Hasta La Creative!

Do you hate your car? Do you want to let the world know how frustrated you are driving around in a jalopy that is beyond repair? Honda can help – sort of. For the rest of today, Honda will be tweeting back Vine videos at unhappy drivers who post #WantNewCar on Twitter. The Twitter/Vine combo, developed by the automaker’s longtime agency RPA, is part of Honda’s Summer Clearance Sales Event, and is meant to provide some catharsis to drivers even though there aren’t any discounts or financial incentives for using the hashtag. There probably should be.

If you watch the promo clip above, you’ll see what it looks like when brands use social media for the sake of using social media rather than really committing to interacting with consumers on various social platforms.Take KFC and their annoying, yet memorable, #IAteTheBones campaign. It’s made to go viral and is primarily identifiable to KFC and no other brand. On Twitter, KFC offers followers free merchandise and deals related to the hashtag on a regular basis. Honda is only responding for one day. Even though Honda’s hashtag is much more relatable (one could argue it’s too generic) the execution feels unsure of itself, just like a teenage driver getting behind the wheel for the first time. Credits after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After watching this mini epic anthem for Dairy Australia, you might have the sudden urge to run out and down a couple gallons of milk, a few pounds of butter or a side of beef. On August, 4, the Australian industry group will launch its first major campaign in six years. It will be called Lengendairy.

This legendary, pro-dairy farming epic will take the form of TV, print, digital, radio, event sponsorships as well as heavy PR and raise the awareness and stature of the dairy industry.

Of the campaign, Dairy Australia Group manager Isabel MacNeill said, “It’s all about giving the industry a well deserved boost. We want to tell the story of Australia’s dairy industry and it doesn’t stop at just milk. The Legendairy campaign will champion the dairy industry, sharing stories of innovation, provenance and personal triumph. We believe this focus will connect the farming community with its consumers.”

Of the campaign’s introduction video, which consist of still images and superimposed copy, we think there could have been even more epicness had Morgan Freeman read the copy as a voiceover. Or to keep it in-country, maybe Nicole Kidman, Sam Worthington or Russell Crowe.

In any case, Australia is about to get its own Got Milk campiagn

From Arnold Worldwide comes “Runnovation Anthem,” a spot for New Balance that depicts people running in different environments interspersed with cuts of what appear to be acts of science. There’s also a very loud musical number, which one would suppose is the titular anthem, despite not being very anthemic. The song is so utterly terrifying, in fact, that it’s easy to imagine all of these people running away from a masked pursuer who chases them while playing this song full-blast on a JVC Kaboom Box held above his or her head.

With an introduction to the idea of “Runnovation” (running + innovation for those playing at home) out of the way, the campaign will unfold into three different storylines across media platforms, with the first focusing on a grassroots fitness group called “November Project.” If you’re interested in watching some suburban white dudes run around outside and yell “fuck yeah” for a while, watch this video:

Did you enjoy watching those people vomit? Yeah, you probably did, you sicko. Credits after the jump.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Ubisoft is still a few months away from the release of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, the sixth installment in its blockbuster video game franchise, but some recent teamwork with Sid Lee Paris will offer fans and future some customers some strangely artistic publicity. “Defy History,” an interactive art project that will be displayed in Le Musée de la Marine, will let users transpose facial webcam pictures onto a selection of characters that are part of a large historical painting. Before the painting is finished, people will be able to vote on the best faces, with the winners being included in the final product.

It’s hard to say why Ubisoft wanted to jump into this creative work, since the painting project is only tangentially related to Assassin’s Creed IV. Sometimes, companies and agencies overthink, especially for a game about an assassin pirate. If interested, you can find out more details about the picture posting here.

I miss the good ole days of Ezio. Credits after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After their amusing spot featuring a basketball player juggling a couple of extra balls, Boost Mobile and 180LA are back together once again, this time emphasizing the savings Boost customers can get. In three short videos, we see various stealing scenarios: a man on the subway gets pickpocketed, a city guy leaps over fences to evade a mugger, a woman has her purse snatched on the sidewalk. But by the end of each ad, the victim has money handed back to them, showing that “Boost Mobile puts cash back in your pocket, literally.”

It’s a good concept, and the little song that shifts each scene into celebration coupled with the actors’ yay-I’m-richer-than-I-thought smiles makes these spots sweet. I only wish they could have cast at least one white thief. Sure, they’re all good guys in the end, but these spots still reinforce tired racial stereotypes. We can do better.

Credits and the rest of the videos after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Budweiser’s new campaign “Made for Music” launches in 85 countries today, featuring Jay-Z and Rihanna carefully dispersed amidst other artists including an ice sculptor and street art painter. Jay-Z’s ad is backed by his song PSA, while Rihanna’s features her newest single, “Right Now.” Both spots are directed by Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go, Bee Season) and each closes with inspirational words from Bud: “It begins and ends with what you make.”

Made for Music was inspired by the Budweiser Made in America Festival which debuted in Philly last year and Jay-Z headlined. This year, Beyonce and Nine Inch Nails will take the marquee billing over Labor Day Weekend.

Jay and RiRi’s ads are mildly inspiring with their filmic, black-and-white “creative spirit.” After the Samsung deal, Jay-Z’s authenticity feels slightly compromised, but both he and Rihanna are still solid examples of hard-working performers. The scenes are nothing new–star reads in the car, star makes decisions with sweeping hand motions, star stands triumphant as the lights go down–so I wouldn’t mind a bit of original dialogue, but all in all these spots do the job. Time to turn up Magna Carta Holy Grail and channel HOV’s productivity.

Credits after the jump as well as clips from our interview last year with Translation CEO Steve Stoute on his agency’s relationship with “the king of beers.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

As much as I appreciate a good fail video and laugh regularly from schadenfreude, Lowe Roche’s latest for Fuzz Wax Bar in Toronto just made me cringe. To advertise their dedication to smoother skin, Fuzz covered a male model in wax strips and sent him onto the streets. People could tear the strips (and hair) off him to receive a 25% off gift certificate. The strips were illustrated with grim-faced smileys, varying based on the amount of pain they would cause. Many people appeared to delight in making this man shout in agony.

“Street Waxing” seems to me the opposite of an attractive ad campaign. The selling point of waxing is the final product: smooth skin. In between appointments, one primary goal is to forget about the pain. That makes this experience more of an anti-waxing PSA. Fuzz Wax Bar reminds us, very viscerally, that waxing is not a pleasant experience. And adding insult to injury, (unlike this model), you’re going to have to pay to get yours yanked off.

Credits after the jump

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

From Mother’s UK shop comes a new two-minute spot for IKEA kicks off the new ‘Make Small Spaces Big’ campaign.

Featuring the vocals support of soul singer Elayna Boynton covering Aretha Franklin‘s “One Room Paradise,” we’re taken inside a doll house stocked to the brim with IKEA furniture. There we meet a single mom with a creepy doll head raising her similarly creepy doll-headed son, both adept at finding solutions for making their tiny house bigger.

Now, for U.S. audiences, the doll heads are a bit off-putting and hard to get over. But, once you do, you come to realize what a rarity it is that we see single parent households depicted in advertising, especially for a global brand like IKEA. Mother does a wonderful job in not only demonstrating the products’ features, but also giving the spot some emotional weight. If it was only something other than doll heads…

Take a virtual MTV Cribs-style tour of the apartment from the spot here, and view credits after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After all episodes of Big Brother are exhausted, late night TV on England’s Channel 4 consists of Random Acts, a short-form “daily arts strand.” They call it television as art, rather than about art.

An upcoming part of this stream comes from Aardman Animations directors Karni & Saul, who have made a 3-minute “Lynchian” film about a sunbathing, flower crown-wearing girl who is infested by her own insect tattoos. “In ‘Skinmeal,’ we tried to make a piece that was visually tempting and at the same time had a sharp edge to it,” Karni & Saul said.

The concept sounds terrifying, and when a spider crawls out of our protagonist’s scalp I do feel a little squeamish. But with its plinky mood music and limited length, I wonder how the piece will fully employ the fear factor. Skinmeal is a great title; let’s hope they follow through and she really gets devoured, albeit artfully.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Along with its hugely successful and Cannes Lions-winning Real Beauty Sketches, Dove is out with Camera Shy, a :60 that focuses on the propensity of many women to shy away from the camera when it’s aimed at them. Created by Ogilvy, the work is accompanied by ose Murphy’s “Peek-A-Boo” as woman after woman hide from the camera until a super asks, “When did you stop thinking you’re beautiful?”

It then shows images of little girls having no fear in front of the camera suggesting camera shyness is culturally induced. Which, of course, may be true. Except for the fact all one has to do is spend a little time on Instagram or Facebook or any number of other image-focused sites to find thousands of mirror shots and selfies.

Which, of course, is not to belittle the fact that, yes, many won are, in fact, camera shy and do question their beauty.