Hasta La Creative!

Cool news out of Honda camp: The American branch of the Japanese automaker is attempting to revive the dying drive-in theater industry with Project Drive-In, an awareness campaign that will provide five drive-in theaters with new digital projectors. Currently, about half of the 368 drive-ins still operating in America may be forced to close in the next few years unless they switch to digital projects to support the technology used for most new releases. New digital projectors cost between $75k-$100k, which as you may be able to guess, isn’t chump change for theaters that mostly exist in Middle America.

Honda, teaming with its longtime ally RPA, launched the super-duper social flood on the usual networks and has anchored it all to projectdrivein.com for users who want to donate, spread the word, vote on theaters to save, etc. And even if the good press will ultimately fail to save the obsolete drive-in theater industry, kudos to Honda for jumping in with both feet anyway.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We figured we’d hold off on posting about this until this afternoon because it’s Friday and you might actually be able to view this in full, if you haven’t already, because it deserves to be.  Werner Herzog, the legendary director, writer and/or producer of a million projects including Grizzly Man during his 50-year career, has gone behind the camera once again for the above documentary, From One Second to the Next. This is the epic, poignant, sad and important extension of the ongoing “It Can Wait” PSA campaign initially launched by AT&T that has now been supported by the other major wireless carriers including Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

Herzog, along with BBDO New York, continues to hammer the message home that texting while driving doesn’t shouldn’t mix via the tales of four different people who were affected by it on either end of the spectrum. Be safe this weekend and if you’d care to, take the “It Can Wait” pledge here. Credits after the jump.

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Personal genetics company 23andMe has launched Portraits of Health, its first television campaign. The campaign, created by Arnold Worldwide in New York, focuses on educating consumers about how understanding their DNA can help them make more informed and proactive health decisions. The campaign, features people discussing their real 23andMe results, visualized as graphics to illustrate what they learned about their health by exploring their DNA.

It’s all to convince people to develop their own personalized plan to proactively prevent and manage health issues. Knowing how your genetic make-up can affect your life and understanding the effect it has on your life is best expressed when one of the characters in the ad says, “Change what you can. Manage what you can’t.”

Of the campaign’s approach, 23andMe President Andy Page said,”Our goal with this campaign is to provide consumer education and raise awareness about the potential of personal genetics, while also establishing 23andMe as a recognized and trusted brand. 23andMe pioneered direct-to-consumer genetic testing and our investment in advertising also represents a first-of-its-kind TV campaign that pioneers advertising for the direct-to-consumer genetic testing industry as well.”

Of course the conspiracy theorists out there will label this effort just another step on the road to amassing enough data to magically manufacture the perfect race of humans who will wipe out the rest of us useless slobs ruining couch cushions with our fat asses. But, that’s just the way conspiracy theorists see it. For the rest of us, hey, it might be groovy to know how what lurks within and how it will lead to our demise.

You’ve never seen an episode of the fictional figurine drama “The Real Soccer Moms of Datalandia,” but you’ve probably seen a show just like it. And for anyone who has encountered the frustration of a malfunctioning TV signal or a storm-induced blackout, missing that crucial moment in whatever show you’re watching can make you want to punch your monitor until it breaks (side note: if you have Time Warner Cable, this process happens daily). Though we watch the shows, we, as consumers, don’t really pay attention to how the sausage gets made, that is: how the wires and signals connect to make sure that our real soccer moms stay on the screen.

For the past few weeks, General Electric and Mekanism have been using a series of online videos to explain this process to consumers. The newest spot, “Stormageddon,” is shown above. I’m not sure if consumers care much for big data explanations. They’d rather watch bad reality shows where women frequently toss glasses of pinot grigio on each other. Thinking about how General Electric makes the sausage feels a little like they are patting themselves on the back as their bank account gets smaller. If I liked sausage, I’d rather just eat it. Check out a second clip after the jump.

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BBDO New York and Foot Locker know that Clippers forward/dunker Blake Griffin is a commercial machine – Subway, Kia, Jordan Brand to rattle off a few quickly. So for their latest joint venture, “The Endorser,” the creatives decided to physically hook up Griffin to a machine called The Endorser as if he were programmed to place products. For some Lob City support, Clippers point guard/whiner Chris Paul steps in as a foil to turn off the machine and show us the difference between Real Blake and Robot Blake.

The spot is another smart and self-aware sports bit that takes advantage of an athlete’s public persona through subversion. Griffin is usually stone-faced or arrogantly posturing on the court after huge dunks, but he’s built up a quiet niche as a funnyman on television. Just see this Grantland piece from March that discusses why Blake’s comedy is more complex than you might think. The only issue with Blake is overexposure, like, when his sponsorship brands debut separate commercials within the same week. His Jordan “Blake and Drain” spot, which alludes to MJ and Spike Lee ads from twenty years ago, is even better than the Footlocker commercial. And for that reason, “The Endorser” might get lost in the ever-expanding Blake Griffin commercial merry-go-round. Credits after the jump.

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If you live in either Chicago or Boston, you may have watched (or wanted to watch) the Stanley Cup Finals, in which case you realized that you don’t have access to NBC Sports. After some McGyver-ing and hooking you iPad to your TV, you got thousands about thousands of commercials advertising that NBC Sports would be broadcasting every game of England’s prestigious Barclays Premier League. After digesting this fact, you immediately stopped caring because 1.) You’re an American who likes ‘merican sports and 2.) Again, you don’t have access to NBC Sports.

But who better to make you, an American without access to NBC, care about this development than Jason Sudeikis, a former Saturday Night Live cast member who has appeared basically fucking everywhere in the last month? First, dude quits SNL. Then, he starts going on a press tour for his terrible-looking new movie, Meet The Millers, where he stars opposite Jennifer Aniston, who plays a middle-aged stripper. Then, he joined ESPN to count down the top 50 “This Is SportsCenter” ads last week. Then, he made cameo appearance in Drinking Buddies, a new film playing on Apple TV before it hits theaters at the end of the month and stars Sudeikis’ real-life fiance, Olivia Wilde. Then, Kiran shows me this and asks me to write about it, compelling me to start complaining about how Jason Sudeikis is fucking everywhere these days. Then, wouldn’t you know it, he releases a viral video YESTERDAY where he leads a parody version of Mumford & Sons, with Ed Helms, Jason Bateman and Will Forte starring as his bearded indie-folk backing band.

Seriously, it’s absolutely impossible to get rid of this guy. Watch him play a dumb American coach who doesn’t get soccer above in a new campaign from the Brooklyn Brothers (who you may remember from those kick-ass John Krasinski/Alec Baldwin New Era spots), and then don’t talk to me about Jason Sudeikis until you’ve developed some sort of Sudeikis repellant.

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When Lollapalooza kicks off its annual Chicago invasion today, there will inevitably be the droves of concertgoers who spend more time recording music on their smartphones than actually watching the music, which this year comes from the likes of Nine Inch Nails, The Cure and Queens of the Stone Age. Three staffers from Leo Burnett – designers Derek Heinze and Adam Prewozniak and writer,  Jake Reilly – are attempting to put a stop to the digital nonsense, asking anyone who goes to a concert to experience the music on their one. Lighters are acceptable, although you can use those at your own risk.

After the jump, you can see more graphics for the movement, including a photo of Jane’s Addiction frontman/Lolla mastermind Perry Farrell signing his support on some posters (we’re sure the Yeah Yeah Yeahs approve as well). Oh yeah (“Superhero” joke).

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And now, for something, er, lighter. These back-to-school posts almost make me wistful for the days when a new pencil case was the joy of my September. But as I have grown, so has the sophistication of academic shopping. To keep with the times, Best Buy is branding themselves America’s go-to “Techfitter” of the season.

To show that they’ll equip students with not only the best technology, but the right technology for their pursuits, CP+B and Best Buy found real students and surprised them with personalized Best Buys, “tech-fitted” to their academic interests in a pair of new Paul Hunter-directed spots. Greg, Aerospace Engineering Major, gets a semi truck parked in front of his house. It opens, and he’s presented with the planetary system, plus a launchable rocket (sadly not available at a Best Buy near you). Lidia, a Marine Biology major, gets an underwater tech experience complete with dolphins and jellyfish. Both personalized surprise scenarios are scattered with Windows 8 laptops and tablets.

Additional spots will air later this month, and my guess is the lucky students will not include an English or PoliSci major, because those experiences would involve sheafs of paper and alcohol. Let’s expect an aspiring architect and an ambitious pre-med; they provide ideal landscapes for Best Buy’s eager urban tech-fitter to make a difference. Credits after the jump.

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Having come from Boston myself, the Boston accent is something very familiar to my ears. Though I don’t really have a Boston accent (parents weren’t from Boston), I have an ear for it and can spot all those fake Boston accents in movies from a mile away.

When DISH launched its recent campaign featuring the Boston Guys talking about the service’s Hopper (Hoppa), I was pleasantly thrilled to see the Boston accent done right. The Boston Guys campaign, created by Barton F. Graf 9000 (or Baaahton F. Graaahf 9000 as AdWeek’s David Gianatasio once called them), began about a year ago and was so loved the agency kept giving us more and more.

The latest entry in the Boston Guys campaign is Talk Boston, a site on which one can learn howe to properly pronounce certain words in the Boston accent. The campaign also includes a series of videos entitled Boston as a Second Language which educates viewers how to properly pronounce car keys or khakis (Kahkeez), Bar Harbor (Bah Habah), Hopper (Hoppa), Offer (Awfa) and Escalator (Escalayta).

The true Boston accent, like many accents, is not easy to replicate if you aren’t native to the area. And even though some of the words used in the campaign are “stretched” a bit for hilarity’s sake, the pronunciation, for the most part, is genuine.

Another element of the Talk Boston site tests your ability to “speak” the Boston accent by showing you phonetic spellings of words spoken in the Boston accent which you then translate into “correct” English. The test gives you one minute. I scored a 65% which is wicked bad. (Catch that?)

Talk Boston is a wonderful extension of a long-running, successful campaign that has helped DISH achieved significant notoriety. Though it doesn’t seem to have done much for revenue recently.

CP+B originally ran with the idea of a blow-up doll lunch decoy last year, suggesting that people could secure more time at Applebee’s by tricking their bosses. In 2013, the same old bag of tricks comes in the form of a longer ad – 102 seconds – showing various worker bees running out of the office to indulge in some Applebee’s. I’ve never been a fan of the fine dining cuisine at such establishments, but I’m told customers can enjoy hundreds of lunch combos starting at $6.99. If you can get a restaurant combo for that cheap, you may want to think twice.

The spot itself isn’t digging much into new ground. There is one interesting bit, when a black construction worker uses a white lunch decoy. I’m not sure what that is trying to say, if anything at all, but the man’s boss must not pay very good attention to his staff if the lunch decoy can be effective while using a different skin color than the man who is jolting to Applebee’s (Ed. update: CP+B clarifies that it did use the likeness that most resembles of its construction worker as part of the campaign. Go here). Maybe the man’s boss is using his own lunch decoy, at which point the men would run into each other at an Applebee’s and ruin the trick for everyone. Credits after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.