Hasta La Creative!

Carlton Draught – Big ad – (2005) 0:60 (Australia)
Oh yes, we all remember the Carlton Draughts Big Ad fondly. It went on to rake in the awards and even had a fierce fight with Guinness Noitulove / Evolution for the Grand Prix spot in Cannes 2006. The later Carlton Draught flashdancer advert was kind either super funny or “meh” depending on who you asked. Carlton has thus done a big time gamble and brought back the thousand Carlton men who sort themselves into shapes.
Only this time… they’re skydiving.
Super adgrunts, enjoy the
Carlton Draught – Skytroopers / Halftime show – (2008) 1:20 (Australia)

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So, according to Radar Online the “Mac guy”, aka Justin Long, is not returning for the next batch of Mac ads. Why? Well if you ask Slate, it’s because he’s a smug little twit.

Perhaps for striking people as a “smug little twit,” in the words of Seth Stevenson, ad critic for Slate. Long, he adds, is “just the sort of unshaven, hoodie-wearing, hands-in-pockets hipster we’ve always imagined when picturing a Mac enthusiast…. It’s like Apple is parodying its own image while also cementing it.” Of the polymathic Hodgman, who has drawn acclaim for his work on The Daily Show and NPR’s This American Life as well as his book, The Areas of My Expertise, Stevenson writes, “Even as he plays the chump in these Apple spots, his humor and likability are evident.”

As much as I like to laugh at the PC guy played by John Hodgman – that Mac guys still wins. I never found him smug or annoying in the least. But then again, the only hardware I run is either a mac or something I put together which has a nice fast Athlon in it. Full disclosure, our server now has xeons which is Intel, but this still doesn’t mean I’m using anything from Microsoft, ever. How’s that for a smug mac user?

Here’s a little trip down memory lane of Mac vs PC commercials for you in the commercial archive, inside are links to the ads so far in reverse chronological order. Which one is your favorite?

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Saatchi and Saatchi, Stockholm has done an almost global commercial for Sony Ericsson which will be aired in “twenty to thirty” different countries. In the ad, several people sing Depeche Mode’s song “enjoy the silence”, and it’s the first time this song has been used in an advertisment.
The most interesting feature of this mood-ad is that there’s a transvestite in it. At least I think this lass is born a lad. Sony Ericsson – Enjoy the silence – (2008) :60 (Sweden)

Saatchi is also aiming for a world record in the amount of people who sing the same song and with the site Jointhesong.com created by B-Reel, Sony fans can upload themselves singing along to the same song. If the campaign works, a Guiness book of records place might be in order.

“I think that the current record is 275 000 [people singing the same song], so it won’t be easy to beat. Be we’re officially aiming for it.”

said Stefan Bergström Sony Ericsson’s Nordic communication manager to Resumé

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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.

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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.

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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 “Obay”

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.
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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.

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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?)

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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?

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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)

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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.

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