Hasta La Creative!

In “Shed the Monster,” the brief, pleasingly silly film below, some guy in a brutish latex mask—he looks like Geico’s caveman—grunts a lot in pissed-off fashion, as all of life’s little challenges conspire to get him down.

Discovering an empty milk carton in the fridge, and no car in the garage, he grabs his bike and angrily peddles to the market. (Note how he signals and stops at the stop sign. Good monster!) But along the way, his tension—and beastly makeup—start to fade. By the time he arrives at his destination, he looks and feels human again. (It’ll be tough getting those groceries home without a bike basket, but whatever.)

Evan Fry, creative development chief at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, and photographer Jamie Kripke crafted the video, about the transformational power of cycling, to promote People for Bikes, an enthusiast organization.

“I know this will sound corny and pretentious as hell,” Fry tells AdFreak, “but ever since I was a little kid, cycling in one form or another has been my therapy, my church, my athletic pursuit, my trusted friend and my main vehicle for growth.”

With that in mind, Fry and Kripke concocted a shaggy-man story that portrays biking as a therapeutic activity for the harried masses.

“I’ve always felt that jumping on a bike, no matter how long the ride, really does help you ‘Ride away the grrrr,’ ” says Fey. “It’s awesome to see it resonate with so many folks. For a dot-org to get that many views—32,000 in a month on YouTube—and shares without any paid media to speak of, it is really gratifying.”

See the behind-the-scenes story of the spot here.

CREDITS
Writer/Director: Evan Fry
Writer/Director/DP: Jamie Kripke
Producer: Corey Bartha
Monster: Darin Toonder
Edit: Beast
Editor: Sam Selis
Producer: Erin Dykman
Executive Producer: Ron Rendon
VFX/Online Artist: Jim Reed
Colorist: Dave Ludlam
Executive Producer, Color: Thatcher Peterson
Color Producer: Antonio Hardy
Color Coordinator: Diane Valera
2D Lead: Tim Robbins
VFX Producer: Kiana Bicoy
VFX Coordinator: Jillian Lynes
Music: Beacon Street Studios
Composers: Andrew Feltenstein & John Nau
EP/Head of Production: Leslie DiLullo
Mix and Sound Design: Beacon Street Studios
Mixer: Mike Franklin
Assistant Mixer: Aaron Cornacchio
Monster FX: AFX Studio
Producer: Kate Vadnais

Never underestimate the promotional power of feel-good fan service.

More than 100 fans were featured out of a whopping 1,500 total submissions for this Pitch Perfect 2 promo. Together they created a worldwide dance party as the premiere for Ester Dean’s song “Crazy Youngsters,” an original song that appears in the movie.

The video also functions as a fun game of Spot the Social Media Celebrity, pairing YouTube stars alongside cast members, and Vine stars alongside DJs. All told, more than 20 influencers are in the video. See if you can spot DJ Flula, Brittany Snow, Anna Camp, the Gregory Brothers, Sami Slimani, Lana McKissack, Carly Cristman, the Wassabi Brothers, Gabrial Valenciano, Will Pecarro, Kyle Hatch, Jamie Pine, MikeJerry and Vine stars Princess Lauren and AmyMarie.

The nearly four-minute music video was created by Portal A. It’s a lot of good, clean fun for a sequel whose inciting incident is flashing Rebel Wilson’s vagina at the president of the United States.

CREDITS
Client: Universal Pictures
Created by Portal A
Director: Kai Hasson
Executive Producers: Zach Blume, Kai Hasson, Nate Houghteling
Producers: Jacob Motz
Associate Producer: Jenny Leaf
Project Manager: Kalli Sandberg
Editor: Arturo Morales

A new Japanese campaign aims to combat domestic violence in the country with inventive coasters that hope to tame excessive drinking, which can contribute to the problem.

Yaocho, a bar chain, and agency Ogilvy & Mather Tokyo created the coasters, each of which features a portrait of a woman’s face printed in thermal ink. When a cold drink rests on the coaster, the portrait changes to include cuts and bruises.

The visuals are—no pun intended—chilling, and it’s a clever use of media, though perhaps a touch too much so for its own good, with mechanics that may undermine the spirit and gravity of the message.

“This drink will turn the woman on this coaster into a beat-up woman—just like you might do to a real woman, if you drink too much,” is essentially the subtext of the ads. “Can you have another round without wanting to hit your significant other?”

But as Lucia Peters points out over at Bustle, while alcohol can be a factor in domestic violence, “placing the blame for domestic violence on alcohol excuses the people who commit the crimes in the first place—which is classic abuser behavior.”

Yaocho deserves credit for openly addressing domestic violence, and trying to raise awareness, theoretically at the expense of its own business. But while a drinking establishment is, on its face, the right place to reach viewers with a message about alcohol and domestic abuse, there’s also a bit of cognitive dissonance in an anti-drinking ad that requires the viewer to be drinking to deliver its full effect.

The tagline, at least in its translated version, isn’t even “Don’t drink too much.” Rather, it is “Don’t let excessive drinking end in domestic violence.” In other words, “It’s OK to spend your money on a bender, so long as you don’t beat your wife or girlfriend afterward.”

And if you are the type of person who gets violent when you drink, you probably shouldn’t be drinking at all. 

More info below. Via Design Taxi.

Are we sure we want the Hamburglar back?

The cartoon character, who was reincarnated after a 13-year hiatus as a real live human man—whom the Internet simultaneously reviled and love—took over McDonald’s Twitter account today. And with the teaser ads out of the way, the character used the platform to … well, sorry, he keeps getting interrupted again and again by his wife’s phone calls.

Yep, even the Hamburglar gets nagged by his annoying wife about the various things (candles and cake) she wants him to pick up while he’s out. 

It’s an easy, albeit regressive joke. But is it really the way you want to reintroduce the nation to a well-known character? This guy’s supposed to be a rebel, but this is about as tiresomely traditional as it gets.

McD’s is after me (apparently, so is my wife)! Tweet #RobbleRobble to keep them off my trail. https://t.co/JBVThrmHir

— Hamburglar (@McDonalds) May 12, 2015

Mother’s Day surprises were aplenty this weekend, including a big one for the U.S. women’s World Cup soccer team.

Due to their demanding schedules, it’s been years since many of the players have seen their moms on Mother’s Day. In a very sweet video uploaded to Facebook and YouTube by Fox Sports, the team sat down for a pre-game dinner, and their coach introduced special surprise guests—their moms.

The mother-daughter reunions are lovely to watch. Maybe even more remarkable is seeing the a second surprise happen—check out the video to see what it was.

“Abby’s been on this team for 14 years. For 14 years, I have not had you around for a Mother’s Day,” says Abby Wambach’s mom, Judy. The video cuts to the two of them standing side by side on the field.

The video closes with a request to “Cheer on our women this summer.” (Fox will be broadcasting the tournament across its networks, including 16 matches live on the flagship broadcast station.)

The team won the game 3-0 with their moms watching. Wambach scored career goals 179 and 180, and turned around after her second goal to point at her mom.

Heartwarming and inspiring all around.

Ad agency The Bull-White House’s “Cancer Sutra” campaign was a provocative idea in search of a sponsor—until Stupid Cancer, a nonprofit dedicated to helping young adults with cancer, signed on.

Central to the effort, which coyly suggests you can spot signs of cancer while having sex, is a series of colorful posters, designed by Brooklyn artist John Solimine, showing couples in the act. Sales of the posters will raise money for Stupid Cancer, and Bull-White House hopes to turn some of them into wild postings. There’s also an e-book, website and video.

Agency founder Matthew Bull discovered Solomine on Behance.net and was drawn in particular to “Strongman Love,” an illustration of a man with his arm wrapped around a woman that Solimine made about four years ago. That visual style defined the new campaign. (There are lots more images here.)

As Bull explained, “Curvaceousness, hard angles, a playful approach to negative space—all of these were critical in differentiating the Cancer Sutra from any other Kama Sutra we’d seen before.”

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AdFreak asked Solimine about the making of the posters.

When did you first get the call for this?
It was late last year when I got a call from Bull-White House. It was funny because upfront, from the call, I had no idea what the project was.

What was the initial brief?
They started off with the statistic that a huge amount of people who find out they have cancer actually discover it before, during or after sex. … When you tell people about it and use that as an intro, people are like, “Wait a second.” Just the words cancer and sex in the same sentence—probably you’ve never heard that before, you know?

Why did you want to do this?
The scope of it, the size of it. They said, “We’re going to need between 20 and 40 illustrations” at the beginning of the whole thing. And just the subject matter I thought was great. When it was pitched to me, I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard that idea before.” So, I found it unique. And I’ve had family members who were stricken with cancer.

What inspired the look and feel of your posters?
An old poster that I had done for Fab, that website fab.com. … They would partner with various artists and have that artist come up with half-dozen or so unique pieces that were just for the Fab sale. And then you could sell anything else you wanted of your previous work on there. But one of the posters I created for my Fab sale (“Strongman Love”)—Bull-White House had seen that on my website and they kind of pulled that out stylistically and said, “We really like what you’re doing with this one.”

What was it about that poster?
I don’t think they wanted it to be anatomically [correct] or lean too much on that. They wanted it to be playful, have interesting body shapes and not go for Ken and Barbie or Penthouse and Playgirl, that kind of thing, and not have it be too porny in any way.

It must have been tricky to straddle that line.
At that first meeting, just to clarify what we were going to be doing, I was like, “So, I’m going to be drawing people actually having sex in various ways, right?” And I think in the beginning everybody though that yeah, you are, and it’s going to get pretty graphic—like there’s really no way around it for what we’re talking about.

But then when we actually started doing the illustrations, working on them and being collaborative, we all realized that there was a way that we were going to be able to pull it off without actually showing anything, which I actually think became the trick of it, like, “OK, how can we show pretty graphic descriptions of sex without actually showing anything at all, really?” I think all you really see graphically are like two or three nipples maybe. So, I think the suggestion of it is the strength of it.

I could see this on T-shirts. Could you?
Oh, yeah, definitely. I think there are a lot of cool applications. They were jokingly talking about turning the pattern into sheets, pajamas or something like that.

In the pantheon of mythical creatures, one character has been curiously lost to history, though not to herstory—the Period Fairy, who visits girls when they get their first period.

HelloFlo tells the Period Fairy’s story in this short mockumentary featuring a girl who investigates the mythology, and gets the Tooth Fairy, Cupid, Santa Claus and more to explain their colleague’s mysterious exit from the scene.

The video was a collaboration between HelloFlo founder and CEO Naama Bloom and writer Sara Saedi, who also wrote HelloFlo’s “Postpartum: The Musical,” which broke in February. (A different team of writer/directors, Pete Marquis and Jamie McCelland, worked on HelloFlo’s earlier “Camp Gyno” and “First Moon Party” virals.)

“I really wanted to play with the idea of a female superhero who helped girls with their first period, and [Saedi] had the idea to create the mystery around the Period Fairy,” Bloom tells AdFreak. “To me, this spot is very different from the others because it’s not one punch line after another. It’s funny but also very sweet and more endearing than the others.”

HelloFlo has a knack for finding great young actresses, and the girl here—discovered by Wulf Casting—is fantastic. “She reminded us of Rachel Maddow, and we thought that was a perfect archetype for our feminist-in-training, Lilian Dyer,” says Bloom.

The hashtag is #MakeItVagical, a word that pops up early in the video and gets an animated treatment on-screen. (It’s also reminiscent of the “First Moon Party” ad, in which a “vagician” made an appearance.)

“Once we added the animation in the beginning on the word vagical, we thought it would be funny to keep playing with it,” Bloom says. “Since the idea is that the Period Fairy and the HelloFlo Period Starter Kit are both there to make the first period experience positive, it just seemed right to carry it forward. It wasn’t a hashtag at first, it was a tagline. One early viewer saw the video and tagline and then sent me an email in which she’d turned it into a hashtag. Once I saw it, it made perfect sense.”

HelloFlo has become the poster child for small brands doing big viral video content. But Bloom says there’s no great mystery to its success. “When I think about creating video content,” she says, “the most important element for HelloFlo is that we have strong female characters who are both relatable and culturally aware.”

CREDITS
Client: HelloFlo
Production Company: Senza Pictures
Written by: Sara Saedi
Produced by: Brandi Savitt
Casting by: Wulf Casting
Music by: Found Objects
Director of Photography: Mark Schwartzbard
Editor: David Fishel
Art Director: Ally Nesmith
Costume Designer: Deirdra Govan
Sound Mixer: Wil Masisak
Production Coordinator: Julia Brady
Hair & Makeup: Rebecca Levine
Script Supervisor: Elizabeth Stern
Gaffer: GT Womack
Key Grip: Ben Hunt
Swing/Driver: Joe Chiofalo
Set Costumer/Tailor: Olivia Fuks
Assistant Editor: Elizabeth Theis
Assistant Camera: Noelle Kandigian
Boom Operator:  Matt King
Assistant Art Director: Nelson Mestril
Production Assistant: Jordan Floyd

AlmapBBDO celebrates Getty Images’ 20th birthday with this fun campaign that looks at how four famous people—Scarlett Johansson, Prince William, Serena Williams and Bill Clinton—have changed in appearance, using Getty photos of them over those 20 years.

There are 111 photos of each of them, but that’s actually just a tiny fraction of what’s available on Getty. For example, the agency had to comb through 32,246 photos of Clinton to choose the ones for his ad. Once chosen, the photos were arranged chronologically, showing the transformations in each of the four figures.

“The idea of depicting the passage of those 20 years through the images of globally relevant celebrities gave us the opportunity to not only observe the changes they underwent, but also provided a creative glimpse at what was going on in the world during that time, with the certainty that we were present during all the important moments across these two decades,” says Renata Simões, marketing and content manager at Getty Images in Brazil.

See the ads below. Click to enlarge.

CREDITS
Client: Getty Images
Project: 20 Years
Agency: AlmapBBDO
Chief Creative Officer: Luiz Sanches
Executive Creative Director: Bruno Prosperi
Creative Director: André Gola, Benjamin Yung Jr., Marcelo Nogueira, Pernil
Art Director:  Andre Sallowicz
Copywriter: Daniel Oksenberg
Photographer: archive Getty Images
Art Buyer: Teresa Setti, Ana Cecília Costa
Client Services: Cristina Chacon, Daniela P. Gasperini
Media: Flavio De Pauw, Patrícia Moreton
Advertiser’s Supervisor: Renata Simões, Susan Smith Ellis, Carmen Cano

In Australia, “ice” is anything but cool.

Ice addiction—that is, a taste for crystal meth—has become a terrifying scourge Down Under, prompting the federal government to launch a six-week, $9 million ($7 million U.S.) PSA blitz that contains several shocking sequences.

Upsetting scenes in the 45-second spot below, which has been edited into shorter commercials, include a scraggy-looking dude violently robbing his mom, a young woman peeling open her skin because she believes bugs are crawling inside, and an addict’s startling, psychotic attack on hospital staffers.

The message: “Ice destroys lives. Don’t let it destroy yours.”

Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash says a graphic campaign is required because “nobody sets out to become addicted, and many users think addiction won’t happen to them. It can and does, and these ads aim to show the realities of ice addiction.”

She has a point, and the approach in and of itself is provocative, memorable and obviously well intentioned. That said, I can’t help feeling we’ve seen this kind of stuff before, and I wonder how impactful it will be. (The mom and bug scenes, though strong stuff, might have packed more punch pre-Breaking Bad. That emergency-room freakout, however, feels startlingly fresh and really crashes through the clutter to lodge inside your head.)

Australian Anti-Ice Campaign founder Andrea Simmons gives the work a mixed review on her organization’s Facebook page. “Its a good start, however it will take more than a couple hundred ads” to effectively deliver the message, she says. Simmons argues that since the spots are airing on late-night TV, they’ll probably get lost in the shuffle, concluding, “We can’t use a band aide fix with this epidemic.”

Creative and technology agency MRY celebrated Mother’s Day by having its staffers video chat with their moms. And along the way, the moms were asked what they think their kids actually do for a living in advertising.

To say they’re unclear about that is an understatement.

“Ever ask certain family members to explain what you do, and have their response completely miss the mark? Happens in advertising all the time,” the agency says.

Check it out below. And yeah, it has a sappy ending.