“You want lasagna for dinner?/Ricotta’s a winner/I’m thinking’ bout a little pasta with some sauce in the center.”
Speed rapper Mac Lethal busts out those lines and a whole lot more in this hidden-camera stunt from ad agency SuperHeroes touting the extended battery life of Asus’ Zenfone Max Android handset. (It lasts 38 days on a single charge, they claim!)
Allergy season is here, which means it’s time for a fun song about snot and sucky genes!
Set to Justin Bieber’s hit “Sorry,” pop-song parody artists Laughing Moms—aka Alisha Found Eden—croon about wheezing, antihistamines and hives, while apologizing to their kids for passing along the miserable immune response.
We’re not in “Like a Girl” territory anymore.
As one Adweek editor thoughtfully put it this week, “Female strength is the new female empowerment.” And while Always’ charming campaign may have begun that conversation, far more powerful elaborations on that message have appeared since, each improving on its predecessor in nuance, style and complexity. (Come on. Are you really going to say you weren’t blown away by Lemonade?)
This powerful new film from U.K. department store Selfridges, created in-house to promote its new Body Studio—as well as the fascinating variety of underpants from the shoot—hinges on the notion that contemporary women’s underwear is made with the male gaze in mind. (To wit: Victoria’s Secret’s big secret? It was founded by a dude.)
And in a step toward releasing women from the nonstop bullshit party they submit to from gendered birth onward, that’s something we can change right now, beginning with the brands pushing the panties.
Yeah, they hit that. Want to hear the deets?
Some swaggering cartoon pandas sing a slightly more animalistic version of Lonely Island’s viral blockbuster “I Just Had Sex” in a new campaign about endangered wildlife. Those bears aren’t looking for back slaps just because they got lucky, though. They’re propagating the species. So it’s OK if they tell the world about their adventures in shagging, even if they admit their partner ate bamboo the whole time. (Doesn’t matter, had sex!)
Livestreaming brand stunts are getting more and more popular—one of our recent favorites being the Waitrose campaign from the U.K. that showed live feeds from the grocery chain’s farms. Here’s a more gimmicky one from Portugal that tries to combine livestreaming with GIFs—or rather, a live-action imitation of GIFs.
With less than 100 days to go before the Rio Olympics, Lacoste builds on its “Life is a beautiful sport” campaign with a chic new video called “Support with Style.”
Created by BETC and its music subsidiary BETC Pop, “Support with Style” follows a troupe of “beautiful supporters” through Paris, whose landscape has been transformed into an eerily empty (and clean!) playground for Rio 2016 stadium seats.
The clip reinforces Lacoste’s relationship with the French National Olympic Committee (CNOSF), for whom it will outfit all French Olympic teams. The partnership was born in 2013, and will conclude this year (barring an extension of the contract).
Summer may be coming to an end, but here’s a fun way to keep reliving the good times—high-quality GIFs of your photos from the season, courtesy of Booking.com.
The Priceline-owned online travel agency is inviting consumers to submit pics of their summer adventures, then turning its favorites into animated GIFs. For eight days between today and September 3, Booking.com will release a new batch of winners. And if the launch samples are any indication, the results will be pretty great.
Highlights so far include ice-cream thievery, cocktail snorkeling, and a zany rainbow. Check out them out below—the original photos are on the left, and their GIF versions on the right.
Overall, the contest is an extension of the company’s “Wing Everything” push, celebrating spontaneous vacation. Would-be participants can compete by hash-tagging a pic #WingItYeah on Twitter or Instagram, or submitting via the Booking.com Facebook page. Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam has hired four digital artists to create the GIFS: James Kerr, Cari vander Yacht, Chris Timmons, and Justin Gammon.
As for Booking.com’s criteria for selecting which photos to GIF, the marketer says its looking for “jealousy-inducing” shots of things like “infinity pools” and “epic views.” In other words, it wants to reward you for doing what you were doing on social media anyways: bragging.
See more GIFs, and the campaign credits, below.
CREDITS
“BOOKING.COM–WHO WON BOOKING SUMMER?”
Chief Marketing Officer: Pepijn Rijvers
Head of Brand: Manuel Douchez
Brand Communications Director: Andrew Smith
Brand Specialist: Robert Schreuders
Social Media Product Owner: Julian Poole
Media Planning Director: Anoeska van Leeuwen
Media Manager: Kelly Lee
Media Specialist: Marie Lootvoet
WIEDEN+KENNEDY AMSTERDAM
Executive Creative Directors: Mark Bernath, Eric Quennoy
Creative Directors: Genevieve Hoey, Sean Condon
Art Directors: Jeffrey Lam, Kia Heinnen
Copywriter: Jake Barnes
Director of Interactive Production: Kelsie Van Deman
Interactive Producer: Matthew Ravenhall
Strategic Planner: Emma Wiseman
Communications Planner: Josh Chang
Group Account Director: Jordi Pont, Marcos Da Gama
Account Director: Aitziber Izurrategui
Account Manager: Caroline-Melody Meyer
Head of Design: Joe Burrin
Designer: Thomas Payne
Project Manager: Stacey Prudden
Business Affairs: Kacey Kelley
GIF ARTISTS
Cari van der Yacht
Chris Timmons
Justin Gammon
James Kerr
SOCIAL LISTEN AND RESPOND TEAM
AKQA London
What’s inspiring about a dusty patch of ground in Venice, Calif., populated with a few scraggly weeds and hemmed in by a chain link fence? Plenty, according to the team at 72andSunny’s in-house creative residency, 72U.
The six-member group looked at the forlorn piece of property and saw an opportunity for a community gathering spot and open-air workspace. Using crowdsourced info, they spent eight weeks creating a 1,500-square-foot pop-up park with free wi-fi, portable desks, fences that convert to tables and art installations. The space on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, meant to “inspire and connect the community,” its designers say, will be open for nine months.
It’s the latest project from 72U, which gathers creative thinkers from outside the traditional ad world, tosses them together for three months and challenges them to create art-meets-technology-meets-culture concepts. Other fruits of the program’s labor include a Craigslist-style interactive music video and two four-story murals about privacy in the digital age.
Peyton Manning is back to shame more lazy people into earning their Gatorade with sweat, and this time he’s brought his brother with him.
In a new reality-style ad series from TBWAChiatDay, Peyton, quarterback of the Denver Broncos, and Eli, quarterback of the New York Giants, play coach to college students who are foolishly trying to use money to get drinks out of a Gatorade vending machine. Rob Belushi, who starred as the convenience store clerk in a similar series last year, returns here as a deadpan janitor.
Despite the possibility that everything is staged, the reactions of the kids, when it dawns on them that the two adults hovering over him are actually football stars, are pretty priceless. And it’s refreshing to see an automated dispenser that refuses to comply, no matter what you do. (The kids are advised that they have to “Sweat it to get it,” but that doesn’t seem to work, either.)
Some other spots show Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt putting other students through the wringer in various ways.
The concept first launched last August. The “Sweat it to get it” tagline is still charmingly snide, but seems to cut out a significant portion of the population who drink Gatorade only to recover from hangovers—unless that counts as hard work, which it should.
Regardless, the Mannings can’t easily beat their ridiculous rap bit for DirecTV—at least not by sitting back and letting everyone else do the heavy lifting.
A new hybrid-electric Audi is just like that time Bob Dylan shocked audiences by playing an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, says Audi.
This new video from the automaker, a sponsor of the 2015 festival, interviews a mix of historical figures, like documentarian Murray Lerner, and modern musicians, like Courtney Barnett, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, and Colin Meloy of The Decemberists—artists who were part of the lineup at Newport this summer, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of famous Dylan’s 1965 show.
So, what exactly are the differences between a Fender Stratocaster and an Audi A3 Sportback e-tron, you might ask? It doesn’t matter, because when you’re driving around in your sweet $40,000 car, you’ll feel like a pioneer and a rebel cranking out creamy licks on your finely tuned instrument.
It also may be worth noting that while it’s widely believed audiences booed Dylan’s decision to go electric, that account is also disputed—other theories include that crowds were upset by bad sound quality, or the shortness of his set. But that’s nowhere near as good a story.
To be fair, the clip does include some charming rumination on music and its evolution. But the implicit message—”Don’t hate progress. Buy an Audi”—isn’t the most compelling song. Especially when other car marketers are making the case that fuel-efficient alternates can literally run on cow crap.
CREDITS
Client: Audi
Spot: “Plugging In”
Executive Producer: Joseph Assad
Director: Phil Pinto
Narration: ?Holly Laessig
Agency: PMK•BNC/Vowel
Production Company: One Thousand Percent
Producer: Tyler Byrne, Kristopher Rey-Talley & Rebecca Assing
Director of Photography: Sam Wootton
2nd Unit Director: Antonio Santos
Associate Producer: Victoria Lada
Editorial: One Thousand Percent
Editor: David Yoonha Park & Ryan Dickie
Post Producer: Kristopher Rey-Talley
VFX Company: Motion Atelier
Nuke Artist: Paulo Dias
Titles/Graphics: Wax Magazine
Animation: Konrad & Paul
Sound Designer: Colin Alexander
Mixer: Greg Tobler
Kudos to Procter & Gamble brand Lenor (known in the U.S. as Downy) for managing to eroticize fabric softener in surprisingly poetic fashion.
Each of these four long-form ads from Grey Dusseldorf delivers a cheeky ode to a different type of garment—skirts, trousers, shirts and scarves.
The first may be the wittiest, but overall they feature some of the richest copy in recent years, full of little twists and turns perfectly juxtaposed with a wildly varied montage that splices contemporary footage with older live clips, stills and cartoons spanning the better part of a century—not to mention a few much older works of art. (Modern highlights include a nod to the No Pants Subway Ride, and a sideswipe at Americans for misusing the word “pants” altogether.)
Even when the prose does get a bit purple, it stays oddly delightful. That’s in large part because, despite reveling in its own wordplay, it hews pretty closely to a truth-telling tone—not in a myopic, product-peddling kind of way but in a broader, clever and observational sense.
“So let’s not skirt around the subject,” explains the voiceover in a quirky Icelandic accent that doesn’t hurt the work’s charm any, either. “You turn heads, drop jaws and make grown men speechless. You help us in our search for Mr. Right, but locate so many Mr. Wrongs.”
In other words, it doesn’t always take the most progressive tack, but the whole thing is credible and entertaining enough to make you feel like Lenor doesn’t just want to reach into your pocket and pull out the cash (along with whatever blue lint it can find).
Rather, it wants to share the secrets to a life well lived. Because what is doing laundry about, if not the meaning of existence?
New parents eventually get so sick of advice, they’ll want to wipe their baby’s butt with it. And now, infant feeding brand Tommee Tippee has made that possible—with a limited run of baby wipes made from actual parenting advice.
The new Advice Wipes—made from a recycled mix of parenting books, magazine articles, printed-out blog posts and more—aren’t available for sale to the public (yet—they might be someday). Rather, they’ve been made in a limited edition for special distribution as part of a new campaign from McCann themed “#ParentOn,” which aims to give parents the confidence to put away the baby books and trust their instincts when it comes to raising their kids.
Check out the brand’s new video about the Advice Wipes here:
An established baby brand in the U.K. that is looking to expand further in the U.S., Tommee Tippee came to McCann with Eric Silver when he arrived earlier this year as North American chief creative officer. (Silver + Partners had picked up the brand earlier.) It’s been a while since Silver was a new father—his daughters are 16 and 14—but he’s still plenty familiar with the pressures of modern parenting, which Tommee Tippee is trying to ease.
“One of the lines we used early on with the client was, ‘Humans were having babies for 200,000 years before the first baby book was written,’ ” he says. “We’re saying to new parents, ‘You got this. You know what you’re doing.’ “
Not only weren’t there baby books in prehistoric times, there also wasn’t an Internet half a century ago (when Tommee Tippee was founded) to amplify the pressure on parents, as the brand’s #ParentOn site reminds us.
“When questions were raised on how to raise a child, you just figured it out,” says a post on the Tumblr-like site. “There was parent and child. There was instinct. And there was Tommee Tippee. For 50 years we’ve made products that are smart and simple, innovative and intuitive. For 50 years, we’ve helped parents parent the way they were made to.”
The site also includes this anthem spot:
The baby-products industry in many ways is invested in making parents feel insecure—so the products can be the antidote. And while a handful of brands, including Similac and Plum Organics, have acknowledged that fact, and turned it on its head, the Tommee Tippee campaign is one of the first to say parents can really do just fine on their own.
And it does so with an approachable, fun-loving vibe—and with elements like the Advice Wipes that could get some buzz. Says Silver: “We thought it would be funny to take all that advice and actually wipe a baby’s ass with it.”
For more about the avalanche of advice doled out to new parents, check out the Tommee Tippee infographic below, based on the brand’s survey of 1,000 U.S. moms:
Kevin Durant may be a basketball star, but he knows how to cheer for the little people, too.
In this new co-branded ad for Nike and Foot Locker, the Oklahoma City Thunder player gets so excited while sitting courtside at a street game that he throws his legs—and his namesake KD 8 Nikes—into the air.
It’s just one part of an epic crowd reaction when a player—wearing the same Joker-esque purple and green shoes—lands a reverse dunk. Other highlights from the stands include a super slow-mo “Oh no!” face, a sax solo and even a kid blasting off with a jetpack (which doesn’t really seem like the safest idea given the crowd below, but anyways).
In fact, the only spectator who doesn’t lose his mind is Zach LaVine of the Minnesota Timberwolves—the NBA’s 2015 slam dunk champion—who barely bothers to look up from studying a copy of a book titled The Funk on Dunk (which sadly doesn’t appear to be a real title … or at least, not one that’s currently in print).
Though to be totally honest, the move itself doesn’t come close to Blake Griffin’s latest for Jordan—or even Marvin the Martian’s.
CREDITS
Clients: Nike & Foot Locker
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Chris Groom, Stuart Brown
Copywriter: Sheena Brady
Art Director: Mike Warzin
Producer: Kevin Diller
Interactive Strategy: Reid Schilperoort
Strategic Planning: Brandon Thornton
Media/Comms Planning: Charles Lee, John Furnari
Account Team: Jordan Muse, Katie Gurgainus, Chase Haviland, Luke Purdy
Business Affaires: Alicia Willett
Project Management: Emily Norman
Executive Creative Directors: Joe Staples / Mark Fizloff
Head of Production: Ben Grylewicz
Production Company: MJZ
Director: Steve Ayson
Executive Producer: Emma Wilcockson
Line Producer: Mark Hall
Director of Photography: Philippe Le Sourd
Editorial Company: Exile Editorial
Editor: Kirk Baxter
Post Producer: Toby Louie
Post Executive Producer: CL Weaver
VFX Company: Saint
Flame Artist: Robert Trent
VFX Producer: Helen Park
—Digital/Interactive
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Director: Chris Groom, Stuart Brown
Copywriter: Sheena Brady
Art Director: Mike Warzin
Producer: Kevin Diller
Interactive Strategy: Reid Schilperoort
Strategic Planning: Brandon Thornton
Media/Comms Planning: Charles Lee, John Furnari
Account Team: Jordan Muse, Katie Gurgainus, Chase Haviland, Luke Purdy
Executive Creative Directors: Joe Staples / Mark Fitzloff
Agency Executive Producer: Ben Grylewicz
Digital Designer: Justin Morris
Exec Interactive Producer: Ben Oh
Content Producer : Keith Rice
Art Buying: Amy Berriochoa
My heartstrings are getting awfully sore, Amazon U.K.!
Last month, it was the “Nursery” ad with that bespectacled, mop-topped kid struggling to fit in on his first day of school. I wept for a week. Who wouldn’t?
I’d just gotten back on solid foods and … bam! … your new Amazon Prime spot, “Best Friends,” sends us all into spasms of blubbering, branded histrionics—by featuring a puppy with a bum leg!
It can’t romp and play in the park like the other mutts, chasing balls and chomping squirrels, or whatever. So, its owner (who wouldn’t look out of place in One Direction) whips out his phone, taps the Amazon app, and orders the perfect product to help Fido carry on stronger than ever before.
My keyboard is slick with tears.
Please, Amazon Prime, no more. I mean, what’s next? Babies? Cats? Baby cats? Baby cats in tiny Superman capes, hobbling around on crutches? I couldn’t take it. I’d need a box of Kleenex and the rest of the afternoon clear to Skype with my shrink.
CREDITS
Client: Amazon
Agency: Joint London
Creative director: Damon Collins
Creatives: Algy Sharman, Al Brown
Director: Kevin Thomas
Lots of kids play with barnyard toys, but the reality of factory farms isn’t as rosy.
A new anti-factory-farming campaign takes that probably obvious truth to the extreme, with a series of online mini-games, and an actual block set, featured in a biting—if also smug—product demo parody.
Animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) and agency Nice and Serious created the ad, website and physical toys, which include box-shaped hens, pigs and cows that cram too perfectly together into cages inside a barn. There are even little removable bacon strips.
The whole thing is basically a more square, interactive version of Chipotle’s famous and similarly themed “Back to the Start” campaign, minus Willie Nelson’s killer Coldplay cover and Johnny Kelly’s stunning animation.
The online games are basically farming-themed skins on classics like Whac-a-Mole (in this case, Whack-a-Sick-Chicken-with-Antibiotics, which will become less effective for humans the more they’re used in food). Other gripes include that cramped quarters make animals more prone to sickness, that rainforests are being torn down to make room to grow their feed, and that factory farming methods may result in meat that’s less nutritious (though given what people are willing to stuff in their faces, less delicious might be a more convincing argument).
It also casts labels like “100 percent natural” as misleading—a case that another group has made in more compelling fashion. In fact, CIWF runs into a familiar problem for animal advocacy organizations in that it feels like it’s preaching to the choir, even if its goal is to accrue signatures on a petition.
And sadly, the toys themselves don’t appear to be actually available for purchase—which puts them at a distinct disadvantage to popular competitors like the John Deere Farm Set.
What are we all but a bunch of emoji with arms and legs and a hankering for McDonald’s?
An insane new French ad for fast-food chain shows a city full of people going about their daily lives—driving around with friends, getting a shave at the barber, break dancing in the streets. But instead of human heads, they all have giant, 3-D, cartoon faces.
The soundtrack—a bubbly electro pop cover of the Buggles’ 1978 classic “Video Killed the Radio Star”—almost makes the ad feel like a music video. But the song, a rendition apparently created specifically for the ad, when coupled with the visual concept, which feels fresh in and of itself, seems to imply a critique of technology that’s more contemporary than the one baked into the lyrical hook, and a bit out of place for a major fast-food marketer.
McDonald’s and agency BETC Paris have explicitly created a world where digital communication reduces facial expression—a wildly subtle and complex phenomenon—to a series of shiny yellow orbs representing monolithic and equally monochromatic feelings. That’s a pretty excellent premise for a video, but the brand presents it here without any of the real anxiety about change that defines the text of the original synth pop song—or the deadpan theatricality with which the Buggles promoted and performed it; or, say, the more explicitly ironic bitterness and dissatisfaction of the 1996 alt-rock cover by the Presidents of the United States of America.
Instead, McD’s presents everyone being a stiff caricature of their own ids as a good thing. And that only really makes sense if you’re a faceless corporation that deals in cardboard platitudes like Happy Meals peddled by a brightly colored clown mascot, and other overly processed hamburgers that can save the doomed love lives of awkward young adults.
It probably doesn’t help the brand’s case that the tagline, “Venez comme vous êtes,” which translates to “Come as you are,” inadvertently bastardizes the spirit of another classic song about the tension between individuality, conformity and perception. (To be fair, that tagline has been around for years—and McDonald’s France has used it to, among other things, promote gay rights.)
Within the emoji ad’s own construct, it includes clever little tidbits—some of them perhaps more deliberate than others, like the kid who turns from angel to devil, as opposed to the weatherman with the smarmy, oafish look on his face. The spot also deserves credit for doing a distinctly better job of getting its message across than some other emoji-driven attempts at marketing. (In fact, it’s way simpler and more accessible—if less delightful—than some of the brands that decided to try to invent their own emoticons.)
It’s also worth noting that BETC Paris is experienced in creating absurd viral sensations, having graced the world with Evian’s classic roller-dancing babies, and the agency appears to be swinging for the fences again here. But the idea, for all its potential, suffers as a result of its attempt to be broadly appealing to what’s seen as the perpetual sunshine ethos of millennials. In that, it turns into a nauseatingly saccharine panacea—without near enough sarcasm or skepticism about what it’s actually saying.
In fact, the insistence on framing a fundamentally disturbing set of images as lighthearted and upbeat can’t keep the dark subtext and implicit social critique at bay. So, the whole thing ends up seeming unintentionally dystopian, like the Kia hamsters tossed into a meat grinder with a deadmau5 helmet and Katy Perry fever dream, with the resulting slime squeezed out into a bunch of circular, cookie-cutter nuggets, baked golden and plopped onto a bunch of necks.
Ultimately, it mostly adds credence to Taco Bell’s case that Ronald McDonald is actually a Stalinist looking to control all aspects of your life—only he’s way more insidious than you thought, mostly interested in brainwashing us into grinning idiots by defining happiness in terms of Big Macs and faces made of pixels.
Plus, you know the spot can’t be trusted because it doesn’t show anyone who just gobbled a McDonald’s burger and turned into the emoji for “I have a stomach ache and I wish I hadn’t eaten that”—which isn’t available yet, but is slated for release in 2016.
Converse’s Chuck Taylor II All-Stars debut with a bang, literally, in the Nike brand’s “Ready for More” campaign touting its highly anticipated line extension.
Ad agency Anomaly and visual-effects firm Framestore produced an explosive spot that shows a Chuck II high-top flying apart in super-slow-motion, impressively revealing the comfort technology within. As bits of rubber and canvas drift in all directions, the camera lingers on the padded sockliner, non-slip tongue and perforated suede lining, with each component identified for viewers.
Ultimately, the sneaker comes back together like new, which probably wouldn’t happen if you blew one up for real. (Still, I’d be glad to give it a try.)
It’s a cool, memorable way to expose the soul (along with the sole) of the reboot. I prefer its destructive simplicity to the bombast of a 30-second online spot that offers throbbing guitar riffs and cascading imagery of city skateboarders, motorcyclists, painters and rock bands, all wearing Chuck IIs. Reminds me of Dr. Martens’ anti-establishment appeals, with fast beats and flashy editing standing in for substance.
Of course, Converse does have street cred in the creative community. Its footwear has long been popular with artists and musicians. Anomaly’s recent “Made by You” push for classic Chucks scored by exploring the unique worlds of such individuals, showcasing both average folks and celebrities. This approach would have been a fine fit for the Chuck II, and hopefully the campaign will eventually step in that direction.
For now, we’re stuck with hipster clichés and a voiceover extolling, “More good stuff. More bad stuff. More your stuff. Whatever it is—more you!”
Sorry, Chuck, but it’s all a tad II much.
It’s good to walk a mile in your client’s shoes. But is it even better to walk 125 miles?
Le Balene will soon find out. The Italian agency is wooing an unnamed mobile accessories client with a unique stunt: Pitch them by walking from the agency’s home in Milan to the client’s office in Reggio Emilia—a distance of some 200 kilometers, or about 125 miles.
Creatives Davide Canepa and Francesco Guerrera, accompanied by their fearless leader, CEO/account director Marco Andolfato, set out last Friday. If all goes well, they’ll arrive this Friday, in time for their 10 a.m. meeting. The walk has taken them through country roads and forests, and across rivers. They’re recording, tweeting and blogging—and even servicing other clients—along the way, using only mobile phones and tablets.
The campaign is tagged #mobileworkers. You can follow their adventures on their blog (that is, if you read Italian; otherwise, hit up Google Translate and enjoy the pictures). Check out our Q&A with Andolfato below, along with a special video shout-out to Adweek readers.
AdFreak: Describe #mobileworkers.
Marco Andolfato: We want to demonstrate that technology is an enabler of whatever you want to do. Every worker is a mobile one these days, and every worker can use technology to work better. As advertising people, to work better we need to take more time to think, and technology is helping us to savor slowness, and to think faster.
So, we decided to walk the 200 kilometers from our office to the client’s, working on the presentation while on the journey.
Can you tell us about the client and the brief?
The client deals with accessories for mobile devices. Usually people are much more interested in devices than in accessories. But accessories allow you to make the best use of the technology; they are your enablers. Much more so if you are a worker.
Along the road we’re using rechargers, selfie sticks, headphones, all kind of cables, iPhone covers. Without them we couldn’t have worked on the road. And our beautiful ideas wouldn’t have reached the client.
How will you use #mobileworkers to pitch?
We are preparing a movie—shooting during the days and editing it during the evenings. This should exemplify the idea, but just in case, we’re preparing 4/5 strategic slides. Of course, we’re planning to enter the meeting room with backpacks and boots.
How far have you gotten? How long will it take you to finish?
We started Friday from our office and walked 137.8 kilometers so far [as of July 28]. The presentation is Friday at 10 a.m., hopefully!
Does the client know you are walking?
Yes. Also because if we are not there next Friday…
How did you prepare for this trip?
You mean physically? I ran a marathon in Copenhagen two months ago. Davide is 27, and Francesco’s real fuel is creativity.
brightcove.createExperiences();
The killing of majestic animals is big news this week. And now, the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd has unveiled a brutal PSA protesting the slaughter of whales by demonstrating how they die at the hands of humans—as acted out by a human.
The spot is skillfully horrific, as Australian character actor David Field mimics getting shot, convulsing, choking and coughing up blood. The PSA aims to draw attention, in particular, to the method of using an explosive harpoon to shoot the mammals, which causes massive internal injuries, and to the time it takes for them to die, which can be up to an hour.
“The cruelty inflicted on whales is shocking, and while most people abhor whaling, I think many don’t realize just how brutally these sea mammals are butchered,” Field said in a statement. “As a supporter of Sea Shepherd, I want to bring this barbaric practice to the attention of as many people as possible in the hope that we can get it stopped.”
As with many animal-rights PSAs, this one aims to evoke empathy by inviting people to imagine how they’d feel in the animal’s situation. This spot goes further by imagining the outcry if whaling were to happen to humans on a large scale. That’s a rhetorical device, yet it undermines the message a bit because it’s so easy to refute—it’s not happening to humans, after all. Yet that kind of hyperbole isn’t surprising following such violent imagery. (The excessive nature of the campaign also extends to the hashtag, #UltimateDeathScene.)
“Those who care about marine wildlife really feel something deeply when they see whaling taking place. We sought to harness this feeling to generate the maximum impact,” said Paul Swann, creative partner at Sydney agency The Works, which created the campaign. “The idea of a human experiencing what a whale does, combined with a graphic execution, will come to life across video, social, radio and print.”
CREDITS
Client: Sea Shepherd
Aegncy: The Works
Creative Partner: Paul Swann
Creative Leads: Adam Bodfish and Leo Barbosa
Digital Strategy Director: Damien Hughes
Planner: Leo Hennessy
Head of Digital Production: Dave Flanagan
Content Production Manager: Tristan Drummond
Senior Digital Designer: Kim Sanders
Social Media Strategist: Vanessa Hartley
Social Community Manager: Anna Lai
Project Management: Catriona Heaphy, Gillian Snowball and Juliette Hynes
Director: Tony Prescott
Director of Production: Robert Morton
Post Production: Method Studios
Sound: Nylon Studios
In 1990, a group of disabled people pulled themselves up the steps at the U.S. Capitol building to advocate for the Americans With Disabilites Act, protesting delays in an event that became known as the Capitol Crawl.
Now, a new outdoor ad campaign from Google and 72andSunny marks the 25th anniversary of the landmark legislation by featuring painted portraits of key figures in the disability rights movement on the steps of major cultural buildings in Washington, D.C.
Posted from July 24-27, the billboards featured a range of notable activists—like Claudia Gordon, the first deaf female African American attorney in U.S. history, and Ed Roberts, a leader in the drive for the ADA as well as the movement more broadly—at buildings like Gallaudet University and the National Portrait Gallery, respectively. They also celebrated legislators like former U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island.
A quote accompanied each portrait. “This vital legislation will open the door to full participation by people with disabilities in our neighborhoods, workplaces, our economy, and our American Dream,” reads Harkin’s, posted on steps in the Newseum.
The steps leading up to the Carnegie Library also feature a quote—sans portrait—from President George H.W. Bush, who signed the ADA into law.
72andSunny hired artist Darren Booth to illustrate the campaign. An accompanying website features more in-depth tellings of each figure’s role in the movement, including, in most cases, video interviews with the subjects themselves. It also ties more directly back into the brand’s products, with a Google Map offering a “tour” of the locations that hosted the portraits.
Here are all the paintings and their locations:
Claudia Gordon at Gallaudet University
Tom Harkin at the Newseum
Patrick Kennedy at Woodrow Wilson Plaza
Justin Dart Jr. at Woodrow Wilson Plaza
Tia Nelis at the National Museum of American History
Kathy Martinez at the National Museum of American History
Ed Roberts at the National Portrait Gallery
Judy Heumann at the National Portrait Gallery
Tatyana McFadden at the National Portrait Gallery
CREDITS
Client: Google
Agency: 72andSunny
Artwork: Darren Booth
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
