Hasta La Creative!

Since the dawn of time, humans have been confounded by cats, those mystifyingly aloof creatures whose inner thoughts are famously inscrutable. But no longer! Temptations Cat Treats has invented a cat collar that lets your feline speak in a human voice—so you can finally understand (though probably not) exactly what she is trying to tell you.

The Temptations Catterbox, created by London ad agency adam&eveDDB, contains a microphone, speaker, Bluetooth technology and wifi. It captures the cat’s meows and translates them into human speech—words that may or may not actually be what they’re trying to say.

The Catterbox is the work of the new Temptations Lab, a scientific-sounding “research workstream dedicated to the future of fun times with your cat,” according to the Mars brand. It is 3-D printed, coated in rubber lacquer for the cat’s comfort and comes in four colors.

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“It makes great cocktail napkins, bookmarks, facial tissues. But you know what’s best to do with it!” Yes, Durham, N.C., agency McKinney knows where its home state’s controversial House Bill 2 belongs—in the toilet.

The Charlotte City Council passed a nondiscrimination ordinance in February that included a rule allowing transgender people to use public restrooms assigned to the gender with which they identify. Furious opposition groups supported by Gov. Pat McCrory then ran ads arguing that the ordinance would make it easier for male sexual predators to get closer to victims by posing as women. 

The state legislature later called a special session to pass “HB2,” which requires all North Carolina residents to use the public restrooms associated with their birth gender. The move has enraged civil liberties groups nationwide, and North Carolina has been the focus of plenty of backlash over HB2. 

McKinney proposes a solution to the HB2 problem: Flush it. And they mean this quite literally, as you’ll see in the video below.

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Allergy season is here, which means it’s time for a fun song about snot and sucky genes!

Set to Justin Bieber’s hit “Sorry,” pop-song parody artists Laughing Moms—aka Alisha Found Eden—croon about wheezing, antihistamines and hives, while apologizing to their kids for passing along the miserable immune response. 

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Livestreaming brand stunts are getting more and more popular—one of our recent favorites being the Waitrose campaign from the U.K. that showed live feeds from the grocery chain’s farms. Here’s a more gimmicky one from Portugal that tries to combine livestreaming with GIFs—or rather, a live-action imitation of GIFs.

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Here’s an unusual way to sell a consumer audio product: Stick a microphone inside an active beehive.

In this three-minute (headphones recommended) ad for Bowers & Wilkins, sound recordist Sam Nightingale captures audio of bees at work, and then plays it back to them through the brand’s T7 Bluetooth speaker, which features a honeycomb trim, to see how they respond.

Since bees communicate through sound and movement, the video suggests, this is a pretty good test of the speaker’s overall fidelity.

The first in a series of “field experiments” from Bowers and Wilkins, it’s beautifully shot—filmed by production company Shuffle Media at Stone Corner Farm, in Kent England. It’s also pretty nicely told, barring the inclusion of an Einstein quote that’s apocryphal at best.

And while the trick seems to work on the insects, it’s hard not to wonder if talking to—and about—bees is the best way to sell a speaker to humans.

Earlier this year, Organic Valley launched a brilliantly idiotic campaign to save bros from synthetic protein. Now, the dairy marketer wants you to know the work isn’t done.

A new video from Alex Bogusky-backed agency Humanaut introduces an anonymous bro-themed hotline, where would-be good samaritans can try to help without risking juvenile retaliation (recounted in the ad as 60 Minutes style confessionals).

The hotline promotes an online component that asks users to name the Twitter handle of a bro in need of saving, and select up to seven of his bro qualities, like whether he has a tribal tattoo. Each quality comes with its own special video appeal.

Overall, the new work’s best part might be the spokeswoman’s crazy eyes—clocking in at a higher degree of intensity than in February’s more deadpan launch spot. The basic concept here is, at its heart, the exact same joke as the original, just stretched further, at moments to the point of feeling thin.

But it does benefit from new gems, like suggesting that if bros weren’t propping up the market for gold chains, the value of precious metals (and ultimately the world economy) might collapse. Other excellent little touches include an edit halfway through the clip on tanning, when the spokeswoman suddenly turns orange, or the video on puerile innuendo, when she addresses the viewer as “a real Edgar Allen Bro.”

And anyway, the whole thing wouldn’t really capture the essence of bro if it didn’t harp on the same gag over and over again.

CREDITS
Client: Organic Valley
Product: Organic Fuel
Campaign: The Brononymous Hotline

Agency: Humanaut
Creative Advisor: Alex Bogusky
Creative Director: David Littlejohn
Strategy: Andrew Clark
Account Director: Elizabeth Cates
Copywriter: Andrew Ure / David Littlejohn
Art Director: Matt Denyer / Daniel Edelman
Senior Designer: Stephanie Gelabert
Creative Intern: Sam Hazelfeldt

Production Company: Fancy Rhino, Chattanooga, Tenn.
Director: Daniel Jacobs
Producer: Katie Nelson / Ivannah Flores
Director Of Photography: Phil Dillon
Photographer: Jaime Smialek / John Goodridge / Cooper Winterson
Editor: Colin Loughlin / Tyler Beasley
Colorist: Andrew Aldridge
Production Designer: Chad Harris
Music Company: Skypunch Studios, Chattanooga, Tenn.
Composer: Carl Cadwell
Media Partner: Redwood, Inc.

What’s inspiring about a dusty patch of ground in Venice, Calif., populated with a few scraggly weeds and hemmed in by a chain link fence? Plenty, according to the team at 72andSunny’s in-house creative residency, 72U.

The six-member group looked at the forlorn piece of property and saw an opportunity for a community gathering spot and open-air workspace. Using crowdsourced info, they spent eight weeks creating a 1,500-square-foot pop-up park with free wi-fi, portable desks, fences that convert to tables and art installations. The space on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, meant to “inspire and connect the community,” its designers say, will be open for nine months.

It’s the latest project from 72U, which gathers creative thinkers from outside the traditional ad world, tosses them together for three months and challenges them to create art-meets-technology-meets-culture concepts. Other fruits of the program’s labor include a Craigslist-style interactive music video and two four-story murals about privacy in the digital age.

If “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” taught me anything, it’s that getting loaded from strange fumes is probably unhealthy, but possibly lucrative. British architecture firm Bombas & Parr evidently learned the same thing, because its latest zany bar gimmick is a place called Alcoholic Architecture, where the signature cocktail is an atomized cloud of liquor that you drink by breathing.

What would you charge for that, I wonder?

Anyway, the booze cloud is made up of a 1-to-3 ratio of spirits to mixers, and special protective suits are required to protect your mucus membranes from overexposure to it. This all sounds (and is) incredibly unsafe, but openly taunting death is a hallmark of debauched London hedonism.

“One of the frustrations of doing things like flooding buildings with booze that people have to boat across before drinking it is that they are so short lived,” Mr. Bombas told Fast Company. “We always wanted to open a bar, and Alcoholic Architecture is the bar from our wildest fantasies, made into reality.”

The bar’s other drinks and spirits are more traditional, taking their theme from an old monastery neighboring the bar, although they do serve Buckfast, which is the Scottish version of 4 Loko. I wonder if Bombas and Parr have been to the Heart Attack Grill. Something tells me they’d like it.

3M, which makes lots of different kinds of random, practical objects like sandpaper and stethoscopes, has now combined a bunch of them into one highly impractical but somewhat entertaining object—a Rube Goldberg machine.

The video below makes the manufacturer the latest in a long line of brands (e.g., Honda, Red Bull, Panera) to create one of the iconic contraptions as part of its marketing. 3M’s angle? Building the machine using its own products, from welding helmets and plastic sheeting to, naturally, 25,000 Post-it notes and many rolls of tape.

Tempting as it is to groan at the reprise, cascading devices do have an intrinsically sticky appeal, at least in terms of viewer impulse control—it’s hard to peel yourself away when you’re wondering what will happen next.

In this case, the big finish comes in the form of brightly colored streamers made of Post-its. That sets up the tagline, “Science. Applied to life,” which, for all its approachable gravitas, feels ultimately anti-climactic. The most powerful emotional appeal the brand can conjure is a bunch of bits of neon paper flying through the air.

That’s probably because all the other fascinating stuff it can do requires the audience to think way too hard. And the interlocking products also risk unintentionally suggesting that 3M’s varied businesses might encumber it (a notion its CEO dismissed as recently as March, in the midst of launching this new push to rationalize and modernize its public image). A Rube Goldberg machine may be functional, but it doesn’t exactly scream efficiency.

So, maybe the company is better off adhering to more useful displays of its technology. Or it could just copy GE—another hard-to-describe conglomerate—and rely on a mishmash of esoteric art projects, pop sci-fi references and insane product demos with Jeff Goldblum.

To introduce AXA’s Victory bicycle lock, TBWANeboko scoured the streets of Amsterdam looking for other companies’ broken bike locks, and used pieces of them in this memorable poster and billboard campaign (which even has its own making-of video).

The cracked, bent bits of metal form letters that spell out AXA’s message about Victory—that it’s “The lock that should’ve been on your last bike.” A sleek, shiny new Victory lock plays a key role in this found-object alphabet, serving as the “O” in the Dutch word for “lock.”

“Holland is the country of bikes,” explains agency art director Rogier Verbeek. “Almost everyone has a bike. Or had one. Because a lot of them get stolen.” More than 300 get pinched there every day, “so if you own a bike, you probably also know the feeling of having your bike stolen,” Verbeek adds.

That made using the remains of rivals’ broken locks to create the typography a no-brainer. Often, such piece are “the only thing left when your bike is stolen,” Verbeek says. “Since Amsterdam is full of bikes—and people stealing them—they weren’t that hard to find.”

Alas, Verbeek speaks from experience, as his own bicycle—not protected by an AXA lock, he concedes—was stolen while he was working on the Victory poster.

“It got stolen from in front of the agency,” he says. “I was pretty bummed, since we were working on this campaign. It was a nice bike and my kid’s seat was on it. Hope the current owner gets himself a better lock.”

As far as Verbeek knows, no cycling enthusiasts or typography fans have stolen the poster from public display, “but it would be great if someone did.”

CREDITS
Client: AXA
Advertising Agency: TBWANeboko, Amsterdam
Agency: TBWANeboko
Art Director: Rogier Verbeek
Copywriter: Matthijs Schoo
Graphic Designer: Reza Harek
Photographer: Paul Theunis