Hasta La Creative!

Rejoice, happy-go-lucky and environmentally conscious Coca-Cola-lovers. Thanks to this new “2nd Lives” kit from the brand, you can now transform your Coke into something even more delightful.

Is that just an empty soda bottle? Nope, it’s a squirt gun. Useless piece of trash? Nope, it’s a pencil sharpener, or the perfect rattle for your baby. Make your children happy. Give them Coca-Cola, and toys made from Coca-Cola. And if you have two empty Coke bottles, you can even make a dumbbell to burn off some of the calories you gained by guzzling both.

Created with the help of Ogilvy & Mather China, the campaign features a line of 16 innovative caps that can be screwed on to bottles when they’re empty, transforming them into useful objects like water guns, whistles, paint brushes, bubble makers and pencil sharpeners. It’s all part of a clever effort to encourage consumers in Vietnam to recycle, and a rare success at the sort of alchemy that seeks to reincarnate garbage as advertising (even if such attempts are a cornerstone of the marketing industry). Coke will give away 40,000 of these modified caps, which come in 16 different varieties, to start.

It’s not clear if the add-ons themselves are made from recycled material. Even if they are, producing more plastic parts might not be the best way to reduce plastic waste.

But that’s beside the point. While the caps might not quite hit the sharing chord as clearly as the it-takes-two-to-open bottles, they’re a smart bit of advertising. “What if empty Coke bottles were never thrown away?” the campaign asks. Clearly, it would mean people everywhere could finally live in a utopia where everything was made of Coke products.

It pays to follow Newcastle Brown Ale on Twitter. Not much, but it pays.

The British beer brand continues its tongue-in-cheek ribbing of traditional marketing by pledging Monday night to pay the next 50,000 people who follow @Newcastle “the princely sum of $1.” To take the brewer up on this, visit follownewcastleontwitter.com.

This is all in the name of transparency. “Why should people endure the unsolicited marketing of other beer brands for free when they can endure Newcastle’s unsolicited marketing and get paid?” the brand rightly asks. The brand is actually going to mail 50,000 checks for $1 each. (“Newcastle-branded checks, of course.”)

The stunt, orchestrated by Droga5, is called “Follow The Money,” and it’s not a complete joke. Despite having some big YouTube hits, and almost 1 million Facebook fans, the brand has fewer than 16,000 Twitter followers. “We really do want 50,000 more Twitter followers,” the brand tells us.

When most great spec projects make the rounds among the Internet’s creative community, it’s assumed the work will never see the light of day. Here’s a notable, wonderful exception.

Late last year, Italian designer Marco Sodano received global praise for his creative pixelation of famous paintings remade with Legos. At the time, he said he wanted to convey “the belief that every child with Lego can become a great artist like Da Vinci and Vermeer.”

This month, he posted a new gallery, this time empowered to call it simply a “campaign for Lego.” The official versions (largely similar but for the word “Imagine” embedded at the top left) were produced by agency Geometry Global in Hong Kong, with Sodano as art director.

Check out the four official executions below:

Via The Inspiration.

Coca Cola’s ad strategy basically comes down to bombarding you with joy and togetherness, and a new animated spot from Wieden + Kennedy continues that tradition.

A boy bumps into a girl and lets go of a red balloon he’s carrying, so he can catch the Coca-Cola she drops, because what better way to charm in a Coke commercial than to save a Coke. The camera follows the balloon as it rises past the windows of a brick building, peering into a range of shared family milestones and moments, all, naturally, including little red-wrapped bottles of sugar water.

Couples are, variously, moving in together; holding a tea party with their young daughter; visiting their college-aged son; cooking and dancing together; and celebrating their fifty year anniversary. All the while, singer-songwriter Wendy Colonna croons in the background about finding happiness in a pair. It’s the slightest bit reminiscent of Up, but mostly an adorable and incredibly efficient bit of storytelling that’s right in the brand’s wheelhouse.

Coca-Cola is no stranger to animated ads (e.g., the Polar Bears and Happiness Factory) or twee soundtracks, and it’ll never stop pumping viewers full of bubbly feelings until they forget—or just stop caring—that the product isn’t really that good for them, even if the brand does occasionally mix in a little sass.

Last summer, TBWA Paris unveiled a bold campaign for McDonald’s that consisted entirely of classic menu items photographed up close—with no branding at all. (Did somebody say McDonald’s? Not in those ads.)

Now, agency and client are back with a follow-up campaign that, in a way, is even more minimalist. Instead of the actual products, now we get clean, simple drawings of the products—turning them into actual icons. There is a bit more explicit branding on these, though, but it’s still very subtle—a tiny Golden Arches next to the illustrations.

The ads feature McDonald’s “Big 6” menu items—Big Mac, cheeseburger, fries, sundae, Chicken Nuggets and Filet-o-Fish—and will appear on more than 2,700 outdoor displays in France, with the major rollout beginning June 2. The agency calls the work “unique and modern, in the McDonald’s brand image,” “exclusive, simple and universal, just like the six iconic products” and “a fun and intriguing addition to our cities.”

More images, plus a new McDonald’s TV spot from TBWA Paris, below.

Source

Evidently not worried about cries of sexism, Heineken has organized a giant shoe sale in Brazil this Saturday—so that women will flock to it and leave their boyfriends and husbands in peace to watch the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Atlético de Madrid.

Women's shoes will be available for up to 50 percent off at Shoestock stores. Wieden + Kennedy São Paulo came up with the idea, which Heineken in a press release said "is entirely good-natured and will generate conversation." Both are surely true.

"Our goal is to run a fun campaign unlike anything we have ever organized in Brazil," said Bernardo Spielmann, director of the Heineken brand and sponsorships at Heineken Brazil. "Therefore, the Heineken Shoe Sale will be announced with a humorous tone in the digital environment, including teasers, email marketing and videos."

"The idea is to help guarantee men time to watch the game on Saturday afternoon," said W+K creative director Otavio Schiavon. "So we're going to provide an argument that will make it so their wives or girlfriends have something interesting to do during the game. He's going to surprise her with news about a shoe sale. And she, in turn, can leave him to watch the UEFA Champions League final."

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Heineken
Project: Heineken Shoe Sale
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, São Paulo
Executive Creative Directors: Icaro Doria, Guillermo Vega
Creative Directors: Otavio Schiavon, Marco Martins
Copywriters: David Besller, Caio Mattoso, Otavio Schiavon
Art Directors: Raul Arantes, Rodrigo Mendes, Marco Martins
Digital Producer: Rafael Gaino e Maurício Junior
Digital Deploy: Debaser
Agency Producer: Gabriel Dagostini
Planning: Rodrigo Maroni, Rafael Rossi, Livia Lanzoni, Ian Bueno
Account: Danilo Ken, Beatriz Andreucci, Isabele Garcia
Media: Renato Valio, Stephanie Campbell, Caroline Ventura, Douglas Silveira
Client Approval: Daniela Cachich, Bernardo Spielmann, Chiara Martini, Andrea Rubim, Renata Costa
Production Company: Conspiração Filmes
Director: Fernando Reginato (DEL)
Director of Photography: Paulo Disca
Producers: Karin Greco, Pablo Alvez
Account, Production Company: Leonardo Alves, Renata Schincariol
Audio Facility: A Voz do Brasil
Account, Audio Production House: Rosana Souza, Cássia Garcia
Announcer: Edinho Moreno
Post House: Nash

Last summer, TBWA Paris unveiled a bold campaign for McDonald's that consisted entirely of classic menu items photographed up close—with no branding at all. (Did somebody say McDonald's? Not in those ads.)

Now, agency and client are back with a follow-up campaign that, in a way, is even more minimalist. Instead of the actual products, now we get clean, simple drawings of the products—turning them into actual icons. There is a bit more explicit branding on these, though, but it's still very subtle—a tiny Golden Arches next to the illustrations.

The ads feature McDonald's "Big 6" menu items—Big Mac, cheeseburger, fries, sundae, Chicken Nuggets and Filet-o-Fish—and will appear on more than 2,700 outdoor displays in France, with the major rollout beginning June 2. The agency calls the work "unique and modern, in the McDonald's brand image," "exclusive, simple and universal, just like the six iconic products" and "a fun and intriguing addition to our cities."

More images, plus a new McDonald's TV spot from TBWA Paris, below.

Oreo would like you to start solving your conflicts by scrubbing its cookies against your tongue as fast as you possibly can.

This new spot from AKQA London (and Mind's Eye director Luke Bellis) shows pairs of what appear to be siblings and friends squaring off over various disputes—like riding shotgun in a car whose backseat is stuffed to the brim, picking what to watch on TV, or taking the blame for knocking the head off a statue with a soccer ball. But instead of, you know, flipping a coin or playing Rock Paper Scissors, they whip out Double Stuf Oreos, put on the stupidest faux-intense-concentration faces they can muster, and compete to be first to transfer all the cream from their cookies onto their tongues.

"We've all got something to settle," reads the copy. "Lick for it," adds the tagline, using a verb that doesn't quite accurately describe the action portrayed in the preceding spot.

It's a somewhat strange commercial, with slightly too much close-up footage of people's mouths, and it can't help but evoke Tootsie Roll Pops, which long ago cornered the repetitive-licking theme in advertising. But maybe it's just not meant for olds like us to understand. The target demographic is clearly tween-ish, a point driven home by the bad dubstep soundtrack.

It is hard to believe any sane person would have the patience not to just eat the cookie.

You might want to grab a snack and get comfortable, because Cornetto's newest ad is an eight-minute short film that is totally worth the watch. As with its other long-form ads, the ice cream brand takes a back seat to a bigger story. In this case, it's a love story.

Between the storyline, the style and Lily Allen's narration and cameo, it feels a bit like a softer and sweeter Judd Apatow movie, and I kept waiting for a Zooey Deschanel appearance. Directed by Lloyd Lee Choi for the U.K. market, the spot is clever and cute and funny, and as an avid fan of the Internet, I particularly enjoyed the part when the story's heroine meets brief fame and gets turned into a meme.

I don't want to give the whole thing away—you'll want to watch it for yourself.

Oh right, it also sells ice cream. Some may argue the product being an afterthought makes for bad advertising, but I think there's something to be said for its entertainment value and the consumer connection. Cornetto has done this before with a romantic three-minute video that's been viewed over 30 million times, and also with a cheesy-but-cute-but-confusing spot last month.

It's also just one spot in Cornetto's "Cupidity" series in the U.K. Others include a film about finding love on a road trip; one where a girl declares, "Everything is ugly beautiful"; and a remake of last month's aforementioned confusing video, minus the techno music. It's heavy on the hipster (Instagram photos, flowers in the hair, I'm sure there's a Pabst Blue Ribbon in there somewhere), but totally cute and appealing to what is likely Cornetto's target—millennials and TwoKays (born after 2000), which is apparently what we're calling the generation after millennials.

For the next video in the "Cupidity" series, I'm hopeful for a story about an underdog competing in a rap battle in Brooklyn.

Other spots from the "Cupidity" campaign:

If you happened to catch this PSA on television in Britain this month, you might be left wondering if it is—could it somehow possibly be?—real footage. And that's the point.

The spot, from Grey London, shows an unborn baby drifting around inside the womb in what is surely the most real-seeming in-utero footage ever. It is, however, all CGI.

"The craft and technique that Digital Domain and [Radical Media director] Chris Milk put into making the ad was amazing, and the end result looks so brilliantly life-like that we hope people will walk away from it questioning whether it's real or not," says Grey deputy executive creative director Vicki Maguire.

The ad, for the British Heart Foundation, even has the baby do the voiceover (in a child's voice). She talks about how she might inherit a heart condition from her parents.

"I wanted to create a sincere and simple piece of film, forging a deeply emotional connection with a girl who needs saving even before she is born," says Milk, who also made Arcade Fire's stunning interactive experience The Wilderness Downtown. "The story is told in a world that is familiar but still a mystery. She's invited us in because she has something to say. Something vital."

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: British Heart Foundation
Agency: Grey, London
Creative Director: Vicki Maguire
Copywriter: Clemmie Telford
Art Director: Lex Down
Managing Partner: Sarah Jenkins
Business Director: Eve Bulley
Account Manager: Grant Paterson
Account Executive: Isaac Hickinbottom
Agency Producer: Vanessa Butcher
Creative Producer: Gemma Hose
Planner: Ruth Chadwick
Media Agency: PHD, London
Media Planner: Monica Majumdar
Production Company: @radical Media
Director: Chris Milk
Visual Effects: Digital Domain
Editor: Brian Miller
Producers: Ben Schneider, Sam Storr
Postproduction: Digital Domain
Soundtrack Composer: Vampire Weekend
Audio Postproduction: Grand Central