Hasta La Creative!

If you’re apartment hunting for a three bedroom/two bath/one Burger King, this might be the spot for you.

Spanish agency La Despensa equipped a tasty pad in downtown Madrid with a BK kitchen and menu counter for a stunt touting the arrival of the chain’s home delivery service. You’ve got familiar brand signage, colorful meal displays and even some guy named Michael, dressed in a BK uniform, ready to take your order.

Because the agency listed the unit on local real-estate websites for roughly half its market value, “we had around 800 calls in five days asking to see the place,” La Despensa creative director Luis Monroy tells AdFreak. Hidden cameras recorded the reactions of prospective tenants, who seem amused and pretty psyched about the experience.

“It took around three days to assemble the restaurant after weeks of searching for the perfect place,” Monroy says. “Can you imagine what it’s like to carry up all the kitchen tools, digital screens for the menu-board … and the bar of 300 kilos to the third floor with no elevator?” Members of the marketing team, production company and agency all pitched in to help with the heavy lifting.

Of course, authentic BK cuisine was served. “It is a much more complete experience with a Whopper in your hands,” Monroy says. Soon after it finished the video, La Despensa (which translates to “The Pantry”—perfect, right?), the apartment, which really had been on the market, was snapped up, “unfortunately without the restaurant, and at a higher price.”

This well done prank manages to stay on-point and satisfy without seeming overcooked. And that’s kind of rare in this category.

Behold! The lowest of the low-budget hidden-camera pranks has been created for discount retailer Ocean State Job Lot, and it is steeped in local commercial magic.

The chain, with 116 stores in the northeast, hired MMB in Boston to make this spectacle whose meager production budget perfectly matched the message that the store is committed to low prices. In fact, if they had spent much more, the video wouldn’t have been nearly as good.

In the clip, several bewildered customers are given the option to go on an Adventure Quest to win a heater. It starts when they ring a bell and get a blast of fake snow to the face. Then, Old Man Winter, a character from OSJL’s TV spot, tells them that Santa has been captured by the wicked Markup King (the guy who works at the mall) and they need to set him free.

Setting him free and winning the heater, however, involves an obstacle course with light-string barbed-wire, wreath tires to run through, a snowball catapult, and more fake snow to the face while a mildly deranged elf named TutTut does her shrillest drill sergeant impression.

Once through the course, they’re led to what is clearly the employee room, welcomed by Santa and forced to search the mailbox block/advent calendar and get more snow in the face before Santa’s true game is revealed!

And of course, there are lots of trumpets. Because everyone loves trumpets.

Just when we thought Facebook couldn’t get any more ordinary, we stumble upon a user who’s taken the constraints of the platform and come in like a wrecking ball into its boring blue walls.

Facebook user “Nikki,” better known as Reddit user rubberdogturds, had some fun with Facebook’s cover photos by inserting herself into a slew of famous pop culture images. The results are fantastic, and will probably make you second-guess any social media savvy you may have. 

Check out the her entire body of work here, and some of these works of beauty and sheer Photoshop wizardry below.

Via Gizmodo.

How far are people willing to go, physically and emotionally, to get a free sample? Australian agency Clemenger BBDO continues its quest to find out by making consumers work hard (and sometimes look a bit foolish) for free Fantastic Delites rice snacks.

Shoppers were asked to queue up for ridiculously long periods of time, even when there was no one standing ahead of them, to get a bag of Fantastic Delites Curls.

After making folks wait and then navigate a winding maze at an outdoor mall, the scenario was repeated at an ice rink and in a pond where the water looks kind of scummy, but no one seems to mind getting wet. Hey, they saved about $2, and the snacks are gluten-free!

The “How Far Would You Go” campaign’s been around for a few years, and it’s generated a couple of viral videos, so I’m assuming some, if not most, of the people who lined up had a notion of what they were in for. 

“It seems no matter what challenge we throw out there, be it mindlessly pressing a button on a vending machine 5,000 times, or the indignity of dressing as a rodent and spinning a mouse wheel for five minutes, the punters always seem to come back for more,” says agency cd Matt O’Grady. “Maybe we’re not making them difficult enough?”

Wondering what sadistic challenge they’ll dream up next? Get in line.

The makers of “Lord of Tears,” a well-reviewed Scottish indie chiller, definitely ruffled some feathers with a pair of pranks that brought the film’s evil “Owlman” into real life.

In the first and less elaborate stunt, Owlman popped up on Chatroulette, where he set some teeth chattering with fear, though most users just seemed amused. (By Chatroulette standards, he’s actually not so bad.)

More recently, though, the beaked beastie nested in an an abandoned children’s hospital that’s reportedly a favorite haunt of sightseers and photographers. “Lord of Tears'” director Lawrie Brewster explains: “Whenever we got a heads up somebody was heading this way … we would get our hidden cameras ready to record what happened when they encountered our Owlman lurking inside. We did not expect the reactions we filmed, and had to cut short the second prank as our victim became too distressed. He was eventually fine in the end and even had a cup of tea with us!”

“Distressed” is putting it mildly. Some hospital explorers seem ready for the psych ward after encountering the Owlman in the hospital’s dilapidated halls. 

Some will insist the prank was faked, and indeed a cursory search of Google turns up no mentions of an abandoned St. Mary’s Children’s Hospital, which seems odd if it’s such a popular destination. (There is, however, an abandoned St. Mary’s asylum in Stannington.) And of course the reactions are almost too perfect.

Regardless, the video has proven scary popular, generating almost 1 million views in a few days and lots of buzz for a relatively small film. So I’d call Owlman’s latest flight a wise move indeed.

Most city dwellers tend to avoid eye contact with the homeless, a fact that made one advocacy group wonder: Would you recognize your own relatives if they were living on the street?

New York City Rescue Mission partnered with agency Silver + Partner for a hidden-camera stunt that filmed people as they walked past loved ones dressed to look homeless. Later, the passersby were shown video footage of themselves walking past their relatives without a second glance. 

As you'd probably expect, no one recognized their family members. One woman even walked right past her mom, uncle and aunt.

The stunt doesn't lead to any emotional breakdowns or similar histrionics, which is somewhat refreshing at a time when "gotcha" videos focus so hard on over-the-top reactions and immediate life-changing self-reflection. But the unwitting participants clearly feel ashamed of their oversight. 

Director Jun Diaz from production house Smuggler tells Fast Company that one person who was filmed asked not to be included in the final video "because they couldn’t handle the fact that they walked by their family."

On a related website, MakeThemVisible.com, the rescue mission further humanizes the needy by sharing photographs of real homeless New Yorkers, smiling while sharing their personal passions and hobbies.

Pleas to help the poor are usually ignored. So what if you turned things around and started advocating against the poor? Would anyone come to their defense?

Publicis London put that question to the test with an experiment for The Pilion Trust. The agency stuck a guy with a "FUCK THE POOR" sandwich board on a busy London street and filmed people telling him off.

After plenty of heated reactions, including a police officer telling him "that's offensive" and a near fight with a homeless man, the organizers flipped the sign around to say "HELP THE POOR" in the same font, same presentation, and filmed everyone ignoring him. The resulting film has already gone viral, with over 1.2 million views in three days.

It's an interesting experiment, but does it really prove that people care about the poor? It seems more like it proves that people enjoy being self-righteous on topics where they know most people agree with them. The truth is, it doesn't cost anything to be offended.

I'd like to see if those people who got upset really did care enough to give. Publicis should design another experiment with two guys, one with a "help the poor" just down the street from the "fuck the poor" guy. Then we'll see how many people who yelled at one actually donated to the other.

CREDITS

Client: The Pilion Trust
Advertising Agency: Publicis, London
Director: Jonathan Pearson
Creative Director: Andy Bird
Art Director: Jolyon Finch
Copywriter: Steve Moss
Producer: Adam Dolman
Director of Photography: Peter Bathurst
Agency Producers: Sam Holmes, Colin Hickson
Editor: Toby Conway Hughes at Marshall Street
Postproduction: Absolute
Sound Design: Wave
Typographer: Andy Breese

A mother bought a full-page ad on the front cover of the Chinese Melbourne Daily—a newspaper for the Australian city's Chinese community—begging her son to come home for Chinese New Year and promising not to pester him about getting married anymore.

The ad reads: "Peng, we have tried to reach you so many times by phone, but in vain. So maybe you will hear from us here. We hope you will come home for Lunar New Year. Dad and Mom will never again pressure you to marry. Love you, Mom."

Now everyone in the community will be curious to see whether Peng actually comes home—but you know, no pressure or anything. The mom's promise references a common problem among Chinese youth, who don't like getting nagged by their parents about their love lives any more than the rest of us do. This might also explain why Chinese online megastore Taobao.com's "Rent a Boyfriend" service exists.

Sadly, there's no girlfriend option for the poor guy being targeted by the Melbourne Daily ad, so he might just have to go home on Jan. 31 and make the best of it. His mom spent almost $2,500 on that ad, judging by the newspaper's advertising rate card. It would be a shame to see that go to waste.

Photo via CNN.

In recent years, we've seen guys propose marriage through infographics, banner ads and crowdsourcing. But Oregon 3-D artist Robert Fink outscores them all with this impressive multi-level video game he created to ask his girlfriend, Angel White, to tie the knot.

Fink worked with two techie friends over five months to create Knight Man: A Quest for Love, which involves a knight's efforts to rescue a princess. White, also an avid gamer, had tested games for Fink before, so she wasn't too suspicious when he invited her to swing by his studio and give Knight Man a try. At the end of the quest, this message appeared: "Princess, I have searched far and wide and braved many dangers searching for my one and only. I believe with all my heart that I have found you … Angel White, would you do me the honor of sharing your life with me?" (I guess hiding a ring in a tub of hot wings during a Call of Duty marathon wouldn't have been as magical.)

White accepted, and with any luck, they'll live happily ever after.

Via Laughing Squid.

It's easy to get swept up in the consumerism of the holiday season, and just as easy to get swept up in the crushing cynicism and contempt for people that passes for opposition to that consumerism. When either of those things occur, it's nice to be reminded that people are sometimes decent to one another during this time of year.

Retired Irish pensioner James Gray has spent the last 10 Christmases by himself, much like almost half a million seniors annually if British charity Age U.K. has its numbers right. Tired of the solitude, Gray, 85, decided to put out a personal ad of sorts, asking for someone to come and have Christmas lunch with him.

Responses were slow until the Irish Post ran a story on Gray, and now he's getting responses from all over Britain, and even some from America. "It is so touching to me, after all these years alone, to see this response from people," Gray tells the Post in a follow-up to the original story. "I should have done this years ago."