Hasta La Creative!

Lance Reddick, who you should know as Lieutenant Daniels on The Wire, takes center stage in Raleigh-based agency Baldwin&‘s new campaign for Cree LED Bulbs, entitled “The Room of Enlightenment.”

The digital campaign features Daniels Reddick in a series of loquacious spots extolling the virtues of LED bulbs, which compare favorably to the incandescent ham fryers you grew up with. Relying on solid copywriting and Reddick’s excellent delivery, the spots are memorable without any frills or fancy production touches. The campaign comes on the heels of a recent incandescent bulb ban, with stores still trying to sell their remaining stock of the soon-to-be relics. One spot, “Gray Market” (featured above) pontificates that there will soon be an illicit market for incandescent bulbs where you may find yourself  “trading jugs of grandpa’s porch juice for bulbs out of a rusty hatchback from a guy with a tattoo on his forehead who goes by the name of Rattlesnake.” In other, clever spots, Reddick uses a competitor’s oddly-shaped bulb as a ping-pong paddle, and talks metaphorical money goats. Stick around for a couple more spots, along with campaign credits, after the jump. continued…

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Burt's Bees doesn't exactly balm in its debut on Vine, but the effort isn't da balm, either.

The brand riffs on classic literature in animated "adaptations" of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Little Women, with more to come, all created by ad agency Baldwin&. Burt's products stand in for the characters and key story elements. For example, a foot-cream tube and a hand-salve tin—the latter with tentacles—play the Nautilus submarine and giant squid, respectively, in the 20,000 Leagues clip. Lip-balm tubes portray the Little Women. (Burt's seven core products are called "classics," hence the theme of classic books.)

Jethro Ames's energetic, playful stop-motion work is a highlight, and the all-out attempt to be wacky is laudable. Still, this feels like a brand searching for its voice in a new medium and falling just a little flat.

Most fans will access the clips through Burt's social outlets, so they'll understand the literary theme. Still, with products playing people, the quirky animation and the oddball dialogue snippets—"Less Leagues! Less Leagues!"—there may be too much to absorb in six seconds.

Burt's plays it far simpler in its first Instagram campaign, showing founder Burt Shavitz paddling a canoe, making tea and generally kicking back in woodsy Maine. These bucolic images do a fine job of illustrating the brand's "classic" folksy motifs. In fact, tastefully edited, with an appropriate soundtrack and logo at the end, they'd make quietly understated Vines that could grow on you.

See the two released Vines below, and scripts/images for three more below that.

Lima, Peru, gets about half an inch of rainfall per year. Yet the atmospheric humidity is around 98 percent. UTEC, the country's major university of engineering and technology, took this peculiar problem and—with help from ad agency Mayo Draftfcb—devised a unique solution: a billboard that draws moisture out of that humid air and turns it into potable drinking water. Check out the case-study video below to see how it works. The billboard wasn't just a nice gesture, either. It served as a recruitment tool to get more students to apply to the university.

On a related note: Burt's Bees is capturing rain water with a billboard of its own—the same interactive board from Baldwin& that delighted Minneapolis last year with its "hydrating" coupons. In the video below, see how the ad is continuing to give back with an interesting second act as a prototype for a rain catchment system.