Hasta La Creative!

Can something as dry as smartphone-controlled appliances ever come across as romantic? 

Gadget brand WeMo and Crispin Porter + Bogusky think so, and they’ve created a rather elaborate video to prove it.

“The Big Anniversary Rig” is WeMo’s first consumer marketing push and features a house-spanning series of contraptions and romantic gestures celebrating a couple’s first year together. 

Owned by manufacturer Belkin, probably best known for its network routers, WeMo makes outlet adapters that allow you to control or automate your home’s electronics. It also partners with other brands to make slow cookers, coffee makers and other devices with its technology built in.

(By the way, the guy in this ad is indeed a terrible cook if his best dish is something called “beer battered ribs.” Pro tip, Dan: You don’t fry ribs, especially in a Crock Pot.)

After the jump, you can see some fake behind-the-scenes videos about “how Dan did it.” (Including slightly more realistic details on his not-actually-battered rib recipe.)

Even if you’re not a hopeless romantic who finds this level of branded affection adorable, you have to admit the concept is a good way to highlight quite a few ways to use the technology. If nothing else, most people would probably just like the idea of starting the coffee pot each morning while checking emails in bed.

LG launched its #MomConfessions campaign earlier this year with a series of cynically amusing TV spots, and since then, real moms have started to get in on the confessional action.

While the appliance brand and agency Hill Holliday seeded the campaign with their own Tumblr posts (“I go running to relieve stress. Just kidding, I drink margaritas.”), there are plenty made from the keyboards of your next door neighbor or PTA president and submitted to MomConfessions.com.

Some of them are funny, some are actually from dads, and some are quite brilliant (“My child thinks the ice cream truck is a music truck. We dance as it goes by.”). Of course, some left me making a face like I just had a bite of day old yogurt, know what I mean?

Here are a few of the better ones, slowly transitioning to the rather sad: