Hasta La Creative!

Here's a pretty cool project from Mullen for a client we won't immediately reveal, lest we spoil the surprise. (Scroll down to the bottom of credits, or watch the video to find out.)

The Boston agency posted this job listing online for a "director of operations" position at a company called Rehtom Inc. The requirements sounded nothing short of brutal:

• Standing up almost all the time
• Constantly exerting yourself
• Working from 135 to unlimited hours per week
• Degrees in medicine, finance and culinary arts necessary
• No vacations
• The work load goes up on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and other holidays
• No time to sleep
• Salary = $0

The job ad got 2.7 million impressions from paid ad placements. Only 24 people inquired. They interviewed via webcam, and their real-time reactions were captured on video.

Check out what happened below. It's worth watching to the end.

CREDITS
Project: World's Toughest Job

Agency: Mullen, Boston
Chief Creative Officer: Mark Wenneker
Executive Creative Directors: Tim Vaccarino, Dave Weist
Creative Director: Jon Ruby
Associate Creative Director, Copy: Andrea Mileskiewicz
Associate Creative Director, Art: Blake Winfree
Executive Director of Integrated Production: Liza Near
Head of Broadcast: Zeke Bowman

Producer: Vera Everson
Account Director: Jessica Zdenek
Account Supervisor: Laila Lynch
Director of Digital Strategy: Eric Williamson
Senior Brand Strategist: Ryan Houts

Production Company: Caviar
Director: Amir Farhang
Executive Producer: Valeria Maldini
Producer: Jason Manz
Director of Photography: Brian Rigney Hubbard

Editing, Visual Effects: PS260
Editor: J.J. Lask
Assistant Editor: Colin Edelman
Senior Producer: Laura Lamb Patterson
Lead Visual Effects Artist: Patrick Lavin
Assistant Artist: Matt Posey
Audio Post: Soundtrack
Sound Design, Mixer: Mike Secher
Music: Human
Casting: House Casting
Casting Agent: Shawn Alston

Client: American Greetings
Executive Director, Marketing: Alex Ho

When Kevin Spacey appears on screen these days, you expect him to speak to camera in a South Carolina drawl, assess his chances at screwing over a rival, and perhaps even (spoiler alert) kill a person or two.

He does none of those things in E*Trade's new campaign from Ogilvy & Mather, but does aim for an air of mystery in his role as a "talent scout" who can tell by looking at someone whether he or she is "Type E*"—the company's term for sophisticated, savvy, self-directed investors.

This Spacey spot is the first in what will be a series, Ogilvy tells us.

An earlier spot that launched the campaign was titled "Epic Musical" and featured everyday people singing and dancing because they are Type E*. The new campaign follows the demise of the E*Trade baby, the star of Grey's longtime campaign, who was put out to pasture after six years of never growing up.

"If you think about it, our target has grown to become more sophisticated, so the baby needed to grow up as well," said Russell Messner, global managing director at Ogilvy. "That being said, we did not want to alienate the smart wit and irreverence that are inextricably linked to the E*Trade brand. We believe Kevin Spacey, our 'Type E* Talent Scout,' is a great embodiment of this new phase in the brand's history."

CREDITS
Client: E*Trade
Spot: "Talent Scout"
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, New York
Executive Creative Director: Steve Howard
Group Creative Director: Chris Van Oosterhout
Chief Creative Officer: Alfonso Marian
Copywriters: Gage Clegg, Ian Going, Chad Johnson, Allison Lackey
Art Directors: Lauren Van Aswegen, Kevin Riley, Becca Morton
Executive Producer: Maureen Phillips
Global Managing Director: Russ Messner
Executive Group Director: Adam Puchalsky
Account Director: Melissa Bartolini Kearney
Head Planner: Margaret Rimsky
Senior Planner: Ned Sonnenschein
Director: Stacy Wall
Senior Content Producer: Karen Rossiter
Production Company: Imperial Woodpecker
Editing: Chris Franklin, BigSky Edit
Music: Tonal Sound
Color Correction: Chris Ryan, Nice Shoes
Mix: Tom Jucarone, Sound Lounge

It's usually off-putting when inanimate objects have faces, but in this new Japanese Vitaminwater commercial, which features a person with a boom box for a head and spinning turntable eyes, that wasn't weird enough.

Nope, they had to go all out for a new coconut-flavored drink, and it's one of the weirder (but not gross!) things I've seen.

They had to have Heems from Das Racist rapping as Turntable Head dashes around to some of New York's latest trendy spots. It's all part of the New York remix, which is New York culture's way of giving old things new life, says Heems. (Ugh.)

Apparently the new coconut flavor is Queens-born Vitaminwater's own New York remix.

OK then!

H/T: Nerve's Liam Mathews.

Agency: Leo Burnett, Dubai, UAE
Executive Creative Director: Malek Ghorayeb
Senior Art Director: Rafael Augusto
Senior Copywriter: Sunny Deo
Communications Manager: Lara ElBarkouki
Communications Supervisor: Layal Nammour

The post National Geographic : Wild Month : Leo Burnett Dubai appeared first on desicreative.

You probably remember popsicle stick jokes as a fun, charming, innocent part of your childhood. Jason Kreher and Matt Moore are here to wreck those memories.

The pair of creatives at Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Ore., have made a fake product called Schadenfreezers—popsicles with the most depressing jokes you can imagine. (For now, at least, they're just animated GIFs.) The tagline is: "The strawberry, blueberry and lemon-flavored joy derived from the suffering of others." When you read them, your sense of happiness drips away much like the sad melting treats themselves.

Kreher and Moore made the first GIFs last year. (Sample jokes: "How many lives does a cat have?" "Only one." "Why did the lifeguard wear pants?" "Because he was ashamed of his body." "Why did the clown go to jail?" "For his collection of child pornography.")

Now they're back with a whole new set. You can check some of them out below, and the rest over at schadenfreezers.com. There are 11 new ones, and more will roll out gradually.

We caught up with Kreher and Moore over email to ask them just what their problem is.

This is Round 2, but take us back a bit. Where did this twisted idea come from? Did neither of you have a happy childhood?
We honestly can't remember how these came about; it was probably just us wanting to visualize the awful things we think are funny. It's kind of like wagging your penis around in public when you're a little kid … it's the wrong kind of attention, but it's attention nonetheless.

Popsicle-stick jokes are generally corny. Why make them existentially bleak?
I don't think either one of us is particularly cynical, but it's fun to take something innocent and make it profane. There's nothing wrong with pondering life's greatest tragedies while enjoying a nice snack.

What's your joke writing process like? How do you know when you have a winner? And how do you know when you've gone too far?
We probably wrote around 200 of these to get to our final ones. I think they work best when the setup feels like it could be an actual popsicle stick joke, but then stabs you in the gut with the punch line. And with these, there's no such thing as too far. If we suspect one has gone too far that means it's probably going to make the cut.

What are your favorite jokes from the new batch, and why?
Jason: The janitor one is my favorite. It's probably the most dehumanizing and bleak thing that's ever occurred to me, which was kind of my bar for these.
Matt: That plane one feels like it's going to be some awful pun and then it ends up as an awful truth. Kids love that.

There was some outcry about the original round of jokes. Do you think people don't want to see innocent popsicle-joke humor messed with?
The only people who got really riled up were the few who thought this was an actual product, and that we'd somehow bribed the press to feature them. I like thinking of us as a corrupt, fat-cat popsicle corporation greasing the palms of the Huffington Post Arts & Culture editors.

The animations seem more sophisticated this time. Was that just a general improvement you wanted to make?
What a nice thing to say! Matt has been wanting to experiment with stop motion for a while now, and this new round was a great opportunity to make these stand out. We host the site on Tumblr for a couple reasons, but a big one is that Tumblr features a lot of funny stuff and a lot of artful stuff, but rarely do the two meet. These feel different because they're something you want to look at and also something you might laugh at.

Have you ever actually produced Schadenfreezers as a product? If not, would you be interested in that?
Sure. If any of your readers are popsicle manufacturers who secretly kind of hate themselves, please have them contact us at your earliest convenience.

Microsoft wants to make sure you remember the famous image of the blue sky and rolling pasture that graced so many computer screens for so long.

As the world mourns (or not) the end of the road for Windows XP—as of Tuesday, Microsoft is no longer offering support for the operating system—Microsoft Netherlands has posted this nine-minute film on its YouTube channel about XP's famous default wallpaper.

The backstory is told by Charles O'Rear, the photographer who snapped the iconic picture, aptly titled "Bliss," in 1996 along a California highway north of San Francisco (reports seem to differ on whether it's Napa or Sonoma).

The video is a bit slow moving, but is worth watching mostly because of O'Rear's amusement at having stumbled, quite literally, into the background of history, and because of the irony that the photo was, contrary to much speculation, shot on the kind of analog film that digital has rendered obsolete (though Microsoft ultimately cropped the shot and pumped up the greens before presenting it to users).

Notably absent is any specific discussion of how much Microsoft originally paid O'Rear for the rights to an image that this video touts as perhaps the most viewed in history. O'Rear does point out that the original print was valued too highly for regular shipping services like FedEx to be willing carry it … but the courier's current maximum declared value for packages containing photos clocks in at a whopping $1,000, not counting for inflation.

O'Rear has said in other interviews that the fee was the most he, previously a photographer for National Geographic, ever received for a photograph, and one of the largest amounts ever paid for a single shot.

Regardless, the fact is, the use of the photo was marketing genius, as it projects natural serenity in a totally generic kind of way. (Guesses as to its provenance ranged over the years from New Zealand to Ireland to Washington state.)

Still, as inoffensive—pleasant, even—as it is to look at, it's memorable mostly because it couldn't be avoided. So, while Microsoft deserves credit for having some fun with the news that it's retiring an era-defining product, it's also hard not to interpret it all as a legacy technology company lamenting its once-great history as its modern significance has waned.

Via Devour.

So, here's a lovely little four-minute love story from Unilever's Cornetto ice cream brand in Turkey. And you're probably smarter than I am and can figure out what's actually going on in it. I've watched it at least five times, and I'm still confused.

I think it's kind of adorable and features the product in an unobtrusive way. And it's also a nice follow-up to last year's viral video from the brand.

It opens with the main character, a good looking guy, catching the eyes of the other main character, a good looking girl. I get that part. They spend the rest of the ad trying to find each other via social media. It's all set to a track by Turkish pop star Yal?n, who also makes an appearance … as a matchmaking fairy godfather. Maybe?

I can't really follow the plot, but it ends with the good-looking couple finishing off their Cornetto ice cream cones and making out while Yal?n looks on approvingly. I don't get that, either, but it's so cheesy it's cute.

I also find that the ad is much better if you mute the audio and play some Vivrant Thing instead. Your mileage may vary depending on your musical tastes.

Grey New York and its client, States United to Prevent Gun Violence, won a silver Lion in Film at Cannes last year for "Ed," their brutal spot about gun violence, set in a workplace.

The sequel, released today, titled "The Monster Is Real," takes place in a family home. Directed by Hornet's Yves Geleyn, the spot may be a cartoon, but that makes it no less devastating. We won't give away the plot, though the conclusion doesn't exactly come as a surprise. But again, that doesn't dull the impact much.

Critics will say that the kid wouldn't play with the gun if he was this afraid of it, though of course children aren't known for tempering their curiosity, either.

"In the wake of so many tragic mass shootings, the nation's focus has been on strengthening gun laws," says Sue Hornik, executive director of States United to Prevent Gun Violence. "But one preventable threat to children's safety is unlocked and loaded guns found around the house … the proverbial 'monster in the closet' of our new public service announcement."

In a release, the group also offered these sobering statistics:

• 1.5 million American children live in homes with unlocked and loaded firearms.
• Every day at least six children 18 and under are injured in an unintentional shooting.
• 75 percent of gun shot injuries to children under 10 that are serious enough to require hospitalization are due to unintentional shootings.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: States United to Prevent Gun Violence
Spot: "The Monster Is Real"
Agency: Grey
Worldwide Chief Creative Officer: Tor Myhren
Deputy Worldwide Chief Creative Officer: Per Pedersen
Executive Creative Directors: Rob Perillo, Rob Lenois
Art Director: Evan Ortolani
Copywriter: Daniel Alvarez
Director of Broadcast: Bennett McCarroll
Agency Executive Producer: James McPherson
Agency Producer: Zach Fleming
Account Director: Elizabeth Gilchrist
Account Executive: John Nelson
Production Company: Hornet
Director: Yves Geleyn
Executive Producer: Jan Stebbins
Composer: Mark Mothersbaugh
Music Company: Mutato Muzika
Music Producer: Natalie Montgomery
Music Engineer: Bradley Denniston
Music Supervision: Zach Pollakoff
Music, Sound Design: Dante Desole (Vision Post)
Principal Talent: Samantha Mathis, Anthony Arkin

Agency: Cheil
Chief Creative Officer- Nima Namchu
Creative Directors- Anupama Ramaswamy & Simran Sahni
Copywriter: Simran Sahni
Art Director: Anupama Ramaswany
Illustrator Company name: Myoo
Website myooworks.com
3d Artist : anshul dabral

The post DesiCreative by Cheil appeared first on desicreative.

Innovative newspaper ads are a rare beast. We've seen a few fun ones lately—the Game of Thrones ad with the dragon shadow; the ad for the movie The Book Thief with two almost completely blank pages.

Here's an interesting one from Colombia. It's an ad for kitchens hidden inside a fake classifieds page—thanks to a nifty 3-D effect applied to the text. "The kitchen you are imagining is in HiperCentro Corona," says the headline.

You can argue about how effective it might be. Is it too subtle? But it's conceptually strong (it's a great way to illustrate something that could be on your mind while idly reading a newspaper) and executed well, too. Plus, here we are talking about a newspaper ad from Colombia. How often does that happen?

Sancho BBDO copywriter Felipe Salazar posted the ad to his Behance page.

Via Design Taxi.