Hasta La Creative!

Here's a pretty cool project from Mullen for a client we won't immediately reveal, lest we spoil the surprise. (Scroll down to the bottom of credits, or watch the video to find out.)

The Boston agency posted this job listing online for a "director of operations" position at a company called Rehtom Inc. The requirements sounded nothing short of brutal:

• Standing up almost all the time
• Constantly exerting yourself
• Working from 135 to unlimited hours per week
• Degrees in medicine, finance and culinary arts necessary
• No vacations
• The work load goes up on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and other holidays
• No time to sleep
• Salary = $0

The job ad got 2.7 million impressions from paid ad placements. Only 24 people inquired. They interviewed via webcam, and their real-time reactions were captured on video.

Check out what happened below. It's worth watching to the end.

CREDITS
Project: World's Toughest Job

Agency: Mullen, Boston
Chief Creative Officer: Mark Wenneker
Executive Creative Directors: Tim Vaccarino, Dave Weist
Creative Director: Jon Ruby
Associate Creative Director, Copy: Andrea Mileskiewicz
Associate Creative Director, Art: Blake Winfree
Executive Director of Integrated Production: Liza Near
Head of Broadcast: Zeke Bowman

Producer: Vera Everson
Account Director: Jessica Zdenek
Account Supervisor: Laila Lynch
Director of Digital Strategy: Eric Williamson
Senior Brand Strategist: Ryan Houts

Production Company: Caviar
Director: Amir Farhang
Executive Producer: Valeria Maldini
Producer: Jason Manz
Director of Photography: Brian Rigney Hubbard

Editing, Visual Effects: PS260
Editor: J.J. Lask
Assistant Editor: Colin Edelman
Senior Producer: Laura Lamb Patterson
Lead Visual Effects Artist: Patrick Lavin
Assistant Artist: Matt Posey
Audio Post: Soundtrack
Sound Design, Mixer: Mike Secher
Music: Human
Casting: House Casting
Casting Agent: Shawn Alston

Client: American Greetings
Executive Director, Marketing: Alex Ho

Fresh from the gnarly folks at Mountain Dew comes "the first soda that is also a tool."

A nifty new Dew bottle designed by Sancho BBDO Colombia is fitted with a hex nut wrench in the cap, so you can fix your board after you've face-planted trying to land a sick trick that ended up all sketchy. It's perfect for skaters who could use a little extra hand during their next search for Animal Chin.

I guess it is cool and all, but I'm pretty sure you can only tighten screws; if you tried to loosen them, wouldn't the cap itself just unscrew? It also doesn't seem like you'd get much torque this way. But I nitpick. It would be killer if the bottle came with some cash stuffed inside it for emergency room bills. Or Obamacare. Dude, put Obamacare in the bottle. 

But whatever, this poser's hella old—gotta bail. Wake me up when the hoverboard is real.

Check it, brah.

Wheat Thins revisits the golden age of ballooning in this weird spot from New York agency Being for the cracker brand's new air-popped snacks.

Why they went with cops trying to pull someone over, I have no idea; the concept doesn't really need them, and neither does the visual gag they're setting up (being outpaced by a slow-moving bird). But I suppose the randomness is part of the charm.

I suppose Wheat Thins probably should be a controlled substance, though. They taste too good to not be drugs somehow.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Wheat Thins
Spot: "Air Chase"

Agency: Being, New York
Executive Creative Director: Matt Ian
Creative Directors: Samira Ansari, Lisa Topol
Copywriter: Jerome Marucci
Art Director: Steve McElligott
Executive Producer: Jason Souter
Director of Business Affairs: Samantha Norvin
Broadcast Traffic Manager: Betty White Butler
Talent Manager: Felicia Simmons
Group Account Director: Brett Edgar
Account Director: Hayden Lockaby
Account Executive: Kelly Mendola

Production Company: Dummy
Director: Harold Einstein
Executive Producer: Eric Liney

Editorial: Mackenzie Cutler
Editor: Erik Laroi
Executive Producer: Sasha Hirschfeld
Postproduction: Evan Meeker
Sound Designer: Sam Shaffer

Visual Effects: Moving Picture Company
Executive Producer: Justin Brukman
Producer: Adele Major
Visual Effects Supervisor: Ricky Weissman
Visual Effects Team: Chris Bernier, Mikael Pettersson, Marcus Wood, Carolyn Figel, Sang Lee

Telecine: Co3
Colorist: Tim Masick

Audio Mix: Sound Lounge
Mixer: Tom Jucarone
Music: Butter
Composer: Dave Quattrini
Producer: Annick Mayer
Executive Producer: Ian Jeffreys

For those of you blown away by The Barbarian Group's 4,400-square-foot undulating "superdesk," Gerry Graf wants you to know his offices are pretty damn impressive, too.

Much like TBG's snake-like, resin-poured desk, Barton F. Graf 9000 has its own impressively enormous piece of continuous furniture. It's called the floor. (And as the video points out at the beginning, "It's not a surfboard.")

Other interesting features of Graf's offices include clear panes of glass called windows, as well as individual desks where people might actually enjoy some personal space and get some work done.

If you haven't seen TBG's agency tour, check that one out first. Both are posted below.

 
• Barton F. Graf 9000 agency tour:

 
• The Barbarian Group agency tour:

Veet, the hair-removal brand, has a new ad campaign out from Havas Worldwide with the theme "Don't risk dudeness." Three ads feature women who turn into hairy, overweight men (actually, the same hairy, overweight man) because they "shaved yesterday."

A lover is disgusted, a nail technician is appalled, and a taxi driver refuses service because these gorgeous women are now sporting a whole 11 hours of hair growth. "Don't risk dudeness," Veet tells us, and follows up with the tagline, "Feel womanly around the clock."

I'm no Letterman, but he's retiring and I just drank a lot of iced tea, so I'm feeling good and I'll take a shot at a list. Check out the first ad below (it breaks tonight during Dancing with the Stars on ABC), and then my take on five things wrong with this strange campaign.

5. It makes fools of both men and women.
Veet impressively accomplishes the task of ridiculing both men and women here. The burly guy in the nightie speaks in a baby-girl voice, doing neither gender any favors.

To its credit, Veet has left the YouTube comments open, but it's not looking good. "I'm kind of dumbfounded as to how a campaign like this was passed when it's pushing a lot of really old ideas about gender typing," says the second of only two comments so far. (The first wasn't kind either.) "So if a woman doesn't shave her legs, it makes her a man? If a man wakes up next to his girlfriend, who hasn't shaved her legs in a day or two, it'll completely repulse him? It's considered 'rude?' If a man shaved his legs would it make him a woman?"

4. It's empirically wrong.
Realistically, not shaving for one day still goes unnoticed at the beach. I polled other women for this one. Results may vary, but no one's turning into Chewbacca overnight.

3. It's dumb.
Everything is exaggerated in a way that's supposed to be funny, but comes off as cringe-inducing—for example, the taxi driver who leaves the EW SO GROSS woman behind in one of the two spots below. (Also, the word "dudeness" can be bullet item 3b.)

2. It's mildly homophobic.
Guys are repulsed by other guys? I know this is supposed to be comedy, but … eh.

1. It shames women.
Telling women that they're less womanly if they miss a spot shaving their legs in the shower, or if they're part of an entire sect of women who choose not to shave at all, is closed-minded. And shame is a weird marketing tool.

In an age when marketers like Dove are seeing great response to ads about accepting one's imperfections, any products that demand women be squeaky clean 24/7 is rowing against the tide. Even cartoony humor can't gloss over that kind of regressive message. As a friend told me on Gchat: "I don't like it. Maybe it's cause my legs are always slightly fuzzy and I don't think that makes me a dude. I also don't like that it implies that only feminine women are sexy. Mostly it's just annoying."

A swing and a miss. Or maybe more like a shave and a nick, am I right? (Sorry.)

"As we stand on the edge of possibility, we choose the path less traveled."

Set to to the grandiose tune of Richard Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," aka the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, this new Lurpak butter ad from Wieden + Kennedy London (and Blink director Dougal Wilson) takes place in a world that looks like the love child of Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas.

Advertising the brand's new Cook's Range of oils and butters, the ad transforms ordinary (yet dramatically lit) kitchens into basically the entire universe. 

Of particular note is the GoPro-meets-lunar-landing slo-mo shot of a woman dropping a yolk on an extraterrestrial landscape of beautiful flour. There's also an otherworldly shot that transforms a gas stove into rocket burners and a carrot into a spaceship. This is so cool.

Lurpak and W+K have a long history of doing food porn together, and have a couple of gold Lions in Film Craft from Cannes to show for it. (Their first collaboration that we covered, in 2011, was "Kitchen Odyssey," which we called "the kind of commercial Stanley Kubrick would make if he were still alive." So, they're certainly consistent.)

This new ad, though, is a close encounter of the nerd kind. So say we all.

I'm positively floored by the fun series of Web videos by Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners and Tool of North America introducing the BMW Mini Cooper Hardtop.

Client and agency asked real Mini owners to think up creative "test drives" to showcase the vehicles. After receiving 800 submissions, they produced 10 videos. The work strikes a happy balance between user-generated content and traditional advertising, with the owners' ideas sparking consistently entertaining, engaging and, in some cases, surprising results.

Running between one and two minutes each, and starring the owners who proposed the concepts, some of the vignettes are simple, others quite involved.

But there's isn't a lemon in the lot.

Highlights include "Getting Medieval," which shows heavily armed and armored knights jousting in their Minis; "Midnight Black Light," with LED headlamps replaced by black lights that cut through a dazzling landscape of fluorescent paint; and my favorite, "Sex Appeal," a tongue-in-cheek, Burt Reynolds/Cosmo-style photo shoot with scented candles, a spray-on tan, bulging obliques—and probably a car in there somewhere, too.

"I was very happy to play the fool—it was supposed to be a spoof and purposely goofy—and the crew were impressed with my willingness to look like an ass," Thomas Lhamon, a chemistry teacher and the star of "Sex Appeal," tells AdFreak of his racy test drive. He wanted to see how many Facebook likes he could generate by posing with the Hardtop, and his video highlights the car's connected apps.

In fact, all mentions of specific brand attributes feel unforced and logical. For example, "Parallel Universe" has Minis squeezing between elephants, shopping carts and even planets to showcase parking-assistance technology, while "Foot-to-Pedal Style," all about shopping for cute shoes, touts cargo space.

Though each is amusing in its own right, the 10 videos, posted below, work especially well when viewed as a series. There's also a whole microsite here. All told, these owners did a fantastic job of generating ideas. Maybe they should shift into advertising. Actually, with this campaign, I guess they have.

Marketers who make ads about inclusive families these days need a battle plan for how to deal with the haters. And it's as much an opportunity as a crisis.

It began, of course, with Cheerios, which was surely legitimately surprised last year when its ad with the interracial family was flooded with racist comments on YouTube. General Mills' reaction was complicated. First it shut down the YouTube comments, then it slowly embraced what quickly became an outpouring of support—and finally it aired a brilliantly subtle sequel on this year's Super Bowl.

Advertisers who do this kind of progressive marketing are surprised by the haters no longer. In fact, I'd be willing to bet Honey Maid and Droga5 already had a plan in place for the video below—a response to the haters (and supporters) of its ultra-inclusive "This Is Wholesome" ad—before the first spot (which now has more than 4 million views) even aired.

Is that a cynical way to approach inclusive messaging—to calculatingly harness the hatred against it to sell more stuff? Perhaps. Still, it's quite amusing to see the haters turned into pawns who can be played for extra exposure.

Here's the original ad:

You wouldn't think Jesus would be too concerned about his investment portfolio these days, but online trading service Kapitall has tapped Him as a spokesman anyway in a campaign featuring "revolutionary" historic figures.

In a series of spots that went live today, Jesus cracks jokes about crucifixion while Che Guevara cooks frittatas and Genghis Khan showers himself with coins. Backed by a $1 million media spend, the online ads also include Leonardo da Vinci (with nude lounging boy toy) and Cleopatra (with frond-waving boy toy).

But clearly it's the depiction of Jesus that's bound to arouse the most consternation. In a second spot, not yet posted, Jesus says he learned about Kapitall when God found the site and yelled "JESUS CHRIST!"

"Kapitall, and our newly launched advertising campaign, is about being revolutionary," Kapitall CMO Pascal Ehrsam tells AdFreak in an email. "The brand campaign is not meant to be offensive, but to give a nod to some of history's notable icons. Comprising many ethnicities and religions, Kapitall is made up of people from all over the world. We have great respect and admiration for all, even as we strive to entertain."

The campaign was created by agency Swell, with media planning handled by PM Digital. It will run through the summer on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and Gawker Network, generating an estimated 50 million impressions per month.

Check out the first Jesus spot below and more from the campaign after the jump.

Subaru is going for the lowest common denominator of dudes with this new grindhouse-style trailer for a movie that hopefully will never really exist.

The title, The Ride of Her Life, is only slightly more clever than a Beavis and Butt-head joke—which might actually make it less funny, according to the inverse stupid-to-laughter ratio that rules the testosterone-addled-teen genre of comedy.

Starring skater Bucky Lasek as "the mysterious drifter," the ad redeems itself with some one-liners that are so exaggeratedly dumb, they're good enough to render the whole thing convincing as a parody—instead of just painfully bad in the same manner it means to mock. Regardless, model-hyphenate Kayslee Colins, playing "the girl," shows enough skin to hold the attention of the flick's target audience—making it a win for the brand.

The trailer, created by Carmichael Lynch, is a million miles from the agency's mostly sentimental "Love" campaign for the automaker, although true to form, it does have a rich father-daughter story at its core. It's just a negative one this time.

And at least it features the full-size WRX instead of a miniature one.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Subaru of America

Agency: Carmichael Lynch
Chief Creative Officer: Dave Damman
Executive Creative Director: Randy Hughes
Writer, Creative Director: Ryan Peck
Art Director, Creative Director: Scott O’Leary
Head of Production: Joe Grundhoefer
Senior Content Producer: Jon Mielke
Producer: Jennifer David
Director of Business Affairs: Vicki Oachs
Product Information Manager: Rob Ar
Account Service Team: David Eiben, Krista Kelly, Eva Anderson, Greta Hughes
Senior Project Manager: Lisa Brody

Production Company: DoubleURXXX Productions
XXXecutive Executives: Scott O'Leary, Ryan Peck
XXXecutive Producer: Jon Mielke
XXXecutive Technology Executive: Rich McGeheren
XXXecutive Design Executive: Andrew Wetzel
XXXecutive Responsible Adult: Lisa Brody
Special XXXecutive in Charge of General XXXellence: Bucky Lasek

Production Company: Cavira
Director: Ruben Fleischer
Executive Producer: Jasper Thomlinson
Line Producer: Luke Ricci
Director of Photography: Matthew Libatique

Editing House: Mark Woollen
Editorial Producer: Jeremy Greene
Editors: Daniel Lee, Zach Pentoney

Visual Effects House: Volt
Online Artist: Pete Olson

Telecine: CO3
Colorist: Sean Coleman

Audio: BWN
Sound Design, Mix: Carl White

Music: Singing Serpent

Talent: Bucky Lasek, Michael Wiles, Kayslee Collins, Eddy Rice Jr., Jenette Goldstein