Hasta La Creative!

CANNES, France—All this past week, Cannes Lions judges and presenters talked endlessly about how the best ads are those that inspire and even improve the world.

So, why was the festival’s most awarded campaign an unapologetic (if tongue-in-cheek) homage to selfishness and greed? One whose centerpiece video has a relatively meager 500,000 views on YouTube—and was, in fact, the only ad jeered by attendees at Saturday’s award show here?

The Harvey Nichols holiday campaign “Sorry, I Spent It on Myself” from agency adam&eveDDB took home no less than four Grand Prix, making it the second most awarded campaign in the festival’s history. (McCann Melbourne set the record last year with five Grand Prix for “Dumb Ways to Die.”)

The campaign centered on the creation of cheap products, such as gravel or rubber bands, sold in Harvey Nichols stores with the label “Sorry, I Spent It on Myself.” The video showed customers giving these crap gifts to relatives and loved ones at Christmas while enjoying expensive clothing and handbags for themselves.

It’s a good campaign, and may well have deserved the Integrated Grand Prix. It also won the Press Grand Prix, the Promo & Activation Grand Prix and a Film Grand Prix—one of two awarded in that category, along with Volvo Trucks’ “Epic Split.” And it’s that Grand Prix in Film—where it bested some truly powerful and popular pieces of cinematography—that’s the real head-scratcher.

At a press conference Saturday afternoon, the Film Lions judges gushed about the spot’s “boldness” but struggled to explain how it merited such lofty accolades. I asked them how it could possibly have been a unanimous selection as one of the two best pieces of advertising film in the past year.

“To take greed and make people laugh and smile about it is, I think, incredibly difficult,” said jury member Pete Favat, chief creative officer  of Deutsch L.A. “And as a film, it’s a perfect piece of film.”

I disagree, and it was clear I wasn’t alone when, during a screening of the ad at Saturday’s big award ceremony, some derisive whistling could be heard.

To illustrate why its Grand Prix selection was so baffling, we’ve decided to highlight some of the work it beat for the top spot. You might not agree that any one of them was Grand Prix material, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that they’re lesser films. 

Below are our picks for seven ads that could have, and should have, ranked higher than Harvey Nichols:

 
• Lacoste: “The Big Leap” by BETC Paris

Somehow this stellar piece of cinematography only won a silver Lion in Film. French journalists told me they felt the video was largely snubbed at Cannes, where it was shortlisted in Film Craft but awarded no Lion in that category.

 
• Wren: “First Kiss” by Durable Goods L.A.

While this viral juggernaut with nearly 85 million views has its share of critics, it’s hard to deny it was one of the most compelling, talked-about and just plain interesting videos of the year. Judges clearly liked it quite a bit, awarding it bronze and gold Lions in Film and a bronze in Film Craft.

 
• Coca-Cola: “Parents” by Santo Buenos Aires

Surprising, funny, perfectly crafted. It’s just so damn good. Judges liked it enough to give it a gold Lion in Film.

 
• Guinness: “Sapeurs” by AMV BBDO

A real story, told really well. This piece starring a super-stylish group of Congolese gentlemen won a silver Lion in Film and a bronze Lion in Film Craft. 

 
• Lurpak: “Adventure Awaits” by Wieden + Kennedy London

Anyone who’s ever made a food ad (or, hell, watched a food ad) will realize what a masterpiece of innovative visuals this is. It won gold in Film Craft.

 
• Skype: “The Born Friends Family Portrait” by Pereira & O’Dell

It’ll make you smile. It’ll make you cry. It’s a touching piece of documentary that’s as stylish as it is emotional. But oddly, it didn’t win any Lions in Film. (It did win two silver Lions and two bronze Lions in Cyber and a bronze in Branded Content & Entertainment.) Read the story behind the story in our interview with creator PJ Pereira.

 
• Volvo Trucks: “The Epic Split” by Forsman & Bodenfors

The other Grand Prix winner in Film, and deservedly so. Let’s revisit it to remind ourselves how different these supposedly equal spots are.

 
What do you think? Did the Film judges overreach, or was the Harvey Nichols spot really that good? And what would you have selected?

Life is good for Landon Donovan, even though he isn’t playing in the 2014 World Cup—at least according to this new ad for EA Sports.

Instead of participating in the world’s biggest sporting event, the U.S. soccer icon is rolling out of bed late in the morning and chilling in his terry cloth bathrobe, enjoying his morning coffee and playing as himself in the PlayStation 3’s 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil (where, apparently, it’s easier for him to score.)

The spot is a clever, topical and deftly executed take on U.S. coach Jürgen Klinsmann’s controversial decision not to bring Donovan with the national team to Brazil, a move that observers will continue to parse as the tournament unfolds.

Donovan’s self-deprecating performance in the ad is excellent, especially at the end of the clip, when a deadpan song about getting left behind turns out to be less morose than it seems.

But if he does start getting lonely, he can always go hang out with Beckham and Zidane in Adidas’ ad. Nike, though, probably wouldn’t like that much.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky has worked hard in the past couple of years to reinvigorate the Grey Poupon brand, which has such an iconic advertising history. But no, “What Do You Poupon?” is not the next big experiment for the brand.

It’s a spoof video that OBVS (Online Broadcast Virtual Station), which is apparently a sketch comedy group, posted to YouTube last weekend. It’s since gotten 1.7 million views.

The reactions among YouTube commenters—not know for their sophisticated sense of humor—aren’t surprising, particularly those drawn to Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog style humor. “This had just had me cackling like a small child.” “Childish humor. Ageless.?” “If I could upvote this twice, I would, because it was EPIC!!!”

Kraft Foods gave us the official word that it’s fake, but even they don’t seem too bothered by it. Says a rep: “We’re not surprised that people may have some fun with an iconic and loved brand like Grey Poupon. ‘But of course,’ we didn’t produce or approve this video.”

Hello Flo, a tampon subscription service, had a major advertising hit last summer with “Camp Gyno,” a hilarious long-form spot about a pre-teen girl who becomes a product- and advice-dispensing despot at summer camp after becoming the first girl to get her period.

Now, company founder and CEO Naama Bloom has teamed up with that spot’s writers/directors, Jamie T. McCelland and Pete Marquis, for a sequel that’s just as comically frank and stars another amusingly precocious girl.

The time, though, the girl has the opposite problem. All her friends are getting their periods, and she’s not. So, she decides to fake it—with quite disastrous results, as her mother, who knows she’s lying, decides to throw her a “first moon party.”

Like the first video, this one—which sells Hello Flo’s Period Starter Kit (aka, “The gift before the gift”)—isn’t for anyone squeamish about the word vagina, in particular. For everyone else, it’s another pretty hilarious take on the subject, making it increasingly less taboo and hopefully selling some product in the process.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Hello Flo
CEO, Founder: Naama Bloom
Written and Directed by Jamie T. McCelland and Pete Marquis
Production Company: Hayden 5
Producer: Todd Wiseman Jr
Executive Producers: Milos S. Silber
Director of Photography: Josh Fisher
Production Designer: Ally Nesmith
UMP: Dale Arroyo
Editing Company: Beast Editorial
Editor: Karen Kourtessis
Post Producer: Valerie Iorio
Executive Producer: Helena Lee

Here’s a very special delivery from French agency BETC. It’s called “Birth,” and it’s a minute-long promotional film touting the annual Young Director Award that will be presented Thursday at the Cannes Lions festival.

Norman Bates (great name!) directed the impressively offbeat outing that presents—in a single, flowing shot—the “debut effort” of a young filmmaker. And I mean, a very young filmmaker. So young, in fact, that she’s still inside the womb. But not for long.

This marks the second notable “in utero” spot in recent weeks, following Grey London’s British Heart Foundation PSA that used CGI to create some amazingly realistic womb footage. (Someone else held the camera for that kid, I guess. Lazy unborn slacker.)

BETC’s commercial is more lighthearted, offering a memorable riff on “giving birth” as a metaphor for creativity, with dashes of cheeky humor punctuating its labor of love.

For better or worse, Fiat’s latest TV commercials might make your head spin.

The brand recently commissioned some wacky GIFs from The Richards Group for the Fiat Tumblr page, but Chrysler CMO Olivier Francois liked them so much that he had them stitched into 15- and 30-second spots—now airing on TV under the tagline “Endless fun.”

Robots, cats, narwhals, people in horse masks, a guy in a rabbit suit twerking against a Fiat. The spots are frenetic, goofy, weird, loud and—at least according to Fiat—fun. They’re getting a mixed reaction on YouTube, though.

If you don’t like them, maybe you can do better. Fiat will soon ask consumers for their own #MyFiatUSA GIFs and will post the best ones to its Tumblr page.

Don’t fake it—on or off the football field—says Durex.

The condom brand is hoping to capitalize on excitement around the World Cup—and particularly, the spectacular dives that players take while competing after barely getting touched—with a new #DontFakeIt campaign aimed at keeping consumers busy in the bedroom.

The goofy ad below shows soccer players who look like they’re from the local recreational league offering ridiculously melodramatic performances—trips, grimaces, flops. Naturally, it’s all in slow motion, and there is opera music playing in the background. It’s chuckle-worthy not only because it’s absurd, but because it’s not that far from the reality (though the stakes are considerably lower).

Durex also conducted a survey that found 40 percent of 2,000 men asked would turn down their partners in favor of watching a game, with many offering hackneyed excuses about not feeling well. The campaign’s tagline, though, obviously calls to mind a different kind of faking—one that Durex has opposed for some time. So, you know, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, don’t fake it.

It’s all reminiscent of Puma’s “Love or Football” work from a few years back, which offered a psychology study of hardcore Newcastle United fans to see whether they cared more about their wives and girlfriends, or their team. In that case, the women prevailed, slightly. That was club soccer, though.

If a new Xbox One ad gone awry is any indication, the voice-command function on the Microsoft Kinect device is working a little too well for some gamers.

The commercial shows Aaron Paul, best known for playing Jesse Pinkman on Breaking Bad, using the feature by bossing around an Xbox. But according to complaints on social media sites including Twitter, the spot’s audio accidentally—and amusingly—turns on the consoles of viewers who happen to watch it while in the same room as their voice-enabled Xbox Ones and Xbox Kinects.

“I find it funny when people complain about the kinect sucking and not working,” says one reddit commenter. “By watching this video on my phone Aaron Paul turned on my Xbox. Thanks Aaron Paul.”

The phenomenon appears to be a boon for the brand, generating quite a bit of press for an otherwise straightforward celebrity spot, which now has more than 2.6 million YouTube views since being posted June 5.

Paul, to the disappointment of many a fanboy, does not address the Xbox in the 30-second ad as “bitch,” Pinkman’s hallmark greeting. But the broken-hearted can rest easy knowing all is well in the universe—as he does grace a gaming exec with the title in this longer ad for the brand.

I’m roaring with approval for this interactive sequel, of sorts, to “The Bear,” the 2012 Grand Prix-winning commercial from BETC Paris and French movie channel Canal+.

In the original, an ursine auteur sinks his claws into a big-budget medieval action film, fussing like a temperamental Hollywood diva over every aspect of production, from the script and direction to the special effects and score. Ultimately, the spot pulls the rug out from under viewers’ expectations with an inspired visual punch line.

Now, with “Being the Bear,” users can play director and take over a film set, choosing among several genre types to complete a dramatic scene (shown in the first commercial) in which a woman kneels over a wounded warrior who has been shot through the chest with an arrow. Naturally, some of the selections work better than others, but the writing and on-screen details are sharp throughout, and they reward multiple viewings. (The approach reminds me a bit of Tipp-Ex’s pick-your-own-adventure videos—work from France that featured a goofy, scenery-chewing bear. It also recalls the “Film, TV and Theater Styles” game from Whose Line Is It Anyway?)

My favorites in the new Canal+ campaign include the “Porno” option, which lets the actors have a ball, and “Horror,” a gloriously yucky exercise in spit-screen technique. The “Independent” selection yields the kind of self-obsessed, overly-probing dialogue only an audience of film majors (or Woody Allen) could love.

I wish they’d included a “Wildlife Documentary” option, because it might’ve given the bear—who stays behind the camera this time (we just glimpse his paw)—a role he could really sink his teeth into.

See the original spot below.

Via Adland.

Plucking Angora rabbits to use their fur in clothing is like waxing the hair off unwilling humans, says PETA’s latest human-shaming ad.

Characteristic of the animal advocacy group’s PSAs, it’s designed to make your skin crawl, complete with close-ups of grimacing faces, and squelchy sound effects, most of which end up seeming kind of ridiculous. The most disturbing part of the spot, created with agency Lowe & Partners Singapore and production company Great Guns, is the brief edit of a man tearing out the hair from a squealing Angora at a factory in China. The footage is excerpted from PETA’s exposé last year, which sparked a scandal in the fashion industry and spurred major brands like H&M to stop producing Angora wool wear.

The spot is effective enough in terms of refreshing awareness about the cruel techniques behind the rabbit fur products, even if the overwrought metaphor isn’t as powerful as the uncut reality. As much as PETA may love anthropomorphizing animals, this isn’t one of those scenarios where drawing a melodramatic comparison to people is necessary, or even helpful—especially not to illustrate the obvious point that the rabbits are treated worse than crybaby homo sapiens who are getting a voluntary, if perhaps unpleasant, preening procedure.

Still, as shrill as PETA’s marketing often manages to be, it has come a long way from the days when it was just a never-ending punch line.