Hasta La Creative!

The mighty Empire has fallen … thanks to some yogurt.

Deutsch/LA’s 2011 Super Bowl spot “The Force” for Volkswagen, which enjoyed an astonishing 41-month reign as the most shared ad of all time, has finally been dethroned—by Activia and the World Food Programme’s three-and-a-half minute music video starring Shakira, created for this year’s World Cup.

As of Tuesday morning, the Activia spot, titled “La La La (Brazil 2014),” has been shared 5,409,192 times across Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere, according to Unruly Media. And it’s only widening its lead over “The Force,” which has racked up 5,254,667 shares.

While “The Force” is a traditional 60-second spot (the version that ran on the Super Bowl was actually a :30), the Activia video is an example of what Unruly calls “trackvertising,” where a brand and a musician co-release a video that is both a music video and an ad. The Colombian pop star’s worldwide celebrity (she recently became the first person to reach 100 million Facebook likes) clearly fueled the Danone yogurt brand’s spot.

Also, while the share counts are comparable, the view counts are not. “The Force” has about 60 million views on YouTube, while the Activia video has more than 275 million.

“Music videos are by far the most shared type of content, so it’s no surprise that brands are now blurring the lines between traditional ads and music videos in order to get themselves seen and heard on social,” says Sarah Wood, co-founder and COO at Unruly.

“Music and advertising have a long history together. Some will remember the early days of TV commercials and jingles—the internet memes of their day. On digital, we see music deployed in a number of ways—from ads released alongside a professional artist, to parody or licensed tracks, to heavy product placement or even ads that make their own track famous.”

TD Canada Trust proved it knew its customers better than most banks by turning a few of its ATMs into Automated Thanking Machines and rigging them to hand out more than cash.

A single mom got two savings accounts for her kids and trip to Disneyland. A Toronto Blue Jays fan got the experience of a lifetime—a chance to throw out the first pitch. And a mother got tickets to Trinidad so she could visit a daughter who is fighting cancer.

The video—like a banking version of Coke’s special vending machines—has 7 million views in 10 days. As with all these feel-good viral ads, it’s the emotion on the customer’s face that creates the connection, along with the backstory. It’s one thing to give a single mom a trip to Disney. It’s another to learn she’s never been able to take her kids anywhere.

But of course, someone probably said, “Hey, that’s nice for those 12 people, but what about the rest of TD’s customers?” Well, TD employees distributed $20 bills to every customer at over 1,100 locations, and thousands more received a direct deposit. I’m sure most of them are giving TD a big thank-you right back.

Of course, having that YouTube view count tick up is the gift that keeps on giving.

If you like watching pretty cars dance with each other, check out this new stunt driving ad from BMW South Africa.

Five cherry red M235i coupes spin around each other in a tightly choreographed high-speed sequence on a closed traffic rotary. Titled “The Epic Driftmob,” it takes pains to emulate a human flash mob. That means showing a woman dressed as a cop blocking several cars (including a Honda) from entering, and cutting in some unconvincing footage of confused and excited spectators.

Ultimately the stunt, orchestrated by Interone in Cape Town, feels more like it’s paying homage to Esther Williams than Improv Everywhere. Maybe that’s because it’s clearly too high-budget and well-planned to feel believable as a spontaneous event. Or maybe it’s because the fast edits and burning rubber can’t hide that there’s a sort of grace to the whole thing—especially if you watch the clip on mute, and spare yourself the obligatory but grating sounds of revving engines and screeching tires.

It also doesn’t look quite as dangerous as some of BMW’s other stunt commercials from recent years, which saw cars drifting through car-shaped holes in walls and around the edges of skyscraper helipads. But while less risky, at least we know the new spot is real (the brand says so on the YouTube page) and not CGI—unlike the recent aircraft carrier ad, which was almost certainly not real. (In the making-of video for the new spot, stunt driver Rich Rutherford points out the thin margin for error in coordinating the fast-moving cars, steered by pro drivers including drifting champions Rhys Millen and Samuel Hübinette).

And of course, the ad has a happy ending: The hot lady cop pulls off her hat and does a dramatic hair toss before climbing into one of the Beamers. Because the brand couldn’t resist suggesting its product will get you laid, too.

Blogger Kat Bouska usually loves being surprised by what’s inside her monthly Stitch Fix fashion box deliveries, but the most recent one included something she truly didn’t expect: an original price tag that showed just how much she was being overcharged.

The popular subscription company charges Kat (and many others) $20 for its personal shopping service, then sends her a box with five pieces of clothing and accessories. The charm is that she can try it all on in the comfort of her own home, and send back what she doesn’t like. She can buy what she does like, and the $20 styling fee will go towards that purchase (items are $55 each, on average, per the site). If she doesn’t like any of the pieces, she can send it all back (within three days), but lose out on the $20 styling fee.

Except this time around, her $68 shorts came with another tag on it—a Nordstrom Rack tag with a discounted price of $24.95. That’s a rather shocking markup of 173%.

She’s not the only Stitch Fix fan who has noticed she might be paying too much for discount apparel. In a comment to Bouska’s Facebook post about her recent delivery, another subscriber named Kathleen Enge remarked: “My Stitch Fix pieces arrived. I loved them. Two days later one of the dresses was featured on Nordstrom Rack Haute App for 50% less.”

So are these experiences indicative of Stitch Fix customers being misled about the price and source of their purchases? In other words, is Stitch Fix routinely buying discounted clothes at retail and then selling them at a markup?

Absolutely not, says a Stitch Fix spokeswoman, who declined to be named. 

“We’re a retailer just like any other store. We purchase clothing at wholesale and sell them at retail.”

I asked why some of the service’s subscribers are finding their items at a 50% or greater discount elsewhere, and she said competing retailers often buy from the same suppliers and then set their own prices. Stitch Fix consistently prices its items at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP).

She went on to clarify that Stitch Fix does not buy its clothing from discount retailers such as Nordstrom Rack and then resell them.

If that’s the case, why did Kat Bouska have an item that clearly came from Nordstrom Rack with a Nordstrom Rack price tag in her Stitch Fix box?

It was a simple mixup, Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake told AdFreak in an email this afternoon. The shorts, she says, were sent to the wrong retailer (Stitch Fix rather than the intended Nordstrom Rack) and accidentally sent out to subscribers with the wrong tag.

“Many of our vendors work with other retail partners such as Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack. Our vendor mistakenly shipped us product that was meant for another retailer. We have quality control processes in our warehouse to catch such errors but in this instance the tag was missed. We sincerely apologize for the mistake and we want to make sure this never happens again.

“The prices we assign to our merchandise are MSRP 100 percent of the time. Many retailers choose to discount different merchandise for promotions or anniversary sales. If a client sees an item that they purchased from Stitch Fix at a discounted price at another retailer, we will always investigate, adjust our prices internally, and credit the client for the price difference.

“We are proactively reaching out to anyone who paid $68 for the shorts and giving them credit for the difference. We are also reviewing our quality control processes to make sure that this never happens again. We are committed to an amazing client experience and should be able to provide prices that are competitive to any other retailers out there. We will work with our vendors and on our internal processes to make sure this happens moving forward.”

Stitch Fix’s website will be updated with the price adjustment policy shortly.

The clarification came a bit too late for Bouska. She says she has canceled her Stitch Fix subscription.

Amy Poehler goes to the top of the class in her latest Old Navy commercial, in which the Parks and Recreation actress moderates a spelling bee.

Of course, we’ve seen her schtick for the retailer before, in ads where she’s played, among others, a lawyer, politician, soccer coach and burrito server, all obsessed with the retailer’s prices and fashions.

Still, Poehler’s sarcastic delivery never fails to please. Her snark is perfectly balanced by the fact that her characters aren’t always thinking straight, their heads clouded by unnatural preoccupations with checked shorts, sleeveless jackets and such. We don’t mind letting her have the last word, because we get the last laugh.

At one point in this new spot from Chandelier Creative, Poehler misspells “four”—Old Navy’s back-to-school sale prices start at $4—as “f-o-r-e.” But that’s OK. As she wryly notes in the amusing outtakes reel, “We have computers, who cares about spelling?”

If the true measure of an ad’s popularity is the afterlife it enjoys through parody and satire, then this 1989 LifeCall ad—featuring Mrs. Fletcher and her infamous line, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”—may be the best-loved commercial of all time.

In the past year, thousands of Vine users—many of them born years after the ad was made—have been using the 6-second format to parody the cult classic (and the 90’s re-make). To date, there are over 6,000 posts tagged “life alert.”

Below is just a sample of some of the ways teens and tweens (and a few ridiculous adults) have spoofed this well-meaning but terribly melodramatic spot. It starts to get even more meta when the Vines start spoofing other Vines.

(Click to play each clip, click again to stop.)

 
Lyin’ on the cold hard ground.
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If I lie here…
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Fallin’ and callin’.
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Do I look like I care?
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Banana operator (with cameo).
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Basketball fakeout.
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A little help from The Beatles.
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Have you ever used tape before?
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Have you ever used tape before? (version 2)
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If you ain’t talkin’ money, I don’t wanna talk.
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Careful with that button.
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I can lift you up!
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One of America’s finest.
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I’ve fallen and I can’t turn up!
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Don’t dubstep and fall.
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Go on…
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Sometimes when you watch an ad, you can’t quite believe it’s real. Then you learn about the backstory, and you watch it again, and you still can’t wrap your head around it.

Take Johnny Dronehunter, the hero in a real new commercial for a real new shotgun silencer, from a real company called SilencerCo.

If you are, like Johnny, a man who drives through the desert in aviators and a beat-up ’80s-era Cadillac, then finds himself in combat with a fleet of flying surveillance robots, then this is the shotgun silencer for you.

If your response to growing privacy concerns around the increasing use of drones by domestic law enforcement doesn’t include overtones of a paranoid dystopian fantasy in which people run around shooting drones out of the sky, then it’s still pretty amusing to watch the clever melodrama of a well-produced drone-hunting video. It even feels a bit like a Tarantino-esque take on grindhouse cinema (even though the Cohn brothers’ No Country For Old Men is more famous for its silenced shotgun, it was also quite a bit more serious).

If you were worried that Johnny Dronehunter might not be coming soon to a town near you, SilencerCo’s CEO tells Vice’s Motherboard that the brand plans to film future Johnny Dronehunter ads in cities and suburban settings, but he admits it’s harder to shoot and blow up robots in less desolate locales, because, you know, laws. 

If you’re still wondering why anyone would need a shotgun silencer in the first place (especially in the desert), it’s because shotguns are loud, which means it could give away your position to the government. Just kidding. Shotguns are incredibly loud, and a suppressor can help keep it from damaging your ears while shooting clay pigeons or hunting live animals. Though it’s generally worse for the duck.

Expedia and 180LA have done a nice job lately of thinking more broadly about the concept of travel, going beyond physical journeys into emotional, even spiritual ones. (Among its more memorable ads was the 2012 spot about the father’s difficult journey to accepting his lesbian daughter.)

Now, the travel site is getting even more ambitious—and more social—as it travels back in time with a fun project around people’s Throwback Thursday photos.

Between now and the end of August, Expedia is asking Instagram and Twitter users to tag their #tbt photo with @Expedia and #ThrowMeBack. Each week the company will pick one lucky winner and give them a travel voucher so they can indulge their nostagia and return to the place where the photo was taken—and recreate it.

Or, says Expedia, you can travel somewhere different and make a new memory—which seems to suggest this campaign is less about actually recreating the old snapshots and more about just piggybacking on the #tbt trend in general. However, the brand is asking the winners to send in the recreated photos with the goal at the end of the campaign of telling a photo story with all the side-by-sides.

“We all have great memories of summer vacations,” says Dave Horton, creative director at 180LA. “So to promote the nostalgia of summer travel, we wanted to tap into the most nostalgic trend out there, #tbt.”

To promote the contest, Expedia has posted the video below, “Back to Ocean Beach,” showing one family’s journey from Washington State to their old beach spot in San Diego to recreate a cute photo from the ’80s.

Read more about the campaign at instagram.piqora.com/expediathrowmeback.

Here’s a lovely little packaging idea from Nike, and we do mean little.

The Nike Free 5.0 is one of the most flexible sneakers ever made. And that’s clear right from looking at the box, which was designed to be one-third the size of a regular shoebox.

As you can see from the video below, the sneakers easily fold up and fit inside. It’s a cool idea for a few reasons—it uses less cardboard, it cuts down on shipping space, and of course, it communicates a product benefit right in the packaging. A great example of thinking outside the box—about the box.

Unfortunately, it was only promotional packaging for the launch, and wasn’t used on a mass scale. Still, it earned Publicis Impetu a silver Lion in Design at Cannes last month.

Credits below. Via The Dieline.

CREDITS
Client: Nike
Agency: Publicis Impetu
Executive Creative Directors: Esteban Barreiro, Mario Taglioretti
Art Director: Diego Besenzoni
Copywriter: Federico Cibils
Account Director: María José Caponi
Account Manager: Mauricio Minchilli
Producer: Metrópolis Films

To promote its new line of Star Wars-themed character cars and die-cast ships, Hot Wheels showed up at San Diego Comic-Con this week with a life-size Darth Vader car.

The car, a modified Chevrolet Corvette C5, incorporates a lot of Vader’s helmet details into its design, along with a 526-horsepower LS3 engine and custom red line tires. It’s always the details that make things like this so fun.

The ad promoting it mixes driving footage with a custom Emperor Palpatine monologue, otherwise presenting itself almost like a typical car ad. But I think the atypical car on display here more than makes up for it.

This is Hot Wheels’ life-size Darth Vader Car #SDCC http://t.co/m02mei6Qlj pic.twitter.com/UUWsNJxZbf

— The Verge (@verge) July 24, 2014