Hasta La Creative!

Doritos go boom on the big screen! Never mind what they do when they land in your belly. As part of an all-out commercial assault for its newest hybrid taco, Taco Bell has created the first 3-D fast-food ad for movie audiences. Launched last week by agency Draftfcb, the spot's three-dimensional wizardry shows a single Cool Ranch Dorito exploding and morphing into a Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco. From your seat in the multiplex, you'll feel like you can reach out and grab one of those fatty shards of salt and maltodextrin. And when you leave, you'll be a short skip—somewhere within a five-mile radius—of a local Taco Bell, according to research from the ad seller, NCM Media Networks. It's little surprise that Taco Bell chose the 40-foot screen as a media buy: There are 700 million moviegoers a year at NCM venues like Regal Entertainment, Cinemark and AMC theaters, and one out of three already hit Taco Bell at least once a month. That's a whole lot of hungry 18-year-olds who are unconcerned about their cholesterol levels. Last year's debut of Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Tacos was the most successful product launch in the chain's history. The sequel was inevitable—or as the ad calls it, the world's most obvious idea. Folks have already been miffed that they couldn't get their hands on a Cool Ranch taco quickly enough, taking to social media to bitch about it. To which Taco Bell says: Keep calm and "Live Más."

A poorly frosted cake is a tragedy in The Martin Agency's new ad for Cool Whip. "Mistreated Cakes," which breaks today and pushes Cool Whip Frosting, plays out like a PSA on behalf of the "millions of innocent cakes [that are] mangled, mistreated and hurt" by rival frostings, which just aren't as smooth. Images of sloppy cakes give way to a shot of a supermarket freezer full of Cool Whip Frosting, as a plaintive male voice explains, "There is something you can do." After a lush close-up of Cool Whip Frosting being spread on a chocolate cake, the ad shifts back to a sad sack of a birthday cake just as one of its candles topples over. "Please help," implores the voice, amid sparse piano notes. "Cool Whip Frosting. Together, we can change the way cakes are frosted." Martin senior copywriter Bob Meagher said the mock-PSA approach stemmed from a simple idea: What if a cake had feelings? To get the mood right, Meagher and senior art director Pat Wittich watched old PSAs and, yes, baked a cake. The ad, which targets moms whose families bond over dessert, will run through May during shows such as Food Network's Cupcake Wars and ABC's Grey's Anatomy, according to Marjani Coffey, brand manager on Cool Whip at Kraft Foods.

Capital One pitchman Alec Baldwin gets an assist from Charles Barkley in new ads from DDB Chicago and Tool director Erich Joiner timed to the NCAA's March Madness tournament, of which the financial firm is a prominent sponsor. In one spot, the pair perform goofy schtick during a sports broadcast, with the Round Mound's tent-size underpants held up to ridicule. In another, they attend a basketball game, where Sir Charles keeps snacks warm inside his jacket and reveals, "It's like a little hot-dog steamer in there"—which is frankly something I never needed to know. All this sporty-bro-bonding is kind of strained and silly, but overall the tone is probably in tune with the target audience. Besides, Baldwin's slimy smile and smug delivery never get old. And Barkley's dazed and indifferent acting style is a hoot—it's as if he can't collect his check and get off the set fast enough. They're like a puffy, middle-aged Odd Couple, and their combined charisma—though not much else—keeps the proceedings from becoming the commercial equivalent of an air ball. More spots and a behind-the-scenes clip after the jump.

So, you're feeling kind of blah and waiting for the elevator and sipping your latte, and the door opens and some guy is choking some other guy on the floor, and you're just like, Whatever, it's probably some stupid marketing stunt for some indie gangster movie because oh my god even these nontraditional ads are getting so tired.

Viral marketing agency Thinkmodo—the professional ambushers who also did the Beauty Shop Scare video that we posted last week—says this latest clip shows regular bystanders, not actors, happening upon what appears to be an attempted murder, and that every precaution was taken to ensure the safety of all parties involved. The clip, promoting the movie Dead Man Down, your average underworld revenge fantasy rom-com starring Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace, features such choice responses to the crime-in-progress as beating the attacker about the head with a bouquet of flowers and spraying both him and his victim with a fire extinguisher. Because everyone knows if you see a person being strangled, don't panic—just reach calmly for the nearest fire extinguisher, remove the pin, stand eight feet back and aim at the base of the strangling while squeezing the handle and sweeping the hose from side to side.

There's also a lot of staring awkwardly and then scurrying away, and one guy who takes a picture—all masterfully emphasized to produce amused incredulity and Internet bravado among the YouTube masses.

Despite the creators' claim that it's not manufactured, it's pretty hard not to imagine the movie's lawyers getting a nasty ulcer over this—unless it was staged. As one random, surprisingly level-headed YouTube troll put it: "I hope you guys did this experiment in a state that doesn't allow concealed carry, I would have shot that mother fucker." Because where's the fun without a little debate.

Whenever I write about zombies, I tend to bury the lead. That's a grave mistake. Anyway, here's a case study about how the Darewin Agency used social media to make The Walking Dead a hit on France's NT1 TV network. On its Walking Dead site, NT1 advised people to avoid a "zombie virus" by avoiding the #walkingdeadNT1 hashtag, which naturally prompted people to use it. Within moments of posting the hashtag on Twitter or Facebook, users were suddenly followed by hoards of virtual zombies. (Maybe those new followers were just average French people. Undead or Parisian … it can be tough to tell.) Contrast this campaign—in which 30,000 users were "attacked" by zombies in less than two weeks, with 550,000 impressions tallied—with this Walking Dead stunt from Toronto, where a finger was chopped off a pair of giant zombie hands each day until the series' return to TV. Effective for sure, but the French effort required more braaaains. Via Adverve.

Oreo just released the second video in its Oreo Separators series from Wieden + Kennedy, dedicated to finding absurdly mechanical ways of separating the cookie part from the creme part. The first video featured "physicist" (also, W+K creative) David Neevel, who came up with a seriously involved contraption in his Portland, Ore., workspace. This time, the intrepid experimenters are Barry Kudrowitz and Bill Fienup, described as "toy scientists" from the Midwest. And you have to hand it to them—their machine is a lot slicker, and simpler, than Neevel's. Their solution involves popping off the top cookie with a swift jab of plastic, then melting and spraying off the creme part. Fienup, the creme lover, gets a little messy in the process, but it's worth it. It turns out these guys were perfect for the job. As students at MIT in the mid-2000s, they helped create the MIT Toy Lab, funded by Hasbro, which developed new concepts for Nerf and Supersoaker products. (The idea for the Nerf Atom Blaster came from the lab.) As he mentions, Kudrowitz is a product-design professor at the University of Minnesota now, though his areas of research are decidedly offbeat, including "play and humor in design." Kudrowitz and Fienup's previous collaborations include a remote-controlled ketchup-squirting car.

Not content with the traditional advertising methods of TV spots and simple product placement in movies, Canada's Labatt Brewing is financing a feature-length film through its Kokanee brand. The film is called The Movie Out Here, and it's a buddy comedy written by Kokanee's ad agency, Grip Limited. Check out the red-band trailer below (NSFW). The movie hits theaters in western Canada on Friday—30 of them, in fact. It's essentially a 90-minute content marketing experiment, so don't expect it to be any good—although judging by the trailer, it is plenty crass. Also, if you've been wondering what happened to the guy who sang "Informer," he's apparently one of the stars. (Oddly, there's no sign of Kokanee in the trailer—would that absence constitute false advertising?) Before this, Grip Limited was best known for letting 10-year-olds run the agency. That may partly explain the movie's juvenile humor.

Red-band trailer below has nudity and profanity and is NSFW.

Who said station wagons are for moms? Oh, how things change. Audi U.K. is changing that stigma with this "Ultimate Paintball Duel" between two new 2013 RS 4 Avants. Yes, they're station wagons. No, they're not your run-of-the-mill kid pushers. They're loaded with V-8 engines, 450 horsepower—oh, and huge hood-mounted paintball guns. The black vs. white, arcade-like duel is a gamer's dream come true, with fast cars, guns, high scores and Paul Engemann's "Push It to the Limit" as the soundtrack (bonus!). What's not to love? The spot shifts into gear as the cars commence in hot pursuit of each other, firing rounds on all cylinders. Paint flies, tires squeal and stunt drivers handle hairpin turns and evasive maneuvers to avoid direct hits. The spot even pays a brief tribute to James Bond with its neon-blue oil slicks and roadside paint bombs. Touché to Audi U.K. Now, let's see how the RS 4 will be introduced in the U.S. Making-of video after the jump.

Possibly in an effort to prove it's more than a Chuck E. Cheese for misogynists, Hooters hired Skiver Advertising for its new "Step Into Awesome" ad campaign. The work, including these "Burrito" and "Big Fan" TV spots, emphasizes the food (Hooters recently expanded its menu) and congenial atmosphere instead of just the state of its employees' undress. It also takes a pretty obvious stab at Chipotle in one of the ads. Both ads are disorientingly tasteful, and I guess that's a good thing. It's also good strategy for Hooters, because focusing more on the waitstaff would remind people of the chain's shady hiring practices, among other things. Fitzgerald+CO previously handled the Hooters account.

Here’s a creative way to highlight an issue as mundane as cramped working conditions. Instead of using computer-generated special effects, agency Dare creates optical illusions through custom set design in new ads for the British Columbia Children's Hospital Foundation. The skewed perspectives and furniture are properly disorienting (it's like they put a hospital in Willy Wonka's house), and the spots illustrate the hospital's current space issues in a way that might have proven too distracting with digital effects. Check out one ad below, watch another after the jump, and read more about the effort over at Adrants.