Hasta La Creative!

Chicago-based agency O’Keefe Reinhard & Paul has a new campaign for Big Lots, promoting its pet food and merchandise offerings with a focus group for pets.

Instead of writing a scripted ad, the agency got a group of pets together for “Pet Focus Group,” a digital video series. The videos feature moderators treating the group of pets like a focus group, with actors asking questions about Big Lots products and interacting with dogs, cats, and other pets. O’Keefe Reinhard & Paul chose to cast improvisational actors to interact with the pets, under the assumption that the animals would create funny situations on their own.

“We realized that instead of scripting this, it would be so much more fun to let pets be pets, and get really good improvisers to react in real time to whatever those animals are doing,” explains Sue Gillan, creative director at OKRP. And because you have these human facilitators in the room with the pets, they get to do the heavy lifting around uncovering the quality of the products without the event feeling commercialized. The result feels like a genuine discovery of the products.”

Stick around for “Cats Only” and “Pets with Style.” (more…)

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BBDO New York has a new campaign for Visa showcasing how quick and easy the brand’s Visa Checkout service is.

In the campaign’s first spot, “Surfer,” BBDO New York teamed up with professional surfer Kolohe Andino, with voiceover from the inimitable Morgan Freeman. Over the course of the 60-second ad, Andino demonstrates how quick and easy Visa Checkout is by using it to order a Pizza Hut pizza while surfing a giant wave. The spot ends with the tagline, “Everywhere you want to be” (it appears they’ve dropped the “it’s”) before directing viewers to sign up for the service at visacheckout.com. “Surfer” debuted this past Sunday during FOX’s NFL broadcast, as Visa is using its NFL sponsorship to promote the campaign and get the word out about its recently-launched payment service.  (more…)

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Qorvis has a new campaign for Aamco, taking a more serious approach while touting the brand as the transmission experts.

The 90-second spot (which is also being released in 60 and 30-second versions), entitled “800 Pieces” highlights the transmission and its 800 parts. “That means there are 800 things can go wrong,” says an actor, while the camera focuses on a transmission coming apart in slow motion. “When the day comes when something goes wrong with one of those 800 pieces, there’s only one place to go: Aamco,” he says, before explaining that Aamco are the “transmission experts,” having fixed over 40 million of them.

While “800 pieces” takes a more serious tone, we can expect a more lighthearted effort to follow. “We are very excited about our two new campaigns. ’800 Pieces”’is serious with an educational tone and addresses the difficulty of understanding the transmission,” said Mike Ganjei, president of the National AAMCO Dealers Association and chairman of AAMCO National Creative. “At the same time, we will continue with our tradition of using humor in our creative, which our second campaign accomplishes.”

Aamco’s follow-up campaign is expected to debut before the end of the year. (more…)

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Earlier this year, Droga5 and Honey Maid celebrated families of all kinds with a campaign called “This Is Wholesome.”

Now, Droga5 is continuing its celebration of diversity in families with a new ad entitled “#NotBroken,” a reference to the outdated phrase “broken home” to refer to families of divorce. As the two-minute ad points out, “More than 40% of Americans are part of a blended family,” so it seems odd that we so few of them in advertising that this spot is noteworthy for including one.

“#NotBroken” is constructed as a sort of two-minute documentary (it will also debut as a 30 second broadcast spot today). “Sometimes it’s hard to explain our family to people. I have two moms, and I’ve got two dads,” says a boy named Isaac, at the opening of the ad. We then follow Isaac and his family, which is celebrated as well-functioning and supportive. “At first I didn’t think there were a lot of families like ours, but now I realize that we aren’t that different,” he eventually concludes. The spot ends by inviting people to celebrate their own blended families with the #NotBroken and #ThisIsWholesome hashtags, which are sure to get some love.

So far, the “This Is Wholesome” campaign has proven to be a success for the brand, with both increased sales figures and Google searches for “Honey Maid,” as Adweek points out.
(more…)

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Following the launch of the NFL season last week, as well as ESPN’s new NFL studio, 72andSunny has launched a new campaign for the network’s Sunday NFL Countdown, entitled “Count on Countdown.”

The campaign launched with a 30-second broadcast spot starring Eagles running back LeSean McCoy. In the spot, McCoy prepares for a Sunday game by following Countdown from his hotel, en route to the stadium and in the locker room. “Every Sunday, I count on Countdown,” McCoy says at the spot’s conclusion. Future spots in the campaign will shift the focus to fans around the country, such as Quin Kilgore’s Tattoo League of Omaha, Nebraska, which gained notoriety in a Countdown feature last season. (more…)

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Happy Monday! Since today is unofficially Apple Week, here’s yet another brand trying to co-opt a bit of that company’s publicity.

M: United has a new campaign for the HTC One in which the agency once again takes on Apple.

Following on the heels of its August campaign promoting the Surface Pro 3 comes a spot in which the agency takes aim at Apple’s Siri, or “Robot Scarlett Johansson.”

The spot opens with Siri looking into a mirror and repeating that classic line “I feel pretty, oh so pretty” before engaging in a conversation with HTC One’s Cortana. Obviously, the conversation is intended to make Siri look silly by comparison, both via Cortana’s less computerized-sounding voice and the HTC One’s fancy features (including not one but two speakers).

This spot works better than most in its surprisingly large family, but how many more Apple-bashing ads can viewers stomach? (more…)

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AMV BBDO, London has a new spot for Guiness Africa entitled “Made of Black” that gets a little awkward.

Well intentioned as it may have been, the spot comes across as a bit tone deaf, homogenizing a continent of diverse cultural groups with the term “black,” because that’s also the color of Guinness. Opening with the question “What is black?,” lines like “Black is an attitude” and “Black got swag” come across as either pandering or condescending. (Several YouTube commenters even go as far as to call the spot racist.) Add to that the poor soundtrack selection of Kanye West (why would you not select an African artist in a spot that supposedly celebrates Africa?) and you’ve got quite the headscratcher. To be fair, the spot’s visuals are quite impressive, but somehow we don’t think that’s what people are going to be talking about. (more…)

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The Los Angeles Clippers have announced the hiring of Santa Monica-based RPA as its new lead agency, tasked with heading strategy, creative, media planning and buying, digital/social marketing and branded entertainment, following a review launched in August.

The review was launched in search of an agency with experience “rebuilding an established, well-known brand” in the wake of the Donald Sterling scandal. Boston-based Pile & Co led the review, with a focus on agencies based in the area. New work can be expected soon, as the Clippers “will start the 2014–2015 season with a new creative platform that will be promoted across media channels.”

“The Los Angeles Clippers are poised for greatness. RPA will help the franchise become a first-class sports and entertainment brand,” said Kirt Danner, SVP, group account director at RPA. “The soon-to-launch campaign will help the franchise stand out and seize this unique opportunity to gain a competitive edge and increase its fan base.”

The team spent $433,500 in measured media last year, according to Kantar media, but that number could increase with the demands of the new campaign.

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To promote the October 17th Channel 4 and Cancer Research fundraiser Stand Up To Cancer 4Creative reimagined the typical disaster film with a twist: instead of human’s facing extinction, it’s cancer cells.

A project over a year in the making, 4Creative and production company Nexus create a world of cancer cell blobs inhabiting a modern city, created utilizing 2D paintings and 3D models. The overpopulated urban environment is disrupted by a mysterious blue orb and soon inhabitants are spontaneously combusting left and right. At the end of the spot, it the environment is finally revealed as a microscopic world which a scientist is testing new anti-cancer drugs on.

As directors Smith & Foulkes explained to Creative Review, personifying cancer posed some distinct challenges. “We wanted to steer away from the obvious route of showing cells as a bunch of grotesque alien germs, but we were also acutely aware of not making them too human or cute,” the pair said. “We also had to find a way to illustrate the new therapies, drugs and scientific breakthroughs that are fighting cancer. We wanted their arrival to be initially magical and mysterious, so we used a glowing blue orb, an unexplained light descending upon a shadowy world.”

The result is a highly unusual approach to raising cancer awareness. While the spot risks viewers sympathizing with the cancer cells (before they are revealed as such) it does make for a visually striking effort that stokes the imagination and entertains while raising awareness for a good cause. (more…)

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At the end of last month we brought news of Lincoln’s partnership with Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey for a new campaign promoting the Lincoln MKC, to be handled by a shop within WPP’s Team Detroit division.

Now, Team Detroit and Lincoln are rolling out the new campaign with a series of (purportedly unscripted) spots that take a somewhat unorthodox approach. In the 60-second introductory spot (featured above), McConaughey drives around pontificating on what it means to “go back” and how some people say you can’t do it but really you just have to look in the right places. What is he talking about exactly? How does it relate to the MKC? Your guess is as good as ours.

In the similarly strange “Bull,” the actor admires the majesty of a large bull blocking the road, before deciding to turn around and take the long route. The 30-second “I Just Liked It” is a little more straightforward, with McConaughey explaining that he drove a Lincoln long before he was paid to, not to look cool or make a statement, but because he “just liked it.” (more…)

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