Tragically, the youngsters in this yearbook will never graduate from high school. In fact, they’ll never grow up at all to reach their potential, or experience the fullness of life. And that’s because each one was a victim of gun violence.
Can discordant screaming sell ice cream?
Snickers sure hopes so, because that’s the angle it’s going with this new spot for Snickers ice cream bars. Playing on the “I scream, you scream” rhyme, the ad shows a mom and son, a crab, a tattooed bodybuilder, his tattoo and the boardwalk caricature of a married couple all screaming at one of those ice cream trolleys you see around the beach.
Time was, McDonald’s put toys in their Happy Meals to promote movies. Now they just dye their burgers, we guess. McDonald’s China is making chicken and pork sandwiches with special red and green buns in advance of the Angry Birds Movie, and they’re hardly a welcoming sight.
Fashion futurists, rejoice! Google and Levi’s first smart garment has arrived, and it’s a jean jacket that connects to your smartphone.
The tech giant’s Project Jacquard, focused on developing touch-sensitive fabrics, has been publicly working with the storied denim brand for a year now. The concept video for their launch product, Levi’s Commuter x Jacquard, slated for beta this fall and to hit shelves more widely in 2017, promises variations on largely familiar functions.
Snickers has dreamed up one of the cooler online/offline advertising-meets-point-of-sale hybrid campaigns of the year, introducing a “Hungerithm” that gauges the mood of the Internet and adjusts the price of its candy bars in 7-Eleven stores accordingly, in real time.
The angrier the Internet, the cheaper the candy—to make everyone a bit happier.
Google France has built an escape room to seamlessly unite online and offline worlds.
Created by We Are Social, Première Pièce will open at an undisclosed location in the heart of Paris. The campaign builds on the escape room trend, in which you and a bunch of friends pay to get locked in a room for an hour or two, left to solve puzzles and work in collaboration to find a way out. Last month, the Toronto Film Festival built an escape room that lives on Instagram. (Google’s is a physical room, but uses virtual tools as a central conceit.)
Imagine if there were an easy way for people who can’t read and write to share their life experiences with the world. HP and agency AlmapBBDO took a crack at coming up with one, focusing on some of the 13 million illiterate individuals in Brazil, as part of a touching new campaign called “Magic Words.”
First, AlmapBBDO sourced 30 such people from around the country, including rural areas and big cities like São Paolo and Rio de Janeiro. Then, it used Google Speech’s voice-recognition software to transcribe their stories, and publish them in a paperback book, created using an HP printer. A documentary followed the effort, and retold it in documentary format.
Recently, we wrote about Jeffery DaSilva of the Sid Lee Collective and how he created an off-label Trump Against Humanity expansion that got yuuuge. Well, now Cards Against Humanity has gone and released its own official Trump expansion, but only to the first 10,000 people who claimed it, and it’s already sold out.
We got in touch with Max Temkin, one of the creators of Cards Against Humanity, to ask him about this latest stunt and learned that it actually had nothing to do with the Sid Lee expansion. In fact, it’s less of an expansion that a preparation kit to help America survive a potential Trump presidency.
Zappos wants you to think outside the box. Beginning with the box itself.
On June 1, the online retailer will begin shipping some shoes in a very cool new box (made with creative collective Variable) that features a collection of template designs printed on the inside—encouraging the recipients to fold, cut and otherwise reuse the box into item like a smartphone holder, a children’s shoe sizer, a geometric planter and a 3-D llama.
It makes perfect sense that Miles Mouvay, the world’s most dedicated film fan, met his bestie in a theater lobby in 1993 while they were both waiting to see Jurassic Park and special-ordering nacho cheese popcorn.
And it becomes a meta moment when the BFF turns out to be Kel Mitchell, since Miles Mouvay, IRL, is Kenan Thompson.
You know how exasperating it feels to call a company and get stuck in an automated voice program instead of being connected to a human being? Soon, you’ll be able to experience that same level of irritation at malls across this great land, when Pepper the humanoid robot glides up beside you for a little digital customer service.
Kidding, of course. Hopefully.
There’s probably a sizable crossover between people who drink Starbucks regularly and people who wear Nikes. But unless they also like ugly shoes, the Nike SB Dunk Low “Starbucks” Premium sneaker is going to be a bust.
Much of the backlash against the new Instagram logo can be chalked up to the simple fact that it isn’t the old logo.
It was advertised like an ordinary real-estate open house, at a residence that looked fine on the outside. But when visitors came for a look inside, they got an eerie surprise—a glimpse at how people can be living in poverty even when they have a roof over their heads.
The Salvation Army and Grey Canada were behind the “Open House” stunt, which has a robust online presence, where you can tour the house yourself. The home is representative of a family living in poverty, and contains plaques and visual displays highlighting the struggles of the more than 300,000 Canadians who live under the poverty line.
This week started out with a flurry of #canalnotes in the ongoing agency #postitwars. And now, one of the key agencies involved, Horizon Media, is ending the week by taking the battle virtual.
Horizon has created a #canalnotes-themed Snapchat geofilter overlay, which people in the area can add to their snaps between noon and 4 p.m. today. So, when you finish your latest sticky masterpiece, you can share it with a bit of official-looking #canalnotes branding.
“The Quaker State brand shares the customer belief that when it comes down to motor oil, you don’t need fancy marketing—you just need good quality oil.” Brand manager Gita Gidwani’s statement may be true … but in advertising, a little humor never hurts.
On that note, Quaker State turned to Onion Labs, the satirical media outlet’s in-house creative services division. The Labs developed a series of ads poking fun at marketing clichés like barely functional novelty products created to drive short-term sales.
The restaurant business in Brussels has been suffering tremendously since the terrorist attacks of March 22. The bankruptcy rate of eateries in the city has increased by 1500 percent since then, according to ad agency Famous—with a nation of gourmands frequently staying home instead of enjoying dinner out.
Famous decided to do something about this. So it teamed up with De Tijd and L’Echo, the leading national business newspapers in Belgium, for a social campaign called #DiningforBrussels.
Here’s a fun if punishing way to get people to think about the ingredients in your beer.
Heineken, the official beer of the UEFA Champions League, with help from Publicis Italy, put up hundreds of outdoor ads around Milan recently featuring a gargantuan 100-character hashtag (that’s the most allowed by Twitter). People were encouraged to share the hashtag in social for a chance to win tickets for the UCL Final.
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