Hasta La Creative!

Last week, we wrote about David’s “Random Gloria Tour” for Burger King, a stunt which saw a chicken traveling the country and deciding which locations would get the chain’s Chicken Fries on its menu for a limited time. Now, David has launched a campaign announcing the national release of the menu item for an “unlimited time” beginning today.

“The excitement was so palpable that following the tour, there was only one card to play and that was to make Chicken Fries available for everyone, for good,” Burger King said in a press release, although it seems obvious that a national release was planned all along. Bringing back Chicken Fries seems like an obvious decision for the brand, which saw same-store sales in the US and Canada rise 3.6 percent coinciding with a limited reintroduction of the product last year, according to AdAge.

The new campaign will launch with a series of two 15-second broadcast spots which begin airing March 26th. Both spots employ quirky, over-the-top humor to reintroduce the product. In “Coopid” (featured above), for example, a chicken browses through a Tinder-like dating app (although the title brings to mind OK Cupid), rejecting potential partners until it finds the right match with Burger King fries. In “Date,” a chick attempts to sneak out with her motorcycle-riding young love, much to her father’s chagrin. Both spots end with the line, “There’s just no stopping true love,” seemingly a nod to fans’ passion for the product.

In addition to the broadcast spots, Burger King is also jumping on the branded emoji trend, releasing a Chicken Fries emoji keyboard, available at both the Google Play and iTunes App Store.

Media agency PHD and out of home company Talon collaborated to conceive and plan a campaign for Oreo timed to coincide with today’s solar eclipse.

Entitled “#OreoEclipse,” the campaign includes the “first-ever translucent cover wrap” for The Sun (pictured below), designed to mimic the effect of an eclipse on the paper. The brand will also appear in two eclipse-themed print ads in the paper itself, created, along with the cover, by FCB Inferno and content agency Drum.

Other initiatives include a digital outdoor effort in London and Edinburgh that uses Royal Astronomical Society data to mimic the path of the sun and create an “OreoEclipse.” Video from the outdoor effort (above) ends with the message, “You won’t have to wait 11 years for the next one.”

“We want Oreo to be an even more iconic brand in the UK,” Jonathan Holden, Oreo marketing manager, told The Drum. “Playfully putting it at the centre of a moment where the whole country will be looking in the same direction makes this idea the perfect fit with that ambition.”

RKCR/Y&R teamed up with BBC Future media to create “a new piece of digital functionality which helps users discover more BBC programming and services that they might love by clicking the heart button to show what they love from the BBC.”

RKCR/Y&R promotes the new feature with a 60-second broadcast spot displaying how people show their affection for the BBC programs they love, entitled “If You Love Something Let It Show.” Set to a cover of “All You Need is Love” by Rae Morris, the spot follows a brother and sister obsessed with Dr. Who, a young Bake Off loving girl with culinary talent, a music-loving The Proms fan, and more. As the spot displays each fans’ unique way of showing their love for their favorite, the name of the program appears onscreen next to a heart. It’s a clever way to promote the new service, and a host of BBC programs at the same time. The online version of the ad ends by directing viewers to “discover more at bbc.co.uk/love with an accompanying link.

Credits:

Director of Marketing & Audiences, BBC – Philip Almond

Director, BBC Brand Strategy – Jane Lingham

Executive Creative Director – Mark Roalfe

Art Director – Paul Angus

Copywriter – Ted Heath

Chief Innovation Officer – Jon Sharpe

Vice Chairman – Alison Hoad

Executive Digital Creative Director – Alix Pennycuick

Business Director – David Pomfret

Account Director – Tom McCoy

Account Manager – Franky Wardell

Planning Director – Henry Gray

Agency Producer – Keeley Pratt

Producer – Deborah Stewart

Director – Vaughan Arnell c/o Moxie Pictures

Editor – Vid Price – The Assembly Rooms

Post Production – Framestore

Sound Design – Parv Thind @ Wave

Typographer – Jonathan Harper

DoP – Clive Tickner

Composer / Music Producer – Nick Foster @ Soundtree

Music Supervisor Jay James @ Soundtree

Recording artist – Rae Morris c/o Atlantic Records

Production was handled by Red Bee Media

To bring back Burger King’s chicken fires to select locations, agency David decided to make the selection of those locations random and via chicken. So they selected a chicken named Gloria, who selects the fate of each location by eating feed out of either a “yes” or “no” bowl. As some have pointed out, this means Gloria is essentially selecting which locations are serving fried up versions of the meat of her species. (It is unclear if Gloria herself will become a chicken fry following the stunt.)

“Gloria has the final word,” Burger King told Adweek. “She can’t be bought, seduced or swayed. After the decision, fans can take celebratory or sad-face photos with her.”

Gloria began her tour in Bayonne, New Jersey, disappointing crowds by selecting the “no” bowl. Her next stop was Colmar Manor, Maryland, where she treated residents to a day of chicken fries by selecting “yes.” There’s a live feed of Gloria’s adventures at www.chickenfries.com and fans can also keep track of the campaign on Burger King’s YouTube page, or on social media via the hashtags #RandomGloria and #ChickenFries. After a “no” decision yesterday in Henderson, North Carolina, Gloria will be making an appearance today in Atlanta, with the livestream beginning at one.

Can a pair of shades help combat colorblindness, an affliction that affects over 300 million people worldwide?

We’d say that seems to be the case based on a new four-minute film from FCB Chicago for paint brand Valspar. The client collaborated with EnChroma, a Berkeley, CA-based company that developed a pair of glasses capable of finally introducing reds, greens, and everything in between to those who’ve only seen their surroundings as dull.

The film, directed by John X. Carey (the guy behind the Dove “Real Beauty Sketches“), features a handful of colorblindness victims whose life stories are briefly revealed before they finally experience a world of color for the very first time…thanks to EnChroma’s innovations.

In a statement, Valspar director of brand integration Joel Wasserman says:

“As a company deeply rooted in color, Valspar believes that everyone deserves to see and appreciate the experience that color brings to life. Most people don’t know what it’s like to live in a muted world. We’re dedicated to making a change for the better and igniting a conversation around the impact of color.”

Along with the film, Valspar is both bringing EnChroma glasses to art museums across the country and encouraging people to share their own stories with #ColorForAll. Winners will receive their own pair.

Resource/Ammirati New York launched a new spot in its ongoing “Get Undomesticated” spot for Canadian beer brand Labatt Blue.

The new spot, entitled “Blue Gold” is billed as a “quality–focused extension” (err, interesting strategy guys) of the campaign, and will run during the NHL Playoffs and Stanley Cup Final. “Blue Gold” touts the brand’s use of “pure Canadian water,” 2-row malted barley, and “select aromatic hops” while giving plenty of screen time to Labatt’s bear mascot and a few scantily clad women (old cliches/sexist tropes die hard?). These quality claims are, of course, just for show: 2-row malted barley is an incredibly common brewing ingredient and quite far from being specific to the brand, while the terms “pure Canadian water” and “select aromatic hops” don’t really mean much of anything. Still, they sound good, and give the brand at least the appearance of some cache in the increasingly crowded and quality-centric beer market (if only to those who don’t know any better). In other words, while Budweiser continues to wage its war on hipsters, Labatt just hopes you might mistake it for a quality brew. The musical selection meanwhile, can’t help but remind us of this scene from Superbad.

Credits:

What happens when you ask a group of children if they’d consider becoming a banker when they grow up? Pretty much what you’d expect (a resounding no).

That’s what agency Duval Guillaume found in its recent spot for Belgian Financial Sector Federation Febelfin. The spot opens with interviewers asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. Responses vary from the expected (policeman, singer tennis player, adventurer, ballerina) to the unusual (“Later, I want to become a piece of furniture”). In the second half of the video, they move on to asking the children if they’d consider becoming a banker, and all answer in the negative. Some are more harsh than others (“They have no friends”) but all seem to agree that they have no interest in banking. The spot concludes with the message, “If we don’t change our reputation today, we’ll have no banking tomorrow,” which is a bit of a logical fallacy since plenty of people end up settling for a career they had no intention of entering as a child. Still, it’s very true that banking needs to clean up its reputation and Duval Guillaume manages to find an entertaining way at delivering what could easily be a very dry message.

Parisian agency Les Gaulois, perhaps best-known for its canine-friendly Citroën campaign, launched an imaginative spot for Acadomia, a company offering “academic support and tutoring for children,” entitled “George.”

The “George” of the title is a young boy who shares that he has “a power” which allows him to time-travel, “enter into other people’s heads,” understand other cultures and “makes me become who I want to be.” At the end of the spot he re-introduces himself and reveals that his power is to learn. While the concept isn’t groundbreaking, or even terribly original, the execution is spot on. The ad is incredibly well-produced, with footage that works in synergy with the copy in imaginative and visually stunning ways. Beyond mere eye-candy, though, the visuals help extend and elaborate on George’s narrative in a compelling way. So while the ad’s big reveal hardly comes as a surprise, the ad is charming enough that it doesn’t really matter.

Credits:

Client: Acadomia
Agency: Les Gaulois, France
Creative Directors: Marco Venturelli, Luca Cinquepalmi
Art Director: Mickael Jeanne
Copywriter: Alexandre Drouillard
Director: Jeppe Ronde

Budweiser got a lot of attention (most of it of the negative variety) for its beer snob trolling Super Bowl ad, created by Anomaly. For the brand’s newest ad, Vayner Media, home to “social media thought leader” and former wine critic Gary Vee, took to Brooklyn for a stunt trolling hipsters during Restaurant Week.

For the stunt, Vayner Media invited a bunch of of young Brooklynites to a sneak peek at a new bar to “try a special beer on tap.” After talking up the brew, patrons discover that it is, in fact, Budweiser. Of course, this says a lot more about Brooklyn hipsters than it does the taste of Budweiser. No one was clued in to the beer’s identity despite the bartender referencing the “139-year-old recipe, American tradition, aged in Beechwood.” It’s unclear if the brand understands the difference between hipsters and actual beer snobs (the latter wouldn’t be caught dead with a Pabst Blue Ribbon) or intentionally conflates the two, but the stunt does a pretty good job at making the former look silly and it may convince less knowledgeable viewers that microbrews are all hipster hype and not worth the extra cash. Like Anomaly’s predecessor, this will also piss plenty of folks off, but then the vast majority of those offended wouldn’t dream of buying a Budweiser.

Before you ask, the “it” in question is deep-cleaning the carpet…and the client is Rug Doctor.

In a soon-to-debut campaign backed by data from the EPA, Dallas-based shop The Loomis Agency enlisted a few couples (not all of whom are middle-aged) to figure out how often they do it. The answer, of course, is “not nearly often enough.”

Here’s the first :30, which will begin airing on network TV at the end of the month:

The second ad in the campaign offers some variations on that classic double entendre, and it doesn’t spare the children:

The campaign also includes two :15 variations on these character lineups.

The work makes a good point: the literal crap trapped in the fibers of your rug plays a sizable role in determining the air quality of your living space, but only 1 in 25 participants in the client’s recent random household survey knew this. For example, we truly cannot remember the last time we deep-cleaned our carpet.

We will defer to the experts on this one, and Loomis knows a thing or two about the deep cleaning process: past clients include Rug Doctor’s chief competitor Stanley Steemer.

No word on whether Barry White’s estate got any ideas from the recent “Blurred Lines” lawsuit.

Credits