Hasta La Creative!

Layoffs after client losses are a harsh reality of the ad business. But one agency leader is putting a $5,000 cash guarantee behind each of the 50 employees he has to let go because a major account left his shop.

Ignite Social Media in Cary, N.C. (which also has an office in Detroit) will have to lay off almost half of its 110-person staff this month, reports the Triangle Business Journal, as Chrysler Group shifts social media responsibilities to IPG Mediabrands following a review.

But Ignite president Jim Tobin isn’t just giving the doomed staffers letters of recommendation, or endorsements on LinkedIn. He’s vouching for them in a more impressive way—by promising to pay $5,000 to any employer who hires an ex-Ignite staffer and then has to five the person within 90 days for performance or character issues. It’s like Hyundai Assurance for agency people.

Sure, one could wonder whether the sum is really enough to cover up to three months of wages, plus the HR hassle of canning a dud hire. But it’s nice to see a guy who is dropping the axe also go above and beyond to recommend talent. Mostly, it’s a clever way to highlight the meat coming onto the market. (In that sense, it’s a little reminiscent of the time a Goodby, Silverstein & Partners alum launched “Grab Some Goodby,” a website to promote his friends when that agency had to let blood in 2012.)

And if agency churn goes the way it sometimes does, maybe Chrysler’s new social media agency will even pick up a few of the Ignite staffers.

It’s a special week in Honda land, as ad agency RPA is enacting a sweeping plan to spread good cheer—online and off—as part of a five-day “Summer Cheerance” event.

A ket part of the campaign involves interacting with people on Twitter—replying to seemingly random posts with “funny, crazy or just plain weird cheer videos, memes and GIFs,” the automaker says.

Check out a few of those here.

@g_will12 Just think of how happy you will be when your shift ends though. #RetailFreedom #Cheerance pic.twitter.com/Cm9v8T2vPg

— Honda (@Honda) August 5, 2014

@caitlin41648090 You might need a little privacy, perhaps a wall…or fence. #Cheerance pic.twitter.com/G8yxVubli2

— Honda (@Honda) August 4, 2014

@benitezkaren21 You should take a lesson from this guy, he’s never bored. #Cheerance http://t.co/4QHfN33bOP

— Honda (@Honda) August 4, 2014

@MattTennenhouse At least your school is a more entertaining place than this guy’s bench. #Cheerance pic.twitter.com/Lt38uoDIkB

— Honda (@Honda) August 5, 2014

@HollyJessup Feel better soon! We aren’t doctors so the only medicine we can send is laughter. #Cheerance pic.twitter.com/ENWDl4vVZY

— Honda (@Honda) August 5, 2014

Facebook and YouTube will also be used. Notably, the brand has teamed with YouTube star Andrew Hales (of LAHWF fame) for two videos—the first of which is already live:

There will be real-world events, too, in select cities across the country. The brand will leave piñatas filled with goodies at random locations; use a “Cheer Detector” at a beach to find buried treasure chests and share them with onlookers; and place “Stand Here for Cheer” boxes in public places, encouraging people to climb up and receive a surprise act of cheer (like being serenaded by a saxophonist).

A Summer Cheerance station will also feature happy tunes on Pandora. The campaign also includes six TV spots (featuring dramatizations of actual social media posts from people who are unhappy with their current cars); banner ads on auto sites like Cars.com, KBB.com and Edmunds.com and on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; print ads in People, Sports Illustrated and top-market local newspapers; and network radio spots.

The goal is to spread cheer to 3 million people. (A ticker is keeping track of the tally at shophonda.com.) Upon reaching that goal, Honda will donate $100,000 to the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation.

“We are committed to spreading unprecedented cheer and connecting with as many people as we possibly can in five days,” said Susie Rossick, senior manager at American Honda Motor Co., Inc. “This collection of silly and wonderful morsels of cheer across social media, and in real life, are designed to make an impact, create smile-filled buzz and remind people that summer is the best time to get a great deal on a Honda.”

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: American Honda
Project: Honda Summer Cheerance Event

Agency: RPA
EVP, CCO: Joe Baratelli
SVP, ECD: Jason Sperling
SVP, Chief Production Officer: Gary Paticoff
Creative Director: Nik Piscitello
Creative Director: Aron Fried
Art Directors: Melinda Keough, Michael Jason Enriquez, Craig Nelson
Copywriters: Kevin Tenglin, Laura Kelley, Adam Gothelf
Creative Interns: Dennis Haynes, Megan Leinfelder, Sarah Ross, Sarah Johnston
VP, Executive Producer: Isadora Chesler
Producer: Phung Vo
Director/Sr. Producer, Content: Mark Tripp
Production Intern: Rudy Wilson

VP, Program Director: Dave Brezinski
Sr. Project Manager: Linda Shin

SVP, Management Account Director: Brett Bender
SVP, Group Account Director: Fern McCaffrey
Account Supervisor: Adam Levitt
Account Supervisor: Alison Bickel
Account Executive: Katie Ahn
Account Assistant: Wendy Kleinberg
Social Media: Joanna Kennedy, Tyler Sweeney, Mike Goldys, Amanda Womack

Production Company: RPA
Director: Mark Tripp

Editorial: RPA
Editor: Wendy Sandoval

Expedia and 180LA have done a nice job lately of thinking more broadly about the concept of travel, going beyond physical journeys into emotional, even spiritual ones. (Among its more memorable ads was the 2012 spot about the father’s difficult journey to accepting his lesbian daughter.)

Now, the travel site is getting even more ambitious—and more social—as it travels back in time with a fun project around people’s Throwback Thursday photos.

Between now and the end of August, Expedia is asking Instagram and Twitter users to tag their #tbt photo with @Expedia and #ThrowMeBack. Each week the company will pick one lucky winner and give them a travel voucher so they can indulge their nostagia and return to the place where the photo was taken—and recreate it.

Or, says Expedia, you can travel somewhere different and make a new memory—which seems to suggest this campaign is less about actually recreating the old snapshots and more about just piggybacking on the #tbt trend in general. However, the brand is asking the winners to send in the recreated photos with the goal at the end of the campaign of telling a photo story with all the side-by-sides.

“We all have great memories of summer vacations,” says Dave Horton, creative director at 180LA. “So to promote the nostalgia of summer travel, we wanted to tap into the most nostalgic trend out there, #tbt.”

To promote the contest, Expedia has posted the video below, “Back to Ocean Beach,” showing one family’s journey from Washington State to their old beach spot in San Diego to recreate a cute photo from the ’80s.

Read more about the campaign at instagram.piqora.com/expediathrowmeback.

And you thought beans were the musical fruit.

This memorable ad from BBH New York humorously suggests that Mr. Sketch scented markers get their smell from actual fruit farts—as we see a blueberry cutting a squeaker inside a fantastical Roald Dahl-esque odor-extraction lab.

The flavorful flatulence infuses one of the venerable Newell Rubbermaid brand’s blue marker pens, and we’re led to believe this same method applies to apple, raspberry, cherry, lemon and other scents in the Mr. Sketch line.

“We wanted a simple, entertaining concept that people would get right away,” BBH group creative director Gerard Caputo tells Mashable. “And since the name of the product isn’t intuitive to the benefit, we wanted to do a little education.”

Smells like a gold Lion to me! At any rate, the ad should amuse kids of all ages, even if the pungent manufacturing process on display doesn’t pass the smell test.

The numbers don’t lie: When a YouTube preroll ad comes on, users are primed to click the “Skip Ad” button the very millisecond it appears on screen. Research says 94 percent of preroll gets skipped shortly after the first five seconds (which are unskippable). And frankly, that number seems low.

The seemingly obvious solution is to make the first five seconds so compelling that people have to watch the rest—rather than just post your TV spot and hope for the best. Embracing the former, ad agency Nail in Providence, R.I., did a simple experiment. It tried to come up with an unskippable YouTube preroll ad.

See the results below.

It’s not very subtle, and it uses a trick from an old National Lampoon magazine cover. It’s also super low budget. Yet it got a view rate of 26 percent, which is impressive. And it made a few bucks for charity along the way.

What do you think? Is it worth building ad executions specifically to work better as YouTube preroll? Or is that just too much of a bother?

Here is Nail’s blurb about the dog video:

As marketers, it’s time we change the way we do YouTube preroll.

The current model seems to be to simply throw your TV commercial in front of any video a loosely defined demographic happens to be watching.

What a missed opportunity. The skip rates are unbelievable (94 percent is a generous estimate). And when there is no skip button, you can practically feel the resentment oozing through the Internet. Hardly the temperament most brands want to inspire from their customers, right?

Yes, content is king. But here, context is also king. (A gay royal couple if you will.)

Think about what we know at that moment: we know what they’re going to watch, we know what they just Googled, we know where they are, we know what device they are watching on, heck, we know they can skip the ad. All of this information is an opportunity to customize a message that respects the viewer and the platform.

We need to stop repurposing content designed for other channels and start taking advantage of the amazing abilities YouTube is throwing at us.

It’s like we’re NASA and we’re only using the Hubble Telescope to look at our neighbor’s boobs.

YouTube ads should be designed for YouTube. They should use the tools and features given to us and interact with the user and the platform in a way that can’t be rivaled. They should be self-aware. They should talk to one person at a time.

What the heck are we talking about, you ask?

OK, here’s an example. We wanted to raise awareness and money for an organization near and dear to us: the ASPCA. We had virtually no money but had given ourselves a serious challenge: can we make a skippable YouTube that virtually no one skips?

Did we do it? You tell us.

Young Latino consumers: They’re hip! They’re mobile! They lead active, on-the-go lifestyles!

They’re also, you know, pretty much like anybody else—though that’s something marketers rarely want to hear when they’re paying small fortunes for demographic “experts” to demystify the millennials who live at an every-growing cultural crossroads in America.

Honda pokes some fun at the marketing world’s Hispanic fixation in its newest ads from the Santa Monica-based Orci agency for the Fit. Wild-haired comedian Felipe Esparza serves as a tour guide of sorts into the world of young Latinos, only to find that they’re mostly just focused on running errands and getting to work.

“Are we going to a party?” he asks a couple from the back seat. 

“We’re…just going to the movies,” the young woman replies.

He’s also shocked to learn that instead of packing their trunk with trendy fixies, they’re just grabbing groceries. “Groceries? Rebels!” 

Agency president Andrew Orcí says the spots, shot in Spanish and English, began with the idea that brands often try to fit Hispanic consumers into specific patterns and niches, when in fact it’s a group that’s pretty much impossible to lump into a few convenient categories.

“Latino millennials are much more than what we make of them. They are a versatile bunch. They ping-pong between cultures, languages, interests and behaviors. That’s why it’s funny when you hear others trying to fit them into their box of clichés,” Orcí says.

“Felipe Esparza, as our ‘Latino expert,’ is the perfect voice to make fun of this situation. Why? Because not even a Latino can define a Latino. They simply defy all expectations.”

Many brands promise to make literally anyone more attractive to the opposite sex, but Old Spice takes this promise to the extreme with its new ads starring a hapless, barely functional android.

In a pair of spots from Wieden + Kennedy, a robot with the head of male human consistently wins with the ladies because he smells nice, all despite his best efforts to ruin his chances.

By positioning its products as deus-ex-machina sex potions that women simply can’t resist, Old Spice comes off smelling quite a bit like competitor Axe, which has actually been moving away from these kinds of tropes in favor of more cinematic fare.

But the spots manage to keep Old Spice somewhat distinct with the sort of over-the-top humor that has defined the brand since Isaiah Mustafa first transformed a pair of theater tickets into a fistful of diamonds. And the commercials—TV ad “Soccer” and Web spot “Nightclub”—definitely have their bizarre moments.

Plus, Old Spice has already made the case, powerfully if insanely, that its products could turn men’s hair into impossibly talented gophers, and mother-smothered boys into men. So it was really only a matter of time before it told us it could seal the deal for cyborgs. 

Greenpeace takes a page from Chipotle’s marketing playbook—haunting animation plus a distressing cover of a well-known song—in its continuing assault on Lego for partnering with Shell on a set of Shell-branded Lego products.

Attacking a beloved brand like Lego isn’t easy. But if you’re going to do it, you need to do it right. And this spot, showing a Lego version of the Arctic drowning in a sea of oil, is incredibly well made by creative agency Don’t Panic—who, you’ll remember, also did the memorable Save the Children ad which brought the Syrian war to London.

The visuals in the Greenpeace spot are beautiful, and the ethereal cover of “Everything Is Awesome,” from The Lego Movie, is the perfectly ironic backdrop. Yes, it is angering people (check out the YouTube comments if you’re looking for a grand old time), but Greenpeace is rarely interested in making friends as it pursues its enemies.

You can debate whether Lego was right to partner with Shell—here is Greenpeace’s point of view, and here is Lego’s reply to the attack ad. But as a pure PR play, “Everything Is NOT Awesome” (which has topped 1 million views since Tuesday) is itself pretty awesome.

The Ad Club, the advertising trade organization of New England, recently held its first “Brand-a-thon” contest for creative agencies to come up with branding campaigns for area startups in just three days.

Eight shops competed on behalf of nine startups. (Hill Holliday worked on two.) Third place and a check for $500 went to Forge Worldwide for its work on eyewear-on-wheels startup Project 2020. In second place, earning $1,000, was Allen & Gerritsen, which teamed with Supplet, an organic products subscription service for new moms.

The night’s big winner was Nail Communications in Providence, Rhode Island, which took home $2,500 and bragging rights for its work on Spray Cake, a product invented by a pair of Harvard students that “makes warm, fresh and delicious cake as easy as a whipped cream-style can of our batter, a pan, and an oven or microwave.”

That cash prize seems like a fair payout for a couple of all-nighters—even if Spray Cake, which won an innovation contest at Harvard and could be on store shelves by the end of the summer, isn’t the future of dessert.

Check out Nail’s Spray Cake video below.

When it comes to airports and traveling by plane, what’s not to love?

GSD&M spins the Beatles’ flower-power anthem “All You Need Is Love” in these Southwest Airlines ads celebrating the carrier’s emancipation from the Wright Amendment. The 35-year-old legislation restricted long-distance flights from Love Field in Dallas to protect business at the competing Dallas/Fort Worth International. When the amendment expires in October, Southwest can jet nonstop all over the country from Love Field.

Happy spots feature fireworks, a colorful water-cannon salute on the tarmac and an “All You Need Is Love” sing-along at a Texas Rangers game. “Love Moment,” the most offbeat commercial of the bunch, captures a few seconds of Love Field activity in super slow-motion—which is exactly how time seems to pass when your flight’s been delayed. Kidding, of course. The folks look as pleased as punch to hang around the terminal taking selfies.

An indie band called Echosmith provides the Fab Four cover. Their version’s got nothing on the original, but it sure beats airport muzak.

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