BBDO and AT&T teamed with photographer Pete Barrett to create seven ads
for the new, “More Bars in More Places†campaign which is currently running nation wide. Sadly they’re not creating the kind of bars that I like. Yeah that’s right, deep fried chocolate mars bars. ;P Still the photography is nice.
PETA is at it again, but instead of undressing celebrities they’ve stripped one of their “very pregnant” members named Noemie down to her skivvies and placed her on all fours and kneeling in a replica farrowing crate with the banner ‘Unhappy Mother’s Day for Pigs’, all in the middle of in Covent Garden. Do you know how cold it is in London these days? BrrRRRrrr! I hope Noemie didn’t catch one in her state.
PETA’s own blog Fish and Chimps explains the stunt:
Mother’s Day is a time to show love, respect and gratitude for mothers so it is only fitting that we extend that kindness to mothers that have a really tough time all year round – sows, who are squeezed into narrow metal stalls barely bigger than their own bodies. Unable to turn around, nuzzle their piglets or do anything that comes naturally to them, they live in misery. When weaned, the piglets are taken away to be fattened for slaughter, and the mothers are put through the process all over again.
PETA seems to prefer the nude approach when doing their ad stunts, you can see photos of the stunt here and PETA’s own channel on Friction.tv has video of the event.
PETA’s tactic of using the nude female body to attract attention has been grating people for a while, The F word responds:
Now I get that naked women attract attention, but I really don’t think that it’s because passersby give a shit about mistreated pregnant sows.
See, what PETA don’t seem to get is that society as a whole couldn’t really care less about women’s welfare, so showing women in exploitative or abusive situations to try and encourage us to care about animal welfare really isn’t a very effective strategy. In fact, their imagery is often very similar to that found in some genres of porn, hardly well known for encouraging the viewer to empathise with the women involved.
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Naked women, even dead ones, are stock images in our media; what shocks is not the alluded to mistreatment of animals, but PETA’s complete disregard for women.
We warned you that Peter & the Wolf – co-produced at Semafor Studios, represented worldwide by HANraHAN – was been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Animated Film. Guess what, THEY WON! Congrats!
Director Eran Creevy – repped by Sleeper USA and between the eyes in London – has done the impossible, he’s made me nostalgic for the late eighties and made the “running man” dance look cool. Yes, in the video a lad down in Cardiff pub busts all the moves that became MC Hammer’s trademark, and he doesn’t look like a complete dork doing it. He does the running man/Vanilla ice and the the Hammer Dance with a pub full of people joining him. Check out the Utah Saints “Something Good ‘08” (Ministry of Sound) (2008) music video 2:45 (UK) in the commercial archive. The eighties were never that cool, kids.
In the late eighties, I despised MC Hammer and that dance, but then again 
I looked like this in 1989. Amy Winehouse eat your beehive out, mine was all my own hair. Useless trivia: my friends amused themselves for hours bouncing lighters and coins off my hair and when I removed my helmet the beehive would “pop” back up into shape. This beehive feature made for a particularly good arrival at a club once as I pulled up on a shiny red scooter removing my helmet, and the line of people waiting to get in broke out in spontaneous applauding.
Ever gotten the idea for a great domain name, checked if it’s available only to find moments later that it has magically and suddenly been bought by the registrar you were using to check the availability with?
The practice is called “domain tasting”. While you’re mucking about and for whatever reason decide to not click “buy it” just yet – perhaps to check if other spellings are available – the registrar buys the domain. This forces you, if you still want the domain to register with that registrar which is most likely more expensive. This practice has been pissing people off for years. So it’s no wonder that a class action suit has been filed today, naming both Network Solutions and ICANN as the bad guys.
Last week when the mysterious ads for Obay cropped up around Ontario many a blogger speculated what it might really be selling. The Accordion Guy Joey Devilla posted the 15th about the Mysterious Ads for “Obayâ€
It’s obvious that the product doesn’t actually exist and that it’s some sort of viral marketing campaign. As for what the campaign is meant to promote, most people with whom I’ve spoken to about the ads think that it’s some kind of jab at parents who are following the disturbing trend of medicating their teenage kids out of normal teenage behaviour and into Stepford adolescence.
The comments are full of speculation on who the sender might be, from drug companies to anti-drug companies to churches before someone working for a College in Ontario reveals that they are the ones behind the campaign. So, now that the buzz it built, will people care?
Image from *J-Bl*’s photostream
Today in Canada.com the story Mystery ad gains momentum: whodunit? looks at the risks with a campaign like this. Just because people were curious when the campaign first went up doesn’t mean they’ll care when the sender is revealed.
In early 2007, an unbranded video of a bridezilla lopping off her hair in a pre-wedding fit drew 12 million views on YouTube but garnered next to nothing in the way of publicity for Sunsilk when, two weeks after the Canadian clip was uploaded, the hair-product company revealed its involvement.
…
Though Scientology and anti-pharmaceutical lobbyists have been widely named as suspects in the Obay whodunit, detective work by Canadian blogs Accordion Guy and Torontoist have pegged Ontario Colleges as the likeliest source of the ads – which despite being clustered in eastern Canada, have gained national attention online.
Questioned about their involvement with the campaign, Ontario Colleges spokesman Rob Savage was cautiously vague (“at this point, we don’t have any information we can give you”), but told Canwest News Service he would follow up before the end of the month about the “long-term marketing stuff” being undertaken by the organization.
Virgin Mobile USA – Lets have Text, Secretary (2008) :30 (USA)
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Virgin Mobile USA and McKinney have launched www.letshavetxt.com where you can have all the promiscuous txt you want. It’s safe and free and takes consumer engagement to a whole new level.
At www.letshavetxt.com, trained professionals will help you polish your sexy texting skills. Visitors can interact with such experts as the Nurse, the Plumber, the Cowboy, the Fireman, the Secretary and even a Sexbot, all ready to engage in “protected txt”. You can practice via live IM sessions and share with friends, too.
Total Beverage is a super-huge, enourmous, gigantic, really really big liquor store in Westminister Colorado. Denver based Sukle Advertising & Design has created a fresh new identity for Total Beverage that is the total opposite of cluttered booze-shops. Inspired by the simplicity of European road signs and informational graphics Sukle brought simplicity to a store large enough to contain all sorts of chaos. (Did I mention that the store is, like, big?)
JWT France are doing another web spreading animation, perhaps encouraged by the success of last years epic animation Wilkinson Quattro Titanium which played off the Oedipus complex with that baby who fought daddy for moms kisses. This time it tells the story of a poor cubicle worker who needs a break from back stabbing co-workers and that alpha male in the cubicle next door.
The end of the film says that “the quest for the ultimate break begins” and directs you to Breakultime-kitkat.fr (Flash 9 req.)
Kit Kat – Break Ultime / the Ultimate Break
Something is going on with political advertising in the states, first we have Chuck Norris cameos, now we have ads so funny that I want to move to Oregon just to vote for Steve Novick. Check out these two.
Would you have a beer with Steve Novick?
In non superbowl ad news, Louis Vuitton temporarily stops duping Yale students into drawing Louis Vuitton ads on the university yard or featuring pictures of Mikhail Gorbachev and other celebs using their luggage in traditional fashion spreads and instead now launch a TV commercial for the first time. The 90-second spot was shot in France, Spain, India and Japan and focuses on travel rather than fashion.
Louis Vuitton, a unit of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, described the advertisement as “the first ever on-screen corporate campaign by a luxury house.†Well, that’s not counting Chanel I guess, since they’ve been at it for some time.
I’m only putting “deaf” in quotation marks as a super bowl commercial can’t really be deaf, it’s an ad for crying out loud. Coolness though, that PepsiCo who is sponsoring the closed captioning for the game and had the idea to do a silent ad.
“Bob’s House” which will air during the superbowl is an ad which illustrates a popular joke in the hearing impaired community, and was created and performed by EnAble, a network in PepsiCo which supports diversity and the inclusion of persons with different abilities. Super adgrunts click the image above to take a sneak peak at the superbowl ad, all others see the making of “Bob’s House inside (quicktime)
The One Show Interactive 2008 Call For Entries
If you don’t deserve an award, who does?
Enter now at www.enteroneshow.org
You work with new media because you understand how to build a connection to your audience. You champion interactivity not because it’s trendy, but because it is the fastest way to make this connection. You and your team are pushing the limits of technology and you haven’t found the boundaries yet. Your work needs to be seen and it merits recognition.
Hey adgrunts, did you know that on Match.com started 2008 with a major UK advertising campaign, introducing two new characters, Cupid and Fate? Well they did, and since I have a major deadline looming (wish me luck! it’s a pitch!), I’ll just post and show you the release and all the pretty posters and the five films inside.
Mattias Montero from Social Club was both the director and DP on the new ATG commercial called “Statues”, which was shot in Madrid
and Stockholm during two weeks this past November. There’s a website to go with this film at Levandespel.se.
In the ad, statues of horses come alive at the break of dawn.
ATG – Statues (directors cut) – (2008) :45 (Sweden)
Euro RSCG New York did some research and discovered – *gasp* – that 95% of Americans want more fun. No kidding? Really? That totally goes against my research that says 80% want to less fun. Lets do a double-blind study guys!
Anyway, armed with this groundbreakingly obvious knowledge they set out to create a new fun campaign for Ritz crackers, arguably the most iconic cracker brand around.
To kick off the campaign, these wild posters – more inside.
Hard working adgrunts will appreciate the sunshine in this story. Creative directors Alan Nay and Tony Fulgam from World Famous ( I know, the name of the agency lends itself to writing “World Famous creative directors Alan Nay and Tony Fulgam” but I’m not falling for that, no siree!), were in the editing suite putting the finishing touches on a regional commercial for US Air when they realized that they loved all the shots that were edited out.
“We fell in love with some of the supplemental footage of the planes and decided to build a spec spot around it,†recalls Nay. “We ended up with a great brand piece that shows a beautiful ballet of planes and highlights all the destinations that company serves.â€
Nay and Fulgam were only intending to demonstrate their ability to take a commercial from concept through delivery, but when they posted the piece on their website it was spotted by Louis Moses, executive creative director of Moses Anshell, US Airways’ advertising agency, who brought it to the attention of his client. The airline was so impressed, it decided to make the spot a part of its national advertising campaign.
Check out the result here in the commercial archive.
According to the NYT Xerox Hopes Its New Logo Doesn’t Say ‘Copier’ – well good news Xerox, it doesn’t. It says “beach ball” or “hard peppermint candy” but not “Copier” or anything else you actually do.
“Our new brand reflects who we are, the markets we serve and the innovation that differentiates us in our industry. We have expanded into new markets, created new businesses, acquired new capabilities, developed technologies that launched new industries — all to ensure we make it easier, faster, and less costly for our customers to share information.” source press release
Sure, OK. Would you like a mint? 
Yeah, I took the headline right out of the mouth of the Finacial Times as it sounds so doomsdayie*. When I think of stealth marketing, I recall actors asking people at the empire state building to take their picture with a phone, and actors chatting about new drinks at bars. At the finacial times they’re talking about product placement, which is a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Product placement – in which items with visible brand names are integrated into television programmes – looks set to become legal on British screens within 18 months. But the process must be treated with care if it is to boost revenues, according to some of the UK’s leading broadcast executives.
Following an European Union directive on broadcasting issued last month, member states have been given the option of permitting product placement in most genres of commercial television, but not news, current affairs, sport and children’s programming.
* new word!
Something strange happens at this time of year. People begin to take ads literally.
Seems that not everyone is liking the new Toyota campaign where people are shown doing all sorts of silly things in order to get rid of their old car. They’re killing them off by pushing them off rooftop parkings, cutting them in half with the help of the snowplow guy, chainsawing down trees next to it which will fall and crush the car just so.
Daniel Johnston, executive director of the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts, said the only conceivable purpose for destroying your existing car, rather than simply trading it in, would be to collect insurance money to pay for a new car.
“Every scene that’s described in the ads is a crime,” Johnston said.
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