Hasta La Creative!

On Saturday, California Chrome will try to become the 12th horse to win the Triple Crown when he races in the Belmont Stakes. But to Breathe Right, his success isn’t just about raw talent—it’s about the nasal strips he’s been wearing lately, which his owners swear by.

Though horses are not its target, Breathe Right is taking full advantage of the news. Parent company GlaxoSmithKline plans to distribute 50,000 Breathe Right nasal strips to fans at the Belmont. And Grey in New York quickly whipped up the commercial below, too.

The agency says the spot was written last Wednesday, awarded production on Thursday, cast Friday, pre-pro’ed Sunday, shot Monday, edited Tuesday and shipped on Wednesday. Showing the journey of a jockey who goes from congested to rested in the “Breathe Right Bedtime Stakes,” the spot will air on NBC during the race on Saturday night.

Also note the jockey’s name: Jimmy Heekin. Inside joke.

Credits below.

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CREDITS
Client: GSK Consumer Healthcare
Agency: Grey, New York
Chief Creative Officer: Tor Myhren
Creative Directors: Lee St. James, Dave Cohen
Art Director: Lee St. James
Copywriter: Dave Cohen, Andy Bohjalian
Agency Producer: Lori Bullock
Production Company: Chelsea Pictures
Director: Robb Bindler
Director of Photography: Derek McKane
Editor: Crandall Miller, Whitehouse
Sound Design: Crandall Miller. Whitehouse
Senior Mixer: Dante De Sole, Vision Post
Principal Talent: Andrew Keenan-Bolger
Principal VO Talent: Dave Johnson

Rejoice, happy-go-lucky and environmentally conscious Coca-Cola-lovers. Thanks to this new “2nd Lives” kit from the brand, you can now transform your Coke into something even more delightful.

Is that just an empty soda bottle? Nope, it’s a squirt gun. Useless piece of trash? Nope, it’s a pencil sharpener, or the perfect rattle for your baby. Make your children happy. Give them Coca-Cola, and toys made from Coca-Cola. And if you have two empty Coke bottles, you can even make a dumbbell to burn off some of the calories you gained by guzzling both.

Created with the help of Ogilvy & Mather China, the campaign features a line of 16 innovative caps that can be screwed on to bottles when they’re empty, transforming them into useful objects like water guns, whistles, paint brushes, bubble makers and pencil sharpeners. It’s all part of a clever effort to encourage consumers in Vietnam to recycle, and a rare success at the sort of alchemy that seeks to reincarnate garbage as advertising (even if such attempts are a cornerstone of the marketing industry). Coke will give away 40,000 of these modified caps, which come in 16 different varieties, to start.

It’s not clear if the add-ons themselves are made from recycled material. Even if they are, producing more plastic parts might not be the best way to reduce plastic waste.

But that’s beside the point. While the caps might not quite hit the sharing chord as clearly as the it-takes-two-to-open bottles, they’re a smart bit of advertising. “What if empty Coke bottles were never thrown away?” the campaign asks. Clearly, it would mean people everywhere could finally live in a utopia where everything was made of Coke products.

Japanese natural cosmetics brand Shokubutsu Hana and TBWASMP have floated an unconventional idea in the Philippines to help clean Manila’s grievously polluted Pasig River—an 88-foot-long billboard made of vetiver, a grass that absorbs deadly toxins. Vetiver is often used to treat waste water and landfills, and the billboard can cleanse up to 8,000 gallons a day.

On its website, Shokubutsu Hana says the effort represents the company’s belief in “healthy beauty brought about by the restorative power of nature” and commitment to “provide not only a clean message but also a clean future.” Additional vetiver signs are planned for the ailing waterway, which was declared “biologically dead” in the 1990s after decades of contamination from industrial runoff and sewage. The Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission and Vetiver Farms Philippines are also partners in the project.

A similar concept sprouted in the Philippines three years ago, when Coca-Cola and the World Wildlife Fund created a 60-by-60-foot billboard covered in Fukien tea plants to absorb air pollution.

The notion that social-issues campaign should not just call for action, but also take action themselves or facilitate change, is growing. Recent examples include Peruvian billboards that generate clean air and water, a “Drinkable Book” with pages that filter contaminants and a “Blind Book” designed to teach sighted folks how vision-impaired people feel when denied access to literature because it is not published in a format they can read.

Via PSFK.

JWT Dubai teamed with FilmWorks and Psyop for this strange 80-second CGI-fest that shows travelers flocking to Atlantis The Palm, a luxury resort in Dubai. And they “flock” in the literal sense of the word, moving through the sky without even flapping their arms, to escape the gray chill of London and Moscow for a taste of sun-soaked, beachfront opulence.

This approach, though well realized from a technical standpoint and certainly memorable, might be a little too odd for its own good. At first, I thought the sky was filled with bees. Around the 30-second mark, we get a clear view of human beings aloft against the sun. They look like souls ascending to heaven, floating into the light … a notion that actually meshes with the tagline, “Check into another world.”

Of course, these people land alive and well at the hotel. The production team used acrobats fitted with special harnesses to make the scenes look realistic. Alas, some of the images serve the client poorly. Who wants to take a vacation in a place where people are constantly falling from the sky? (A stockbroker from Croydon could burst through the clouds and crush you at any moment.) And that hand skimming the surface of the sea is creepy.

There’s nothing worse than waiting for something to download on your phone, especially if you are a 14-year-old boy waiting for sexy models to appear in your Instagram feed. 

BBDO Moscow and Russian telecom MTS collaborated to baffle the crap out of followers of popular Instagram bloggers Victoria Bonya, Alena Vodonaeva and Anna Sedokova. In one of the troll-iest social media plays ever, these attractive Insta-celebrities posted photos captioned with the following hashtags: #sexy #oiled #myself #six #hot #naked #pumpedup #guys #red #latex #ass #withanimals #cat #bear #horse #experimenting #crazy #positions #wow #amazing #ohmygod.

Except the photos never loaded. In fact, they were just images of the loading screen.

Comments and engagement went through the roof as horny teens, animal lovers and basement dwellers freaked out upon realizing the images weren’t going to load at all. The models followed up by posting ads promoting MTS’s new 4G service and apologizing for the false expectations. 

What is unclear is how the users reacted to having their dreams shattered.

CREDITS
Agency: BBDO Russia
Nikolay Megvelidze, creative director
Alexey Starodubov, creative group head /  director / editor
Vladlena Obukhova, group account director
Luiza Vasyutina, account manager
Boris Anisonyan, head of tv production
Valery Gorokhov, producer
Kristina Malberg, celebrities producer (TMA)
Ekaterina Komolova, managing director (TMA)
Alexander Lubavin, art-director / composer
Elina Yaroslavskaya, digital account director

“Mobile Telesystems” (Client)
Natalia Glagoleva, director of marketing communications department
Maria Yakovleva, head of marketing communications department
Yaroslav Smirnov, head of marketing communications group
Anastasia Terekhova, marketing communications manager
Valery Kopytin, marketing communications manager

FreeParking (Production)
Alexander Polishuk, DOP
Maria Yakushina, producer
Andrey Rubtsov, head of production group

When most great spec projects make the rounds among the Internet’s creative community, it’s assumed the work will never see the light of day. Here’s a notable, wonderful exception.

Late last year, Italian designer Marco Sodano received global praise for his creative pixelation of famous paintings remade with Legos. At the time, he said he wanted to convey “the belief that every child with Lego can become a great artist like Da Vinci and Vermeer.”

This month, he posted a new gallery, this time empowered to call it simply a “campaign for Lego.” The official versions (largely similar but for the word “Imagine” embedded at the top left) were produced by agency Geometry Global in Hong Kong, with Sodano as art director.

Check out the four official executions below:

Via The Inspiration.

Coca Cola’s ad strategy basically comes down to bombarding you with joy and togetherness, and a new animated spot from Wieden + Kennedy continues that tradition.

A boy bumps into a girl and lets go of a red balloon he’s carrying, so he can catch the Coca-Cola she drops, because what better way to charm in a Coke commercial than to save a Coke. The camera follows the balloon as it rises past the windows of a brick building, peering into a range of shared family milestones and moments, all, naturally, including little red-wrapped bottles of sugar water.

Couples are, variously, moving in together; holding a tea party with their young daughter; visiting their college-aged son; cooking and dancing together; and celebrating their fifty year anniversary. All the while, singer-songwriter Wendy Colonna croons in the background about finding happiness in a pair. It’s the slightest bit reminiscent of Up, but mostly an adorable and incredibly efficient bit of storytelling that’s right in the brand’s wheelhouse.

Coca-Cola is no stranger to animated ads (e.g., the Polar Bears and Happiness Factory) or twee soundtracks, and it’ll never stop pumping viewers full of bubbly feelings until they forget—or just stop caring—that the product isn’t really that good for them, even if the brand does occasionally mix in a little sass.

We’re only 16 days away from the start of the World Cup. And ESPN—which will present all 64 matches of the quadrennial tournament across the ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC networks—released its latest teaser commercial on Tuesday, this one devoted to the time warp that happens for viewers around the world every four years.

The spot, by Wieden + Kennedy in New York, feels like the beginning of an action movie, where the team is getting together before a big heist—except here, we’re seeing how different people around the world are getting ready for the World Cup. And wherever they are in the world, day or night, they’ll be setting their countdown clocks to Brazil time.

The spot moves seamlessly from metropolis to metropolis, with business executives, children, fisherman, etc., getting ready for the event. It opens on a favela rooftop in Rio and goes around the world—to a pub in England, a social club in Ghana, a fishing boat off Spain, an apartment in Russia, a car heading to Tehran, a bar about open at dawn in Japan, an office in Seattle, a family barbecue in Mexico and a research station in the Andes—before returning to Brazil.

“Every 4 years the world has one time zone,” says the end line. (That follows a spot earlier this month that said, “Every 4 years the conversation starts again.”)

Thanks to our longitudinal proximity to Brazil, Americans will see the matches at exceedingly humane hours, with kickoffs generally scheduled for noon, 3 p.m. or 6 p.m. ET. That’s a lot better than other recent World Cups—in particular, the 2002 tournament in Japan and South Korea, whose daily slate of matches began at 2:30 a.m. and wrapped up shortly after breakfast.

CREDITS
Client: ESPN

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, New York
Creative Directors: Brandon Henderson, Stuart Jennings, Gary Van Dzura, Caleb Jensen
Art Director: Mathieu Zarbatany
Copywriter: Andrew Jasperson
Producer: Luiza Naritomi
Executive Producer: Temma Shoaf
Account Team: Casey Bernard, Katie Hoak, Alex Scaros

Production Company: Imperial Woodpecker
Director: Stacy Wall
Executive Producer: Doug Halbert
Line Producer: Terry Shafirov
Director of Photography: Corey Walter

Editorial Company: Final Cut
Editor: Jeff Buchanan
Assistant Editor: Geoff Hastings
Post Producer: Beth Fitzpatrick

VFX Company: MPC
Senior Producer: Matthew Loranger
Production Asst.:
Lead Flame Artist/Creative Director: Gigi Ng

Mix Company: Heard City
Mixer: Philip Loeb
Producer: Sasha Awn

Music Company: Travis + Maude
Creative director: David Wittman
Producer: Kala Sherman

Oreo would like you to start solving your conflicts by scrubbing its cookies against your tongue as fast as you possibly can.

This new spot from AKQA London (and Mind’s Eye director Luke Bellis) shows pairs of what appear to be siblings and friends squaring off over various disputes—like riding shotgun in a car whose backseat is stuffed to the brim, picking what to watch on TV, or taking the blame for knocking the head off a statue with a soccer ball. But instead of, you know, flipping a coin or playing Rock Paper Scissors, they whip out Double Stuf Oreos, put on the stupidest faux-intense-concentration faces they can muster, and compete to be first to transfer all the cream from their cookies onto their tongues.

“We’ve all got something to settle,” reads the copy. “Lick for it,” adds the tagline, using a verb that doesn’t quite accurately describe the action portrayed in the preceding spot.

It’s a somewhat strange commercial, with slightly too much close-up footage of people’s mouths, and it can’t help but evoke Tootsie Roll Pops, which long ago cornered the repetitive-licking theme in advertising. But maybe it’s just not meant for olds like us to understand. The target demographic is clearly tween-ish, a point driven home by the bad dubstep soundtrack.

It is hard to believe any sane person would have the patience not to just eat the cookie.

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Those who have been waiting with bated breath for the results of Pornhub’s SFW advertising contest were assuaged today with the unveiling of 15 finalists. And there’s quite the smattering of innuendo and suggestion in this batch, featuring a few videos, some clever image and word plays, and some that almost literally spell it out.

To those just tuning in, the site challenged the world to make G-rated, family-friendly ads for the site in March. And many of the entries gave us quite the chuckle. Check out the finalists below and vote on PornHub’s SFW tumblr.

Here’s hoping this contest has a happy ending.

Via Business Insider.

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