It’s hard work making a price and item commercial interesting. But we think Crispin Porter + Bogusky may have done it with their Best Buy holiday campaigns which employs celebrities who read customized holiday stories. In all, there will be 11 spots featuring Will Arnett, Maya Rudolph, LL Cool J and Jason Schwartzman. The spots were directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon (The Switch, Blades of Glory, Cavemen) and three-time Academy Award-winning director of photography Bob Richardson (Django Unchained, Hugo, Kill Bill, Shutter Island, Casino, Platoon).
Well this is kind of a stretch. In an effort to convince us life can be so much better if you can get a handle on what you need to do to insure you will be able to retire comfortably, Swedish pension company SPP handed a starving musician an audience.
Now, we have nothing against starving musicians making it in the brutally difficult world of commercial music and the notion of a corporation helping an individual achieve success is laudable but corporations can’t do this for every single individual.
Yea, we get that this is a metaphor for a financial services company offering products that can help an individual do what they need to do to ensure a better retirement but can one financial services company really give every individual their big break? Oh it’d be awesome if they could but it’s just not possible.
That said, it’s a nice story and M&C Saatchi Stockholm did a nice job crafting it. And if it were possible for everyone to find success this way (or any way), we’d be all over it. But all this does is create an even greater chasm between the haves and the have nots; the lucky and the unlucky; the blessed and the unblessed.
Yes, it’s Monday morning. It’s cloudy. It’s cold. Blackfish shattered our warm, tender memories of SeaWorld. And we’re just plain grumpy.
Oh somehow we’ll get in trouble again for this one but what the hell. Young women in Australia are angered over a CougarLife ad which features porn star Julia Ann trashing “immature girls who think they’re all that.”
In the ad, she stuffs a hamburger in one girl’s face saying, “you need a sandwich.” She tells another catty lady “you fold sweaters for a living” after the girl spitefully says to her date, “oh, so you’re a computer geek.” Finally, after a third freeloader says “buy me a drink” to her date, Ann shoves the girl out of her chair and says to the guy, “How about I buy you a drink.”
Yes, it’s all to illustrate older woman have more to offer than younger women. At least according to CougarLife.
Australia’s Advertising Standards Board has banned the add saying the violence in the ad “is not justified in the context of the service being advertised.”
While the Board’s banning focused on the violence, the whole review kicked off when one women complained,”I found the ad very offensive, as it depicts an older women inferring that the men in the ad would be better ‘taken care of’ by her, rather than the younger women. It seemed to suggest that she would be a better ‘mate’ for the men in the ad than the younger women”
All of which could be true. Or not.
Think about it. Older men are gleefully praised for their accomplishments and, stereotypically, are sometimes sought after by younger women. But when the roles are reversed and its the older women in the position of power and wealth hooking up with younger men, it’s somehow less acceptable to some.
All we can say is date who you want regardless of age. Hook up with whomever you choose for your own reasons. Don’t let others judge and, yes, if you are strolling into a bar as an older woman, shoving aside a younger woman to hook up with the younger guy is probably not your best approach.
Hmm. All this just to sell a car. Well, this is advertising after all and not car salesmanship. With car salesmanship the goal is to move metal. With car advertising, well, the goal isn’t always so clear. Sure, car brands want the sales needle to move but as with most advertising, there seems to be a lot of shenanigans on the way to that sale.
Take this elaborate mcgarrybowen London-created commercial for the Honda CR-V 1.6 i-DTEC Diesel. The spot, entitled An Impossible Made Possible, is a well-crafted collection of optical illusions directed by Gorgeous’ Chris Palmer which aims to convince the viewer that, like the car, things are not always as they seem.
Both the spot and the “making of” can be viewed below.
You’ve seen it before. You know what to expect. It usually comes from brands with a long history. And the concept is always the same. That said, somehow, this Young & Rubicam-created, MassMarket-effected commercial for Valvoline works well enough.
It features your usual car buff/mechanic types getting their rocks off revving up their engines as they look off into what the future of motor oil has to hold. All while a voiceover intones the heritage of oil’s awesomeness.
Of course, there are no women in this ad because as we all know, when it comes to cars, women are just eye candy…which this ad aptly captures in one muscle car-themed scene.
While this chainsaw massacre-themed ad for Star Tron Enzyme Fuel Treatment may certainly be offensive to women it’s also offensive on another level. It’s a terrible ad. How do these things get made? Who creates them? Who approves them? What were these people thinking?
Heeding the fact that one in eight people will get into an auto accident this year and that, following those accidents, vehicles are in the shop for an average of 13 days resulting in vehicle owners borrowing family cars, hitching rides, or paying out-of-pocket rental fees of up to $400, Enterprise Rent-A-Car is highlighting the importance of rental reimbursement coverage.
Why? Well, because they want you to rent from them instead of using your daughter’s pink car like the frustrated father in this hilarious new commercial.
What the hell? Who gets this excited about their mobile carrier? No matter how many free WiFi spots, 4G upgrades or big data plans, no one is going to go frolic through the woods like a hipster exploring Alice in Wonderland’s back yard as if it were Burning Man.
No one.
Except, apparently, Telecom NZ customer who, it seems, are over the moon about the carrier’s new Ultra Mobile offering.
You can thank Saatchi & Saatchi for this psychedelic trip.
None of you under the age of, say, 35, will understand the freakishly odd appeal of the Human League’s 1981 hit “Don’t You Want Me.” It was the number one song on the Billboard 100 in July 1982 for three weeks when a place called “Brothers 4” in Falmouth Heights on Cape Cod was the place to be seen. OK, the place to be seen if you were a college kid toiling in the Cape Cod restaurant scene and you choice of nighttime activity was slightly limited.
Anyway, California-based Foster Farms, with help from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, has trotted out the synth pop classic for a new commercial promoting their 100 percent all natural frozen chicken. And what better way to do that than to enlist a chorus of chickens to sing “Don’t You Want Me.”
Hey, even if you weren’t around in 1982, you’ve got to admit chickens singing anything is kind of funny.
The chickens also sing Sister Christian’s “Night Ranger” and Toto’s “Africa.”
Oh what men (and advertising copywriters) will do to get a beer. Tapping the fairly tail-ish “cry wolf” scenario coupled with the old-timey trustworthiness of Lassie, New Zealand-based Colenso BBDO have crafted a witty commercial that cuts to a man’s truism; he would rather be having a beer with friends than, well, do just about anything else. And, he’ll do just about anything to get that beer with friends. Just watch any non-Clydesdale Budweiser Super Bowl commercial.
It’s pretty much become the cultural norm for a marketer to discuss just about anything they want in their advertising. So it comes as no surprise for conservative undie brand Fruit of the Loom to chat about “panties creeping upstairs” and “calibrating nuts” to sell some of the most basic underwear known to mankind.
After all, for a brand that is known for its decidedly unsexy fashion sense, injecting a few well-crafted double-entendres into your advertising is, perhaps, just what the brand needs to garner purchase consideration from consumers who have been so sexed up by the likes of Victoria’s Secret, Agency Provocateur and others to the point nothing seems sexy any longer.
So kudos to CP+B for crafting some well-worded, not over-the-top commercials for the brand.
A new campaign from The Martin Agency would like to convince us that Moen bathroom faucets are so fashionable, they can be worn as jewelry. Hey, ask your grandparents if they thought a telephone would ever become a fashion statement. Stranger things have happened.
To bring this concept to life, The Martin Agency asked jewelry designers from around the world to submit sketches of statement piece necklaces inspired by Moen’s statement piece faucets.
From these, four metal smith jewelry designers were selected: Sarah Loertscher of Seattle; Gina Pankowski, also from Seattle; Sarah Chapman of Minneapolis; Andrea Blais of Calgary and our director, Johan Perjus of B-Reel, Sweden. Perjus and the Mill NYC worked their magic to transform the necklaces into faucets.
To tout its Carefree Maintenance program, Volkswagen is out with a new Deutsch New York-created ad which features A-Ha’s 1980’s hit “Take On Me.” In the ad, which combines animation, stills and live action like the original, a man evades a menacing mechanic and gets the girl after he crosses the finish line.
It’s all innocent and fun until you realize the whole thing was conjured in the mind of a man sitting in a conference room who suddenly hears the song and asks, “Is that me? Was I singing?”
The spot was created using the same rotoscoping method as the original video–they filmed the actors and the cars and then animated the results.
To tout its Carefree Maintenance program, Volkswagen is out with a new Deutsch New York-created ad which features A-Ha’s 1980’s hit “Take On Me.” In the ad, which combines animation, stills and live action like the original, a man evades a menacing mechanic and gets the girl after he crosses the finish line.
It’s all innocent and fun until you realize the whole thing was conjured in the mind of a man sitting in a conference room who suddenly hears the song and asks, “Is that me? Was I singing?”
The spot was created using the same rotoscoping method as the original video–they filmed the actors and the cars and then animated the results.
Wieden + Kennedy is out with another ESPN SportsCenter spot. This one features U.S. Open winner Rafael Nadal as a lady magnet while ESPN personalities John Anderson and Bram Weinstein attempt to figure out Nadal’s secret. Alas, it has nothing to do with Nadal’s sexual prowess and everything to do with a tired stereotype that hot office bimbos can be motivated to do anything if you just give them a piece of candy.
We’re pretty sure some people are going to have their panties in a bunch over this one. While we’re all for humor and making light of serious topics, there are some things that are sacred. In advertising, it’s never a good idea to touch on topics like Hitler or 9/11.
Or the JFK assassination. But French online betting site, PMU, seems to have no problem sharing an alternative scenario of the fateful day in Dealey Plaza back in 1963.
Is the ad funny? Sort of. Has it been long enough to poke fun? That’s an individual decision. Is it ever a good idea to poke fun at tragedy? Not usually but, then again, humor has a funny way of making certain things OK. What do you think?
Ever traveled abroad and found yourself in a sticky situation cause by a language barrier? The guy in this Societe Generale commercial does. And it’s kind of funny. But not if it actually happened in real life. Societe Generale is a financial institution with presence in 76 countries that makes it easy for travelers and students studying abroad to exchange money.
As beer ads go, they usually fall into one of two camps; guys acting stupid/drooling over hot women or guys getting all macho with one another. This BBDO New York-created commercial falls into the latter category but ups the anti with a twist ending that cements what true friendship really is. It’s wonderful work.
In an analogy of his career and love for the team bus, Tom Brady can be seen walking through a 250 foot bus in this M&C Saatchi LA-created UGG For Men ad entitled “For Gamechangers.” The ad chronicles Brady’s journey from high school athlete to Super Bowl-winning NFL player and consummate man of character.
It’s too bad that 250 feet of awesomeness isn’t actually 250 feet. Take note when he gets off the bus at the end of the spot. We know, we know, it’s supposed to be a metaphor. But still.
After developing the Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch taco, Taco Bell had to come up with a third, equally awesome flavor. In a new Deutsch LA-created spot, people ponder what the next flavor might be but despite a few very obvious clues, they come up empty handed. Thankfully, the taste scientists over at Taco Bell had no problem coming up with the Taco Bell Fiery Doritos Locos Taco.
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