Hasta La Creative!

I’m not a NASCAR fan, but apparently, Goodyear makes all the tires that the drivers use, and of course, in the world of car buffs, that’s a huge coup.

Unless the drivers bitch about the tires. From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

On Monday, Goodyear was peddling a feel-good story: “Goodyear tops Fortune magazine’s most-admired list.”

But 24 hours earlier, NASCAR driver Tony Stewart was peddling his own story.

“Goodyear can’t build a tire worth a crap,” said the mouthy fireplug of a man known for saying exactly what’s going on inside his racing helmet. A frustrated Stewart was speaking after a race Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway about newly designed tires that forced drivers to drive like grandmas.

But he was just getting started.

“I’m going home and taking everything that has Goodyears off and put Firestones on and feel a lot safer,” Stewart said in another interview.

“It’s a shame these teams that work so hard are being dictated by a company incapable of building tires fit for a street car.”

Ouch. These celebrity endorsements and sponsorships can really boost a brand’s sales. They can also backfire.

Shawn Waite brings this retro-feeling print campaign for Nocona Boots to our attention.

I don’t like that these cowboys are messin’ with a bear. Bears are my peeps. However, if I allow myself to overlook this fact and to overlook the fact that the other ads in this campaign also glamorize man conquering nature, I can see what nice work this is. From a visual storytelling point-of-view these illustrations are wonderful. And brand building. Should I ever want to have nature-conquering boots on my feet, I’ll consider purchasing Nocona.

See more ads from this campaign after the jump.

I’ve been working on some “green” intiatives for a client of mine this week, so this story caught my eye:

British environmentalists say a Chicago-to-London American Airlines flight was “obscene” because it carried only five passengers.

The Feb. 9 flight used 22,000 gallons of fuel to carry the passengers on the trans-Atlantic route, a decision Friends of the Earth said was environmentally irresponsible, The Telegraph reported Wednesday.

“Flying virtually empty planes is an obscene waste of fuel,” said Richard Dyer, Friends of the Earth’s transport activist. “Through no fault of their own, each passenger’s carbon footprint for this flight is about 45 times what it would have been if the plane had been full.”

American Airlines officials said it was forced to cancel one of its four daily fights from Chicago to London. While it was able to place nearly all of the canceled flight’s passengers on other flights, five couldn’t be accommodated.

Then there was the London-to-Chicago flight to consider.

Canceling the flight “would have left a plane load of west-bound passengers stranded at London Heathrow who were due to fly back to the U.S. on the same aircraft,” an airline spokesman said.

This is an interesting dilemma. I have some questions, after the jump:

Cons are 100 this year.

Gary Koepke, the cofounder and executive creative director of Boston-based ad agency Modernista! says, “They’ve always been around in my life. They’re a fixture, like family . . . it’s like an archetype now – like a cross or an old Coca-Cola label.”

[via The Boston Globe]

Stuart Elliott brings us the story of a small beer brand using the interwebs to further its cause.

A Mexican import, Pacifico, is filling its Web site with 30 brand-centric video clips that celebrate a life centered on sun, sand, surf, street food and a willingness to eat extremely hot peppers or play checkers with bottle caps.

The videos, and the Web site, were created by Creature, an agency in Seattle that also produces ads for Pacifico in traditional media like magazines and billboards and oversees promotions like the refitting of 1960s Volkswagen buses to serve as touring Pacifico peddlers.

The videos, which run from 15 seconds to 3 minutes, were filmed in Mexico with Super 8 movie cameras to give the footage less of a slick, polished look

I loathe vanity-driven plastic surgery. So, these ads from McCann Erickson/Argentina promoting the use of Chevrolet Official Service Centers, caught my eye.

Of course, the premise doesn’t make any sense, given that doctors “fix” health problems everyday.

[via Ads of the World]

In response to a complaint about an American Apparel ad, an Austin Chronicle writer lashes back.

Have you seen Denny’s new ad with Tony Sirico, channeling his Sopranos persona Paulie “Walnuts,” paying for a fast food breakfast with phony money?

So, how would you rate that ad on a scale of 1 – 10? More importantly, what criteria did you use to arrive at your decision?

I have my own list, but I’m really interested in what you all in the industry use. And let’s not play the ROI card. Someone had to evaluate it and approve it prior to seeing the results. How’d they go about it? What was their thought process?

To compel drivers to make the “personal luxury crossover,” Infiniti (or rather, TBWA\Chiat\Day) surprises us with EXtraordinary, a campaign for the EX that’s all smooth pacing and cool grace.

I noticed that New Yorker, Fred Wilson, used Gridskipper to find Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco this weekend (while looking at colleges with his daughter).

I learned to drink coffee in San Francisco, so the topic is one I have passion for. So does San Francisco lifestyle book, 7×7.

7×7, in effort to provide context for what it calls “the third wave” in coffee culture, quotes Joel Pollock, head roaster at Stumptown in Portland (an even more advanced coffee market):

“When you’re roasting coffee, you’re caramelizing sugars, there’s the potential for citric notes, herbal notes, floral notes. But when you roast dark, you’re taking all these notes and turning them into carbon—and that’s the same carbon if you’re working with coffee from New Guinea or a piece of chicken.”

I love the way this man talks about coffee.