Director Alex Smith has created his first-ever 360 video, as part of an ongoing series called “Picture This,” a project started by Facebook in partnership with Semi-Permanent, an Australia-based global creative and design thinking platform. And it’s one of the most instructive uses of the technology we’ve seen.
If either Matt Damon or Ben Affleck has an actual superpower, it’s their epic friendship—a bond so endearing and renowned that it even won them an award.
Until Tom Brady arrived.
The #BFFgoals-inspiring pair are facing off for Brady’s affections via Skype in this weird, but charming, promotion for fundraising platform Omaze, which is offering you the chance to win an afternoon in Boston with all three of them, part of an effort to raise money for three charities.
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How do you shoot real, authentic, unscripted footage of a family for your advertising campaign? Set up a bunch of cameras around their house, and then go away for a long time—so the family can (mostly) forget about the cameras, and you, and just be themselves.
That’s what ad agency CHI & Partners has done for TalkTalk, the British TV, internet and mobile provider. They found an ordinary family—mom Julie and dad Paul, sons Peter and Harry, daughters Sophie and Lucy, niece Daisy and family dog Elvis—and filmed them for two straight weeks with unmanned cameras.
Then they sorted through the hundreds or hours of footage to find ordinary, everyday moments to write ads around. The point? That small moments matter, and indeed, are the stuff of life—particularly moments involving TalkTalk’s products and services, from trying to have a TV dinner with a dog on the sofa, to texting boyfriends, to teaching your aunt how to use a tablet.
The Alexa-enabled Amazon Echo can answer questions, play music, control smart devices and fulfill numerous other suburban needs, according to two new ads for Amazon’s command device.
Finally someone has found a good use for drones: Making a cake.
A team of little flying robots assembles a three-tier confection by airlifting genoise, splashing icing, firing candies out of a makeshift cannon and even lighting a sparkler with a blow torch—all in a new ad for Norwegian telecoms company Telia.
Imagine you’re asked to assess the beauty of airbrushed photos of professional models—and then regular snapshots of your spouse, or a close family member.
A new Dove ad from Portugal does that to a group of men, sitting them down in an empty warehouse and strapping them to a heart monitor in an attempt to measure their emotional response when a screen flashing pictures of stereotypically attractive women—the kind who might grace a shampoo ad with a half-smile—suddenly gives way to pictures of wives, sisters, daughters and grandmothers.
Among iOS 10’s shiny new toys is a messaging feature that allows you to add effects to your message bubbles, send full-screen animations with your messages, add handwritten notes and more. Apple pushes those capabilities with a pretty new spot from TBWAMedia Arts Lab that focuses on one full-screen animation in particular.
A striking new ad from Spain is making waves there, accusing the nation’s culture of being completely disingenuous—and using an adult film star as its righteous messenger.
“My name is Amarna Miller,” she says, staring into the camera, as she introduces herself in the commercial’s first shot. “I’m a porn actress, and was born in a hypocritical country, where the same people calling me a whore jerk off to my videos.”
It’s a brutally effective opening salvo, and the 90-second commercial—promoting the 2016 Salon Erótico de Barcelona Apricots, a live sex show staged in that city—doesn’t let up, indicting bullfighters, politicians, financiers, priests and all other forms of forked-tongued bad actors.
There’s more than one way to feel the flab. But however much time you spend on the treadmill, French ad publication Influencia hopes to draw your attention to a more insidious fitness foe you may be overlooking—infobesity.
It’s getting the conversation started with a surreal campaign from Glory Paris.
Sooner or later, everyone’s sausage needs some support.
If you find yourself in such straits between now and this Friday—say, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Central time—go ahead and call Johnsonville HQ at (844) 9-SAUSAGE. Company employees will be serving up all manner of advice on pork-pipes and cow-casings as part of the marketer’s “Sausage Support Center.”
Live! Unscripted! Sausage talk! That number again: (844) 9-SAUSAGE.
What makes a good TV title sequence?
YouTuber Ryan Hollinger of Screen Smart explores that question in a video of nearly seven minutes, using the starting sequences of American Horror Story, Twin Peaks, Stranger Things, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones and many more. What you’ll learn here, though, can apply to any title sequence you watch—and will definitely up your geek cred at future binge-watching fests.
There’s been no dearth of dubious job titles in the recent years, thanks in large part to the tech boom. But outerwear marketer Columbia Sportswear is reaching for new and awesome heights with its tongue-in-cheek “director of toughness” role—and this time around, it’s really making candidates work for the gig.
A new ad from agency North shows potential hires interviewing for the position, largely by taking a surprise, semi-coerced trek up to the top of a mountain, only to suffer the verbal abuse of an HR rep camped out 8,000 feet above sea level. Because if they really are qualified, such trivial exertion and feeble taunts shouldn’t faze them at all.
We all know a girl like Louise Delage. You’ve been on Instagram for years and are scraping by with 50 likes on a good day—then she appears on the scene, with her fun little life, and cultivates over 16,000 followers in a few months.
In the years following LonelyGirl15, we learned to be wary of that kind of success. Who is this girl, and what does she do? But “personal branding,” Instagram stardom and the overall pressure to demonstrate the most photogenic parts of our lives has perhaps blunted our critical knives. Aren’t we all stars for somebody?
So when Louise Delage arrived on Instagram on Aug. 1, bearing drinks and a cheerful, sun-soaked smile, few wondered who she was. Many assumed she was one more chic Parisian. Maybe she had one of those depressed Instagram husbands whose sole role in life is to capture their muses for an insatiable audience.
U.S. Cellular sets a new standard for tedium with this preroll ad that lasts seven hours.
It’s about as exciting as watching grass grow. In fact, that’s mostly what happens during its 420-minute running time: Grass grows … and grows … and grows. Imperceptibly. As grass is wont to do.
Crafted by MullenLowe, the ad opens with brand spokesman Darien riding a lawnmower across an expansive green field. “Switch to U.S. Cellular,” he says, “and get seven gigs of data for just $49 per month. You’ll have so much data, you can stream almost anything. Even hours and hours of grass growing. Enjoy!”
One December day at the International Scene of Contemporary Dance in Stockholm, Sweden, a man named Olle, one of the best air acrobats in the world, did a triple-somersault jump. It was a jump like hundreds of others he’d done before, but this time was different.
He fell on his head.
“Within that second I heard my neck break. A moment devoid of time,” Olle writes. “The sound of the neck break echoed in my head, itself an endless, dark, spherical space in which I was hovering weightlessly.”
Olle crushed several cervical vertebrae and damaged his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from the neck down. The doctors couldn’t say how much brain functioning he’d regain, or even whether he would walk again. One thing was sure: He’d never jump again.
It’s been 10 years since then. Olle has miraculously recovered. Many people like him would count their blessings, move to a quiet town and take up gardening. But in what’s being dubbed “the most irresponsible circus performance ever,” Olle is gearing up to repeat the same jump, with just one difference. This time, he’ll do it from up to 12,000 feet in the sky.
When Major League Soccer began play in 1996, those of us who lived in New York City had only one team to root for—the New York/New Jersey MetroStars. But despite their odd hybrid name, they were pretty solidly a New Jersey team. They played out at Giants Stadium, and those of us coming from Manhattan would often arrive late to games, as they never scheduled enough buses from Port Authority. Intentional or not, the indifference to fans east of the Hudson was palpable.
That franchise has since cleaned up its act, and become the formidable New York Red Bulls. They still play in Jersey, though, at the Red Bull Arena in Harrison (which is, admittedly, a lovely stadium). But luckily for New York City fans, there’s been another option over the past two seasons—New York City Football Club, a new MLS franchise that plays its home games at Yankee Stadium.
NYCFC clinched its first-ever MLS Cup playoff berth this past weekend, and is celebrating with a gritty new spot from Johannes Leonardo, its first-ever brand commercial.
The poetic spot, called “Along These Lines,” is as much a tribute to the city as the team—rallying New Yorkers to get behind their soccer team, using a theme of connection that’s both literal (the subway system connects everyone, and of course stops at Yankee Stadium) and figurative.
The lottery may not have much to do with fate, but it’s a lot like love—if you don’t play, you won’t win, says a new ad from Spain.
The three-and-a-half minute commercial for EuroMillions, the country’s national cash raffle, offers a twist on a classic romance—boy meets girl, boy chases girl, boy and girl win gigantic sum of money in long-shot gamble, boy and girl live happily ever after.
Travel can be rough on animals. So, to celebrate National Dog Week (Sept. 19-25) and promote its 600,000 pet-friendly homes, Airbnb shined a light on social media star Marnie the Dog, a senior pet who just moved from New York to sun-soaked Beverly Hills.
Fame is packed with perks … even for dogs. To ease her transition, Airbnb checked her into a luxurious $5000-a-night mansion, where she spent a pampered stay under the care of her “hosts,” Hugo the Butler and Teddy the Dog.
It remains the most notorious night in advertising history—June 13, 1991.
The Clio Awards were scheduled to hand out their radio and print awards. But as Adweek later told the story, “what ensued was less an ad-award show than a tawdry circus, an event so grossly mismanaged that its trajectory from embarrassing to appalling seemed, in retrospect, almost destined—’beyond the beyond-o,’ as Ruth Ayres of DDB Needham put it.
“The ceremony started late, was hosted largely by the caterer, featured presenters who (when they weren’t singing Irish lullabies) tried to guess the agency winners since they had no list, and was aborted when fevered, greedy ad types rushed the stage in a mad grab for Clios they hadn’t won.”
It was quite the shameful scene indeed. But now, at least, Clio can laugh about it.
On this 25th anniversary of the 1991 debacle, Clio got Funny Or Die to re-enact that fateful night in an amusing video starring Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman—the latter acting as host of a fictitious show called Unresolved Mysteries.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
