Hasta La Creative!

It’s not every day that you see a baby drinking beer or attempting to do lines of cocaine. Do we have your attention yet? Good. It means 12 Keys Rehab’s latest ad campaign is working, and you haven’t even seen it yet.

There happens to be a long history of babies and young children being used in advertisements; it’s a practice that dates back to the 1800’s, though it would be quite some time after that until actual photographs of babies became fodder for ad campaigns.

One particularly memorable advertisement from the 1950s featured a baby being served a soft drink – an image that most of us would find reprehensible today, given recent findings that have found similarities in dental damage between soda drinkers and hard drug users.

Is it that much of a stretch, then, that 12 Keys has leveraged babies in their anti-drug campaign? To be sure: unlike that soda ad from decades ago, their message is meant as a deterrent – not as encouragement for the behavior pictured.

They’re Just Like Us

The title of the 12 Keys ad campaign is “They Are More Like You Than You Know” – a fitting title, given the fact that it’s sometimes hard for us to remember that we all were babies once, and looking at a baby is to look at the future.

Of course, the pictures themselves are mere window dressing for the real message: each photograph is accompanied by an alcohol or drug statistic, some of them as startling as the images themselves. Some examples include: “7 million children under 18 in the U.S. have alcoholic parents” and “If you’re addicted to alcohol during pregnancy, they will be too.”

He Has Your Eyes (And Habits)

While these advertisements are obviously meant to shock, it’s not difficult to remember that there’s nothing but good intentions behind the imagery. It’s a reminder that nothing parents do happens in a vacuum, which is to say that even our unborn young can potentially experience the impact of our bad decisions for their entire lives.

You’re familiar by now with the words “the children are our future,” but 12 Keys has reminded us that this truth comes in many forms. Their goal is to shed some light on a trend that still seems to be inexplicably rife with confusion, misconceptions, or simple ignorance.

Investing in the Future

12 Keys is a rehab facility, which means they spend a great deal of their time treating adults for alcohol and substance abuse and addiction. Their mission statement is a great deal broader than that, however; to borrow their own wording, “drugs aren’t only an adult problem.” They’ve reminded us that adult decisions don’t confine themselves to the adult world.

At the end of the day, these pictures can resonate with us because they remind us of a simple truth: addiction fuels addiction. In a society ruled in part by narcissism, it’s refreshing to see our collective awareness growing when it comes to the toll we take on future generations.

This guest post was written by Shane Jones, a content expert who’s specialty is with online advertising campaigns. His real passions however, lie in print media. Follow his opinions on Google+ and keep up-to-date on his latest ad projects, The Happiness Theory.

That Neal McDonough ad for Cadillac in which he struts around his pool and home and raps about building the American dream with crazy hard work and “only” two weeks off in August has finally received spoof treatment.

Ford developed “Upside: Anything is Possible” featuring Pashon Murray, founder of Detroit Dirt, who raps about the beauty of turning waste into compost which she sells to people who create urban gardens.

Much like the Cadillac ad, Murray struts around talking about “crazy entrepreneurs trying to make the world better” and then closes with, “It’s pretty simple. You work hard, you believe that anything is possible, and you try to make the world better. You try. As for helping the city grow good, green, healthy vegetables? That’s the upside of giving a damn. N’est-ce pas?”

Yes, it’s an eco message. And while the Cadillac ad, in a way, is too, the Ford ad is the polar opposite. It’s going for green, for liberal thinking, for “it’s not just about money,” for activism and for communal thinking versus individual bravado.

Important as that message is, it falls a bit flat. Perhaps it’s Murray’s less than forthright delivery. Perhaps it’s yet another example of yet another brand trying to ride the coat tails of another. Perhaps it’s that it leverages “green” in a hypocritical effort to sell something that still requires the burning of fossil fuels (where do you think all that electricity comes from?). Or perhaps we’re just sick of writing headlines that read “Brand A Copies Brand B so That It Can Draft Brand A’s Success”

In what has to be the dumbest car stunt advertisement is a very long time, Audi of America, to tout its 450 hp RS 5, has recreated the famed 1974 Evil Knievel Snake River Canyon jump. The jump, across a 4,781 wide section of the Snake River in Idaho, was a failure with Knievel landing in the river bed below.

The three-minute video begins with footage from the famed attempt and with Knievel intoning “Each time I was hurt, they all said that guy is lucky he’s not dead. And they were right. But I wanted to get up and try again.”

Cut to 2012 and Audi is setting up for its own attempt at making it across the river. Complete with overblown staging, a countdown clock (what the hell is that for. Just jump when you’re ready to jump), stupid hand gesture shots, pensive closeup shots of the anonymous stunt driver, audi-branded headphones (really?), NASA-style radio conversation, a helicopter (WTF? Oh right, gotta get the aerial shots) and more voiceover from Knievel (“something inside me makes me do it”) which, on assumes, is supposed to somehow tie Knievel’s awesomeness to Audi’s determination towards greatness.

Then? Black screen. Yes, black screen. We don’t get to see whether or not the jump is a success. Why? Because it’s all a silly stunt. Because it never happened. Because it’s a stupid commercial.

And after viewing what little of the jump we are able to see, one doesn’t need to be a math whiz to realize the car’s trajectory can only lead to the Audi plunging into the river below.

Why would Audi do this? Clearly, the brand is going for the Knievel daredevil spirit. We get that. But why would the brand create a spectacle such as this that, clearly, is going to result in the death of our Knievel stand in? If a rocket ship can’t make the almost one mile jump, then certainly a car is never going to be able to make it.

And what’s the takeaway here? “We’re Audi. We Try Harder?” Oh wait. It’s like Audi is saying “It’s Your Space. Do whatever the hell you want even if it’s killing yourself while trying to jump over a river in a shiny new Audi.” WTF?

The stunt is claimed to “demonstrate the excitement surrounding one of our latest performance models – the RS 5.” All this work demonstrates, with typical advertastic tour-de-force masturbatorial aplomb, is that you (and, by association, Audi) are an idiot for thinking the ability of a car to jump across a mile-wide river is somehow related to the ability of the car to back out of the garage and drive the kids to soccer practice.

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OK. So let’s get this straight. Maybe we’re in a bad mood or something but what’s up with the outpouring of love for Nike’s new “epic” three minute commercial featuring a who’s who of world famous soccer players?
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Bill Green of Make the Logo Bigger and the new Adverve podcast took a look at a new commercial from Chase and was reminded of the World Trade Center tribute.

At ad:tech Chicago last week, and prior to his opening talk, I approached Denuo CEO Rishad Tobaccowala in hopes of scoring an interview later on. He was in a hurry and answered in a way I found brusque and upsetting — which ended up colouring my feelings about his keynote.

Talk about a headline. George Parker has a campaign in Germany that rivals the DDB 9/11 party going on for shock value–and is just as misguided. What’s better than AIDS? Getting screwed by an infamous world leader of course.

Crowdsourcing. Good or bad?Bad.Good.   GET YOU SOME! Nice little quiet topic to bring up, innit. More than a few ad blogs have covered this (as I also did with the AdPulp gang on a recent episode of the Beancast)….

We all want to sell the world. A new doc out takes a look at the iconic “Guerilla Heroico” y’all know and love, Che Guevara for the new kids, and, which most of advertising has exploited quite nicely.

This is history kids, honest to goodness advertising history. A Mad Men returns, with tie! You have to love an interview with triumphant horns between segments.