enhanced nail polish currently being developed by undergrads at North Carolina State University. The polish can reportedly detect the presence of date-rape drugs such as (one would assume) rohypnol in drinks and change color to indicate a warning. 

So far, few details have been announced about the product, which a spokesperson tells the Triangle Business Journal is “in the R&D stage.” It got an early boost by winning a university entrepreneurship challenge called the Lulu eGames and from an early investor who contributed $100,000, the business journal reports.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the most frequently cited drugs used to incapacitate sexual assault victims are rohypnol (illegal in the U.S.), GHB (legal as a narcolepsy treatment) and ketamine (legal as an anesthetic for humans and animals).

So, it’s reasonable to guess that the Undercover Colors team is trying to develop a product that will react to those three drugs, possibly along with ecstasy (MDMA).

The nail polish, while innovative, is likely to re-open two long-running debates about date-rape drugs and rape prevention:

First, our society shouldn’t need tools to prevent rape, such as the recently launched Guardian Angel necklace that quietly alerts friends that the wearer is in trouble. 

Second, date-rape drugs are far more rare than pop culture often leads us to believe. Reliable numbers are notoriously hard to come by, but a 2007 survey of female sexual assault victims attending colleges found that only 0.6 percent were sure they’d been slipped a drug, while another 1.7 percent suspected they had been given a drug. 

In that same survey, 82 percent of victims reported being drunk, a stat which USA Today featured in its 2013 article about how alcohol is the most common drug used in sexual assault. “Roofies are very rarely—if ever—seen in real life,” an investigator told the newspaper.

Anyone who’s been active in rape prevention efforts knows that discussing alcohol can be volatile and extremely divisive. Pointing out the role of alcohol is often seen as synonymous with victim blaming, while the image of someone covertly spiking a drink with a dissolvable powder clearly conveys who’s at fault, making it a popular plot line for party-boy villains in movies and TV. 

(Quick sidebar with a real-world example: A male friend of mine was actually drugged by two women while visiting Eastern Europe. He was with two friends, whom the girls had convinced to drink some very strong alcohol until they were incapacitated. When the girls realized mid-evening that my friend wasn’t drinking, they made him some hot tea. He passed out, woke up the next day to find their luggage stolen, and a doctor told him he almost certainly would have died if he’d had another cup of the drugged tea. So, it happens, but not always in the situations you might expect.)  

If Undercover Colors becomes a national product, it’s hard to imagine many potential customers rushing out to buy it. In the end, if you’re careful enough to be mindful of being drugged, you’re probably careful enough to open, make or pour your own drink and politely decline anything else.

Hat tip to my friend Clair McLafferty, who among other things writes about cocktail science for Mental Floss.

Is it controversial to be a CEO in your underwear?

Many brands have been changing the way they use models in their ads lately. Several have promised not to airbrush models, and one used only women with PhDs for a campaign.

Now, underwear brand Dear Kate—which has long used nontraditional models of all sizes for lookbooks and web images—is featuring prominent female tech-company founders and CEOs in their underwear for a new line called the Ada Collection (named for 19th century tech pioneer Ada Lovelace).

Critics say the campaign is a step back in the fight for women to be taken seriously, especially in a field known for being dominated by men. “Presenting yourself undressed has inherently sexual overtones, and undermines being seen as a serious technologist,” Elissa Shevinsky, CEO of Glimpse Labs, tells Time magazine.

But Dear Kate CEO Julie Sygiel says this isn’t your typical Victoria’s Secret spread. “I think a lot of traditional lingerie photo shoots depict women as simply standing there looking sexy. They’re not always in a position of power and control,” she says. “In our photo shoots it’s important to portray women who are active and ambitious. They’re not just standing around waiting for things to happen.”

Personally, I don’t think women CEOs posing in their underwear is something worth clutching our pearls over. The lookbook includes smart, successful women, and the variety (women of color! plus-sized women! thin women!) doesn’t feel like an afterthought. At the same time, the ads are certainly odd. Women coding together in their underwear? What? (The inspirational quotes on many of the images also make them way too busy.)

In the end, it misses the mark a bit, but points for doing something cool and different.

Who turned out the lights?

Tim Hortons and JWT Toronto plunged customers at one of the coffee and donut chain’s Quebec locations into inky darkness for a prank introducing a new dark roast coffee blend.

When unwitting patrons arrived, they found the L’Île-Perrot store completely covered in black-out material, even the windows. Dark vehicles were parked out front to heighten the mystery. Those who ventured inside bumped into a dude wearing night-vision goggles, who led them to a counter where dark roast was served and the gag revealed.

Goggles Guy looks pretty creepy, and unlike the hammy, self-aware fright reactions we’ve seen in some “scary” ad pranks, the squeals of shock and surprise at Tim Hortons seem genuine. This is the client’s second large-scale, Twilight Zone-ish effort of late. In May, it meticulously recreated its first shop from 1964, interior and exterior, in minute detail (see below)—even bringing back the original employees as servers.

Both the time machine and darkness stunts have generated lots of attention (the latter is approaching 700,000 YouTube views in four days). Still, such shenanigans seem like an awful lot to digest before you’ve had your morning joe.

Earlier this year, Coca-Cola rolled out its first TV spot made completely with user-generated content. Now, it’s Miller Lite’s turn to shine the spotlight on its fans.

In May, the beer brand launched an #ItsMillerTime campaign, in which it used packaging, promoted tweets and its social channels to ask people for their best summer photos—with cameos by the retro-cool Miller Lite cans, of course.

The brand says nearly 180,000 photos were submitted. (It further claims that #ItsMillerTime has been the No. 2 branded hashtag on Twitter since May 7, trailing only Adidas’s #allin).

The brand liked seven of the fan photos in particular and featured them prominently in the new national TV spot below, which breaks early this week. (A few dozen shots more are compiled in a collage at the end of the ad, but only the seven get full-screen treatment.)

They’re all fun snapshots—not particularly compelling, but “relatable,” as they say. And as for the wedding couple—more power to you.

Advertisers may dominate the lion’s share of America’s billboards, but roadside signs seem to be an increasingly popular medium for artists as well.

A number of billboard installations have been popping up around the country, reports The New York Times. In Missouri, there’s the “I-70 Sign Show,” which seeks to spark political debate with images like a Mickalene Thomas piece on female sexuality.

In Cincinnati, the “Big Pictures” show aims to break up the daily routines of passersby with images like a toucan surrounded by Post-it notes, created by artist Sarah Cwynar. And along cross-country Interstate 10, “The Manifest Destiny Billboard Trip” has since last fall sought to call attention to issues concerning the history of westward expansion, with some 100 signs featuring the work of 10 artists.

Each example offers a bit more art theory and cultural critique than your average billboard. They’re also more modest in scope than the massive “Art Everywhere” initiative launched this summer, which has seen an advertising trade organization team up with a group of major museums to bring more than 50 crowd-curated paintings, including classics like Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, to more than 50,000 outdoor ad spaces.

While the smaller works might not be as inventive as turning billboards into houses for the homeless, they are a nice change of pace from, say, Ashley Madison.

On Monday, we posted Miller Lite’s new national TV spot, featuring a handful of fan photos selected from some 180,000 gathered through the immensely successful #ItsMillerTime hashtag campaign.

Now, with impeccable timing, Newcastle is here to call bollocks on the whole idea.

The British brewer, known for its anti-marketing marketing, just launched its own hashtag campaign, #NewcastleAdAid, in which it’s also asking for fan snapshots—and promises to use the wonders of Photoshop to turn them into really shoddy-looking ads.

Why the sudden embrace of low-cost user-generated content? Because it blew its marketing budget on celebs for the Super Bowl and the Fourth of July.

“Newcastle recognized it needed more ‘engaging social content’ to keep all of its new followers interested, but this lazy branded content wasn’t going to make itself,” the brand tells AdFreak. “Newcastle definitely is not the first brand to ask fans to post photos on social media to ‘build a stronger community’ and whatnot, but Newcastle definitely is the best at turning those photos into into obvious, exaggerated, poorly executed ads.”

Here’s the pitch video from Droga5, running on Twitter and Facebook:

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