Hasta La Creative!

DigitasLBi hired David Chriswick as senior vice president, creative strategy lead for its Chicago and San Francisco offices. In the role, Chriswick will be based out of Chicago and report to senior vice president, connections and brand experience planning Jonathan Tatlow. 

“David has a proven track record of award winning work with a passion for insightful thinking and brave ideas,” Tatlow said in  a statement. “His expertise to inspire and create across a breadth of categories, makes him a perfect fit for DigitasLBi. We look forward to him continuing to set the bar ever-higher.”

Chriswick joins DigitasLBi from DDB Worldwide, where he served for over three and a half years as global strategy director out of the agency’s Chicago office. While there, he led strategic planning on the agency’s international Mars account, which includes Wrigley, Mars Chocolate and Mars Petcare. Before that he spent nearly two and a half years as a planning director for DDB Sydney, leading the office’s strategic offering and working with clients including Mars, McDonald’s and Campbells Arnotts. A native of Wales, he began his career with Ogilvy Heathworld (formerly Bates Healthworld) in London as an account executive, leaving two years later to become a senior account manager with In Vivo Communications in Melbourne, later joining McCann and then DDB in account management roles. 

“The concoction of in-house capabilities at DigitasLBi is mouthwatering for an account planner like myself,” said Chriswick.  “Transformative creative opportunities lie in so many places nowadays, so with these resources within arm’s reach, I’m very excited. DigitasLBi can become the future-proof agency model that more and more clients are realizing they need.”

About a month ago, DDB Chicago released a re-make of State Farm’s 2011 ad “State of Unrest” (more commonly known as “Jake From State Farm”) reimagined with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin reprising their Conehead roles as Beldar and Prymaat. Now, the agency has released the Coneheads followup, entitled “France.”

Behind-the-scenes footage from the last spot hinted at the direction of “France,” which opens on the Coneheads, whose microwave has just broke. Using the magic jingle, they summon a State Farm representative, not realizing that they’re revealing that they are alines, and not, in fact, from France. In an effort to reverse his mistake, they use the jingle once more to transport everyone to France, with the ad ending with tagline, “Save Mass Quantities.” It’s not the most imaginative of scenarios, but Coneheads fans should enjoy seeing Aykroyd and Curtin reprising their roles once again nevertheless. The ad debuted online and during the CBS broadcast of NCIS: Los Angeles. It will be interesting to see if DDB Chicago sticks with the Coneheads for more ads or switches to other retired SNL characters (which State Farm can do thanks to a deal between the company and Lorne Michaels‘ Broadway Video Entertainment).

DDB Chicago is launching the first big broadcast spot for Mars brand Milky Way in roughly five years, extending a print and digital campaign entitled “Sorry I Was Eating a Milky Way.”

The broadcast launch comes on the heels of a sizable digital push for 3 Musketeers, another Mars brand that doesn’t receive the same kind of marketing push as Snickers and M&Ms. “These are beloved brands that consumers grew up with, but they tend to forget about them,” Allison Miazga-Bedrick,  Mars’ brand director for filled bars, told AdAge, referring to Milky Way and 3 Musketeers. She added that the new marketing push is intended to keep both brands relevant, particularly with a millenial audience.

The spot shows people in various professions screwing up because they’re too distracted by the Milky Way they’re eating. This ranges from a captain grounding his ship, to a lumberjack felling a tree on someone’s car, to a tattoo artist giving a man a “No Regerts” tattoo. It’s a simple, humorous approach that has been successful thus far in the print and digital campaign, which has run since 2012.

It’s been a while since we last saw ads for Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit. For a Throwback Thursday reminder, check out this 2000 relic starring Aaron Paul aka Jesse Pinkman.

Earlier this week, DDB Chicago launched a new campaign for the client; while the agency produced some print work over the summer and its Australian office produced some unusual creative a few years ago, these two TV spots are the brand’s first in more than a decade.

The opening ad’s headline is fairly self-explanatory: “Locker Room Guys Resort to Tasteful Arm Farts.”

The second spot continues with the “fun triggered by chewing a piece of Juicy Fruit” theme: the characters can’t speak because the gum is so deliciously sweet…

No word on whether we should expect more TV spots in this series.

Creative Agency

DDB

John Maxham – Chief Creative Officer

Mark Gross – EVP, Executive Creative Director

Matt Collier – Creative Director

Wayne Robinson – Creative Director

Bart Culberson – Creative Director

Diane Jackson – EVP, Executive Director of Integrated Production

Will St. Clair – VP, Executive Producer

Luke LiManni – Producer

Scott Terry – Production Manager

Nicholas Papaleo – Audio Engineer

Bobby Lord – Audio Assistant

Stacey Simcik – Audio Producer

David Chriswick – SVP, Group Strategy Director

Matt Mullen – Strategy Director

Heather Stuckey – Global Business Director

Kate Christiansen – SVP, Group Business Director

Phyllis Lee – VP, Account Director

Alexander Wood – Account Manager

Production Company

Tool

Benjamin Weinstein – Director

Oliver Fuselier – Managing Director Live Action

Robert Helphand – EP

Jason Manz – Producer

Marcelo Durst – DP

Post Production Companies

Filmworkers

Derek de Board – EP

Casey Swircz – Producer

Fred Keller – Colorist

Rob Churchill – Creative Director/Flame Artist

Spot Welders

Kevin Zimmerman – Editor

Sophie Kornberg – Edit Assistant

Denise Brown – Producer

Carolina Sanborn – Executive Producer

David Glean – Managing Partner

Butter.

Fred Szymanski – Sound Designer

Ian Jeffreys – EP

Producer: Annick Mayer

Vitamin Pictures

Sam Gierasimczuk – ACD / 3D Lead / Compositor

Michael Siegel – 3D Modeler

Danny DelPurgatorio – Executive Creative Director

Larissa Berringer – Executive Producer

Here we thought last week’s BBDO Throwback Thursday campaign for Twix would fill our 90s nostalgia quotient for the month.

But a coming campaign created by DDB Chicago to promote State Farm promises to pack in more former Saturday Night Live stars than an Adam Sandler movie.

Here’s the first spot:

Nice to see Rob Schneider get work when he’s not busy blaming Big Pharma for Robin Williams’ suicide.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

State Farm's neighborhood-destroying alien robot is back after a successful run in 2011's "Chaos in Your Town" campaign from DDB, and this time it's coming right for you.

Using the GPS in your smartphone, a new iAd from State Farm lets you create a custom video of the robot stomping around your current location. As you can see in the video below, the resulting Chaos clip uses Google Streetview images instead of real-time augmented reality, so it's not quite as dramatic as it theoretically could be. But for something that's created through an ad rather than an app, it's a pretty impressive demonstration of what mobile ads are capable of these days. 

It's no surprise the insurer is bringing back "Chaos in Your Town," which racked up some pretty impressive numbers in terms of consumer engagement. After the jump, check out the interactive campaign's key stats provided by DDB.

In the first 10 weeks of the 2011 "Chaos in Your Town" effort, with a digital media spend around $700,000, the campaign:
• Garnered more than 900 blog mentions
• Saw more than 1 million user-generated films created
• Resulted in more than 200 million user-generated impressions
 
In the following 20 months, without any paid media support, the campaign went on to generate:
• More than 6 million additional user-generated videos, bringing the total to about 7 million films 
• More than 800 million user-generated impressions

You can still make a State of Chaos video for yourself on the campaign microsite.

Chaos in Your Town Mobile iAd Credits:

Agency: DDB, Chicago
Chief Creative Officer: Ewan Patterson
Executive Creative Director: Joe Cianciotto
Group Creative Directors: Barry Burdiak, John Hayes
Creative Directors: Bob Davies, Matt Christiansen
Art Director: Megan Sheehan
Copywriter: Melissa McCarthy
Director of Digital Production: Paul Sundue
Executive Producer, Digital: Carly Ferguson
Executive Producer: Scott Kemper
Account Director: Gladys Jeffrey
Account Supervisor: Heidi Frank

Production Company: B-Reel