Century 21 and its agency, Mullen, have been doing some offbeat stuff together lately—pretending to sell Walter White's house on Craigslist; urging Twitter's mascot to upgrade to a bigger birdhouse after the company's IPO. But this new video is truly out there—a Thanksgiving ode to the soporific effects of turkey meat called "Tryptophan Slow Jam." It's available on iTunes, and Century 21 will donate all proceeds from the sales to its philanthropic partner, Easter Seals. It doesn't seem to have much to do with real estate—nor does the #Tryptophan hashtag, which Century 21 is also pushing this week. But hey, amusing content doesn't always have to double as a sales pitch. (Right?)
Remember the "map wars" of 2009, when AT&T and Verizon spent a combined $4 billion on ads (and went to court) to claim coverage-area supremacy? Well, it looks like Verizon is firing another round of salvos.
For a new installment of its "Reality Check" campaign, Verizon and McCann New York created a modern art gallery featuring 4G coverage areas offered by competitors AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. Visitors are asked to describe what they see, with the point being that few can recognize the illustrations as maps of the United States.
It's a clever gag and not overly aggressive, but will it mark the start of another round of cartography conflict?
Dec. 1 will be a tough day for a lot of guys, including Dan. That Movember mustache, the object of so much spousal derision for weeks now, must come off. Shaving brand Harry's tries to lessen the blow in this amusing video from Droga5 in New York, in which a guy and his mustachioed, cool-but-not-cool alter ego come to terms with the day of reckoning in the morning mirror. Harry's is also going a step further by declaring Dec. 1 to be an invented holiday called "National Shave Day," and has built a whole nationalshaveday.com site to promote it. Sure, that may be (literally) bald-faced marketing opportunism, but it could help ease the grief for guys nationwide on Sunday—as Harry's is partnering with barbershops and boutiques nationwide to give out free shaves and limited-edition razors.
CREDITS Client: Harry's Agency: Droga5, New York
Production Company – Arts & Sciences Director – Tom Scharpling DOP – Paul Yee Production Designer – Ada Smith Producer – Rob Hatch-Miller Producer – Puloma Basu Executive Producer – Mal Ward Executive Producer – Marc Marrie
Editorial – Production Company Productions Editor – Rob Hatch-Miller
Post Production – The Room / Lively Group VFX Supervisor – Russell Mack Color – Benjamin Murray
Soliciting testimonials from alumni isn't a new way to advertise a university, but this example definitely takes it to a new and charming extreme.
Canada’s Royal Roads University decided to let alumni speak for themselves by physically embedding them in what passers-by assumed to be digital ad kiosks.
In the case study below, the university and agency Cossette Vancouver show how they constructed a special display box that hid a live alumna inside. When people pressed a "Connect" button on the display, a panel dropped down, revealing the actual woman they thought they'd be hearing from digitally.
Some were so surprised that they thought she was a very realistic video or perhaps a robot.
Nothing screams "I love my university" louder than a woman’s willingness to stand in a claustrophobic box all day and talk to surprised strangers. But the clip would obviously be more effective if we saw high schoolers or even parents praising the approach rather than hearing seniors talk about how nice it was to talk to a "real person." Still, I look forward to other inventive executions in this campaign.
CREDITS Agency: Cossette Vancouver Client: Royal Roads University Creative Director: Michael Milardo Art Director: George Lin Copywriter: Pierre Chan Director of Account Services: Chris Miller Strategic Planner: Ute Preusse Account Supervisor: Robyn Smith Account Team: Philippa Groom, Megan O'Rourke Producer: April Haffenden
Christmas is coming, and along with it comes the worst part of the year: ironic ugly sweater parties. Formerly the sole domain of grandmothers and Bill Cosby, ugly sweaters are some kind of awkward hipster mating plumage now, so it's only ill-fitting that Coke Zero has capitalized on it with the Coke Zero Sweater Generator, built by Droga5. You design a sweater with minimal Coke branding, and it goes into an online gallery where other people can vote on the best/worst designs. The top 100 will be made and sent to their creators, who will probably model them on Facebook. Above is the one I made.
Bedsider.org, a free online resource for birth control, has teamed up with BET Networks to target African-American women ages 18-29 through a series of TV spots from Havas Worldwide portraying painfully awkward discussions about sex and birth control with family and friends. The idea is cool. Talking about sex can be awful, but checking out a website about sex and birth control is awkward free, as long as you're not in a library or synagogue or elementary school.
The three spots feature a young woman having cringe-worthy conversations with 1) her grandmother, 2) her boyfriend and 3) her mother.
A little old lady delivers the line "Oh, you're very supple" to her visibly uncomfortable granddaughter in the best of the three ads. The spot featuring the IUD conversation with the boyfriend doesn't do it (pun!) for me. You guys are having sex, but you can't ask your boyfriend to tell his dog to stop humping your leg? Strange. The video featuring the daughter—wrapped in a towel, fresh out of the shower—and the overeager mother is the weirdest of the three. The line "We should talk, like, vagina to vagina" is seriously grossing me out.
Bedsider's goal is to make us all cringe; mission accomplished. I've maxed out my quota for hearing the word "vagina" today. Nobody talk to me until tomorrow.
CREDITS Bedsider 2013 Awkward Campaign
Agency: Havas Worldwide New York Chief Creative Officer Global Brands: Lee Garfinkel Chief Creative Officer: Darren Moran Executive Creative Director: Lisa Rettig-Falcone Creative Director: Jeremy Pippenger Art Director: Thomas Shim Copywriter: Catherine Eccardt Global Chief Content Officer: Vin Farrell Integrated Producer: Candice Vernon Group Account Director: Tamara Goodman Account Executive: Alexandra Litzman Senior Content Strategist: Shawn Shahani Strategy and Analytics: Chris Lake
TV Production Company: Director: Clay Williams EP: Scott Howard Producer: Debbie Tietjen DP: Stefan Czapsky
Editorial:Mackenzie Cutler EP: Sasha Hirschfeld Producer: Evan Meeker Editor: Dave Anderson Telecine: Company 3 NY Colorist: Tim Masick
Arrghh … can't breathe … too much cuteness! TBWA\Chiat\Day in Los Angeles crafted these 60 seconds of adorable hi-jinks as part of Best Friends Animal Society's pro bono campaign to raise awareness for pet adoptions, a cause near and dear to the heart of legendary adman and agency chairman Lee Clow. The clip shows Instagram photos of four rescued pets—Lil Bub, Nala Cat and two pups named Ginny and Tuna—who each enjoy various measures of Internet fame. Ginny's got a space helmet. She's a widdle dog-stronaut! Sorry. This stuff's face-meltingly cute. And I don't even like cats. But I'll make an exception here. Clow says, "Wouldn't it be great if we could get people to see that the smart, cool and socially responsible thing to do is to rescue a pet rather than buy them from a breeder or a pet store?" Fair enough. Plus, if they had pets, folks wouldn't act all catty like that woman in the Tenth Life Rescue spot from a few months back.
UN Women sparked a global debate last month, surprising even the group itself, when their modest print campaign, The Autocomplete Truth, went viral across the Web. Now, the organization and agency Memac Ogilvy & Mather Dubai are back with a video extension of the campaign, as they hinted at in a recent interview with AdFreak. The clip is mostly a collection of great moments in the history of female empowerment, and I was a bit disappointed to see just one of the Google autocomplete examples at the end. It feels like this could have been an opportunity to truly expand the campaign, showing new examples of search suggestions worldwide or even just highlighting the countless blog posts, articles and online conversations generated by the print ads. Still, it's good to see UN Women building on that initial success and creating something—including the hashtag #womenshould—that gives fans more content and context to share.
Honda loves Michael Bolton. Maybe even more than the Bobs, the doofus business consultants from Office Space, who really, really, love Michael Bolton.
The 60-year-old pop crooner—who has popped up in ads recently for brands like Optimum and Starburst—stars in the automaker's holiday campaign, called Happy Honda Days, because marketers also love bad puns. The short original songs Bolton belts out are characteristically saccharin, meant to capture the feeling of spiritual-love-ecstasy that some men of a certain age can only get from Bolton—and, the automaker would have you believe, anyone can get from buying a Honda.
The generally fantastical series wins points for poking fun at itself with melodramatic guitar solos and idiotic lyrical gems like "This special time of year, it's filled with joy and cheer, for me and you and you and you, too." Most realistic, though, are the dumbstruck stares of the relatively young buyers, whose sometimes ambiguous expressions seem to range from charmed to baffled to terrified to regretful (at least Honda didn't include him in the crash package it sent to that poor couple's wedding).
Still, if you're a sucker for punishment—or just want to torture your loved ones—Honda has arranged for Bolton to deliver season's greetings to the family and friends of people willing to tweet the hashtag #XOXOBolton. Because if you didn't want to buy a Honda already, maybe Bolton can sing you into submission. Plus, once you own the car, you can insist nobody ever play Michael Bolton in it again.
Taking its cues from the great 1997 documentary Hands on a Hardbody, Dodge and Wieden + Kennedy will launch a contest Tuesday called Hands on Ron Burgundy—an online test of endurance that will feature daily prizes as well as a grand prize of (as in the movie) a new car. In the film, contestants put their hands on a pickup truck, and the last person to take his or her hand off won the truck. The Burgundy contest, part of a larger campaign promoting the Dodge Durango and the upcoming film Anchorman 2, will go live at noon ET on Tuesday—and it looks like it will challenge users to click on Burgundy in photo after photo. The details will become clearer tomorrow, but it will surely take some serious stamina to win the car.
This kind of advertising as punishment was popular a few years back, when Burger King made people watch a spinning Whopper for hours on end to get coupons—and, in a somewhat similar idea to Dodge's, Peugeot had people click and hold their mouse button on a car for a chance at a free week's rental. People lasted up to 15 hours in that contest (and 77 hours in the movie)—so, proceed with this Burgundy thing with caution.
Halfway through Movember, Nick Offerman's mustache is so excited to be growing uncontrollably that it breaks into song and dance in this crazy-weird new spot from Made Man. For some reason, Offerman's mouth becomes tiny as he belt out the Irene Cara classic "What a Feeling" from Flashdance—the perfect song for a Stachdance. The ends of his 'stache, meanwhile, punch the air and fly around joyfully like a couple of possessed baboon arms. Movember, of course, is the annual, month-long event in which dudes get hairier to raise awareness of men's health issues.
Is it possible to have work-life balance in the advertising biz? Sure, with the right amount of self-inflicted sabotage.
That's the idea behind "The Happy Hour Virus" from Colorado agency TDA_Boulder, whose tongue-in-cheek recruiting effort encourages workaday types to fake a computer catastrophe and leave work early.
The HappyHourVirus.com site explains TDA's workplace philosophy: "We are all better employees if we achieve something called work-life balance. However, pursuing that goal is not always an easy task in today's corporate culture. Please use the Happy Hour Virus to leave work early and enjoy the company of friends, family or co-workers. We are aware that this might jeopardize your productivity the following day, but we are willing to take that risk on your behalf. And if this sounds like a philosophy you could live with, learn more about us here." That last word links to an employment application.
Visitors to the site can click a button to select one of three "crashed computer" motifs—"Kernel Panic," "Broken Monitor" or "Blue Screen of Death"—to make it seem as if technical troubles are forcing them to call it a day. I'd use one of the fake screens to help me escape from AdFreak a few hours early, but I'd still need a hacksaw to break these ankle chains.
NBA stars are a festive bunch, with great timing to boot. They need both in the league's holiday campaigns. Last year, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, Russell Westbrook and Joe Johnson impressively played the popular Christmas song "Carol of the Bells" just by bouncing basketballs (in a spot that soared to more than 8 million views). Now, here's the sequel—also from GS&P.
It stars Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose, James Harden, Steve Nash and Stephen Curry shooting three-pointers at nets outfitted with Christmas bells—producing an even more impressive musical performance, this time of "Jingle Bells." LeBron James punctuates the song with a dunk at the end, then asks, "Please tell me the camera was on." It's a perfect spot.
Like last year's spot, this one promotes special-edition uniforms, available for sale, that 10 teams will wear on their Christmas Day games this year.
See a making-of video, plus credits, below.
CREDITS Client: NBA Spot: "Jingle Hoops"
Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners Executive Creative Director: Jeff Goodby Creative Directors: Nick Klinkert, Adam Reeves Associate Creative Director, Copywriter: Rus Chao Associate Creative Director, Art Director: Kevin Koller Producer: Benton Roman Executive Producer: Tod Puckett Director of Broadcast Production: Cindy Fluitt Account Directors: Jason Bedecarre, Janice McManemy Account Manager: Heather Morba Senior Business Affairs Manager: Julie Petruzzo
Production Company: O Positive Director: Jonathan Klein Executive Producer: Ralph Laucella Line Producer: Angie Revell Director of Photography: Eric Steelberg
Editing: Final Cut Editor: Matt Murphy Assistant Editors: Tara Wall, Nate Connella Producer: Suzy Ramirez Executive Producer: Saima Awan
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