Hasta La Creative!

If you like watching pretty cars dance with each other, check out this new stunt driving ad from BMW South Africa.

Five cherry red M235i coupes spin around each other in a tightly choreographed high-speed sequence on a closed traffic rotary. Titled “The Epic Driftmob,” it takes pains to emulate a human flash mob. That means showing a woman dressed as a cop blocking several cars (including a Honda) from entering, and cutting in some unconvincing footage of confused and excited spectators.

Ultimately the stunt, orchestrated by Interone in Cape Town, feels more like it’s paying homage to Esther Williams than Improv Everywhere. Maybe that’s because it’s clearly too high-budget and well-planned to feel believable as a spontaneous event. Or maybe it’s because the fast edits and burning rubber can’t hide that there’s a sort of grace to the whole thing—especially if you watch the clip on mute, and spare yourself the obligatory but grating sounds of revving engines and screeching tires.

It also doesn’t look quite as dangerous as some of BMW’s other stunt commercials from recent years, which saw cars drifting through car-shaped holes in walls and around the edges of skyscraper helipads. But while less risky, at least we know the new spot is real (the brand says so on the YouTube page) and not CGI—unlike the recent aircraft carrier ad, which was almost certainly not real. (In the making-of video for the new spot, stunt driver Rich Rutherford points out the thin margin for error in coordinating the fast-moving cars, steered by pro drivers including drifting champions Rhys Millen and Samuel Hübinette).

And of course, the ad has a happy ending: The hot lady cop pulls off her hat and does a dramatic hair toss before climbing into one of the Beamers. Because the brand couldn’t resist suggesting its product will get you laid, too.

If the true measure of an ad’s popularity is the afterlife it enjoys through parody and satire, then this 1989 LifeCall ad—featuring Mrs. Fletcher and her infamous line, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”—may be the best-loved commercial of all time.

In the past year, thousands of Vine users—many of them born years after the ad was made—have been using the 6-second format to parody the cult classic (and the 90’s re-make). To date, there are over 6,000 posts tagged “life alert.”

Below is just a sample of some of the ways teens and tweens (and a few ridiculous adults) have spoofed this well-meaning but terribly melodramatic spot. It starts to get even more meta when the Vines start spoofing other Vines.

(Click to play each clip, click again to stop.)

 
Lyin’ on the cold hard ground.
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If I lie here…
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Fallin’ and callin’.
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Do I look like I care?
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Banana operator (with cameo).
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Basketball fakeout.
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A little help from The Beatles.
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Have you ever used tape before?
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Have you ever used tape before? (version 2)
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If you ain’t talkin’ money, I don’t wanna talk.
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Careful with that button.
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I can lift you up!
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One of America’s finest.
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I’ve fallen and I can’t turn up!
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Don’t dubstep and fall.
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Go on…
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Expedia and 180LA have done a nice job lately of thinking more broadly about the concept of travel, going beyond physical journeys into emotional, even spiritual ones. (Among its more memorable ads was the 2012 spot about the father’s difficult journey to accepting his lesbian daughter.)

Now, the travel site is getting even more ambitious—and more social—as it travels back in time with a fun project around people’s Throwback Thursday photos.

Between now and the end of August, Expedia is asking Instagram and Twitter users to tag their #tbt photo with @Expedia and #ThrowMeBack. Each week the company will pick one lucky winner and give them a travel voucher so they can indulge their nostagia and return to the place where the photo was taken—and recreate it.

Or, says Expedia, you can travel somewhere different and make a new memory—which seems to suggest this campaign is less about actually recreating the old snapshots and more about just piggybacking on the #tbt trend in general. However, the brand is asking the winners to send in the recreated photos with the goal at the end of the campaign of telling a photo story with all the side-by-sides.

“We all have great memories of summer vacations,” says Dave Horton, creative director at 180LA. “So to promote the nostalgia of summer travel, we wanted to tap into the most nostalgic trend out there, #tbt.”

To promote the contest, Expedia has posted the video below, “Back to Ocean Beach,” showing one family’s journey from Washington State to their old beach spot in San Diego to recreate a cute photo from the ’80s.

Read more about the campaign at instagram.piqora.com/expediathrowmeback.

And you thought beans were the musical fruit.

This memorable ad from BBH New York humorously suggests that Mr. Sketch scented markers get their smell from actual fruit farts—as we see a blueberry cutting a squeaker inside a fantastical Roald Dahl-esque odor-extraction lab.

The flavorful flatulence infuses one of the venerable Newell Rubbermaid brand’s blue marker pens, and we’re led to believe this same method applies to apple, raspberry, cherry, lemon and other scents in the Mr. Sketch line.

“We wanted a simple, entertaining concept that people would get right away,” BBH group creative director Gerard Caputo tells Mashable. “And since the name of the product isn’t intuitive to the benefit, we wanted to do a little education.”

Smells like a gold Lion to me! At any rate, the ad should amuse kids of all ages, even if the pungent manufacturing process on display doesn’t pass the smell test.

At last, you don’t need to be a degenerate military dictator (or Ed Gein) to soak up the luxuries of sitting on piles of human skin. Or at least, creepy facsimiles thereof.

London-based designer Gigi Barker has made a leather “Skin Chair” that looks (and smells!) like actual human flesh, thanks to the modern miracle that is pheromone-infused silicone. The design and smell of the chair are apparently modeled after an actual individual’s body, and it probably feels a lot like sitting on Jabba the Hutt.

Barker made these for the London Design Festival in September, but they’re for sale to the public as well, just in case you have $2,500 lying around. (The ottoman, though, officially called the “Skin Stool,” is a steal at $675.)

Some aspects of the techno-utopian fantasy are especially worth skewering, and Dutch insurer Centraal Beheer does a pretty nice number on one of them: the self-driving car.

The brand has a knack for making disaster funny by casting some obnoxious stereotype as fictional villain. A couple of years back, it was a moron in a red Speedo doing circus tricks with his speedboat wheel. Now, in a new ad, it’s a self-important ass reading the paper in the backseat of a Volkswagen that’s being driven by a computer.

The commercial does bear a resemblance to Liberty Mutual’s 2012 spot about human error, but adds another layer to the slapstick joke, and keeps it au courant by blaming the escalating fiasco on the disbelief of spectators distracted by the driverless VW. That premise is a stretch, but it’s definitely good for a chuckle.

Now, if only the computer chauffeur would take its passenger into the ocean, or maybe just into a shipping container bound for a remote island inhabited entirely by robots.

CREDITS
Client: Centraal Beheer Achmea
Agency: DDB & Tribal Worldwide, Amsterdam
Production Company: Passion Raw
Director: Owen Trevor
DP: Tim Hudson
Producer: Dan Scott-Croxford, Kwok Yau
Editor: Guy Savin
Grading : Brian Krijgsman
Online: Ton Habraken, Stephen Pepper, Jeroen van Berkel
Soundstudio: Rens Pluym, Wessel-Jan van Zijderveld
Music: Massive Music

We’ll always listen and be here for you. Even when you’re wrong.

That’s the somewhat odd message that Johnson’s Baby offers consumers in this video emphasizing the Johnson & Johnson brand’s commitment to the safety of its products—to the point of reformulating them even when there’s nothing wrong.

The ad, “Our Safety Promise,” explains that Johnson’s Baby heard the worries of customers bothered by news that “chemicals of concern” had been found in its products. “Although always safe, for your peace of mind, we removed them,” the video says of the chemical.

That message may be transparent. To me, it’s also condescending. It’s like saying, “We’re doing this to appease you. But we still know better than you.” Perhaps it’s a legal thing. Still, the wording could be much better.

The brand then goes on to celebrate its bigheartedness by having its employees make 1,000 origami storks, which apparently signify “a hope granted and a promise fulfilled,” according to a Japanese legend about origami cranes.

It could be I’m just not the target for the ad, which is obviously meant to be touching and sweet. (I’d call it more feel-good for feel-good’s sake.) But after watching, I was even more curious about the controversial chemicals.

The spot is part of a new social-media effort that will see 40 more videos released throughout the rest of the year. Let’s hope they’re less awkward than this one.

Legendary anchorman Bill Kurtis is a man’s man. Just ask Ron Burgundy … or the Illinois Office of Tourism.

A new campaign from JWT Chicago features Kurtis, a veteran Chicago journalist best known today for hosting cable crime shows like Investigative Reports, Cold Case Files and American Justice. This time we see a new side of Kurtis, pitching his home state as an ideal destination for “mancations”—getaways that focus on stock car driving, gambling and—wait, wait… don’t tell me—golf.

These trips are cast as reciprocation for womanly leisure activities like book clubs, because, the argument goes, if a guy suffers in the name of love through a sentimental novel, he should be rewarded.

Kurtis oozes charisma, and the message is certainly more down to earth than the zany miniature replica of Abraham Lincoln the state has been using to appeal to potential visitors. The world didn’t really need another advertising portmanteau, but the real risk for the brand is that Kurtis’s outsized personality eclipses a concept that, at its core, doesn’t add much new to the resurgent trend of testosterone-drenched advertising. 

Then again, if a person in a bear suit playing a bugle comes standard with vacations to Illinois, sign me up.

CREDITS:

Advertising Agency: JWT, Chicago
Executive Creative Director: Dan Bruce
Creative Director/AD: Terra Hambly
Copywriter: Mike Beamer
Group Managing Director: Erin Clark
Account Director: Sarah Brick
Account Executive: Kyle Piazza

Production and Postproduction:
Director: Dan Bruce
Production Company: One
Executive Producer: Lisa Masseur
Senior Producer: Sarah Slevin
Line Producer: Alison Ginsburg
Director of Photography: Kyle Bainter
Editorial: Optimus
Producer: Tracy Spera
Editor: Craig Lewandowski
Assistant Editor: Ben Winter
Audio/Sound Design: Marina Bacci
Logo Animation: Tyler Nelson
Explosion animation: BlinkFarm

Many brands promise to make literally anyone more attractive to the opposite sex, but Old Spice takes this promise to the extreme with its new ads starring a hapless, barely functional android.

In a pair of spots from Wieden + Kennedy, a robot with the head of male human consistently wins with the ladies because he smells nice, all despite his best efforts to ruin his chances.

By positioning its products as deus-ex-machina sex potions that women simply can’t resist, Old Spice comes off smelling quite a bit like competitor Axe, which has actually been moving away from these kinds of tropes in favor of more cinematic fare.

But the spots manage to keep Old Spice somewhat distinct with the sort of over-the-top humor that has defined the brand since Isaiah Mustafa first transformed a pair of theater tickets into a fistful of diamonds. And the commercials—TV ad “Soccer” and Web spot “Nightclub”—definitely have their bizarre moments.

Plus, Old Spice has already made the case, powerfully if insanely, that its products could turn men’s hair into impossibly talented gophers, and mother-smothered boys into men. So it was really only a matter of time before it told us it could seal the deal for cyborgs. 

Hey, look, the new Apple isn’t just the same old monolith after all.

A video released by the brand this week features thousands of the company’s employees, including CEO Tim Cook, and their family members all gathering to march in last month’s San Francisco Pride Parade.

It’s unusual to see Apple’s workers show up in its consumer advertising. It’s also nice, especially in support of a worthwhile cause (even if Apple does, yes, just ultimately want to sell more gadgets). Set to Coldplay’s new single “A Sky Full of Stars,” the video opens on the company’s prep for the parade, with rows of bicycles, and a barista pouring beverages, and staffers donning boxes-on-boxes worth of special Apple-logo T-shirts reading “Pride,” before the montage crescendoes to the main event. Cook’s appearance is brief, nestled among a sequence of less-recognizable faces. “Inclusion inspires innovation,” says the closing copy.

That reads, though, as more than just a corporate show of force for LGBT rights, which the company has a history of supporting in its own employment policies. Everybody always knew Cook would have a hard time replacing messianic figure Steve Jobs as the face of Apple. The perhaps obvious answer, hinted at subtly here, is that Cook is not doing it alone.

After much handwringing in recent years over the new CEO’s vision—or perceived lack thereof—the blueprint of Cook’s Apple that’s now trickling out suggests a company that’s less closed off and more collaborative than during its mythic era under Jobs, a notoriously exacting master who crafted its reputation for shrouding itself in secrecy and keeping a tight focus on products—including in its advertising.

In other words, it’s hard to imagine an ad featuring a smiling Jobs milling around with his underlings. Yet, here is Cook, doing just that.

The clip itself is a little slow to get off the ground, but the payoff, focused as it is on people—namely Apple staffers and the LGBT community writ large—is well worth the wait. That’s something of a coup, considering the company’s ill-fated detour into advertising around its corporate culture in 2013, by way of a botched attempt at a manifesto about the significance of products.

The new ad, meanwhile, also aligns with Cook’s championing, including in his CEO role, of human rights broadly defined, as well as other causes like environmentalism. Such are the trappings of inheriting a powerful company with the ability, and arguably an obligation, to contribute more socially. But back in 2011, Cook also made a point of saying that one of Jobs’s last pieces of advice to him was never to ask what Steve Jobs would do, and instead to “just do what’s right.”

Maybe those who want to can still see Jobs pulling the strings, even from beyond the grave. Subtle perception games aside, that just might mean the next great Apple product everyone’s been waiting for is just around the corner, too.