Hasta La Creative!

Everyone and their personal brand logged on to social media on Sunday night to let their followers know how much better they are than movie stars. Meanwhile, actual brands spent the night unabashedly making it all about themselves—instead of throwing shade on celebs.

Some tried to have a real-time-marketing-moment, but among the flurry of thematic entries, most seemed pre-planned. Check out some of their efforts below.

 
—From the red carpet:

No #ManiCam? We can’t be THAT intimidating. #AndTheLobsterGoesTo pic.twitter.com/KmiW3lIa0V

— Red Lobster (@redlobster) February 23, 2015

We think @Logitech has what it takes to really click on the red carpet. #GearLove pic.twitter.com/PkhV6UEzKE

— Office Depot (@officedepot) February 22, 2015

A designer loaned me an outfit for #OscarsRedCarpet too. By designer I mean “hotel” And by outfit I mean “bathrobe” pic.twitter.com/DXNY9VjM8Y

— Travelocity Gnome (@RoamingGnome) February 23, 2015

 
—Lots of brands paid homage to Ellen’s epic group selfie from last year:

The award for best supporting actor in a selfie goes to…the stick. #RedCarpet #PlayWithOreo http://t.co/zIl1IyN9nd pic.twitter.com/iX8nhhNRmQ

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 22, 2015

Who’s ready for another epic #selfie? #Oscars pic.twitter.com/gVAC8zvr3k

— Coors Light (@CoorsLight) February 22, 2015

Throwback to last year’s awards show! pic.twitter.com/kgf4Mt3L8i

— SUBWAY® (@SUBWAY) February 22, 2015

 
—Farmers Insurance and M&M’s were both thrilled by J.K. Simmons’ win, as he endorses both brands (he’s the voice of the Yellow M&M):

It’s Oscar gold for #JKSimmons! Congrats on snagging Best Supporting Actor for an amazing performance in Whiplash. #BumBuDumBumBumBumBum

— Farmers Insurance (@WeAreFarmers) February 23, 2015

CONGRATS! #JKSimmons I’m speechless. Never mind. Found one. – Your #1 Fan Yellow pic.twitter.com/urGOB98b1W

— M&M’S® Brand (@mmschocolate) February 23, 2015

 
—PetSmart scored with this real-time tweet, after Birdman won Best Original Screenplay and one of the winners thanked his dog Larry:

You always make time to thank your family. #LarryTheDog #Oscars #PetParenthood pic.twitter.com/lcrvfHuxD3

— PetSmart (@PetSmart) February 23, 2015

 
—So many versions of the Oscar trophy, too:

#EverythingIsAwesome at the #Oscars! pic.twitter.com/A7HzK7FOGG

— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) February 23, 2015

Even Oscar has the confidence to leave his at home. #GoCommando #Oscars2015 pic.twitter.com/AJkJdrpRMV

— Cottonelle (@cottonelle) February 23, 2015

And the O-ward for Best Came-O goes to… #FingersCrossed pic.twitter.com/H9uPttcnm2

— SpaghettiOs (@SpaghettiOs) February 23, 2015

Everyone’s all like “The #Oscars is on” and I’m all like “What am I gonna eat during the #Oscars” pic.twitter.com/7eVuaddFlD

— Jimmy John’s (@jimmyjohns) February 23, 2015

wow omg thank you I’m so surprised first I’d like to thank my mom, she’s an oven, and my dad, he’s a freezer. pic.twitter.com/orwBCCeYK3

— Pete Zaroll (@totinos) February 23, 2015

 
—One brand even paid homage to the Emmy trophy, for some reason:

I’d like to thank the burger academy. It’s an honor just to be NOM-inated. pic.twitter.com/yFYoDAmLME

— Jack in the Box (@JackBox) February 23, 2015

 
—Among the best of the rest:

Film editing is the crust. Sauce is like visual effects & cheese is sound edit COME ON GUYS JUST TRYING TO MAKE THESE CATEGORIES INTERESTING

— DiGiorno Pizza (@DiGiornoPizza) February 23, 2015

One of his wingmen is an actual bird. #BestOriginalScreenplay

— Dos Equis (@DosEquis) February 23, 2015

ok but how many awards will this tasty hit win? pic.twitter.com/mRXFtb3dfE

— Denny’s (@DennysDiner) February 23, 2015

Bonpoint, the luxury French fashion house for children, wants you to play peekaboo with its child models.

Fred & Farid Shanghai produced an interactive website for the brand, which asks for access to your webcam and microphone. Adorable children in expensive clothing stare at you while you cover your eyes, uncover them, and shout peekaboo. The adorable children then laugh.

The agency calls it “maybe the cutest interactive website ever,” but I found it super uncomfortable. I took one for the team, tried it out, and had to adjust my screen so the children were “staring” at my ceiling and not at my face. On the plus side, you get to admire their clothing and then click on a link to buy the whole outfit (for $200).

The kids are adorable, and the clothing is beautiful, but something about it—maybe it’s the green light suggesting that you’re being recorded—feels a little bit like I’m starring in an M. Night Shyamalan film.

Saatchi & Saatchi uses suggestive visual humor, and deadpan delivery from actor Alan Cumming, to skewer the U.S. Food and Drug Adminstration’s rules around donating blood.

At issue is a recent revision in the FDA’s regulations that allows gay and bisexual men to give blood, but only if they have haven’t had sex for a year. (They were previously barred entirely, based on concerns about exposure to HIV.)

With tongue firmly in cheek, Cumming introduces a series of eight non-sexual activities that that are “guaranted to make your year without sex fly by.”

Among them: Apply your manual dexterity to packing powder into a Civil War musket; thrust your hips into yoga; and polish your trophies. The logo “Celibacy Challenge” logo also is a riot—a pair of red briefs with a white lock over them.

The ad points to celibacychallenge.com, where you can sign a petition.

Saatchi and Bullit director Ari Sandel created the mock PSA for GLAAD and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which want the FDA rules to be based on risk factors, not sexual orientation, and are petitioning the federal agency to make that change. The pro-bono ad, which is being distributed online via the hashtag #CelibacyChallenge, went up Thursday on YouTube.

CREDITS
Clients: GLAAD, Gay Men’s Health Crisis
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, New York
Chief Creative Officer: Jay Benjamin
Creative Director, Art: Johnnie Ingram
Creative Director, Copy: Chris Skurat
Design Director: Juan Saucedo
Art Directors: Mete Erdogan, Matilda Kahl
Copywriters: Callum Spencer, Viktor Angwald                                                 
Chief Production Officer: Tanya LeSieur
Director of Content Production: John Doris
Executive Producer: Dani Stoller
Integrated Producer: Matt Micioni
Lead Creative Technologist: Steve Nowicki
Digital Strategist: Shae Carroll
Information Architects: Robert Moon, Kelly Redzack           
Head of Art Buying: Maggie Sumner
Lead Retoucher: Yan Apostolides
Proofreader: Ed Stein
Chief Marketing Officer: Christine Prins 
Talent Director: Akash Sen
Account Director: Rebecca Robertson
Associate Director, Business Development: Jamie Daigle
Account Supervisor: Carly Wallace
Project Manager: Bridget Auerbach
Production Company: Bullitt 
Director: Ari Sandel
Directors of Photography: Warren Kommers (Alan Cumming)
Benjamin Kitchens (vignettes)
Executive Producer, CEO: Todd Makurath
Line Producer: Nathaniel Greene
Editing House: Arcade Edit
Editor: Jeff Ferruzzo
Assistant Editor: Mark Popham
Producer: Fanny Cruz
Executive Producer: Sila Soyer
Music House: Nylon
Producer: Christina Carlo
Audio: Sound Lounge
Mixer: Glen Landrum
Post House/Telecine: Company 3
Colorist: Tom Poole

Jim Elliott, the new global chief creative officer of Arnold Worldwide, and voiceover artist Paul Guyet made these two amusing videos (in what looks like Michael’s house from GTA5) explaining how to win a 2015 Radio Mercury Award—by demonstrating all the terrible radio ad clichés that will guarantee failure.

Elliott (who’s also the chief Mercury judge this year) even has a “NO” button to make his disapproval absolutely clear. Guyet is clearly having a ball with his impressions, and some of them are frighteningly accurate. Yes, nightclub ads really do sound that rapey.

The side effects portion of video No. 1 introduced the phrase “anal snoring” to my lexicon, which I consider a plus. Video No. 2 is more of the same, with Elliott and Guyet taking on AutoTune, bad writing and yelling, and long website URLs.

After all this, I’d be interested to hear what they like about radio advertising, because the tropes these videos are crapping on represent about 99 percent of it. Hey guys, how about some examples of what wins a Mercury?

Submissions are being accepted now through April 6 for this year’s Radio Mercury Awards. Enter at RadioMercuryAwards.com.

CREDITS
Client: Radio Advertising Bureau
Voiceover artist: Paul Guyet
Script: Robert Rooney, Creative Director, Y&R NY
Director Kevin R. Frech
Camera: Taylor Christoffel
Recording Studio: Sound Lounge
Recording Engineer: Collin Blendell
Production Company: Logical Chaos
Editor: Nick Fehver

The Oscars are just around the corner, so now’s as good a time as any to start amping yourself up by revisiting past highlights. And the show’s producers, with help from 180LA, are making it easy to get a quick fix with the four new ads below, cut together by Oscar-winning editor Kirk Baxter.

The first, “And the Oscar Goes to,” features a parade of stars—too many to name, though movie buffs might have a fun time trying to rattle them all off—doing their best victory dances. Their exuberance is pretty moving, even if it’s plenty vain, too.

A second, “Holding Oscars,” features the campaign’s most poignant moment—one second of Robin Williams looking around in breathless gratitude, a genuine scene that makes the loss of such a talent sting all the more in hindsight.

The third spot, a multilingual Kumbaya “Everyone Speaks Oscar,” can’t help but be a bit corny. (Sure, movies are a universal language, sort of, but really, where would most of us be without subtitles?) Still, the Academy deserves a nod in the Best Lie category for trying to pretend Hollywood isn’t a U.S.-dominated enterprise, and implying the winners are an ethnically diverse bunch—when in fact they’re mostly white.

The fourth ad, a Valentine’s spot featuring the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hanks kissing their wives at the show, is cute enough, set to the fairly obscure but anachronistically charming sounds of “Am I in Love” from 1952’s Son of Paleface, performed by Bob Hope and Jane Russell.

For good measure, 180LA also commissioned a series of 15 posters featuring the Oscar statue alongside various artists interpretations of imagination (a popular theme in ads because it’s hard to hate).

The results feature a number of nods to the award show’s roots in the Art Deco era, but the standouts are really the weirder takes—like Hattie Stewart’s leering, winking cartoon hearts, and Blastto’s surrealist eyeball sculpture. Because if those aren’t apt metaphors for America’s unhealthy obsession with celebrity, what is?

CREDITS
Client: Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
President: Cheryl Boone Isaacs
Chief Executive Officer: Dawn Hudson
Chief Marketing Officer: Christina Kounelias
Marketing Manager: Ford Oelman

Agency: 180LA
Chief Creative Officer: William Gelner
Creative Directors: Zac Ryder / Adam Groves
Copywriter: Christina Semak
Art Director: Karine Grigorian
Head of Production: Natasha Wellesley
Producer: Nili Zadok
Chief Marketing Officer: Stephen Larkin
Account Manager: Jessica DeLillo
Account Coordinator: Alexandra Conti
Planner: Jason Knight

Editorial _ HOLDING / GOES TO / VDAY
Editorial Company: Exile Edit
Editor: Nate Gross (HOLDING)
Editor: Will Butler (VDAY & GOES TO)
Executive Producer: Carol Lynn Weaver
Producer: Brittany Carson

Editorial _ FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Editor: Dave Groseclose (Foreign Language)
Producer: Brian Scharwath (Foreign Language)

Color/VFX/Finishing: The Mill LA
Colorist: Adam Scott
Color Executive Producer: Thatcher Peterson
Color Producers: Natalie Westerfield, Antonio Hardy
Color Coordinator: Diane Valera
Lead 2D Artist: Robin McGloin
Additional 2D Artists: Scott Johnson
Art Department: Jeff Langlois, Laurence Konishi
Executive Producer: Sue Troyan
VFX Producer: Kiana Bicoy
VFX Coordinator: Jillian Lynes

Recording Mix
Recording Studio: Eleven Sound
Date: Various
Mixer: Scott Burns
Asst Mixer: AJ Murillo
Producer: Dawn Redmann
Executive Producer: Suzanne Hollingshead

A creative team from DDB Sydney gives the Cannes Lions logo a sex change—and proposes a “Cannes Lioness” category—as a way of challenging the creative festival to reward work that reverses the trend of gender-based objectification in advertising.

The 90-second video below, “Sex Sellouts,” explains the idea, though the judging criteria for the proposed category are awfully vague. (We’re told the Lioness honors work “that changes the culture of objectifying women in order to sell stuff,” but that’s about it.) Still, using industry awards to inspire ad professionals “to go against the strategy that sells so many hamburgers”—and by extension, fuel a broader media-driven conversation in society—is ironically appealing.

The video was created in response to the brief “Change the conversation around sex,” and it won gold in the third round of Young Glory, an ongoing competition for advertising students and professionals. DDB worldwide creative chief Amir Kassaei evaluated the entries. Lest anyone think he simply tossed a prize to his own network, however, Young Glory maintains that the creators weren’t identified in the judging phase. (Nepotism in ad awards? Never!)

Philip Thomas, CEO of the Lions Festivals, appears to be a fan. “We love the thinking behind DDB Sydney’s idea,” he tells AdFreak. “The representation of women in this industry, and in society at large, is something Cannes Lions feels a responsibility to address. Last year, we launched the ‘See It Be It’ initiative to accelerate creative women’s careers in the industry. This year, we’ve been working hard, together with the industry, on a big idea that we’ll be ready to announce in the next two weeks. It’s really encouraging to see that the whole industry—veterans, rookies, male and female—is at a stage where we want to fight for the same vision.”

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for—the 2015 .GIFYS.

What are the .GIFYS, you might say? They are, obviously, an award show for the best animated GIFs on the internet—as nominated by a panel of GIF experts, insofar as such people exist—and ultimately decided by you, the public.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Los Angeles is the organizer. And now, in the competition’s second year, GIF search engine Giphy has joined as co-host.

There are awards for animal GIFs, and cat GIFs—a separate category, of course—and art, and music, and politics, and film and television. There are awards for GIFs that will hypnotize you (“Can’t Look Away”), and make you nostalgic (“Throwback”), and just kind of creep you out (“Weird”).

Some of the 55 nominees are excellent, like baby goats doing backflips off other baby goats, and a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon man swiping the face of a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon woman like an iPad, and a Nick Offerman head bouncing through a field gobbling bacon.

The judges who picked the nominees include writers and visual artists for news sites like Mashable, The Huffington Post, New York magazine, and, naturally, BuzzFeed, as well as execs from companies like Daily Motion and Reddit. Internet-famous cat Lil Bub is also somehow a judge, which seems perplexing, given cats thankfully don’t have thumbs.

If you like wasting your time looking at GIFs, it’s worth a gander at the full collection. Voting ends Feb. 22, and your voice could help decide which mini works of circular clip art earn the highly questionable honor of becoming “permanent fixtures in an Internet hall of fame.”

But you also know that when an ad agency creates, as a means of self-promotion, a crowdsourced competition celebrating snippets of self-referential web culture, that the award show glut truly has imploded into a black hole.

Men and women would get along better if they just had more domestically themed emojis to help them communicate properly in their text messages, says Ikea.

The Swedish furniture maker and brain-hacking home-retail maze is playing couples therapist in a new campaign from the Netherlands that announces the launch of Ikea Emoticons. These special little text-message pictures will supposedly reduce friction at home by letting you more efficiently text your significant other about having, for example, vacuumed the house.

Ridiculous as that premise may be, it’s a cute idea. And the resulting alphabet includes some clear winners, like a symbol for Swedish meatballs, as well as harder-to-explain gems, like a symbol for a green-eared dachshund. (Where in the real world does such a thing exist, without taking peyote?)

In the video, a salesman with a thick accent and expert method of smugly grabbing his white lab coat tells you where to download the emojis to your phone.

Alas, a number of reviews in Apple’s App Store pan the whole thing as a false promise. The emojis, critics claim, are not small at all but giant pictures that you have to copy and paste into your texts, which requires granting the app full access to a phone’s keyboard. (And funny thing, not everyone trusts Ikea.) Another review, which doesn’t read at all like an Ikea agency employee wrote it, blames the complaints on Apple’s coding restrictions.

Sadly, there are more fundamental flaws. For some inexplicable reason, the alphabet doesn’t seem to include a cinnamon bun emoji, or, even worse, a person tearing his or her own hair out and screaming while standing over a pile of sticks and pegs that are supposed to become a shelf emoji. Which means you’ll have to fake it with an Allen wrench and an angry face, just like in real life.

Via PFSK.

Jesus Christ pulled off some pretty impressive brand stunts in his day: turning water into wine; healing the blind; feeding the multitude with the loaves and fishes. But when it came to one of the biggest stunts of his career, he turned to Montreal’s 1one Production—at least, according to this “never-before-seen original footage” of Christ and his marketing team from a couple thousand years ago.

As self-promo films go, it’s pretty well done. “With the evolution of media, and the viewer becoming more intelligent (and cynical) towards traditional advertising, we need to create stunts that can’t look like anything short of amazing,” says Jean-René Parenteau, executive producer and associate at 1one. “When it comes to doing that, you want an expert, not someone who’s just hoping they can pull it off. This has been our focus for the past five years. Stunts aren’t a new trend for us. It’s what we’ve always done and focused our expertise towards.”

CREDITS
Client: 1one Production
Agency: lg2
Copywriter: Philippe Comeau
Director: Pierre Dalpé
DOP: Barry Russell
Producer: Jean-René Parenteau
Production House: 1one Production
Music and Sound Design: 1one Production

Kanye West held an outdoor concert in front of the Flatiron Building in New York on Thursday night, but not everyone was completely welcoming. In fact, Partners + Napier’s NYC office (at 11 East 26th St.) spelled out a message for the rapper on its windows—obviously a reference to Kanye’s latest Grammys antics.

Agency execs Matt Dowshen and Jason Marks told Gothamist: “We are an agency actively researching the effects of out-of-home advertising. We found out Kanye was playing outside our building, and we wanted to make a point about being in the right place at the right time with the right message, and how that can be amplified through digital channels. And … don’t fuck with Beck.”

In other words, those who troll will get trolled back.
 

PNYC welcomes @KanyeWest to Flatiron for his performance tonight. http://t.co/t2bLVIUN6s #nba #allstarweekend pic.twitter.com/JNZVX5idFK — PNYC (@pnycagency) February 12, 2015