Hasta La Creative!

College students know that chewing gum is for making out. But Immuno Gum, a new product, also claims to include immune-system-boosting ingredients like zinc, vitamin C and echinacea. To promote the brand, business incubator Chicklabs and students from Chapman University’s film school created this video of a pair of college students—the “hottest” at the school, according to the ad’s makers—handing out free samples, and then free kisses, to dozens of their peers on campus.

It’s an awkward and slightly gross premise that will make germaphobes squirm. The result, though, is ultimately pretty innocent, consisting mainly gawky pecks, and blushing, and laughter, and cheering, and the general lack of comfort that’s bound to accompany spit-swapping for the sake of business.

The product’s tagline, “Gum with benefits,” ends up fitting pretty well, as a pun for vitamins and casual hookups, though it seems a bit specious to suggest kissing a lot of random people is going to be good for you. In other words, it manages to be funny, at moments, but still pretty weird.

The public setting and pass-around vibe makes it feel more transactional and less charmingly intimate than this spring’s wildly popular strangers-kissing ad for L.A. fashion label Wren. But it’s pretty much hoping to leverage the same kind of rubbernecking dynamic—it’s just the undergrad version. At least the product actually has something to do with mouths, though.

Gas masks might imply that something stinks, but that’s probably not the intended message of Mono’s Grand Central Terminal takeover this week promoting Michael Bay’s TNT series The Last Ship. (A stinker from Michael Bay? No chance in hell!)

In the show, which debuts June 22, the crew of a U.S. Navy destroyer fights to save the planet after a pandemic has wiped out 80 percent of the population. The campaign in New York City’s historic railroad terminal features posters, banners and other elements with stark gas-mask imagery and messages like “1 virus. 6 billion dead. Don’t be next,” as well as hand-sanitzer dispensers from marketing partner Purell. I mean, why take that urban grit home to Greenwich?

Grand Central commuters have probably developed an immunity to wacky ad stunts, owing to outbreaks of “Hammer Pants Dancers” for a certain MC’s reality series (which, I’m sure we agree, changed the world in ways we’re just beginning to understand), and “technophile living mannequins” for Sony.

And who can forget the time a Dutch company rolled “the world’s largest wheel of cheese” onto the platform? Gas masks might have come in handy after that fearsome fromage spent a day aging beside the tracks.

CANNES, France—Maybe India’s Internet Baby isn’t as horrifying as he seems?

If you think about it, the preternaturally social star of the MTS Telecom campaign—who learns to cut his own umbilical cord immediately after birth—is actually someone to be revered, at least according to the agency that created him.

We thought he was creepy, as most CGI infants are when they do adult-like things. The ad’s utopian vision of ever-younger digital natives also seemed dystopian, to say the least. The ad will make you “weep for humanity,” we wrote, adding that Internet Baby must be stopped. (Others, including Time magazine, later agreed with us.)

But Sajan Raj Kurup, founder and creative chairman at Creativeland Asia—which is hoping the ad snags a Lion at Cannes this week—sent us an email in which he suggests we may have missed the cultural import of the spot. He urges us to look at it in a different way—as beautiful, not terrifying.

Check out his full email below.

Dear Tim,

You have mentioned how the MTS Internet Baby spot will make one weep for humanity. You have also appealed that somebody must stop the Internet baby. As someone who wrote the spot, may I sincerely ask that somebody not to stop my little Internet baby. Very humbly, here’s why:

I live in a country where millions of babies are born into poverty. Hunger in their life manifests itself in many terrifying ways. From basic amenities, to education, security and healthcare.

The Internet and mobile phones arrived in my country in the late ’90s. Today, India is the fastest growing telecom and Internet market. Beyond the economic benefits, there is huge social upside to it. Internet and telecommunications has perhaps been the greatest social leveler in my country. It has begun to empower even the most socially backward Indian in the remotest corner of the country with information, with access, with knowledge, with education, with true power.

I would like to hope that this empowerment continues. And it transcends age-groups, caste, religion and social standing. I would like to hope that every baby born in my country is born to the Internet. The Internet that empowers him or her to start life like any other baby in an urban Indian home, European or an American home. For then he would have knowledge available, at the touch of a button. The same button a child in London presses when he needs to know. The same button that empowers a child in Tokyo.

It is natural for a handful of people to think that this is freaky or unnatural. Remember even the motorcar was called evil by some people a hundred years ago. But let not the playful thought of an Internet-empowered baby at birth terrify us. Let’s not stop him.

There’s no telling how far this generation of Indian children, those born for the Internet, will go. They will definitely go farther than their fathers did. They might even go farther than kids in the developed world. Let them go. Let them break barriers.

Debates and point of view are essential. They are what make our business a lot more fun. But that doesn’t change facts. Technology and the Internet are getting deeper into our lives. And the MTS Internet Baby has made people stand up and take notice.

I would like to invite you to Mumbai after Cannes Lions to witness firsthand India’s flourishing creative scene and our country’s “Internet Babies.” I promise it would be something you would never forget—and you would weep for humanity. With a mixture of joy and excitement.

Yours sincerely,
Sajan Raj Kurup
Founder & Creative Chairman, Creativeland Asia

 
To commemorate the birth of the Internet Baby, Creativeland also ran a promo in which it christened babies born on MTS India’s founding day (which happened to be within the launch month of the spot) as Internet babies and gave away free Internet connections. See that case study below.

Dockers prepares men for fatherhood, among other things, in these two videos from Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners, timed to Father’s Day. Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers head coach Jon Gruden gives a speech that is loaded to the gunwales with quotables (“You’re just hired help paid in groin kicks!”) to a room full of soon-to-be dads, while Sarah Harbaugh—wife of San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh—tearfully warns men about the dangers of “dad pants.”

Didn’t Dockers make those popular in the first place? Just asking questions. It’s nice to see gendered advertising that doesn’t go out of its way to insult anyone for a change, but did I hear Gruden take a swipe at dad jokes? Like hell those are going away.

Why is JFK’s youth fitness anthem marketing the iPhone 5S?

Apple has a new 5S spot out, and the musical choice is even odder than the previous 5S spot, which featured a reworked version of “Gigantic” by the Pixies (and that’s saying something, since that song is supposedly about male genitalia).

As Uproxx noted, the new ad uses “The Youth Fitness Song,” aka “Chicken Fat,” a song from President Kennedy’s national physical fitness program. Apparently this little ditty, which the creator of The Music Man came up with, was sent to school districts throughout the U.S. in the ’60s to accompany the calisthenics program.

On visuals alone, it’s clear the spot is promoting the physical-fitness uses of the iPhone, and it’s got quite a few. The tagline here, as in the previous spot, is: “You’re more powerful than you think.”

Though the song could theoretically make boomers’ nostalgic for a time when they were told to “Go, you chicken fat, go,” I found it quite confusing and distracting. Personally, I didn’t notice much of what was going on in the ad until I took my headphones off.

Welp. Hopefully there won’t be too many customers upset at the prospect of the tech giant telling them, in a questionable manner, to start exercising.

Friskies has partnered with BuzzFeed to produce some chunky, meaty kitten content fresh out of the YouTube can. The video below, quickly closing in on 10 million views, is voiced by Ze Frank, who works for BuzzFeed and is also a YouTube celebrity in his own right with his True Facts series, in which he tells you “true facts” about animals that are clearly not true.

It’s easy to see how this Friskies video is an extension of the humor in his existing series, but this time Ze Frank is voicing a cat who is writing a letter to a younger kitten who has moved in with him. “Dear Kitten,” the elder cat intones, “since I have hissed at you the customary 437 times, it is now my duty as the head of the household to—begrudgingly—welcome you.” At which point he offers the kitten lots of great advice about hiding from Va-coomb, sleeping in the underwear drawer, and of course eating delicious wet cat food from Friskies.

With #DearKitten becoming a popular tag on Twitter without Friskies even trying to seed it, it’s clear that cat content is still king of the Internet.

Hey, millennials, 20 years ago you might’ve been riding in the third row of a Volvo station wagon, staring out the back window and maybe trying to stave off the slight nausea that can accompany your body’s sense that it is hurtling in the wrong direction through space.

If you were, Volvo and Seattle creative studio World Famous would like to point out to you that you’re now old enough to buy a Volvo of your own, and drive it forward through space on outdoorsy adventures with your pals.

Isn’t it fun to grow up?

This is a nice spot that seems likely to resonate with viewers in the target—based on the entirely anecdotal evidence that I, a twentysomething who grew up in one of those white refrigerators on wheels, find it manipulating me into feeling nostalgic … even though I can tell, rationally, that the forward-and-backward metaphor is advertising pseudo-philosophy.

In the true version of the story, the millennial probably buys the vintage version of the car and pimps it out with 22-inch chrome spinners with blue lights, then leaves it in a heap on the lawn, because the millennial doesn’t know oil changes are actually important.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Volvo
Production Company: World Famous
Director: Jesse Harris
Writer: Jesse Harris
Executive Producer: Megan Ball
Head of Production: Nick Hegge
Producer: Kyle Seago
Editor: Nick Pezzillo
Director of Photography: TJ Williams Jr.
Color: Lightpress
Sound Mix: Clatter&Din
A co-production of NFFTY

How precocious are digital natives today? They take charge of things literally from birth, according to this somewhat terrifying spot from MTS Telecom, which the company claims is now the most-viewed ad ever to come out of India.

The spot—created by Creativeland Asia, directed by Guy Shelmerdine from Smuggler Films and set to “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross—has 23.4 million views on YouTube (surpassing the previous Indian record holder, Lifebuoy’s “Help a Child Reach 5” PSA, with 19 million). And its pint-size star fits snugly into a long line of famous unusually dexterous infants, from Evian’s CGI babies all the way back to the original Internet dancing baby. Rather than just cavort about on roller skates, though, he spends his brief first moments of life Googling, stealing and taking selfies. And MTS quite clearly loves that about him.

A rep tells us the company launched the ad in an innovative way—by seeding the spot as a BitTorent file and letting the country’s digital natives find it on their own. And indeed, it got plenty of buzz before it was launched on the brand’s official social channels.

MTS Telecom has entered it in next week’s Cannes festival and hopes to bring home a Lion. We’ll leave it up to you to determine whether it deserves one.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: MTS Telecom
Agency: Creativeland Asia
Production House: Smuggler London
Creative Chairman: Sajan Raj Kurup
ECD: Anu Joseph
Script: Sajan Raj Kurup
Director: Guy Shermeldine,
Producer: Chris Barret,
Director of Photography: Alex Baber
VFX: Glassworks London
VFX lead: Abi Klimaszewska,
Editor: Andy Mcgraw, Stitch
Music Director: Mickey Mcleary

Epic ads are crowding the field ahead of Thursday’s World Cup kickoff, but Adidas doesn’t mind just having a little fun, sometimes.

This spot from the official sponsor, via TBWAChiatDay, finds retired giants of the game David Beckham (age 39) and Zinedine Zidane (41) bored while watching whippersnappers Gareth Bale (24) and Lucas Moura (21) playing EA Sports’ 2014 FIFA World Cup video game. The old men challenge the young men to kick a ball around in real life, and the foursome proceed to trash Beckhingham Palace, the posh home Becks used to occupy with his wife Victoria (before they moved to a much more expensive one).

The roguish spot is a welcome respite from anxiety-ridden opuses like Nike’s animated takedown of knockoff players, or Beats by Dre’s ode to pre-game rituals, or Adidas’s own Messi nightmare, or the brand’s PETA-trolling cow-heart campaign.

It is a game, after all. And given that it’s one where players tend to tap out well before 40, it’s nice to see age trump beauty for a change.

Remember the good old days, when a Coca-Cola cost only a nickel, and people weren’t always whining about how bad soda is for your health?

Coca-Cola does.

“A Coke used to cost 5 cents,” says this new Coke ad. “But what if a 12-oz. Coke cost 140 calories?” the brand adds, in a head-scratcher of a rhetorical non-sequitur that’s the perfect setup for the awkward answer that follows.

A 140-pound person would have to ride a bicycle for 23 minutes, on average, to burn off an equivalent amount of energy, according to the commercial. Of course, 140 pounds is only 56 pounds lighter than the average American man, and 26 pounds lighter than the average American woman, according to CDC data on body measurements.

In other words, welcome to Coca-Cola’s fantasy world, where mostly fit young people are more than happy to climb onto a giant stationary bike in front of a crowd and sweat it out to earn a Coke, delivered by some kind of circus robot, cash and guilt free.

The online video is surreal mainly because it forces into relief the main criticism it’s hoping to defuse—and, in a state of more or less total delusion, manages to make a case that supports the brand’s detractors. The science is misleading, and the creative is depressing—suggesting exercise is a zero-sum game akin to a hamster on a wheel chasing a treat that will kill him, unless he runs ever longer.

“Movement is happiness,” says the end line. Yet never has it seemed so bleakly transactional and dead-ending.

It’s not the first time Coca-Cola’s marketing has struggled to meet, head on, its health critics. It’s also not the first time it’s leaned on nostalgia as a means of deflecting blame for the rise in obesity. And for a brand that produces so much global advertising—much of it hitting the sort of pitch-perfect distraction that can help make the product more endearing—it’s almost inevitable that some of its commercials will be flat-footed duds.

But while we’re imagining an alternate universe where all of Coca-Cola’s dreams come true, we might as well talk about the one where every single household object is made of empty Coke bottles.