The full run of Breaking Bad is coming out on Blu-ray soon after the AMC series wraps up. And if you're enough of a fan to spring for the special-edition box set, it's packaged in a replica money barrel. Not only that, it comes with a Los Pollos Hermanos apron and enough special features—a documentary on making the last season, commentaries on every episode, etc.—to choke Jane Margolis. You can pre-order the set on Amazon, but be warned: It costs at least half a money barrel right now.
That's the request from one anthropomorphized Beats Pill speaker to another in the commercial below, which aired Sunday on MTV after the pop singer's controversial performance on the Video Music Awards. To which the other speaker opines: "Don't you need ass to twerk?"
Actually, Beats, feeding Miley would be your job.
First off, hat tip to sci-fi writer Tim Maughan for pointing out the Miley-mocking video on the Beats page. The brand is involved with plenty of pop and hip-hop stars at the moment, but the confluence of Miley and Robin Thicke at the VMAs was a branding bonanza for the electronics maker.
Beats Electronics is, of course, the brainchild of rapper and producer Dre, whose Beats by Dre headphones have been a huge success. The company's next big thing is a wireless speaker called the Beats Pill, voiced in commercials by Eminem, Chris Rock and (it sounds like, at least) Tichina Arnold from Fox's late, lamented Everybody Hates Chris. The speakers have been prominently featured in music videos, notably Miley's, and Thicke starred in a full-blown RadioShack ad for them with his accessories—I'm sorry, backup dancers—using the speakers to do more or less everything except speak.
Anyway, on Sunday, Miley and Robin got down and dirty on stage in a way that offended millions of people who were doubtless being forced at gunpoint to endure the spectacle. Beats, meanwhile, was ready—like, really, really ready (thanks to the digital wizards at Framestore)—to whip up a video showing two Pills asking where "all the thick girls" have gone while watching clips from Thicke's video and then suggesting Miley should have more material to twerk with. "Somewhere, Sir Mix-A-Lot is crying his eyes out," says one.
This actually wasn't the only time Beats teed off on a pop star during the show. It also found time to make fun of Katy Perry (who doesn't appear to be sponsored by the company) in a video with Barclays Center seats visible behind the two big-mouthed little speaker dudes. And Dre protege Eminem announced a new album at the VMAs, which Beats immediately promoted with a 30-second clip from the rapper's new single.
Check out all three videos below. It was a well-orchestrated campaign of pop-culture mockery—as well as pop-culture sponsorship, individual-artist sponsorship, cross-platform synergy, album promotion. So, y'know, don't confuse it with satire.
Here's a question: When, during the VMAs, weren't you watching an ad? Yeah, we're going to go with "never," too.
Taking "a trip to Belize" doesn't sound fun, at least the way the phrase was used on Breaking Bad last Sunday. But the small Central American country took the reference in stride and is out to prove that a visit to Belize isn't, in fact, a one-way trip to oblivion—by offering free vacations to Vince Gilligan and eight members of the AMC show's cast.
"Many of us are big fans of the show and can't wait to see what happens over the last six episodes," the tourism board (with help from ad agency Olson) wrote in its invitation. "While we hope that some of our favorite characters don't get 'sent on a trip to Belize' in the show, we do hope you will take us up on the following offer—we'd like to send all of you on an ACTUAL trip to our country after the season is over."
As Olson explained to us in an email, this is certainly a better response to the unflattering mention than just freaking out about it.
Are you so tired of James Franco's artsy Instagram pictures, his smirking superiority, his pretentious poetry, his cornrow-sporting Spring Breakers white gangsta, his incessant everywhere-ness—so much so that you could just punch him right in his boyishly handsome face? Here's the perfect video snippet for you. The actor-writer-producer-"student of life" already let slip—in a recent Instagram video as laconic and lifeless as his Oscar co-hosting gig in 2011—that he'll be the subject of an upcoming Comedy Central roast. Now the cable network is starting its own promotion, creating the piece of performance art below that a lot of haters will no doubt really dig. Take that, pretty boy! But the 35-year-old star is still standing, of course. He'll play a young Hugh Hefner in the upcoming flick Lovelace, about Linda Lovelace and the porn game-changer Deep Throat, premiering next week. And there's that book of poetry on the way. What a great time for a beatdown. The cable channel roast airs Sept. 2.
Breaking Bad wins the award for most poetic TV show promo ever. The final episodes of the series, beginning Aug. 11, are heralded by a haunting reading of "Ozymandias" by Bryan Cranston, aka Walter White, aka Heisenberg. Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet about the inevitable decline of kings serves as a warning to all those who would create an empire, suggesting time and nature will obliterate the works of man in the end. Given that Breaking Bad is a quintessential tragedy with all the trappings thereunto, including the inclusion of a Greek chorus, nothing could have been more perfect to foreshadow the end. Glad someone paid attention in 10th grade lit.
ESPN's "This Is SportsCenter" is among the handful of classic sports ad campaigns of all time. Launched in 1995 by Wieden + Kennedy in New York, the campaign—originally inspired by the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap—hasn't changed much over the years. And why would it? You don't mess with a winning formula.
The premise of the ads, as we've noted before, is that ESPN's Bristol, Conn., offices are the center of the sports universe—a surreal yet mundane fantasy world where athletes and mascots live and work together with anchors and journalists. Where other marketers portray athletes as superhuman, "This Is SportsCenter" presents them as comically, relatably human. Eighteen years and more than 400 spots later, the campaign continues.
As part of the Adweek story linked above, W+K drew up a list of its 10 favorite SportsCenter ads. Now, ESPN has one-upped its agency—devoting a whole special to its 50 favorite SportsCenter spots of all time. The show, airing this Thursday at 8 p.m. ET and hosted by Jason Sudeikis, will feature anecdotes and stories about the top 50, and fans are encouraged to vote for their favorite spot over on Facebook. Sudeikis will announce the winning spot on the show. (More than 1 million votes have been cast so far.)
Check out the program on Thursday, and click the link below for a sneak peek at ESPN's official top 10 favorite "This Is SportsCenter" commercials.
The only thing scarier than a 12-foot-tall Colin Firth in a British lake is a 40-foot-long dragon skull washed up on a British beach. Beachgoers in Dorset were surprised to come across the latter on Monday—as a skull the size of a London bus suddenly appeared on Charmouth beach, part of Dorset's Jurassic coast, famous for its dinosaur fossils.
Alas, it's not a real dragon skull—it's an ad from movie and TV streaming service BlinkBox, which is celebrating the arrival this week of the third season of HBO's epic Game of Thrones on its site. It took a team of three sculptors more than two months to design, construct and paint the skull, which was dreamed up by Taylor Herring, the same PR company that built the giant Mr. Darcy earlier this summer.
The skull—perhaps the coolest Game of Thrones-related marketing since the dragon-shadow newspaper ad—was inspired by the scene in the series when Arya Stark discovers a dragon skull in the dungeons of King's Landing, the capital of the Seven Kingdoms.
It's an image that was nearly too hot for Los Angeles, a town that regularly sees bare bums and lithe bodies in various states of undress along its famous streets and highways. But after some wrangling with ad sellers, and the threat of a ban, Lifetime will be able to launch its risqué billboard in L.A. after all to promote the 12th season of Project Runway.
The ad, from agency Ignition Print in Santa Monica, Calif., shows Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn lording over a bunch of nude models. The same image, by the way, got a swift and unconditional OK in New York, where it's debuting Wednesday on hundreds of bus shelters, kiosks, newsstands and other high-visibility spots. Guess the Nanny State of Bloomberg doesn't extend to public displays of flesh. The cable network, which wouldn't comment on the flap but said privately that it didn't want to scrap the campaign, had planned to make adjustments via Photoshop for L.A. But now, the image, sans added clothing, will appear in a single spot in L.A.—above the storied Sunset Strip, where no one impressionable ever goes.
If the models had had Glocks in their hands like all the one-sheets for Hollywood action flicks, this would've been a non-issue to start with. The series, which has used suggestive advertising with the smokin' hot Klum many times in the past, returns July 18.
High school would've been so much more bearable if we'd had a tipsy teacher spouting U.S. history, pausing during key Watergate moments not for dramatic effect but just long enough to puke. Who wouldn't ace that part of the test? Comedy Central is doing its part to make up for those slept-through second periods. The cable channel has nabbed a popular Web series, as it's done successfully in the past, for one of its new summer offerings called Drunk History, which is combination re-enactment, cult celebrity fest and kegger. Stars like Adam Scott, Aubrey Plaza, Bob Odenkirk, Fred Willard, Stephen Merchant and Jack Black will take part in loopy re-enactments of the Scopes monkey trial, the Battle of the Alamo, the Haymarket riot and other seminal historical events. They aren't really shitfaced, but the show's narrators are (for the sake of argument, that is). Advertising for the series, launching July 9, is appropriately booze-soaked. Suds float up to cover dynamic online banner ads, like cold draft being drawn from a tap, and famous politicians flash bottles of hooch instead of peace signs. Lingering question: How in the world did George Washington ever make it across the Delaware with all that beer? Our 11th-grade class left out all the good stuff.
AMC on Tuesday released the official key art for the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad, premiering Aug. 11. "Remember my name," warns an intimidating, clenched-fisted Walter White, echoing the famous "Say my name" scene from the first half of Breaking Bad's fifth season. Beyond that, who knows what will happen as this great series comes to an end?
In more playful Breaking Bad news, AMC has also launched the Breaking Bad Name Lab, which allows you to see your name transformed with element symbols like the iconic Breaking Bad logo. You can then share the image on social media or download it as an animated GIF.
Fox's Family Guy has a new "For Your Consideration" ad for this year's Emmy Awards, because Seth MacFarlane's unfunny Rat Pack schtick hasn't ruined enough award shows yet. The latest ad references an episode of HBO's Girls in which someone received a pearl necklace. Hence the Family Guy headline: "Here's a load of comedy to shoot on your chest." Groan. It's better than the lazy Jew-baiting that MacFarlane and company have been relying on lately, but that Girls episode was beaten to death long before they got to it. But that's to be expected from a show that hasn't been funny since I was in college.
No one feels sorry for Jeff Lewis, and most everybody wants to see Padma Lakshmi in a soaking-wet cocktail dress. These and other truisms come through in Bravo's just-launched summer 2013 commercial, with the backdrop styled to look like a deserted tropical island. It's actually green screen, shot in winter in New York, so there were no real waves or sharks and, with lots of Real Housewives on hand, few real body parts. But lo and behold, James Lipton gets his second-in-a-row cameo, cementing his unlikely Bravolebrity status amid all the gold diggers and social climbers.
And speaking of prostitution, the ever-droll Lewis says in the behind-the-scenes footage that he feels "no better than a common street whore" for having participated in the spot. Chin up, Jeff. Many of your cable cohorts have done plenty worse than take a bucket of water in the face in the name of self-promotion.
The campaign, with new videos expected in the coming months, is the fourth consecutive summer-pegged Bravo work from L.A.-based Stun Creative. It hypes Top Chef Masters, Princesses: Long Island, Don't Be Tardy, Watch What Happens Live and other series in the cable channel's trashy universe. Will.i.am and Miley Cyrus, already gunning for "song of the summer" status with "Fall Down," provide the danceable soundtrack. And there's a Giggy appearance, so that's always good.
Second spot after the jump, with James Lipton playing cards with a monkey!
Lego has unveiled a life-size Star Wars X-Wing fighter jet made entirely of Legos in Times Square. It promotes an upcoming Cartoon Network show called The Yoda Chronicles. You can also see a life-size Lego Chewy, Vader, R2-D2, C-3PO and Boba Fett in the promo for the show. But the X-Wing has the distinction of being the largest Lego structure built to date. At 11 feet tall, 43 feet long, 44 feet wide and almost 46,000 pounds, it's made of 5,335,200 individual Lego bricks. It took 32 people four months just to put it together. And you can climb into the cockpit for a photo. Which means all you Star Wars and Lego fans must make a pilgrimage to this, the largest and most awesome Lego thing ever made, and get a picture of your child sitting in the cockpit shouting "Pew! Pew!" See lots more photos at Gizmodo.
Intern abuse is always good fun. The Weather Channel is celebrating the beginning of Tornado Week today by putting its interns in a room and blowing powerful winds at them, with the force of the breeze increasing for every public mention of #TornadoWeek on Twitter. They're broadcasting the whole thing live on YouTube (see below—although for the full experience, click the link above). There have been about around 6,000 mentions so far, and the winds are in the mid-90 mph range. If the tweet count hits 1 million, the channel is vowing to pummel the interns with a "full blown EF-5 tornado." That would mean wind speeds of more than 200 mph. They'd better have a lot of desk fans on hand.
CC Sabathia is a large man, but he's not technically wearing a fat suit. That latter fact—and not just his slimming New York Yankee pinstripes—gives Sabathia the advantage over the horizontally striped (and comically fat-suited) Scott Van Pelt in ESPN's new This Is SportsCenter commercial from Wieden + Kennedy in New York. Now, if they can combine a fat suit and a mullet, they'll really be breaking new ground.
"Fuck you. You'll take what we give you." That's easily the line of the year from any parody ad so far, and it comes around the 18-second mark of "The First Honest Cable Company," from Extremely Decent Films, which has gotten almost 2.5 million YouTube views in a week. Director and co-writer Nick Smith, sort of a cross between Will Robinson and Doogie Howser, does a fine job delivering the on-target faux pitch, aided by snazzy "infographics" and cloying music cues, as he explains how the corporate Internet-cable oligopoly is able to screw consumers and blithely "raise our prices to optimum cockbag levels." Big cable and Internet providers are such easy targets, so this is basically a can't-miss concept, but it's a flawless execution with a bit of economic education along the way. Thankfully, there are options on the horizon virtually guaranteed to relieve our collective pain. The progressive, right-minded folks at Google have our best interests at heart and would never dream of telling us to F-off. Right? Right?!
Don Draper is a man with at least two identities, so it shouldn't be surprising that he's seeing double on the Mad Men Season 6 poster, which AMC unveiled today. The New York Times has the story behind its creation:
Showrunner Matthew Weiner, inspired by a childhood memory of lush, painterly illustrations on T.W.A. flight menus, decided to turn back the promotional clock. He pored over commercial illustration books from the 1960s and '70s and sent images to the show's marketing team, which couldn't quite recreate the look he was after.
"Finally," he said, "they just looked up the person who had done all these drawings that I really loved, and they said: 'Hey, we've got the guy who did them. And he's still working. His name is Brian Sanders.' "
UPDATE: AMC also released this video offering a sneak peek at the new season.
For use on external sites w/exclusive video premieres.
Mad Men returns to AMC on April 7 for Season 6—with a special two-hour premiere written by showrunner Matthew Weiner and directed by executive producer Scott Hornbacher. Check out the first on-air promo below, which began airing on Sunday. There's not much to go on, plot wise, although Don looks as conflicted as ever.
Separately, the other big Mad Men news this week is that Gita Hall May, a model from the 1950s and '60s, is suing Lionsgate over the show's opening credits. May, who is now 79, claims the opening segment uses an image of her without her consent. The image, below, was taken by Richard Avedon and used in a Revlon hairspray ad.
Marketers just won't let people waiting in bus shelters have any peace. Case in point: The Weather Channel and ad agency Iris recently tricked out one shelter with hidden sprinklers to promote the client's latest Android app. The app apparently provides such precise forecasts that you might never again be caught in surprise downpours. As an actor checked the app and hurriedly opened his Weather Channel umbrella, the sprinklers were activated, putting a damper on the other people's daily commute. (At certain bus stops, the sudden shower would also have washed away a buttery baked-potato smell.) Bottom line: I feel empowered knowing that, thanks to the Weather Channel, humankind will no longer have to guess what the weather will be like inside covered spaces!
Gerber has launched its third Gerber Generation Photo Search on its Facebook page. The brand seeks the next Gerber baby and will award $50,000 to the winner.
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