Hasta La Creative!

Burger King made headlines earlier this year after deciding to leave global AOR Mother for David just as it had left CP+B for mcgarrybowen.

David’s most prominent work for the client to date concerned the debut of an especially colorful Whopper at San Francisco’s Gay Pride parade, but this new campaign reminds us that the chain continues to turn work with other agencies. The spot comes from Culver City agency Pitch, which has been working with BK for over a decade; Pitch was the only creative shop to survive Burger King’s January purge.

How many dated references appear in this ad?

Yes, the Yumbo is — or was — a real thing. Like the McRib, it appeared briefly and then grew tastier by virtue of its own absence.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

DDB Canada crafted a new campaign for Sony, promoting its Hi-Res Audio collection via two 30-second broadcast spots.

The ads aim for a weird sort of humor, with each showing people working out their ears in preparation of the intense experience they’ll get from Sony’s products. In practice, this ends up looking a bit creepy, as in “Ear Crunches.” The spot opens on a man as he takes off his cowboy hat and, with the aid of some special effects, begins some vigorous ear crunches. “Ear Workout” (featured after the jump) is more or less the same concept, with each spot ending with the tagline “Get Your Ears Ready” before showing the range of products in Sony’s Hi-Res Audio collection. Strange as the approach may be, it’s refreshing to see audio equipment advertised for sounding good rather than as a fashion accessory worn by celebrity athletes. Still, it would have been nice if DDB Canada could have mixed up the formula a bit more between the two ads.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Today is the day that Deutsch NY client PNC Bank releases its annual “Christmas Price Index,” which helps put the old 12-day carol in perspective by pricing every gift on the list.

A release tells us that the agency noted that the song had hit an all-time low in popularity this year and sought to reinvigorate it by presenting users with a “modern twist” on each item.

The corresponding “The Great Carol Comeback” site features an intro explaining PNC’s role in the project as well as a page for each present. First comes the partridge in his pear tree, which has risen in price thanks to both inflation and a healthy tech addiction (readers should click for the full interactive book experience):

We liked the Grinch-worthy ending. Next: the videos.

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TD Bank gave 24 of its customers $30,000 to contribute to a community cause of their choosing, with just one stipulation: they had to complete the project in 24 hours.

Created in collaboration with Leo Burnett and Diamond Integrated Marketing, the campaign is captured in the above four-minute video (which fell through the cracks here last week). The video release was perfectly timed for Thanksgiving and easily went viral, having past the 3.5 million views mark on YouTube in under a week. “#MakeTodayMatter” shows surprised TD Bank customers learning they’ve been awarded the money for a cause of their choosing and then getting to work on making a difference in just one day.

The majority of those nominated for the campaign were chosen by TD employees, TD Chief Marketing Officer Dominic Mercuri told Adweek, with a few “chosen based on random live interviews in branches and stores with random customers.” Mercurri added, “We didn’t know if this idea would work. Would people drop everything to bring to life their idea? Turns out—yes, they would.”

Those ideas are on full display in the “#MakeTodayMatter” video, from buying all-new gear for a local youth football team, to making a woman’s home wheelchair accessible (allowing her to leave for the first time in years), to a gala event to boost the self-esteem of foster children. It’s hard to not be at least a little touched with people making their charitable ideas a reality. There are also separate videos for each project, hosted on a campaign website, as well as a social component. As you may remember, Leo Burnett and TD Bank went viral with the similarly charitable, “Automated Thanking Machines” this summer, and TD also collaborated with Philadelphia-based Tierney to commission “Art For Trees,” promoting eco-initiative MillionTreesNYC back in October.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

BBH London created a PSA campaign for Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY), a UK charity founded in 1995 which “raises awareness about sudden cardiac deaths in young people resulting from undiagnosed heart conditions.”

In a 60-second PSA video, a group of young men engage in a game of rugby. Throughout the spot we hear a heartbeat, adding an element of unease, until at one point the hearbeat speeds up and one of the boys falls to the ground. The message, “An undiagnosed heart condition can kill an apparently healthy young person instantly. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Get your heart tested.” It’s a harrowing message, bringing attention to an issue many don’t know about. Crafted to shock and startle viewers, it just may succeed in its goal of getting young people tested for heart conditions.

The spot was created by BBH London Assistant Producer David Lynch (not to be confused with that David Lynch), with help from Creative Directors Nick Kidney and Kevin Stark in adapting the original script. “I knew about CRY through a friend who was helped by them in the past,” Lynch said. “I wrote a script and showed it to my then producer, Ruben Mercadal. He said I should run with it. As I’m an Assistant TV Producer and not a Creative, I sought help from two of BBH’s best Creative Directors..To my surprise they were of the same opinion as Ruben and said if I ever get the chance to make it, they would love to mentor me through it.”

BBH then enlisted director AG Rojas and Park Pictures to bring the project, which Lynch called a “particularly emotive and rewarding campaign to work on,” to light. “Once we began production, it became clear that so many of the people who helped us had also been affected – or knew someone who had been affected – in some way,” he added.

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FCKH8 attracted a lot of attention with its recent controversial video featuring young girls in dresses dropping “F-Bombs for Feminism,” addressing issues of gender inequality and violence against women for the for-profit activist t-shirt brand.

If you saw that video, you already know what to expect, as the new video, after a brief introduction from a young boy portraying a violent man stereotype, begins almost identically to its predecessor. The joke is less funny the second time around, but the video eventually differentiates itself when the girls take more of a focus on domestic violence. In the previous video, four girls counted off as a demonstration of the statistic that one in four women will be physically abused in their lifetime. They repeat the tactic here, only this time when the fourth girl counts off she’s wearing makeup to make it look like she’s a battered woman, which the rest of the girls also don for the remainder of the video.

Those who had a problem with the girls talking about violence and rape in the original video will be doubly offended here, but FCKH8 anticipates the backlash when two girls question viewers disturbed by the video, “Isn’t one out of four women beaten the real disgrace?” Those who accuse the company, which normally donates five dollars of every fifteen dollar t-shirt sold to charity, of child exploitation will have less fuel here, as according to the video, “100 percent of the profits from these ‘not a wifebeater’ tanks will go to domestic violence charities.” Viewers who found the shock humor in the original video refreshing or effective, however, may find that the same formula seems stale the second time around, despite the attempts to up the shock factor.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

W+K Portland has launched a new campaign for Weight Watchers, its first for the brand since winning creative duties back in April.

In a new 60-second spot, W+K drops the celebrity-driven approach taken by previous agency McCann (whose latest work featured Jessica Simpson), instead going for a universal theme of “eating your feelings.” The ad, entitled “If You’re Happy…” is set to an adaption of the popular children’s song “If You’re Happy And You Know It” by Tony Babino. “If you’re happy and you know it, eat a snack,” he sings at the beginning of the spot over shots of people happily enjoying ice cream, burgers and cake. Around 15 seconds in the tune changes to “If you’re sad…” and later on to such feelings as “bored,” “lonely” and “sleepy” before finally ending with “If you’re human and you know it, eat your feelings, eat a snack” and ending with the tagline, “Help with the hard part” before finally showing the Weight Watchers logo.

It’s an interesting tactic, tapping into the insight that people associate eating with all types of emotions rather than relying on a celebrity endorsement, which seems to be the standard for the category. W+K seems to be banking on the empathy and relatability of the message being more persuasive than association with celebrity.

According to The New York Times, the ad will “be introduced broadly on Sunday” with an emphasis on “programming apt to draw multiple members of a household” like “the midseason finale of The Walking Dead on AMC on Sunday and the season finale of The Voice on NBC on Dec. 15.” The ad will also “appear widely in cinemas,” which Lesya Lysyj, president of Weight Watchers in North America, told The New York Times “…is great because you’re sitting there with your huge thing of popcorn.”

“We’ve never actually said that weight loss is easy, but when you use celebrities and show before-and-after photos, what you’re doing is kind of implying that it is easy,” she added, explaining the move away from celebrity endorsements.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Mother and client Stella Artois released a series of spots this week that put a light twist on the sentimental holiday classic: real-life stories starring real-life people!

The campaign, which will roll out over the globe in the coming weeks, centers on a series of short films illustrating truly unexpected gifts in an effort to showcase “loss and redemption, love and community, timeless romance and artistic beauty.”

Here’s the first film, “Lights,” which coincidentally stars the owner of a Christmas tree farm:

Three more below.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last week saw the debut of Leo Burnett Chicago’s latest work for client Samsung. The spot looks to tie the client to high fashion brand Swarovski via a series of bling-worthy tech accessories.

In the one-minute ad (double-length version here), a particularly fashionable young woman manages to navigate her way through the various inconveniences of modern Lisbon without flinching…all while calling our attention to her fancy phone case and watch band.

The ad is called “Changes” and the campaign tagline is “Dress your device up, no matter what the occasion.”

Details and credits after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

While in recent years many retailers have made infamous Black Friday sales into even more of a behemoth by pushing back their opening times so sales start earlier and earlier on Thanksgiving day, others, such as Costco, have gained public respect by bucking the trend. In a new campaign aimed at the most infamous shopping day of the year, Arnold Worldwide came up with a series of Black Friday alternatives for Santander Bank in an attempt to take back the “true meaning” of Thanksgiving (and make Santander look good by association).

In the above, 30-second spot, “Black Bean Soup Friday” for example, we see shots of a family rising early and piling in the car. “On…Black Friday, Tom and his kids will rise before the sun,” the voiceover informs us, “They will beat the crowds” it goes on as the car speeds along. But, in what’s designed to be a surprise, they “…pass the department stores with lines around the block,” and instead go volunteer at a local soup kitchen. “There are many ways to make the day after Thanksgiving meaningful,” the spot concludes, “How will you spend your day?”

This may seem like an unusual move for a financial institution who stands to benefit from a rush of holiday spending, but Santander claims its “family-values focused European roots run deep” and that they have a “commitment to Real Change and challenging traditional perceptions of banking.” So by taking a stab at Black Friday, in a way designed to be heartwarming, Arnold is distancing Santander from other banks, and attempting to make people think that, unlike their competitors, Santander stands for something. Other Black Friday alternatives suggested in the campaign are “Black Top Friday” (spent playing basketball with friends and family) and “Black Belt Friday” (spent watching Kung-Fu flicks). (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.