Hasta La Creative!

CP+B Miami named three new creative directors with the hiring of Juan Perez and the promotions of Alvaro Ramos and Jeff Siegel.

Ramos and Siegel have worked as a creative team at CP+B Miami for the past year and a half, working with brands including Vonage, Ryder, Mission 22, Santa Margherita and letgo as associate creative directors, following Siegel’s arrival from Energy BBDO. With Energy BBDO, Siegel served as vice president, associate creative director and worked with clients including Wrigley, Lay’s Quaker, Ziploc and Raid. He previously spent time with agencies including Cole & Weber and Publicis. Ramos arrived at CP+B Miami around four and a half years ago, following nearly four and half years with The Vidal Partnership, working with clients including Sprint, Cadbury Adams, Rémy Martin and the Ad Council. Before that he served in art director roles for agencies including 180 Amsterdam, BBDO, Leo Burnett and FCB. 

“Alvaro and Jeff have been stars here for a while,” CP+B chairman Chuck Porter said in a statement. “They’re not just serious talents, they never quit – they have the passion and drive that it takes to actually get good work produced. And Juan, well, he made himself so valuable during his freelance stint that we just had to get him here for real. This is all really good news for Miami and for CP+B.”

Perez joins CP+B full-time after a period as a freelance creative director and art director with CP+B’s Los Angeles office, after a year as a group creative director and art director with Grupo Gallegos, working with brands including Mitsubishi, Comcast, Valvoline and JCPenney. Prior to that he spent two years as co-executive creative director and art director at Blitz in Los Angeles, where he worked with brands such as Naked Juice, CiCi’s Pizza and Mirage Resort & Casino. That followed two years as a creative director/art director with Siltanen + Partners, working with brands including Yakult, Skechers, Kindle and Suzuki. Before that he spent a year as vice president, executive creative director with Mullen, working on brands such as DSW Shoes and T.J.Maxx, after three years as senior vice president, group creative director/art director with Energy BBDO, working with such clients as Wrigley and Jim Beam.

CP+B goes with an elaborate anti-pitch in its work for Fruit of the Loom’s new Micro-Mesh Breathable Boxer Briefs, which are intended to keep guys a little cooler below the waist.

The campaign features the ridiculous and desperate co-owners of Josh and Donny’s Supercool Superstore for Men, which was apparently the go-to place for men’s pelvic cooling products before Fruit of the Loom came along. In a series of fake ads, and on a garishly moronic website, Josh and Donny reveal that they’re going out of business—because their stupid products are no longer selling.

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Infiniti recreates the “flirting on the highway” scene from 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation with one of that film’s original stars (not Chevy Chase, unfortunately) in this Crispin Porter + Bogusky ad tied to the Vacation remake coming later this month.

Here, Ethan Embry (who played Rusty in Vegas Vacation back in ’97) replaces Chase in the Clark Griswold role, rolling down the road with his family en route to Walley World for some R&R. Instead of a crappy station wagon, however, they’re ensconced in a comfy, high-tech Infiniti QX60 SUV.

Embry is soon distracted by an attractive blonde woman in a sleek convertible, and some intensely silly flirting ensues. (Sorry, Ethan, but nothing tops Chevy’s self-consciously goofy grin. Nothing. Ever.)

In the movie, Christie Brinkley played the blonde. Will she show up here? Perhaps in an ironic punch line that makes me feel ungodly old?

Um, maybe. Cute enough ad, though.

Though we cannot confirm specifics at this time, sources close to the matter tell us that the Los Angeles offices of Crispin Porter + Bogusky recently won a pitch to create work for Elon Musk’s other crazy venture, PayPal.

The online payment service recently split with eBay, and earlier this year its revenues overtook those of its parent company for the first time. While the company did not publicly announce a review, we hear that Crispin’s West Coast office pitched and won some portion of the business last month. PayPal’s PR firm did not directly respond to our queries and an agency spokesperson referred us to “the client,” which would be a very odd statement if the two parties are not in fact working together.

You may recall that the company’s very first domestic ads, which debuted in 2012, starred Jeff Goldbum; they were created by Publicis & Hal Riney.

Havas Worldwide won the global creative account back in 2014 and created PayPal’s first international campaigns, which ran in Australia and Europe last May. The company also worked with Kansas City’s Muller Bressler Brown, which went on to work with its then-parent company as well.

PayPal’s most recent campaign “People Rule,” which popped up all over the New York subway system last year, was created by Havas Worldwide New York in collaboration with the animators at Studio 6 and sound design studio Antfood.

Based on the company’s past and present relationships with its creative agencies, we assume that any forthcoming work from Crispin will run domestically.

Updates when we get them.

CP+B created a PSA campaign for Mission 22, an initiative the agency created to deal with the issue of veteran suicide, whose name refers to the sad statistic that 22 veterans commit suicide in America every day.

“War At Home” aims to deliver the message that “Suicide, not war, is now the leading cause of death in the military” through an online video and a series of print ads running in magazines including Esquire, Fortune and Money. For the project, CP+B collaborated with veteran war photographer David Guttenfelder, who took photos of the homes where veterans committed suicide, with messages like “Ryan Clapper died on this battlefield six thousand miles from Iraq.” The campaign drives traffic to the Mission 22 website, which aims not just to raise awareness but to provide a list of resources for veterans who need help. It’s an arresting campaign that can hopefully not only bring the issue to light in an attention-grabbing way, but help veterans find the proper channels to deal with the lingering mental health issues caused by combat. The video above provides more of a look at Guttenfelder and the creation of the campaign, and head over to Adweek for a more in-depth look at the print ads.

On Tuesday, Domino’s flooded its Twitter feed with a heap of tweets written almost completely in pizza emojis. They looked like sentences. They were even punctuated. Not only that, but Domino’s had the gusto to respond to people curious about the stunt with—what else?—pizza emoji-filled tweets.

Perplexing? Sure. Annoying? A little. A promotion? Of course.

Starting May 20, Domino’s customers will be able to order pizza via Twitter. You can hook up your Twitter to your online Domino’s account, and with a quick pizza emoji tweet at the brand, you’ll have an order on the way.

So, what better way to promote this than to confuse one’s consumers? Lots of people seemed to get into it, though, and JCPenney even briefly joined in the emoji-only banter.

“We wanted to start a conversation about why Domino’s has gone emoji crazy in the lead-up to the emoji announcement,” says Matt Talbot, vp and creative director of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency that handles Domino’s creative business. He explained that the tweets were modeled after real tweets the brand usually sends to customers.  

“There’s no decoder machine to work back to the true answer of the text, though,” he said. 

Check out more from the the pizza emoji takeover below.

A few weeks ago, we posted on what appeared to be CP+B’s first work for its newest client, Infiniti.

Following what seemed like an endless review, Crispin won the business after a July breakup with TBWA; the client finally confirmed the CP+B win in October.

A month ago, we found a spot promoting the Q50 model on the Facebook page of audio production house JSM Music. The spot, which had not been released to media, was attributed to Crispin — but a contact now tells us that most of the work involved in what was essentially 30 seconds of car stunt footage was that of the client’s previous AOR.

The client has yet to debut its official “brand work” by the new agency — but earlier this month it did post what is definitely the first ad by Crispin.

Here’s “Driver’s Seat”:

So Infiniti is NOT one of Google’s self-driving cars…but who would admit to owning one of those anyway?

While the coming work will be completely separate from this particular ad, it does provide us with some hints as to the campaign’s creative direction: a combination of what the car’s new features can do and how driving it will make you feel.

No word on when, exactly, the larger effort will debut.

Kraft has changed how it defines consumers who eat Velveeta, from age and gender (millennial males) to mind-set (fun people who like to indulge). As such, new ads for Velveeta Shells & Cheese feature a broadly appealing pair of prospectors from the 19th century instead of a cool dude who sells remote-control helicopters at a mall.

In one TV ad breaking today, the bearded prospectors, one older and one younger, marvel at the “liquid gold” they’re eating, and the young one asks the oldster how he found it. Then what looks like a campfire conversation in the woods pulls back to reveal a whole different scene entirely.

Future spots will also find humor in the odd placement of frontiersmen in a modern supermarket. The campaign also includes online ads, social media marketing and a new wrinkle for the brand, radio ads, said Tiphanie Maronta, a senior brand manager at Kraft.

The ads are the first for Velveeta from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which inherited the brand from Wieden + Kennedy in an agency consolidation late last year. 

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.