Hasta La Creative!

It was the best of times, it was the … well, literally the best of times. Van Halen was the greatest band in the world. George Orwell was totally right about the future. And the Edmonton Oilers were the world champions of hockey.

It was 1984. And speaking of oil, that’s the year Shell started refining in Alberta. To celebrate, eight Shell stations in the area reduced their prices on Wednesday to match their 1984 levels—39 cents per liter.

With gas costing way more than that nowadays, Canadians were surely happy to fill their gas-guzzling vehicles without hurting their wallets, even if just for one day.

Via Global News Canada.

It’s like we’ve gone back in time! #1984Pricing #80smoment #yyc http://t.co/An8PSXB0FO

 

— Shell Canada (@Shell_Canada) October 8, 2014

Shell employees at Wye Rd station are ready for #1984Pricing!! #80smoment pic.twitter.com/hsXZJSDXMv

— Shell Canada (@Shell_Canada) October 8, 2014

Usually when you wake up and something weird has happened at a neighbor’s house, you call the police and get the kids in the basement. But not Tuesday morning on a street in Calgary. People there got together and had coffee—at the new Tim Hortons on the block.

Overnight, the chain secretly turned a residential home at 303 Oakfern Way into a fully functional pop-up restaurant. It opened, much to the surprise of nearby residents, at 6 a.m. Tuesday and stayed open until noon, when it abruptly closed—but not before demonstrating that Tim Hortons isn’t just neighborly, it can sometimes actually be your neighbor.

The stunt, orchestrated by by Taxi Canada, was part of a recruiting campaign, as the chain is trying to fill more than 2,000 positions. “We are inviting people to join us today to have a coffee and talk about maybe an opportunity to work at a local Tim Hortons in the Calgary area,” said a spokesman.

This follows a different stunt last month in which the chain totally blacked out one of its locations in Quebec—for more quasi-nefarious reasons.

Check out more pics below from the #TimsNextDoor hashtag.

This morning a #YYC neighbourhood woke up to a big surprise! It’s a house, it’s a Tims, it’s the #TimsNextDoor. pic.twitter.com/bfSgbl5UYV

— Tim Hortons (@TimHortons) September 23, 2014

It’s the little details that make a house feel like a home… #TimsNextDoor pic.twitter.com/RMUTJlah5n

— Tim Hortons (@TimHortons) September 23, 2014

We’re not just in your neighbourhood, we’re your neighbours. Join our team: http://t.co/TcaHBXrcH4 #TimsNextDoor pic.twitter.com/I3HYelbrIU

— Tim Hortons (@TimHortons) September 23, 2014

In case you didn’t want to drive to a Tim’s there’s one right next door! #awesome #TimsNextDoor @weathernetwork pic.twitter.com/0CTKkfFuMH

— Deb Matejicka (@debmatejicka) September 23, 2014

Imagine if you had a Tims at home? Like literally, in your house. Check out our #TimsNextDoor in Calgary today! pic.twitter.com/8nPXy1KvFp

— Tim Hortons (@TimHortons) September 23, 2014

Amazing experiential marketing event happening in Oakridge! Thanks for the coffee and donuts

The stars really aligned for Corona—well, one did in particular—in this clever outdoor stunt from Toronto agency Zulu Alpha Kilo.

Check out the video below to see how the brand brought some extra hours of sunlight to some drinkers on a patio. It’s a great realization of the brand’s tagline, “Find your beach,” and surely has extra resonance in Canada, where summers are short enough.

Corona, of course, loves any marketing that involves celestial bodies—as seen in New York City last summer, when the brand made the waxing crescent moon look like a slice of lime resting in a Corona bottle on a billboard.

Who turned out the lights?

Tim Hortons and JWT Toronto plunged customers at one of the coffee and donut chain’s Quebec locations into inky darkness for a prank introducing a new dark roast coffee blend.

When unwitting patrons arrived, they found the L’Île-Perrot store completely covered in black-out material, even the windows. Dark vehicles were parked out front to heighten the mystery. Those who ventured inside bumped into a dude wearing night-vision goggles, who led them to a counter where dark roast was served and the gag revealed.

Goggles Guy looks pretty creepy, and unlike the hammy, self-aware fright reactions we’ve seen in some “scary” ad pranks, the squeals of shock and surprise at Tim Hortons seem genuine. This is the client’s second large-scale, Twilight Zone-ish effort of late. In May, it meticulously recreated its first shop from 1964, interior and exterior, in minute detail (see below)—even bringing back the original employees as servers.

Both the time machine and darkness stunts have generated lots of attention (the latter is approaching 700,000 YouTube views in four days). Still, such shenanigans seem like an awful lot to digest before you’ve had your morning joe.

To help expand its reach in Canada, Netflix has released a series of new ads that play off the streaming video service’s role as a sort of cultural watering hole from which we can draw endless references.

Created by DDB Vancouver, two of the spots continue the vibe of the “Pep Talk” spot from earlier this year by showing how citing movies and shows on Netflix can help you in tough situations like asking someone to marry you or sharing a hospital patient’s prognosis. 

A third spot takes a pretty different approach, although the setup’s quite similar. I’ll let you watch without spoiling it, though.

CREDITS:

Agency: DDB Canada Vancouver
Executive Creative Directors: Dean Lee, Cosmo Campbell
Creative Directors: Dean Lee, Josh Fehr

“AIRPORT”
Associate Creative Director: Daryl Gardiner
Art Director: Daryl Gardiner
Copywriters: Daryl Gardiner, Jessica Schnurr, Geoff Vreeken

“PROPOSAL”
Associate Creative Director: Daryl Gardiner
Art Director: Daryl Gardiner
Copywriters: Daryl Gardiner, Jessica Schnurr, Geoff Vreeken

“TEST RESULTS”
Associate Creative Director: Daryl Gardiner
Art Director: Daryl Gardiner
Copywriters: Daryl Gardiner, Geoff Vreeken

Agency Producer: Karen Brown
Account Team: Patty Jones, VP Client Services Director; Roger Nairn, Account Supervisor
Project Manager: Matthew Sy
Strategy: Rob Newell

Production Company: Steam / Anonymous Content
Director: Brian Billow
Senior Executive Producer-Anonymous Content:  Eric Stern
Executive Producer-Steam:  Krista Marshall
Executive Producer-Steam:  Tony DiMarco
Director of Photography: Dion Beebe
Line Producer: Kelly King
Post-Production Company: Cycle Media http://www.cyclemedia.net/
Editor: Matthew Griffiths
Visual Effects/Animation: Peter Debay at Cycle Media http://www.cyclemedia.net/
Colorist: Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3
Audio House: Vapor Music
Audio House Creative Directors: Joey Serlin, Andrew Harris
Audio House Producer: Natalie Schnurr
Casting Agency in LA: Ryan Bernstein
Casting Agency in Toronto: Andrew Hayes http://powerhousecasting.com/

Talent/Lead Roles only:
“PROPOSAL”
Jake: Chris Smith
Kate: Cali Fredrichs

“AIRPORT”
Stephen: Gary Smith
Elizabeth: Abigail Marlowe

“TEST RESULTS”
Patient: Mike Beaver
Doctor: Richard Waugh

It’s one thing to drive at breakneck speeds around a barren salt flat or abandoned airport, but the pucker factor goes up a few notches when you’re teetering on the edge of an aircraft carrier.

In BMW’s questionably real “Ultimate Racetrack” ad for the BMW M4, we see the typical anonymous, black-gloved stunt driver fishtailing and drifting around a course built on what looks like the redesigned deck of an aircraft carrier.

I feel the need – the need for speed. See the #BMW #M4 Coupé transforming an aircraft carrier into an ///M carrier. http://t.co/u5Z20NfYWT

— BMW (@bmw) July 8, 2014

Several YouTube commenters believe it’s fake, and Jalopnik points out some pretty compelling reasons to be dubious, such as the inconvenient fact that aircraft carriers don’t have rounded edges. We’ve reached out to Cundari, BMW’s agency in Canada, and will update with more information if we hear back.

That said, it sure doesn’t feel fake when you’re watching the car cut around those edges and risk a drop into the ocean. 

If nothing else, the ad highlights the fact that the only three differences between one high-adrenaline car ad and all the others like it: location, location, location.

One of the lovably misguided characters from “Dumb Ways to Die” sold both his kidneys on the Internet. Now, the client behind the beloved campaign has made a similarly greedy deal with the devil.

Through a licensing deal, Metro Trains has sold the creative product pretty much wholesale to Empire Life Insurance Co., which is cutting its own ads from it. Three 30-second spots posted online play snippets from the original musical cartoon, before a female voice pipes in and says: “What’s the dumbest way of all to die? Having no life insurance.” Empire has also done some digital ads with the characters and plans “a robust merchandise program … for multiple territories worldwide,” according to the Globe and Mail.

Ugh.

Talk about dumb. As the Ethical Adman points out, it just seems lazy and greedy—plus, the viral potential of the work has already been tapped worldwide, so what’s the point? On the eve of the 2014 Cannes Lions festival, it’s also a depressing slap in the face to the ad business to see the most decorated campaign in Cannes history bastardized like this—a PSA cynically turned into for-profit campaign.

You can understand Metro Trains wanting to make a buck off the work. But stick to making plush toys, not selling the whole cartoon to some huckster.

McCann, whose Melbourne office created “Dumb Ways to Die,” declined to comment on the Empire ads and referred inquiries to Metro Trains. We left messages with Metro and will update when we hear back.

Lest you were worried that Axe had given up on dumb bro antics, the brand is reaching for a new low by putting the sweat of its employees on little pieces of paper and claiming those sweaty pieces of paper will help those employees get laid.

The "Pheromone Business Cards" campaign, created by Union in Toronto, shows Axe "associates"—aka, bros—excreting into headbands before lab techs "distill" each dude's body juice into "a concentrated solution," hopefully also including some kind of scent other than musk, and then drop it onto said business cards, which openly declare that they are, for example, "infused with the essence of Kyle."

Of course, the "essence of Kyle" sounds like something even more gross than sweat, but of course that's the point.

If the video is any indication, there are no women working at Axe—and if they're are, they're female lab techs who are also expected to find the men they're helping irresistible, and take them in back to show them a good time, because duh, that's the way Axe works, and more or less always has.

What is surprising, though, is the idea that Axe thinks its target would identify with business cards in the first place, since all the kids are probably just fist-bumping their phones or Facebook-ing to trade info nowadays anyways.

Or, you know, just meeting on Tinder in the first place.

CREDITS
Client: Axe
Project: Pheromone Business Cards
Agency: Union, Toronto, Canada
Executive Creative Director: Lance Martin
Associate Creative Director, Art Director: Glen D'Souza
Associate Creative Director, Copywriter: Mike Takasaki
Agency Producer: Julie Riley
Account Director: Kimberlee McCormack
Account Manager: Rhiannon Enss
Science Advisor: Rudolf Furrer

Video Credits
Agency Producers: Grace Lee, Jennifer Dark
Director: Joshua Chaiton, Touchpoint Films
Editor: Aaron Dark, School Editing
Audio: Brad Nelson, Cylinder Sound

Diz a lenda – pelo menos a contada neste novo filme da Coca-Cola – que John Pemberton acordou um dia em maio de 1886 com a ideia de criar uma bebida refrescante. A primeira coisa que ele teria feito seria dar um Google, para descobrir se alguém já havia feito isso… Google? Pois é, não deu, porque ainda não havia sido inventado.

Basicamente, essa brincadeira de inserir a tecnologia na história da Coca-Cola, de uma forma muito bem-humorada, dá o tom ao filme Pemberton, uma criação/produção do coletivo CANADA, agência The Cyranos e Glassworks Team.

Com uma produção muito bem-feita, é engraçado pensar que, se existisse Facebook no século 19, talvez a fórmula da Coca-Cola não fosse um segredo até hoje.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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To highlight the global tragedy of children being sold into prostitution and hard labor, agency kbs+ has released three new spots for World Vision Canada's "No Child for Sale" initiative. Each spot starts with a beautiful childhood scene and ends with the stark reality of life for a child slave.

The videos are beautiful, moving and completely heart-wrenching. The "Bedtime" spot depicts lovely scenes of children falling asleep and being tucked in bed, and ends with a painful shot of a young child lying on a bed under the gaze of a pedophile customer.

The juxtaposition of the two very different childhood experiences is brutally effective. These spots—as well as the additional creative assets on the website—provide the viewer with some eye-opening awareness, and hopefully encourage all of us to take action to help end human trafficking and child slavery worldwide.

CREDITS

Agency: kbs+

TV:
Director: Miles Jay
Production House: OPC/FS
Editor: Jackie Roda
Editing House: School Editing
Online Creative Credits: Fort York VFX
Color: Eric Whipp, Alterego
Music: Me&John, Pirate Toronto
Broadcast Producer: Clare Cashman
Chief Creative Officer: Matt Hassell
Executive Creative Director: Dan Pawych
Art Director: Travis Cowdy
Writer, Creative Director: Lyranda Martin Evans
Account Team: Marie Magnin, Chantelle D’Aoust

Print:
Photographer: Hasnain Dattu
Retoucher: Mark Jackson
Chief Creative Officer: Matt Hassell
Creative Director: Marketa Krivy
Art Director: Braeden Laverty
Writer: Alyssa Geffen
Account Team: Marie Magnin, Chantelle D’Aoust

Interactive:
Executive Creative Director: Dave Sylvestre
Senior Art Director: Matthew May
Art Director, Illustrator: Carlos Lopez
Senior Copywriter: Lynne Valeriote
Design Production: Matthew May
Senior Development Consultant: Pat Lam
Development: Lollipop
Producer: Camelia Jitariu
Account Team: Erin Abbatangelo, Tiffany To
Business Lead: Robin Whalen
Agency Account, Integration Lead: Erin Abbatangelo