Hasta La Creative!

In our age of virtual sharing gone berserk, here's a refreshingly tactile effort by a British ad agency. For new restaurant Dishoom, OgilvyOne U.K. is collecting customer stories through the Internet and baking the best ones into Dishoom's dinner plates—each one nicely designed in a way that fits that particular story. The campaign draws on an ethnic tradition. Dishoom is an Irani café—styled after similar cafés opened in India in the 19th century by Iranian and Persian immigrants. The sharing of stories over food was a big part of the Iranian café tradition (and restaurant tradition generally). OgilvyOne started the campaign with 80 plates featuring the personal memories of Irani cafés from the older generation in Bombay and the U.K. See some examples below. Now, new visitors are being asked to contribute. "Crazy and unusual anecdotes are very much encouraged!" says the site. "Tell what you used to do—whether it was hanging out with friends, dating, bunking off, doing business deals, finding inspiration. Tell us how the food tasted, the conversations you overheard, how the place felt, the more personal your stories the better." Via Creative Review.

It was my first visit to India. I was in Churchgate near the station and used to visit this old cafe on the corner for some of the best dosas and uttapas in town. The owner introduced himself and made me feel like he was one of my uncles. Uncle Satish or 'Satishbhai' as I called him invited me to their late night card games, and I learnt all sorts and made all sorts of new friends. Only in such a cafe, could you feel like you were part of the family as soon as you walk in, and leave with not only a full stomach, but a whole new bunch of friends.

Adi was tickled when he heard about my memories of the cutlet gravy at Cafe Excelsior from a decade back. He immediately called for a plate of gravy for me to taste. I took a spoonful…creamy yet edgy…an initial soothing sip followed by a slow but resounding hit of chillies. A very elegant and yet passionate sauce. I liked it so much that I finished the contents of the saucer. Seeing the delight on my face Adi insisted on packing some cutlets and gravy for me to take home…and some slices of bread too….the bread turned out to be as soft as Cupid's cheeks. I pointed out the lack of salt in the dhansak to Adi. "Well that's good for old people no with BP? Others can add salt" said Adi with a smile.

Colaba is the most popular tourist hub of Bombay because of the famous Taj hotel and gateway of India. A lot of Iranians migrated and settled in Colaba. They relate to this place a lot. Everytime I come here, I see them sitting around and it makes me feel comfortable. I've been a student of Xaviers College and have been very fond of this Irani Café, especially when you have a tight budget cause I'm in college. The food is very affordable. Every time I have a friend visiting, I bring them here to give them a taste of the real Bombay experience.

I once asked Mr. Kohinoor, who is 83 and owns Britannia Restaurant what would happen to Britannia when he was no longer with us. Gesturing towards his son and brother he exclaimed (a bit loudly!) "The moment I'm gone, these buggers will shut the place down!"

I held Bapa's hand tightly.
I was so scared
So many people
And I, so small
I sat in the chair
My chin on the table
He ordered
I stared
It came.
I smiled
A big smile.
Tutti Frutti Ice Cream.

Afshin Kohinoor, Boman's son, started talking to us at length about the restaurant. He pointed to the portraits hung on the wall, spoke about the letter written to his father by the Queen of England, and pointed to one of their latest awards. …and then willingly posed for me with a trophy. And then when we were leaving, asked us to return with our boyfriends. "I don't want to see you alone next time," he said.

Overheard one evening in an Irani café in South Mumbai's Fort District. A customer complains to the owner, that there is no sugar in his tea. "Did I call you? Did I say, come to my shop and drink tea? You are the one who climbed the steps and came. Today there are no complaints. Everyone's quietly drunk their tea and gone. No one said anything. What are these tantrums that you come up with …. God knows how your wife stays with you. Is she still with you or has she eloped and run away."

Advertising has been obsessed lately with scaring the crap out of people. So here, for your Friday enjoyment, is a more benign prank. Target, which is the exclusive retail partner for the release of Justin Timberlake's new album, got 20 of the pop star's biggest fans together for a commercial shoot. They thought they would just be singing a Timberlake song for the ad. They didn't realize the great and powerful JT himself would actually be there. Check out the spot below, and a behind-the-scenes video after the jump. All the reactions are genuine. Decent work by Deutsch in Los Angeles—though to be honest, the bar for this kind of thing was set by David Beckham and Adidas last summer. If you don't leave someone sobbing tears of joy, maybe you haven't gone far enough.

Revenge billboards are getting to be a trend. Expensive but emotionally satisfying, they're great for anything from declaring spousal inadequacies to calling out cheaters. This one, in Greensboro, N.C., goes the extra mile by spoofing MasterCard's "Priceless" campaign. It reads: "Michael – GPS tracker – $250, Nikon camera with zoom lens – $1600, Catching my LYING HUSBAND and buying this billboard with our investment account – Priceless. Tell Jessica you're moving in! – Jennifer." Chad Tucker of Fox 8 News broke this story. Hopefully, he can track down Jennifer and film the fisticuffs we're all imagining.

The taxicabs in Denver are a bit hornier than usual, and it's all science's fault. Carmichael Lynch put ornamental mammoth tusks on a fleet of cabs to drum up attention for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's "Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age" exhibit. The cool thing about this idea is that when the exhibit ends, they can keep the tusks and do cab jousts for charity.

Floyd Hayes, the former executive creative director of creative agency Cunning, includes a quote from a 2007 AdFreak story in materials touting his new venture, the World's Fastest Agency—although when my colleague David Kiefaber described the guerilla advertising veteran with a penchant for self-promotion as "pregnant with marketing genius," it was with anvil-heavy irony, and perhaps some confusion about which gender is able to conceive. Back then, Hayes was offering to think really hard about a client's products at least once an hour for a week in exchange for $10,000. Now, he's hawking a quick-turnaround service—selling concepts for $999. Send that amount via PayPal, DM your creative brief to @FastestAgency, and he'll issue a 140-character response within 24 hours. "Make the logo bigger" and "Put the CEO in the commercial" easily fit the space and would probably satisfy most clients. But Hayes offers this example, based on a real project he helmed at Cunning in London: "Brief: Gain media and buzz for our park-anywhere small car. Idea: Attach replica cars to landmark city buildings." Hmmm, that sounds like a $997 solution to me. And I don't see anything about a money-back guarantee. The World's Smallest Ad Agency should piggyback on Hayes's publicity by offering next-day ideas for 99 cents. Via PSFK.

UPDATE: Hayes tells AdFreak that the nonrefundable $999 is actually a plus for clients because "they will be forced to FOCUS on their challenge and get the problem to its essential core. Yes, they could do this without paying but money makes it happen." (The emphasis is his, so you clients better FOCUS!)

Cookie or creme? Perhaps not surprisingly, Oreo says it's both. Following the "Whisper Fight" Super Bowl spot, the #cookiethis/#cremethis Instagram campaign, the Oreo Separator videos and the "Life Raft" TV spot, Wieden + Kennedy today wraps up its "Cookie vs. Creme" campaign with SuperImportantTest.com, an amusing grab bag of a website which makes it clear that there's no wrong answer to the question of which part of an Oreo is better. Submitting a vote on the site takes you to one of more than 30 silly videos—from 2-D horse animations to robotic cats and everything in between. Directors, production companies and YouTube personalities from "six different time zones" (!?) created the clips, the agency says. After each one, you can go back and cycle through the others. All in all, the campaign was a pleasant confection—six weeks of inspired silliness which proved that even with kind of a dumb premise, Oreo can still have plenty of fun. Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Oreo
Project: Super Important Test
www.SuperImportantTest.com

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Jason Bagley, Craig Allen
Digital Director: Matt O'Rourke
Copywriter, Digital Creative: Jarrod Higgins
Art Director: Ruth Bellotti
Account Team: Scott Sullivan, Jessie Young, Ken Smith
Broadcast Producer: Katie Reardon
Broadcast Production Director: Ben Grylewicz
Interactive Producer: Robbie Veltman
Executive Interactive Producer: Lori DeBortoli
Information Architect: Jake Doran
Digital Designer: Paul Levy
Creative Technologists: Ryan Bowers, Billy McDermott
Executive Creative Directors: Joe Staples, Susan Hoffman

Video Creators
Carl Burgess
Cat Solen
Tony Foster
Fatal Farm
Jimmy Marble
Max Erdenberger
McRorie
Power House
Agile BrandTelligence
Visual Arts and internal W+K resources, including W+K Motion Department and Don't Act Big Productions

Development Partner
Hook LLC

Just watch this astounding Tide commercial from Saatchi & Saatchi in New York. It came out in January, so quietly that we didn't even notice it. And that's the beauty of it. See the dad? He's an ordinary dad. I'll let that sink in. He's not a buffoon, the butt of a joke, a clueless child who needs his wife to take care of him. He's not afraid of washing his daughter's clothes, or even a guy who has to supplement his masculinity by doing pull-ups and crunches after he handles a princess dress, like Tide's overcompensating dad-mom from 2011. He's just a guy with a daughter—who also bucks gender roles, by the way, by managing to be a messy tomboy even while she's wearing a princess dress. Judging by the YouTube comments, parents are loving it. Tide deserves a standing ovation for this bold statement in the movement to take back fatherhood.

Doritos go boom on the big screen! Never mind what they do when they land in your belly. As part of an all-out commercial assault for its newest hybrid taco, Taco Bell has created the first 3-D fast-food ad for movie audiences. Launched last week by agency Draftfcb, the spot's three-dimensional wizardry shows a single Cool Ranch Dorito exploding and morphing into a Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco. From your seat in the multiplex, you'll feel like you can reach out and grab one of those fatty shards of salt and maltodextrin. And when you leave, you'll be a short skip—somewhere within a five-mile radius—of a local Taco Bell, according to research from the ad seller, NCM Media Networks. It's little surprise that Taco Bell chose the 40-foot screen as a media buy: There are 700 million moviegoers a year at NCM venues like Regal Entertainment, Cinemark and AMC theaters, and one out of three already hit Taco Bell at least once a month. That's a whole lot of hungry 18-year-olds who are unconcerned about their cholesterol levels. Last year's debut of Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Tacos was the most successful product launch in the chain's history. The sequel was inevitable—or as the ad calls it, the world's most obvious idea. Folks have already been miffed that they couldn't get their hands on a Cool Ranch taco quickly enough, taking to social media to bitch about it. To which Taco Bell says: Keep calm and "Live Más."

If Gatorade's latest commercial from TBWA\Chiat\Day seems vaguely familiar, that's because it treads some of the same ground as Element 79's mid-'00s work for the brand, recounting the drink's 1965 creation in a lab at the University of Florida. From there, the TBWA spot mixes stock footage and new clips of Peyton Manning, Michael Jordan, Dwyane Wade and others as it assesses the brand's place in the history of modern sports. This heady concept works best in a pop-culture context. Gatorade is a beloved and ubiquitous game-day fixture, itself iconic, sloshing around in small plastic cups and giant buckets, ever ready to drench the winners in sparkling showers of limey-electrolyte glory. Sure, Gatorade might help gifted athletes—and by extension, you and me—win on the playing field. But more important, the brand is synonymous with triumph and superior achievement overall. That status gives Gatorade a shared meaning that transcends its sporty origins and helps ads like these appeal to anyone hoping to catch lightning in a bottle.

There's nothing new about marketers trying their hand at popular Internet memes. But Electronic Arts takes a pretty clever stab at it in the new trailer for The Sims 3 University Life expansion pack. The video uses in-game footage of college Sims to reenact the Lazy Senior and College Freshman photo memes, along with two that are less college specific—Overly Attached Girlfriend and the classic Ermahgerd. Over on Reddit, where most meme fodder is generated these days, the response to the trailer has been surprisingly positive, considering the level of hate that gaming Redditors typically reserve for all things EA, which most recently bungled the highly anticipated launch of the new Sim City with insufficient servers. But it's always hard to direct a significant level of rage against The Sims, which has been reveling in self-aware cheesiness for more than a decade.