Hasta La Creative!

A good way to succeed on Super Bowl Sunday is to put a bunch of animals in your ad, though as GoDaddy learned, you have be careful with your message. 

Director Sam Nicholson (the visual effects wizard for AMC’s The Walking Dead) and Stargate Studios teamed up with animal control group The Lucy Foundation to create the cute ad below, which will air Sunday on the Hallmark Channel during the Kitten Bowl. Which, in case you’re wondering, is basically Off-Broadway for Super Bowl ads. 

The commercial features rescue animals playing football, and includes over 1 billion separate images, according to the client. (It’s been submitted to Guinness to be recognized as the first Super Bowl Sunday ad to accomplish such a feat.)

We don’t want to spoil the ending, so take a look below at this bittersweet tale. Hint: It’s got something to do with the responsible deflation of balls.

Budweiser melted hearts with its “Puppy Love” commercial on last year’s Super Bowl, and is prepping a sequel, “Lost Dog,” that’s expected to break Wednesday online. But a day early, here is Go Daddy—amusingly deflating Bud’s balls a little bit with a spoof that even somewhat matches the plot of the sequel.

Yes, Go Daddy has its own adorable yellow Labrador puppy. And like the one in this year’s Bud spot, it’s gotten lost—after falling out of a pickup truck when it went over a bump. The little guy runs home as fast as his little legs can carry him … but it’s not exactly a sappy ending that awaits him there.

The spot was made by Barton F. Graf 9000. Check out our Q&A with Gerry Graf here, where he talks Go Daddy’s approach this year, and the ups and downs of making Super Bowl spots.

Deutsch LA unleashes some potent adorbs for Dr Pepper in this ad starring a super-shaggy “mop dog”—a Hungarian herding pooch known as a Puli with a dreadlock-style corded coat.

Try as it might, our lovable hero just can’t seem to fit in. The stray hitches a ride with a Dr Pepper delivery dude, played by Domingo Molina, who memorably essayed a villain in early episodes of Breaking Bad, and they head for the pound. Will the guy keep the misfit pooch, validating the brand’s new tagline, “Always be one of a kind,” and giving us a three-hanky happy ending? C’mon, Krazy-8, what’s your play?

This stuff is hokey and sentimental, manipulative in the extreme—one more example of a brand taking the easiest route to play on consumers’ emotions. (Why not just drive the beast to the Super Bowl so it can frolic with the cuddly canine commercial stars from Anheuser-Busch and Go Daddy?)

That said, director Simon McQuoid of Imperial Woodpecker unfurls the tale, and the tail, with understated aplomb. And that scrappy scamp is so darn cute … sniff … I can barely see the screen as I type this.

Oh man, that mop dog will wring every last tear from your eyes.

The ivory trade isn’t just killing elephants. Humans are the victims, too, because poaching helps to fund terrorist organizations like al-Shabaab and Boko Haram.

That’s the message of Last Days, a three-minute film by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, best known for the features Zero Dark Thirty and Hurt Locker. Produced in conjunction with WildAid and Annapurna Pictures, Last Days ranks among the year’s most provocative PSAs. Its atmosphere is heartbreaking, and there’s some disturbing imagery.

Bigelow uses simple, cut-out-style animation to tell a complex story in reverse chronological order. We start at the end of the sordid tale, in an exotic boutique that sells trinkets. A question flashes on screen: “When you buy something made of ivory, where does the money go?” The ivory is traced back to its source—slaughtered African elephants—in painstaking detail. At one point, dark, indistinct figures pack tusks into shipping crates stamped with the word “Coffee” on their sides. These crates resemble coffins.

“To make a feature film about such a topic would likely take years, during which more elephants would die,” says Bigelow. “So instead, I approached a team of fellow filmmakers and we made Last Days as an animated piece, which we thought would give it a broader audience.”

In a jarring sequence, animation gives way to security-camera footage from the 2013 Westgate Mall massacre in Nairobi, Kenya. We’re told that al-Shabaab, which claimed responsibility for the attack, makes $600,000 a month from illegal ivory. Later, we see the mutilated bodies of elephants, bloody tusks freshly hacked from their faces. Though animated, this segment stands as a shocking testament to senseless slaughter.

“An elephant disappears every 15 minutes,” said Bigelow, and they could be extinct in the wild in little more than a decade. “It is our hope that this film helps to bring an activist into existence at least that often.” There’s also a website to visit for more information.

Tying the murder of elephants to terrorism and human suffering is a powerful way to build empathy. This approach clearly illustrates cause and effect, and suggests all living things share a deep connection. By butchering another species, or allowing such horrors to take place, we ultimately brutalize ourselves. Each rifle blast and machete stroke makes us less human.

Stop it, you’re quilling me.

Birds with tiny human arms and hands soar in sublimely silly style thanks to SuperHeroes’s first global campaign for the Asus Transformer T100 2-in-1. It’s also the inaugural work from the New York office the Amsterdam-based agency perhaps best known for its prankvertising efforts on behalf of LG.

In “Modern Birds,” a freaky fingered flock demonstrates the features of the Asus laptop/tablet hybrid. The idea is that birds know how to get stuff done #OnTheFly.

Savvy consumers of Internet culture will recognize that birds with arms are nothing new. 

“We’ve always loved the birds with arms meme,” agency ecd Rogier Vijverberg tells AdFreak. “And when looking for a spokesperson for Asus we saw the match. Birds are truly always on the move, plus they would allow us to have a great outside perspective on our modern human race.”

Besides, he says, “it’s a crowded market, so to stand out and get noticed, you need to also stand out in communication.”

Edward, a tufted titmouse with an attitude, stars in a trio of spots. He praises Asus to the skies and taunts users of competing devices: “My T100 has up to 11 hours of battery life to keep me productive. Eleven hours, pecka-face!”

Beyond the spots from directors Andrew Watson and Maarten Boon via production house Minivegas, SuperHeroes has more creative lined up for the campaign.

“There’s a bunch of work for Asus in the pipeline,” Vijverberg says. “It’s fully global, launching in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. Apart from (the three films), we have a Facebook game, loads of social content and more memes coming up.”

So, who’d win an all-out war between ad mascots with asinine appendages: Asus’ birds with arms or Cravendale’s cats with thumbs?

CREDITS
Client: Asus
Client contacts: Chinwen Weng, Clio Kuo, David Chen

Agency: SuperHeroes
ECD: Rogier Vijverberg
Copywriters: Elliot Stewart Franzen, Dimitri Hekimian
Art Director: Quentin Deronzier
Designers: Nando Pawirodikromo, Krister Lima
Client Services Director: Django Weisz Blanchetta
Producers: Evelien Schenkkan, Severien Jansen
Strategic/Planning Director: Felipe Camara
Interactive Designer: Krister Lima       
Developers: Chris Noble-Partridge

Production and Postproduction: Minivegas
Directors: Andrew Watson, Maarten Boon
Scriptwriter: Andrew Watson
Executive Producer: Brian Bourke
Producer: Sanne Rosinga
Postproduction Producer: Marloes de Rijke
Editor: Sander van der Aa
Lead Compositor: Sven de Jong
Sound Design: Kaiser Sound

It really is the best way to see an agency: the dog’s-eye view.

Toronto animation, design and VFX studio Crush did it last year, attaching a GoPro camera to their dog Sadie and live-streaming her travels around the building. Crush has since merged with Notch, AXYZ and Lollipop to create a new agency called Smith—and what better way to introduce the new place than bringing Sadie back for an encore?

Follow the live stream below until 2 p.m. to see every nook and cranny of Smith’s offices, particularly the ones where delicious unclaimed food may lie.

Petco had a whole Halloween contest around dressing up pets this month, but you don’t have to be a pet brand to get in on that action. Droga5 did this cute ad for Chobani, featuring pooches in their Halloween costumes—while enjoying the treat that is Chobani yogurt.

Check out the video below. Happy Halloween!

Have you ever wondered how a goat would interpret ’80s rock ballad “Simply the Best”? Of course you have.

The cute beast in this Norwegian commercial for goat cheese sticks pretty close to the classic version by Tina Turner, though it does change the line “You’re Simply the Best” to “I’m simply the best.” That’s a bold creative statement. For a goat. And decidedly on brand.

Some silly billies at Try/Apt in Oslo devised the 30-second spot.

I kept expecting the wooly warbler to get even more anthropomorphized and maybe bust some moves, like Three’s famous dancing pony. Alas, this goat isn’t much of a hoofer. (I’m also surprised there’s no horn section.)

That’s one crazy kid, but way saner than Mountain Dew’s Felicia, who, you may recall, got everybody’s goat last year.

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Anyone who says flying is a terrible experience hasn’t had a missing carry-on item returned by KLM’s lost-and-found delivery beagle.

Say what, you say?

It’s simple, says KLM: Its trained beagle traces the scent of left-behind personal effects—maybe a pink iPhone, or some headphones—and chases down the owner while he or she is still in the airport. Joy, gratitude and cooing abound, warming even the most frozen and incredulous jet-lagged souls (including more than 9 million YouTube viewers at last count).

Is this an excerpt from a 20th-century movie about a dog with a big heart who teaches people a thing or two about humanity? Nope, this is an ad by DDB & Tribal Worldwide for a Dutch airline, which is shrewd to pretend it employs a dog who will always be more genuinely happy to see you than any bipedal flight attendant, because the dog will hold out hope that you might reward its loyalty with a snack, but forgive you—or at least forget—if you don’t. (Before you hesitate to break off a piece of that beef jerky, don’t forget that dogs are people, too).

Too bad it’s all a sham, if a wildly popular one, designed to promote KLM’s obviously inferior humankind methods for returning lost items. In other words, it will leave you feeling cheated and disoriented, which at least is consistent with lots of flying experiences.

Citroen puts on the dog once again in this commercial with an anthropomorphized mutt who charmingly works out the muscle kinks and stiffness of a long drive when its owner pulls in to a desert gas station.

The spot, from Les Gaulois in Paris, promotes Citroen’s BLUEDi engine, which, according to the title card, allows drivers to “stop less often at the pump.” Some versions of the ad substitute the line, “Next stop is in 1,520 km.” That’s a whole lot of miles in dog years.

Directed by Control’s Joachim Back, the lonely, sun-baked locations succeed at suggesting a winding, hours-long journey where the stops are few and far between. So does the use of “Sixteen Tons” on the soundtrack, which will now be rumbling through my head for the duration of my lifespan.

Your enjoyment of the spot—a companion to Citroen’s canine love story (I mean, woof story) from last year—will probably hinge on your attitude about ads where special effects are used to make animals and babies act like adult human beings. In my view, this puppy’s a winner by any stretch of the imagination.