Hasta La Creative!

VSA Partners teamed up with Vimby/Facebook Creative Shop for the latest in its “Someone Needs One” campaign for Kleenex, which it launched earlier this month. Vimby created the “Unlikely Best Friends” spot, along with other online videos in the campaign, with its roster of documentary filmmakers.

“Unlikely Best Friends” tells the story of the lovable Chance, a dog who lost his rear legs after being hit by a car and left for dead at the side of the road. San Antonio Pets Alive found the dog and decided to give him a second chance at life, thus the name. Chance, who now gets around with the help of a wheelchair, was adopted by a man named Michael, who is also bound to a wheelchair. “I deal with the same struggles that he deals with,” Michael says in the spot, adding that they’re best friends and “do everything together.” The spot’s charm is pretty impossible to resist and the touching friendship has clearly stuck a chord with viewers on Facebook, where it has been viewed over 23 million times.

Credits:

Client: Kleenex
Agency: VIMBY/Facebook Creative Shop
Media Agency: Mindshare
Kleenex AOR: VSA
Executive Creative Director: Adam Reno
Producer: Carrie Stett
Director of Photography: Ed Wu
Production Company: VIMBY
Editor: David Rowe, VIMBY

How far would you follow David Beckham?

Deutsch LA’s first full campaign as Sprint’s new creative AOR launched back in March–and while While “Too Rich to Care” continued to emphasize the client’s status as the low-priced carrier, it didn’t aggressively call out competitors. But you knew that was coming, didn’t you?

The new campaign stars Beckham, former underwear model and wallet chain fan, as he leads the pack toward a cheaper and simpler future. The full version is also three minutes long, so get comfortable enough to absorb a sort-of lecture on cell service:

They’re all in there.

We like the idea that Joe Public is so eager to follow “Pied Piper” Beckham that he will abandon his work (not to mention his wedding) in the interest of a slightly lower cell phone bill.

Note that the ad does not mention the quality of service one might receive under this particular carrier. That’s another company’s tagline.

Recode also examined Sprint’s newer, simpler plan yesterday with a skeptical eye, concluding that “Sprint missed an opportunity” by failing to include taxes and fees that “often add 10 percent or more to a monthly bill” and that many iPhone buyers might pay more for the new plan. As fresh-faced CMO Kevin Crull puts it:

“There’s a segment of the consumer base that really values unlimited. I think that need will be met. The pricing will probably move around a little bit.”

The broadcast version of this ad debuts tonight during the U.S. Women’s World Cup game on Fox Network, and the most important question regarding Sprint’s latest marketing effort may be, “how will John Legere of T-Mobile respond?” We look forward to weeks of shameless Twitter trolling.

Client: Sprint
Assignment: “All In” Wireless Campaign
Name/Length of Spots: “Pied Piper” :60 / :30 (3-minute online as well)

Client Credits:

President, CEO: Marcelo Claure
Chief Marketing Officer: Kevin Crull
Director of Brand & Advertising: Tracy Palmer
Advertising Manager: Sara Mozingo
Advertising Manager: Stacey Shupert

Deutsch Credits and Titles:

Creative Credits:

Chief Creative Officer, North America: Pete Favat
Executive Creative Director: Gavin Lester
Creative Director: Brian Siedband
Creative Director: Gordy Sang
Associate Creative Director: Matt Clark
Associate Creative Director: Yelan Tong
Director of Integrated Production: Vic Palumbo
Executive Integrated Producer: Dan Kaplan
Integrated Producer: Fabby Hernandez
Music Director: Dave Rocco

Account Management Credits:

Group Account Director: John McGonigle
Account Director: Kristie Weston
Account Director: Chuka Schneider
Account Supervisor: Lauren Mangum
Account Executive: Kristin Paul

Account Planning:               

Chief Strategic Officer: Colin Drummond
Group Planning Director: Kelsey Hodgkin

Business Affairs/Traffic:

Director of Integrated Business Affairs: Abilino Guillermo
Executive Business Affairs: Jimmy Gutierrez
Senior Business Affairs Manager: Andy Recalde
Director or Broadcast Traffic: Carie Bonillo
Senior Broadcast Traffic Manager: Gus Mejia

Live Action Production Company

Production Company: MJZ/Los Angeles, CA
Director: Rupert Sanders
President: David Zander
Executive Producer: Kate Leahy
Producer: Laurie Boccaccio
Production Supervisor: Adriana Cebada Mora

Editorial Company

Production Company: WORK/New York, NY

Editor: Bill Smedley
Executive Producer: Erica Thompson

Editorial Company

Production Company: Exile/Santa Monica, CA

Editor: Shane Reid
Executive Producer: CL Weaver

Post Facility

Production Company: MPC LA/Santa Monica, CA

Executive Producer: Amanda Ornelas
Producer: Summer McCloskey
Colorist: Mark Gethin

Post/VFX

Production Company: The Mill/Los Angeles CA

VFZ Supervisor: Chris Knight
VFX: Koen Vroeijenstijn, Bill Higgins
Executive Producer: Sue Troyan
Producer: Jordan Sharon

Licensed/Composed Music, Credits and Track Info:

Production Company: Mophonics

Track: Best Man Speech
Performed by: Roberto Murguia
Composed by: Roberto Murguia
By arrangement with: Nico Mansy

Audio Post Company:

Production Company: Lime Studios/Santa Monica, CA

Senior Executive Producer: Susie Boyajan
Mixer: Zac Fisher
Assistant Mixer: Kevin McAlpine

Shoot Location:                                                                       Universal Studios Back lot, Los Angeles

New York agency Untitled have launched a new campaign for mobile game Game of War, notable for the absence of Kate Upton.

Instead, the agency enlisted UFC fighter Conor McGregor for a series of new ads promoting the game. It’s a large change in approach for the brand, who previously relied on Upton’s sex appeal for virality (with one spot, “Empire,” racking up almost 25 million views). In the 30-second “Prepare For War!” he introduces himself as a “fighter,” “warrior,” and “hero” while simultaneously defeating an opponent in the ring and playing Game of War. A 60-second spot sees him distractedly playing the game while ignoring an interviewer, while “Challenge!” sees him directly challenging gamers to take him on in Game of War. McGregor’s acting skills (or lack therof) are similar to Upton’s, but his UFC celebrity (and/or epic tattoos) make him a more natural selection for the brand. Still, it seems unlikely that the new spots can approach the millions of views Upton generated for the brand.

W+K Portland brings back a screaming Terry Crews for a new 30-second online spot for Old Spice, but that’s just the beginning.

The spot features Crews crashing into a bathroom on an Old Spice rocket and promoting the brand’s “powerful smelling” body spray and body wash, which he uses to cover his “powerful body.” It’s a return to an old formula for the brand, following the slight departure of its previous campaign, but ends with something different: a call to viewers to click through to an interactive experience called “Muscle Surprise.”

Old Spice spokesperson Kate DiCarlo told Mashable “Muscle Surprise” was designed to appeal to the brand’s video game-loving audience. “We know our guys love video games. We know they’re spending a lot of time engaging with their friends digitally,” she said. “But they’re also spending a lot of time engaging with brands digitally, so we thought, ‘Why not give it a try and turn Terry into a game?’”

Calling “Muscle Surprise” a game might be a bit of a stretch, as there isn’t a clear cause and effect to users’ actions. Rather, the surreal interactive experience finds users clicking on Crews’ various muscles to bizarre and unexpected effect, with which muscles they click on, and in what order, leading to different (always strange) results. You can give it a try yourself here, and see if you can figure out how to get the ennui-suffering stapler.

Credits:
W+K PORTLAND
Executive Creative Directors: Mark Fitzloff, Joe Staples
Creative Directors: Craig Allen, Jason Bagley
Copywriters: Jarrod Higgins, Andy Laugenour, Ansel Wallenfang
Director of Interactive Production:Mike Davidson
Interactive Producer: Eddye Borgese, Amy Marsh
Interactive Strategy: Michael Holz
Social Strategy: Danny Schotthoefer
Media/Comms Planning: Lisa Feldhusen, AJ Blumenthal, Mary O’Malley
Account Team: Nick Pirtle, Liam Doherty
Business Affairs: Cindy Lewellen

PRODUCTION COMPANY
Production Company: MediaMonks
Founder: Wesley ter Haar
Director: Tom Rijpert
Executive Producer: Joris Pol
Executive Producer: Nell Jordan
Post Production Producer: Marloes de Rijke
Producer: Tim Ruiters
Executive Creative Director: Jeroen van der Meer
Digital Art Director: Nicolas Mollien
UX Lead: Martin Kool
Animation Director: Pierre Nelwan

The robots are officially taking our jobs…in the “domestic responsibilities” industry.

A new campaign from Doner L.A. to promote Neato–or Nest for vaccum cleaners–reminds us in various ways that robots just happen to be superior to homo sapiens. Operationally speaking.

First, in “Card,” a grandmother gets an unpleasant surprise that might have made for an annoying chore…until Neato:

The tagline on that one was “Neato Knows your Grandma misses you.”

Next, “House Sitter” shows us why dogs will always be better than cats. Period.

Are some people allergic to dogs? Sure, but that’s not the point. As the tagline tells us, “Neato Knows the Internet is alarmingly devoid of cat videos these days.”

Next comes “Hippie Pinata,” which doesn’t deliver quite as much “Schadenfreude” as one might hope:

Wasn’t that a Portlandia episode?

Here’s a Costanza-worthy “One Night Stand”:

Finally, eating from the trash can is fine as long as you do it within the ten-second grace period, right?

The point is that Neato knows a whole lot. In fact, it probably knows more than you think it does.

On the question of “why,” the campaign implies that Neato can take care of your cleaning needs before you even realize how pressing they might be. Do you really want to explore the “how?”

And while Neato might make “housecleaning easy with automatic, cordless robot vacuums” that return to their charging stations when done, we doubt their familiarity with early 00’s R&B.

(And yes, we know these are not the full/real creative credits.)

Client: Neato

Titles: “Card,” “House Sitter,” “Late Night Snack,” “One Night Stand,” “Piñata” 5 x :30

Agency: Doner/LA

Agency Producer: Bob Samuel
Production Company: GO
Director: Brigg Bloomquist
Managing Director: Gary Rose
Executive Producer: Adam Bloom
Executive Producer: Catherine Finkenstaedt
Line Producer: Greg Jones
Production Supervisor: Carol Fahey
DP: Pablo Berron
Editorial: Cut & Run

TBWAChiatDay New York launched its first campaign for Travelers Insurance since winning lead creative duties for the Hartford-based company back in February.

The campaign is made up of three spots, with the 60-second “Growing Up” (featured above) as its centerpiece. “Growing Up” shows a father’s relationship with his daughter as she cries through various growing pains, then leaves for college and gets married in the backyard. It’s the kind of emotional plea more typical for a brand like Subaru, but TBWAChiatDay New York ties it to the brand fairly well with the line, “You make it a home, we help you protect it.” The other spots trade in emotion as well, with the 45-second “Charging Station” showing a girl calling her worried parents thanks to a Travelers charging station after a disaster and “Bakery” showing a community bakery recovering from catastrophe. Each of the ads ends with the tagline, “It’s better under the umbrella.”

“The campaign targets existing and prospective customers, independent insurance agents, and employees,” Lisa Caputo, executive vice president and chief marketing and communications officer at The Travelers Companies, Inc. explained to MediaPost. “We want to reinforce that Travelers is there to help people protect the things they care most about.”

“The convention in the insurance category is to use humor to gain awareness,” added TBWAChiatDay New York CEO Rob Schwartz. “We went in a different direction and delivered emotion. Travelers is a company that truly cares about its customers, so we tried to frame that feeling.”

As part of a major brand overhaul including new packaging and entree options, Nestle brand Lean Cuisine has changed up its advertising with a move away from weight loss marketing with new broadcast and social campaigns.

The broadcast campaign, “Feed Your Phenomenal” (featured above), launches early next month with a 30-second spot by Grey. Grey’s spot depicts a hard-working maternity nurse in Boston who looks forward to the end of her shift, at 3:23 AM,when she can finally take a breather and enjoy a Lean Cuisine mac and cheese meal. She credits lean cuisine with helping her maintain a healthy lifestyle and “eat the way I want to eat,” despite her hectic schedule. Nonsensical tagline aside, the spot does move away from the brand’s typical association with diet and weight loss, and if its claim that it is part of a “healthy lifestyle” is far-fetched it at least presents one accurate selling point in its fitting in with a busy schedule.

360i’s social campaign, which precedes the broadcast effort, takes on the scale more directly. A 2:25 video, entitled “#WeighThis,” opens with the question “How much do you weigh?’ as a moderator tells a group of women, “I want you to approach the scale.” The catch? The women don’t step on the scael to weight themselves, but instead weigh their biggest accomplishment, which varies from a backpack representing trips around the world to a college textbook signyfying a middle aged woman’s fresh start to divorce papers to a single mother’s Dean’s List certificate, accompanied by the message, “If you’re going to weigh something, weigh what matters.” The spot ends by inviting viewers to share how they’d like to be weighed with the hashtag, #WeighThis.

Lean Cuisine brand manager Chris Flora told AdAge that the new campaign represented a “massive pivot” for the brand, which consumers “most closely associate…with being a diet brand,” adding, “But we recognize that diets are dead and we want to show that we are truly shifting away from diet.” The new campaign follows about a year and a half in which the brand was largely absent from marketing while it considered a new strategy. “We didn’t really have a brand soul,” Flora explained, “for us to really thrive in this marketplace we wanted to find that brand soul.”

This morning, on the heels of a monumental ruling by the Supreme Court in favor of marriage equality (no thanks to a bizarre, nonsensical dissent from Clarence Thomas), YouTube released a video celebrating the decision, and Pride Month, entitled “#ProudToLove.”

The video, directed by Scott Chan, opens with footage of individuals who used videos posted to YouTube as a way to come out. This highlights YouTube as not only a longtime supporter of LGBT rights, but also its role in acting as a supportive community for those who need it. As the spot continues, it mixes in footage both personal and political. One of these clips includes the line, “I hope you will stand on the right side of history,” an appropriate choice since the Supreme Court decision now makes it abundantly clear which side that is. It’s a fitting tribute to both the Supreme Court’s historical decision in favor of equality and to Pride Month. We expect to see a lot of brands follow in YouTube’s footsteps with their own celebratory messages, but this will likely stand as not only one of the first such efforts but also one of the best.

Olson seeks to capitalize on the buzz around the upcoming third installment in SyFy’s Sharknado series (which debuts July 22), with the over the top shenanigans in its “Mosquitonado” spot for pest-control brand Terminix.

The spot takes the form of a movie trailer, opening on a woman preparing for a Fourth of July party. She’s annoyed by a mosquito which bites her while she’s forming burgers and then stops outside to a see the giant “Mosquitonado” swarm, letting out a big dramatic scream. From here the trailer just gets more and more silly and ridiculous, as citizens try to fight back against the swarm by any means possible. Sharknado star Tara Reid makes a brief cameo, with a tongue in cheek reference to her roles in the SyFy movies. Apparently released to coincide with National Mosquito Control Awareness Week (we had no idea this was a thing), the message seems pretty clear: with the summer here, mosquitoes will be a ubiquitous nuisance, even if the don’t approach “Mosquitonado” levels.

“We knew that if we wanted to get people talking about the world’s actual deadliest killer, mosquitoes, we’d need to create something truly outrageous,” Kelly Medley, vice president of communications at Terminix, told Adweek. “We’ve heard lots of people sharing that a Mosquitonado is something straight out of a nightmare,” she added. “They can relate with how annoying these buzzing bloodsuckers can be all summer long. Mosquitonado leaves viewers kind of frightened and very amused.”

In an idea straight out of a South Park parody of Family Guy, California-based agency Lambesis uses Mr. T to sell Coca-Cola iced tea brand Fuze. But Lambesis ratchets up the level of bizarreness by turning him into a butterfly.

When a woman sitting on a park bench pops open the beverage, a group of Mr. T monarchs emerge from the container and one stops by to give her his compliments on her choice of the “flavor charged Fuze.” Speaking in rhymes and extolling the beverage’s B-vitamins, he claims the only thing bolder than the beverage is T. himself.

The brief spot is, of course, steeped in the ridiculous in an attempt to stick in viewer’s minds, but can Mr. T really convince people to give the drink a go? Lambesis and Coca-Cola are betting he can give the struggling brand (down 18.2 percent in the most recent measured period, according to Chicago-based market research firm IRI) a boost. The digital campaign launched this week, supported by social, OOH and experiential elements, and will run through October, with the brand still evaluating whether or not it will roll out to broadcast and print.

“We were looking for somebody with high awareness, high likability and certainly a connection with someone who has a big, bold personality,” Geoff Henry, group director-tea, Coca-Cola North America, told AdAge. “Mr. T came back at the top of the list. In fact, ‘he pitied us for not calling him sooner.’”