Kevin Hart’s upcoming stand-up concert film is called What Now? Which is the question he poses to his uninterested wife and son in this Xfinity ad by 72andSunny New York.
A road safety ad by AMV BBDO is sparking cries of victim-blaming in the U.K. for warning cyclists to hang back from trucks that are making left turns—the driver’s blind side on that country’s roads.
Havas Chicago certainly knows how to stop pedestrians in their tracks with its office-window installations for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Last October it set up peep-show windows, but the peepers got a bit of a shock when they looked inside. This year’s effort, which launched Tuesday and runs through the end of the month, features a Plexiglass room in the lobby filled with 3-foot boob balloons—latex spheres painted to look like breasts.
Brightly colored window decals invite passersby to come inside at 36 E. Grand Avenue and just have a good old time playing with them.
The Nike Mag self-lacing sneakers from Back to the Future II are finally a reality—27 years after the movie, five years after Nike built a Mag prototype, and seven months after it announced a different self-lacing shoe altogether.
How do you improve a glass of milk?
By improving the glass of milk. (Ba dum—tss!)
With help from DDB Canada, the Dairy Farmers of Canada introduce The Milk Glass™. Because you don’t want to drink milk from just any old thing, and certainly not a clumsy mug that’s as adapted to coffee as it is to dairy.
Working with toddlers in commercials can be tough. Sometimes, the wee thespians just can’t take direction. In these cases, alas, the kid most definitely does not stay in the picture. David Bernstein, chief creative officer at The Gate Worldwide, and his team faced just such a challenge as they shot new spots for iconic children’s clothing brand Garanimals.
The apparel has been sold exclusively by Walmart since 2008, and the new ads introduce the line “Big on cute. Small on price,” because Garanimals items start at less than $4.
“Everybody remembers Garanimals” from the brand’s 1970/’80s heyday, Bernstein says. In that era, the colorful tops and bottoms could be easily mixed and matched by youngsters based on which critters appeared on the items’ hangtags. (Those tags were discontinued when the label began specializing in clothes for newborns and the 5T set.)
“Even first-time moms have probably been exposed and maybe even have worn the brand as a child,” says Bernstein. “Part of our target audience live in multi-generational homes. The media strategy and selected programming allows one generation to remind the other about the brand and to speak of its virtues.”
To facilitate production when working with kids, “You always cast several actors for the day of the shoot,” he adds, “because they don’t always want to act on the day of the shoot.”
Working with toddlers in commercials can be tough. Sometimes, the wee thespians just can’t take direction. In these cases, alas, the kid most definitely does not stay in the picture. David Bernstein, chief creative officer at The Gate Worldwide, and his team faced just such a challenge as they shot new spots for iconic children’s clothing brand Garanimals.
The apparel has been sold exclusively by Walmart since 2008, and the new ads introduce the line “Big on cute. Small on price,” because Garanimals items start at less than $4.
“Everybody remembers Garanimals” from the brand’s 1970/’80s heyday, Bernstein says. In that era, the colorful tops and bottoms could be easily mixed and matched by youngsters based on which critters appeared on the items’ hangtags. (Those tags were discontinued when the label began specializing in clothes for newborns and the 5T set.)
“Even first-time moms have probably been exposed and maybe even have worn the brand as a child,” says Bernstein. “Part of our target audience live in multi-generational homes. The media strategy and selected programming allows one generation to remind the other about the brand and to speak of its virtues.”
To facilitate production when working with kids, “You always cast several actors for the day of the shoot,” he adds, “because they don’t always want to act on the day of the shoot.”
In advertising’s best pun so far this year, Chance the Rapper encounters Chance the Wrapper in this new Halloween-themed Kit Kat commercial by agency Anomaly.
The 23-year-old hip-hop star is seen wearing a bear suit and shopping for Halloween candy (Kit Kats only, of course) when his wrapper alter ego calls out to him. And as promised, we get Chance’s version of the Hershey brand’s famous “Gimme a Break” jingle—a slow, crooning piano version of it, as it turns out.
In advertising’s best pun so far this year, Chance the Rapper encounters Chance the Wrapper in this new Halloween-themed Kit Kat commercial by agency Anomaly.
The 23-year-old hip-hop star is seen wearing a bear suit and shopping for Halloween candy (Kit Kats only, of course) when his wrapper alter ego calls out to him. And as promised, we get Chance’s version of the Hershey brand’s famous “Gimme a Break” jingle—a slow, crooning piano version of it, as it turns out.
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How do you shoot real, authentic, unscripted footage of a family for your advertising campaign? Set up a bunch of cameras around their house, and then go away for a long time—so the family can (mostly) forget about the cameras, and you, and just be themselves.
That’s what ad agency CHI & Partners has done for TalkTalk, the British TV, internet and mobile provider. They found an ordinary family—mom Julie and dad Paul, sons Peter and Harry, daughters Sophie and Lucy, niece Daisy and family dog Elvis—and filmed them for two straight weeks with unmanned cameras.
Then they sorted through the hundreds or hours of footage to find ordinary, everyday moments to write ads around. The point? That small moments matter, and indeed, are the stuff of life—particularly moments involving TalkTalk’s products and services, from trying to have a TV dinner with a dog on the sofa, to texting boyfriends, to teaching your aunt how to use a tablet.
Finally someone has found a good use for drones: Making a cake.
A team of little flying robots assembles a three-tier confection by airlifting genoise, splashing icing, firing candies out of a makeshift cannon and even lighting a sparkler with a blow torch—all in a new ad for Norwegian telecoms company Telia.
Imagine you’re asked to assess the beauty of airbrushed photos of professional models—and then regular snapshots of your spouse, or a close family member.
A new Dove ad from Portugal does that to a group of men, sitting them down in an empty warehouse and strapping them to a heart monitor in an attempt to measure their emotional response when a screen flashing pictures of stereotypically attractive women—the kind who might grace a shampoo ad with a half-smile—suddenly gives way to pictures of wives, sisters, daughters and grandmothers.
Among iOS 10’s shiny new toys is a messaging feature that allows you to add effects to your message bubbles, send full-screen animations with your messages, add handwritten notes and more. Apple pushes those capabilities with a pretty new spot from TBWAMedia Arts Lab that focuses on one full-screen animation in particular.
Sooner or later, everyone’s sausage needs some support.
If you find yourself in such straits between now and this Friday—say, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Central time—go ahead and call Johnsonville HQ at (844) 9-SAUSAGE. Company employees will be serving up all manner of advice on pork-pipes and cow-casings as part of the marketer’s “Sausage Support Center.”
Live! Unscripted! Sausage talk! That number again: (844) 9-SAUSAGE.
There’s been no dearth of dubious job titles in the recent years, thanks in large part to the tech boom. But outerwear marketer Columbia Sportswear is reaching for new and awesome heights with its tongue-in-cheek “director of toughness” role—and this time around, it’s really making candidates work for the gig.
A new ad from agency North shows potential hires interviewing for the position, largely by taking a surprise, semi-coerced trek up to the top of a mountain, only to suffer the verbal abuse of an HR rep camped out 8,000 feet above sea level. Because if they really are qualified, such trivial exertion and feeble taunts shouldn’t faze them at all.
We all know a girl like Louise Delage. You’ve been on Instagram for years and are scraping by with 50 likes on a good day—then she appears on the scene, with her fun little life, and cultivates over 16,000 followers in a few months.
In the years following LonelyGirl15, we learned to be wary of that kind of success. Who is this girl, and what does she do? But “personal branding,” Instagram stardom and the overall pressure to demonstrate the most photogenic parts of our lives has perhaps blunted our critical knives. Aren’t we all stars for somebody?
So when Louise Delage arrived on Instagram on Aug. 1, bearing drinks and a cheerful, sun-soaked smile, few wondered who she was. Many assumed she was one more chic Parisian. Maybe she had one of those depressed Instagram husbands whose sole role in life is to capture their muses for an insatiable audience.
U.S. Cellular sets a new standard for tedium with this preroll ad that lasts seven hours.
It’s about as exciting as watching grass grow. In fact, that’s mostly what happens during its 420-minute running time: Grass grows … and grows … and grows. Imperceptibly. As grass is wont to do.
Crafted by MullenLowe, the ad opens with brand spokesman Darien riding a lawnmower across an expansive green field. “Switch to U.S. Cellular,” he says, “and get seven gigs of data for just $49 per month. You’ll have so much data, you can stream almost anything. Even hours and hours of grass growing. Enjoy!”
One December day at the International Scene of Contemporary Dance in Stockholm, Sweden, a man named Olle, one of the best air acrobats in the world, did a triple-somersault jump. It was a jump like hundreds of others he’d done before, but this time was different.
He fell on his head.
“Within that second I heard my neck break. A moment devoid of time,” Olle writes. “The sound of the neck break echoed in my head, itself an endless, dark, spherical space in which I was hovering weightlessly.”
Olle crushed several cervical vertebrae and damaged his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from the neck down. The doctors couldn’t say how much brain functioning he’d regain, or even whether he would walk again. One thing was sure: He’d never jump again.
It’s been 10 years since then. Olle has miraculously recovered. Many people like him would count their blessings, move to a quiet town and take up gardening. But in what’s being dubbed “the most irresponsible circus performance ever,” Olle is gearing up to repeat the same jump, with just one difference. This time, he’ll do it from up to 12,000 feet in the sky.
When Major League Soccer began play in 1996, those of us who lived in New York City had only one team to root for—the New York/New Jersey MetroStars. But despite their odd hybrid name, they were pretty solidly a New Jersey team. They played out at Giants Stadium, and those of us coming from Manhattan would often arrive late to games, as they never scheduled enough buses from Port Authority. Intentional or not, the indifference to fans east of the Hudson was palpable.
That franchise has since cleaned up its act, and become the formidable New York Red Bulls. They still play in Jersey, though, at the Red Bull Arena in Harrison (which is, admittedly, a lovely stadium). But luckily for New York City fans, there’s been another option over the past two seasons—New York City Football Club, a new MLS franchise that plays its home games at Yankee Stadium.
NYCFC clinched its first-ever MLS Cup playoff berth this past weekend, and is celebrating with a gritty new spot from Johannes Leonardo, its first-ever brand commercial.
The poetic spot, called “Along These Lines,” is as much a tribute to the city as the team—rallying New Yorkers to get behind their soccer team, using a theme of connection that’s both literal (the subway system connects everyone, and of course stops at Yankee Stadium) and figurative.
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