Ogilvy France and Ogilvy Asia-Pacific joined forces to make a can that splits in half for Coca-Cola, the most literal extension of the brand's global "Share Happiness" concept. The split-can design is admittedly pretty cool, although sharing a Coke with anyone who isn't a germaphobe is already pretty easy, so this is a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. It does make Twix look even worse for their infamous "Two for me, none for you" campaign back in the day, though.
It's another one of those things that shouldn't be a story but is—an ad from a major U.S. brand featuring an interracial couple and their daughter. You'd think this new Cheerios ad from Saatchi & Saatchi in New York might go largely unnoticed, given the plethora of interracial couples on TV shows these days. (NBC's Parenthood is a notable example, though far from the only one.) But it's not going unnoticed—it hit Reddit's front page, a place largely reserved for life's great oddities, and the YouTube view count is rising fast. The problem is that TV ads have always lagged TV programming in this regard, as so many brands are clearly scared of being perceived as making a political statement with the casting of their commercials. Thus, the Cheerios ad, despite its characters being representative of tens of thousands of actual couples in America, sticks out like a sore thumb. And then you have the YouTube comments section, which predictably has devolved into an endless flame war, with references to Nazis, "troglodytes" and "racial genocide." At what point will an ad like this just seem normal?
UPDATE: Camille Gibson, the brand's vice president of marketing, said in a statement: "Consumers have responded positively to our new Cheerios ad. At Cheerios, we know there are many kinds of families, and we celebrate them all." On Monday's Today show, she added: "The [YouTube] comments that were made were, in our view, not family friendly. And that was really the trigger for us to pull them off. … Ultimately we were trying to portray an American family. And there are lots of multicultural families in America today."
That hunky Bradley Cooper can do anything he wants, you understand, including strolling into an elegant cocktail party eating ice cream straight out of the container. Lapses in etiquette be damned—just look at those baby blues! And he even brought his own spoon. It helps that he's visiting The House of Häagen-Dazs, which isn't a real place but more of a sugar-fueled fever dream, in this new spot from Team One in El Segundo, Calif. There's a raven-haired supermodel (Jana Perez) who latches onto the smokin' hot Oscar nominee and onetime Sexiest Man Alive for canoodling purposes. Oh but wait, she just wants his dessert. Sure, she does. The General Mills brand, which shot this all-slow-mo, no-dialogue commercial in an 18th-century Baroque chateau in Prague, has never used a celebrity before. (European brand Magnum used a car-hopping Rachel Bilson in a campaign directed by Karl Lagerfeld for its decadent ice-cream bars a few years ago. Could this be a trend?). The Häagen-Dazs ad, meant to luxe up the brand, comes from director Allen Hughes of the famous filmmaking Hughes brothers. It fairly sizzles, and it's hot outside. Eat up!
A print ad that uses solar power to charge cellphones? At long last, mankind's prayers have been answered! Giovanni + Draftfcb in São Paulo, Brazil, developed the ad, which includes a wafer-thin solar panel and phone plug, to promote the Nivea Sun line of skincare products. It ran in Brazilian magazine Veja Rio, and there's a sun-soaked beach video that shows the device in action. Of course, the ad is mainly a gimmick to generate publicity through media coverage, which we're pleased to provide, though the work also suggests that adding novel functionality to traditional campaigns could be a smart way to stir things up. What will they think of next—a billboard that generates drinking water out of thin air?
Taco Bell's Dollar Cravings Menu is a low-budget option, so naturally it needs low-budget advertising. Enter Deutsch/LA, which claims to have produced radio ads for a dollar promoting the menu. The agency decided not to hire a voiceover actor, choosing instead to have a low-quality text-to-speech voice—i.e., a bad robot voice—read the scripts. The result is pretty amusing. The robot pronounces radio as "rah-dio," but more shameful is that he can't say "tortilla" properly either. He makes up for it with some humorous musings on his personal life, and the refreshing sign-off "Live Más. Bell sound."
Graphic designer/illustrator Jaime Calderón's "Super Likes" series dresses up the Facebook "Like" button in a variety of superhero costumes, including Spider-Man, Batman, The Thing, Wolverine and The Flash. The Flash icon is pretty clever—it's captured in motion and almost out of frame—but the rest of these could do with some accessorizing to make them look less generic. Only two or three of them are immediately recognizable as superheroes without the captions explaining who they are. That said, I'd like to see a Villains "Like" series if he wants to keep this going, if only because the Two-Facebook icon should also be flipping a coin. More after the jump, and many more at Calderón's Behance site, linked above. Via Design Taxi.
Cruzan Rum welcomes you to "The Don't Hurry," an island paradise where no one is busy, people enjoy zero-kilometer runs and sleep yoga, and every minute lasts 64 seconds. (The brand hails from the U.S. Virgin Islands and is now owned by Beam Inc.) Even the animals are slow, from a rum toting turtle to the national bird—a parrot that talks like Barry White. Well written, interestingly edited and expertly cast, the nearly two-minute anthem below is a lovely little gem. And Cruzan has clearly been watching other alcohol ads closely. The spokesman with the exotic, sometimes Spanish-sounding accent is a cross between Dos Equis's Most Interesting Man in the World and a drunken bum. You can also look to the left of the screen, where a man who looks suspiciously like Southern Comfort's comfortable guy saunters in his shoes and undies. It's backed up by some lovely print and digital work. (Sample headline: "Your only handheld device should be the one with ice cubes in it.") And it's clearly inspired by consumer insights. Well done, Cruzan. Hold my massage monkey, I'll be right there. See some shorter companion spots below.
Poor JCPenney. The retailer, which lost gobs of money last year and could very well die this year, simply cannot catch a break. This time it put up a seemingly harmless billboard in California. But wouldn't you know it—people are already saying the tea kettle on the billboard looks like Hitler. That's a stretch (this is what a proper Hitler tea kettle looks like) but somehow not surprising, given how star-crossed this company seems to be these days. Perhaps Michael Graves, the designer of the kettle, should apologize—although JCPenney would probably beat him to it. Via Reddit and Gawker.
UPDATE: Kudos to Penney for the tweet response below. There's life in the old gal yet!
Visiting the video arcade at my neighborhood mall in the '80s was both exhilarating and a bit scary. On the one hand, I feared that bigger kids would try to take all my change. (And I mean a physical shakedown, so quarters would spill from my pockets onto the pizza-smeared floor.) The adrenaline rush came from the games themselves. Asteroids, Space Invaders, Radar Scope … I loved them all. As I played, I rarely paid attention to my score. I just grooved on the sights and sounds, thrilled to each synthesized pop! bleep! and ping!, riding waves of pixelated excitement for hours on end. I wanted to meld with those machines and live in that world. Magic machines everywhere! That's what I wanted the future to be like. That was a scary thought, too, but no less wonderful for that.
Fast forward to Google's latest Chrome Experiments—two games designed to show off the advanced capabilities of the company's browser. They took me back to those arcades of my youth in ways both good and bad. This is partly because the games, "Roll It" and "Racer," are self-consciously retro. (The latter's soundtrack is by Giorgio Moroder, still taking his passion and making it happen after all this time!) Despite the nods to yesteryear, both games are cutting edge and let users play across multiple screens—phones, tablets and computers. "Racer" lets you drive a car across as many as five mobile devices. Watch it speed from the phone you're holding to the tablet in your buddy's hand! With "Roll It," you control the trajectory of a virtual skeeball on a desktop or laptop screen by moving a smartphone handset this way and that.
"Racer" and "Roll It" are both fun and absorbing—impressive slices of techno-magic that fulfill the promise of those crude arcade screens from the mall. They're like yesterday's dreams come true, brimming with possibilities for our digital tomorrows when synced systems running Chrome will conquer space and time. Still, I can't help feeling ambivalent, even dispirited about the proposition. For one thing, the joviality feels forced and works a tad too hard to sell happiness on a microchip. "Grab your phone, some friends and get ready to roll," says the "Roll It" promo clip. "No apps. No downloads. All you need is Chrome."
Booyah, Google's got the fun! It's daffy doodles, rad robots, animated animal rock groups and games all day long. Just follow the bouncing Chrome ball across screens of every shape and size … because the company now demands our attention on multiple platforms, as if retargeting humanity one screen at a time wasn't enough fun.
Ah well, there's no point in bemoaning "Big Bad Google," because I can't imagine a world without its products and services. Sure, Google's scary—but it gives us wonderful stuff, and its output has become an indispensable part of our daily existence. Maybe that's my problem. We've melded with the machines more thoroughly than I'd ever imagined, and now there's no escape. Our cursor-driven workplace tasks are essentially problem-solving games, complete with somewhat more sophisticated pops! bleeps! and pings! There aren't any shakedowns per se—just data-driven commerce. We can all groove to that, right?
I got the future I dreamed of all those years ago. So, why can't I shake the feeling that I'm the one being played?
Better call Saul? Actually, try Harry Kassabian first. The proprietor of People's Bail Bonds in Van Nuys, Calif., co-stars with some real-life criminals in this great commercial produced by local-ad heroes Rhett & Link. The cue-ball-headed Kassabian makes liberal use of air quotes in describing his clients' supposed innocence—but really, it's all the same to him. "The customer is always right, even if the customer is you and you've done something illegal," he says in one of the ad's better lines. Kassabian's personal tagline? He's "the guy that gets you out." "We decided there was a group out there that really needed their own commercial: criminals," Rhett & Link tell AdFreak. True enough. Rhett & Link also made their traditional cameo—look for them in the final seconds of the spot. Credits below.
CREDITS Written and Directed by: Rhett & Link Produced by: Stevie Wynne Levine Editor: Benjamin Eck Production Assistant/Behind the Scenes: Jason Inman Production Coordinator: Kendall Hawley
Seventh Generation tips a hat to its hippy heritage with this new streaking-themed spot for its chemical-free diapers. Lest you get uppity about naked babies, don't worry. The trick of the spot, by ad agency Made, is that this cute little streaking tot—who, despite the pink shoes, is impressively androgynous—is actually wearing a Seventh Generation diaper. They just pixelated the privates to vaguely shock you. (You see, wearing Seventh Generation diapers is, toxins-wise, apparently like wearing nothing at all.) Add in some booty-shaking to booty-shaking music, and you get an winning result. Of course, really dedicated hippy moms go with cloth diapers, ditching disposables altogether. But surely there's a market niche in between the two extremes, for when you want to do a little good for the Earth. Do a little more by tweeting your story with #toxinfreegen, and Seventh Generation will donate $1 in your name to Women's Voices for the Earth.
CREDITS Client: Seventh Generation
Agency: Made Movement Chief Creative Officer/Partner: Dave Schiff Chief Design Officer/Partner: John Kieselhorst Chief Digital Officer/Partner: Scott Prindle Chief Strategy Officer: Graham Furlong Art Director: Stephanie Sullivan Writers: Dan Ligon, David Satterfield Consulting Head of Integrated Production: Chris Kyriakos Junior Integrated Producer: Isaac Karsen Business Affairs: Jennifer DeCastro Senior Account Producer: Rachael Donaldson
Production Company: The Academy Director: Austin Wilson Executive Producers: Harry Calbom, Nate Barr Line Producer: Craig Stevens Director of Photography: Christian Hansen Editorial Company: NO6, Santa Monica, Calif. Editor: Kyle Whitmore Executive Producer (Editorial Co): Crissy DeSimone Producer: Leslie Tabor
Visual Effects Company: NO6, Santa Monica, Calif. Lead Flame: Verdi Sevenhuysen Executive Producer: Crissy DeSimone Visual Effects Producer: Leslie Tabor Telecine: Verdi Sevenhuysen Music Company & City: Beacon Street Studios, Venice, CA Composer/Lyricist: Andrew Feltenstein, John Nau Audio Finishing: Lime Studios Audio Engineer: Sam Casas
Avec cette série « Ricettario : A balanced diet », l’artiste italienne Elena Mora basée à Hambourg nous propose des sculptures très amusantes composées essentiellement de nutriments équilibrés, et en équilibre. Des créations photographiées par Karsten Wegener à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.
The Creative Circus, Atlanta's advertising school, has hired the most famous, perhaps infamous, stripper in town to pimp its do-goody-goody advertising contest known as A+, where all the winners receive a pimp cup. They're trying to make Atlanta a "more livable city" one stripper promotion at a time. Blondie is Atlanta legend. I heard about her before I even moved here. She strips at the Clermont Lounge, officially known as the place strippers go to die. Her great trick is crushing cans with her boobs. But she's not all flash and bling. She's a sensitive soul who is also well known for writing poems. (It is considered an honor to receive one.) Watching the promos, created with ad agency Iris, where Blondie is dressed like a ridiculous caricature of a southern belle, posed in front of a plantation and giving advice about how you have to dig deep down to your nasty self and bring it out like The Exorcist, one can only blink and repost. There simply are no words. More videos below.
Advertising Agency: BEI Confluence Communications, New Delhi, India National Creative Director: Anwar Abbas Art Director / Illustrator: Dheeraj Singh Copywriter: Ranit Mukherjee
The ubiquitous Twitter hashtag #FML (there have been 37,000 #FML-tagged tweets in the past seven days alone) is generally understood to be short for an obscene phrase uttered when things are at their bleakest. But now, Jell-O is here to help. The Kraft Foods brand and agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky are trying to hijack #FML and make it stand for "Fun My Life" (rather than doing something else to your life). Between now and June 14, everyone who tweets the #FML hashtag is entered into a pool, from which a certain number will win "Fun My Life" prize packs "specially created to get their life back on track." You can follow along at jelloFML.com, which also shows how the brand is tweeting at #FML-ers.
Here's a clever little gimmick. Australia's Cascade Brewery recently made a limited-edition batch of beer with special "experimental" hops from a secret garden in Tasmania's Derwent Valley. There was only enough for 5,000 cases, and so the brewer—with help from Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne—made an ad for it that can only be watched 5,000 times. Check it out below. The special embed code (which can take some time to load) includes a ticker that's counting down to zero. "Whether you caught the film in time or not, make sure you don't miss the beer," the brewer says on its website. Come on, people, we can make this thing obsolete within the hour if we put our minds to it. Via The Denver Egotist.
UPDATE: Video has been having trouble loading—either that or it hit 5,000 and ran.
Lego has unveiled a life-size Star Wars X-Wing fighter jet made entirely of Legos in Times Square. It promotes an upcoming Cartoon Network show called The Yoda Chronicles. You can also see a life-size Lego Chewy, Vader, R2-D2, C-3PO and Boba Fett in the promo for the show. But the X-Wing has the distinction of being the largest Lego structure built to date. At 11 feet tall, 43 feet long, 44 feet wide and almost 46,000 pounds, it's made of 5,335,200 individual Lego bricks. It took 32 people four months just to put it together. And you can climb into the cockpit for a photo. Which means all you Star Wars and Lego fans must make a pilgrimage to this, the largest and most awesome Lego thing ever made, and get a picture of your child sitting in the cockpit shouting "Pew! Pew!" See lots more photos at Gizmodo.
This Chevy Volt ad, titled "Silent Anthem," is an extended version of the Volt footage we saw in the "Find New Roads" launch spot in February. Visually, it's interesting, although it's as much an ad for wind farms and iPads and robot dogs as it is for the Volt. The deer/dog moment at the end is pretty barfy, too, but at least this campaign reaches for something beyond the norm. The Volt bookended the launch spot, which made it feel like the focus of it. But the other vehicles in it have been getting their own individual :60s as well. Check out three of those after the jump.
Kmart's "Ship My Pants" ad was a major success, to the tune of 17 million YouTube views and counting. But can Draftfcb turn almost-profanity into a running gag for the retailer? It attempts to do so with this follow-up spot, "Big Gas Savings," which features some big-gas humor indeed. It even features the same family from "Ship My Pants," and once again the kid gets the best line. (In the earlier spot, he blurted out, "I can't wait to ship my pants, Dad." Here, he shouts, "Dad, look at that big gas truck!") It's not quite as funny as the original, perhaps, but it seems destined to get similarly big-gas numbers on YouTube. And if nothing else, the #biggassavings hashtag clinches it. Credits below.
CREDITS Client: Kmart Chief Marketing Officer: Andrew Stein Vice President, Creative: Mark Andeer
Agency: Draftfcb Chief Creative Officer: Todd Tilford Executive Creative Director: Jon Flannery Creative Director, Copywriter: Berk Wasserman Creative Director: Todd Durston Group Executive Producer, Agency Producer: Chris Bing
Production Company: Bob Industries Executive Producers: T.K. Knowles, John O'Grady, Chuck Ryant Producer: Brian Etting Director: Zach Math
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