From the very Canadian, but not Canadien, news bureau: Red Tettemer O’Connell + Partners and Under Armour are launching a youth hockey contest tomorrow, October 12, called “Storm the Centre.” Two teams of skating youngsters will eventually win a chance to play at the Air Canada Centre, home of the Toronto Maple Leafs. I want to spell it center, but it’s for the kids, so I’ll keep it Canadian.
The contest consists of three stages – social media engagement, teamwork, and finally, hockey skills. These sort of pee-wee competitions happen all the time, but adding a social media component is a cool twist from RTO+P, especially in a hockey-crazed country, where presumably, families will claw for the chance to see their kids play on a pro rink. The details of the challenges haven’t been released yet, but you can check team eligibility and sign up here. To all the little Charlie Conways out there, have fun.
Remote Control Tourist, the new interactive digital/video Tourism Victoria project from Clemenger BBDO , Exit Films, and Tool director Jason Zada, is kind of like The Sims without the gibberish language. You can control people from your computer, suggest they eat a certain food, walk a certain direction, enter a certain door. If you don’t want to suggest activities via social media, you can just watch the live streams. Voyeurism at its finest, or at least, voyeurism at its least creepiest.
The project is meant to promote Australian tourism by showing off the sights and sounds of Melbourne, and the live stream, which runs October 9-13 for about eight hours per day, adds a compelling dimension to tourism advertising. One man and one woman will travel around the city with head-mounted cameras, tailoring their movements to the social media suggestions. Hear’s to hoping people use the opportunity to be classy and find out more about a beautiful city, and not, you know, be dumb and inappropriate on the Internet, like most of the time. The broadcast officially kicked off, well, about now.
September 14th saw the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series return to the Blue Lagoon on the scenic Pembrokeshire coastline in Wales. Red Bull decided to use a slightly different approach to capture the excitement of that day, including the dives from a 27 meter high platform.
They’ve released a stop-motion film, created using thousands of photos taken at the event by three top UK Instagramers: @danrubin, @jeera and @chaiwalla. The two minute video was stitched together out of photos taken over the course of just a few hours. It takes the viewer on a tour of all the action, capturing people’s reactions to the dives, divers climbing the ladder, the dives themselves, and (of course) the Red Bull stand. You get a nice mix of the excitement of the event, the natural beauty of the location, and a quick glance at the kind of people making up the audience. Everything is put together so seamlessly, you might not even notice it’s stop-motion.
For those of you who like beer and live reasonably close to Toronto, Open and Bier Markt have teamed up for a promotional campaign meant to make you all bubbly inside for the goodness of suds. Tall glasses brimming with foam, hangovers, and bad decisions. Oktoberfest is here.
To kick off the celebration, Bier Markt’s Facebook page has a Biervent (like advent, get it?) calendar, and for each day, there is a new billboard with a headline that might say, “Rock out with Your Sauerkraut” or “Get Schnitzel’d.” In addition to the social media, there will be events for all 32 days of Oktoberfest at Bier Markt, such as a Snout Sunday Roast and the aptly titled Bier and Lederhosen So In Right Now Event. Probably could’ve gotten more creative with that. It almost sounds like a bunch of people were sitting around a table, getting drunk, and they were like, “What should we call the event with beer and lederhosen?” Which is probably true. Credits after the jump.
OK so it’s not the same as jumping out of a capsule in space 120,000 feet above the ground but it’s cool all the same. And, perhaps, even more exciting because these jumpers don’t have a parachute to slow their fall.
Red Bull, again displaying its apparent fixation with heights, has released a stop motion film made from 21,489 photos taken by three Instagrammers over the course of three hours. What did these Instagrammers shoot? Proferssional divers leaping off a 27 meter high platform into the Blue Lagoon in Wales.
@danrubin, @jeera and @chaiwalla were the photographers for the day and it was all done to promote…wait, what? Nothing? You mean a brand sees value is producing interesting content for the enjoyment of consumers? Who knew? Stop the presses! This is radical stuff!
If you’ve ever had a nightmare boss in advertising, Zulu Alpha Kilo’s latest spot for NABS Vintage Intern Auction should appeal to you.
The NABS Vintage Intern Auction auctions off “twelve notable executives and thought leaders,” to be used as interns for a day, for the Canadian charitable group NABS, who provide assistance for people in communications and related industries who need help due to illness, injury, unemployment or financial difficulties. Winning bidders can assign their interns to do anything from giving a speech or holding a seminar to cleaning up the kitchen or getting coffee.
The spot highlights the revenge aspect of the auction, with bidders attempting to win the right to boss around a truly awful Chief Creative Officer. At the center of the spot is the eventual winning bidder, a man with an eye patch who the CCO told, “If you can work from home, you can work from Intensive Care.” He outbids the woman the CCO called “Sarah in bed and then said ‘I’m so sorry, Diane,’ which isn’t [her] name either.” I don’t know what kind of work he has for the CCO, but it won’t be pretty. Perhaps cleaning the bathroom floor with a toothbrush?
As you can tell from the synopsis, Zulu Alpha Kilo isn’t afraid to push the boundaries a little bit with some risque humor, and the result is a spot that is actually funny. We’re guessing that since it’s for a good cause, no one will be offended. No CCOs were harmed in the making of this video. At least not any that didn’t deserve it.
Here’s the full list of the “interns” up for bids, in case your boss from hell is one of them:
Claude Carrier – President, DentsuBos
Mary Maddever – VP & Editorial Director, Brunico Publishing
Young Glory Season 3 is upon us, with a twist. While previous iterations have included only Advertising briefs, this season kicks off with a separate Design category. More categories, more opportunities to win points, and more points is good for just about everything except golf and driving records. However, and I’ll inform you upfront, points from the Advertising category cannot combine with points from the Design category. When you enter, whether student or professional, choose wisely.
This month’s judges are R/GA Regional ECD David Brown (Advertising) and Collins New York Partner and ECD Leland Maschmeyer (Design). Brown’s ad brief focuses on wearable technology: “we are turning the table a little and asking you to think from “what” to “what if?” In the same realm as Nike Fuel, Google Glass, etc., Brown is asking for fashion and function. On the Design end, Maschmeyer’s brief deals with improving America’s healthcare system (don’t worry about issues such the healthcare lobby, Congressional gridlock, or Republican hostage-taking). From the brief: “Design can help in one key area: the customer’s relationship with their health insurance provider.” Sreamline, simplify, convenience. Do whatever you have to do to earn those points. Everyone is eligible.
Alas, it’s that time of year again when the industry converges on New York City for Advertising Week (damn, time flies). So, to help kick off the event, we gathered a few folks from the creative, media and publishing sides last week in our Mediabistro studios to discuss the weeklong festivities (as well as various other non-Advertising Week-related industry issues). Those taking part in the lively, free-flowing chat include PSFK founder/CEO Piers Fawkes, Huge creative director Ross Maupin and Scott Schwartz, senior partner, integrated planning at MEC.
The topic of this particular conversation was, yes, Advertising Week, including if its actually still worth attending and if so, what our participants are looking forward to at this year’s event. Tomorrow, the lads discuss the elephant in the room that is the Publicis-Omnicom merger. Stay tuned.
To bring opera to the people, Lowe Roche put a new spin on the FAO Schwarz-style giant piano (as made famous in this scene from Big) for TFO, the only public television station in Ontario featuring opera as part of their weekly program.
Set during the Festival d’Opéra de Québec, Lowe Roche assembled twelve opera singers to correspond with the twelve notes of the instrument. When these notes were played they lit up and the corresponding opera singer bellowed out his or her note. (Tom Hanks was conspicuously absent from the performance, unfortunately.) Everyone from children to seniors to dogs can be seen having a blast playing with the piano, while the opera singers concentrate on their every move to make sure they don’t miss their cue. Unfortunately, no one organized a group of twelve people to jump on the twelve keys at the same time to create a large atonal blast of opera awesomeness.
Lowe Roche and TFO found a unique way to engage their audience, while accomplishing the near-impossible task of making opera seem fun to young people. I’d venture a guess that more than a handful of children dragged along to the festival spent the entire time playing or watching TFO’s ‘L’Opéra Piano.’ To those youngsters saved from boredom, Lowe Roche and TFO are heroes. Credits after the jump. continued…
After a mastectomy, breast cancer patients are left with scars, and, in many cases, no nipples. These consequences of the operation can’t always be aided by reconstructive surgery — which is an expensive option at any rate. P.INK, which we’ve covered in the past, is a post-mastectomy support platform offering a different solution to women left with body image issues after a mastectomy: tattoos.
P.INK has been educating women about the potential of tattoos to help them take creative control of their post-op bodies with their Pinterest boards.Today, P.INK launched an online crowdfunding campaign to finance the tattoos of ten breast cancer survivors at an event called P.INK Day October 21st in Brookyln. The event, scheduled to coincide with Breast Cancer Awareness Month, will feature ten of the country’s top tattoo artists inking scar coverage and nipple replacement tattoos for ten breast cancer survivors.
“This is an investment in art,” says Noel Franus, one of the creatives at CP+B who helped launched the non-profit. “Public contributions will help commission beautiful work that will serve as a personal and permanent celebration of life.”
Donations are open starting today, at the P.INK Day Indiegogo campaign site. P.INK hopes that the inaugural P.INK Day at Saved Tattoo studio in Brookyln will be just the first of many to come.
Advertising Week X, the tenth annual week for people in the advertising industry to celebrate advertising by talking about, awarding, and giving tips about advertising is only a week away. What more appropriate way to celebrate advertising than with an advertisement for celebrating advertising? Yay, advertising!
The above advertisement comes from SF-based advertising agency Mekanism, which doesn’t seem to be an official partner or sponsor of Advertising Week so we’re assuming this advertisment was made just for love of the game. (The game is advertising, by the way.) While the ad does a good job of advertising all of the hipster/yuppie advertising people you’ll meet at Advertising Week, it doesn’t advertise one of the week’s biggest events: The Battle of the Ad Bands, in which advertising industry folks with trace amounts of musical acuity compete to be the best at simultaneously being in advertising and being in a band. I mean, CMJ is in town next week, but as an member of the advertising community, your attendance at the Battle of the Ad Bands should be mandatory if it isn’t already.
ESPN and ESPN Deportes will kick off Hispanic Heritage Month — which is not actually a calendar month, but a month-long period from September 15 through October 15 — with a 60-minute primetime special celebrating the most renowned Hispanic athletes airing on both networks Monday, September 17 at 8 p.m.
The top 10 countdown is sponsored by Jack Daniel’s and Gillette and will include such legends as Roberto Clemente, Lionel Messi, Oscar de la Hoya, and the soon-to-be-retired Mariano Rivera. Athletes were ranked from an initial list of 50 athletes by a panel of journalists, entertainers, athletes and Hispanic community leaders. One Nación was produced in front of a live live audience in Los Angeles. The bilingual show will be hosted by ESPN Deportes’ Adriana Monsalve and SportsCenter anchor Max Bretos and features special guests unveiling the countdown.
In the social sphere, Gillette is sponsoring a live Twitter fan vote encouraging fans to choose between the number one and number two athletes while discussing the countdown, while Jack Daniel’s will sponsor a recap of the top ten during the show as the top athletes are revealed. Both brands will also be integrated through different live events and programs scheduled for the rest of Hispanic Heritage Month, including vignettes featuring Hispanic athletes such as Carmelo Anthony, Sergio Romo, Victor Cruz, and Omar Gonzalez.
To promote the new, high-performance Lexus IS Hybrid, Lexus Italy, Saatchi & Saatchi Italy, Movie Magic International, LOGAN (LA&NY) and Fake Love collaborated to create “Trace Your Road,” an experiential event featuring Formula 1 driver, Jarno Trulli.
Held on July 26, “Trace Your Road” pit Trulli against a series of improvised racetracks, each one designed on a touch tablet in real-time by one of ten contest winners. Fake Love conceptualized and produced the generative visuals, projections and interactivity for the campaign. LOGAN directed the live action portion, and handled post VFX and finishing. Movie Magic International provided on-site pre-production and production for the spots and produced a behind-the-scenes documentary.
The live event took place inside an aircraft hangar near Rome and featured the new IS Hybrid, a collection of cameras, and real-time projections brought together by LOGAN director, Alan Bibby.
The ten finalists – selected from hundreds of applicants on Lexus’ Facebook page – were given the opportunity to sit in the passenger seat of the IS Hybrid with Trulli at the wheel. The course was then traced by contestants on a touch tablet that projected their designs onto the floor of the hangar using a collection of 12-20K and 22K projectors. The Lexus IS Hybrid was tracked using a custom high-res infrared (IR) camera system.
Now that everything’s online and it’s like the offline world doesn’t exist any longer, marketers spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how to promote their goods and services online. Websites are designed and created, blogs are authored, Facebook pages are crafted and tweets are sent. However, marketers can’t site behind a screen forever (well, maybe they can but we hope it doesn’t come to that) and there comes a time when they need to meet their potential customers and investors face-to-face.
Remember the trade show? Yea, that thing were all these people gravitate to one location for few days to do some business? Yea, that place. But in a convention center filled with hundreds of companies all trying to attract attention how does a marketer stand out from the crowd?
Remember how everyone has said banners are dead? Well they may be but not in the offline world. And they’re way less expensive than an online banner, as little as $50. Apart from a sexy booth babe, what attracts attention more than a well-designed banner? Need a good one? Check out these guys.
But trade shows aren’t the only place marketers can use their banners. For instance, they can be used to sponsor local community events. You’ve seen those flag banners, right? The ones that wave in the wind? If you’re doing an outside event, this style banner is perfect for capturing attention.
Just remember, everything in marketing isn’t digital. While everyone is lauding inbound marketing, content marketing, DSPs, native advertising, programmatic buying and social media just remember. We are still human and we still like to get away from the screen and get a little face time every once in a while. And for a marketer, implementing strategies that increase face time are, well, just smart and ROI efficient.
“The Big Ad Gig” turns five this year, meaning there’s another chance for six creatives to win a monthlong paid freelancing job at a New York City agency. Similar to last year’s campaign, contestants will have to deal with immediate pressure: they’ll each be given only 60 minutes to record a video response to the prompt question. Eight finalists will be selected, and then during Advertising Week, judges will whittle the eight down to six. An interesting stat worth noting: 28 of the 32 past finalists now have full-time positions at agencies.
Oil brand Shell really needs no help embarrassing itself. Their 2012 Arctic drilling program was so inept (including a rig grounding and a ship fire) that even the U.S. government said they screwed up. But Greenpeace decided to go ahead and give them a hand anyway.
Following their disastrous Alaskan campaign, Shell packed up and moved their Arctic drilling program to Russia, in a joint venture with state owned energy company, Gazprom. Greenpeace wanted to get the word out that Shell’s assault on the Arctic was far from over. What better place to do that than at Sunday’s F1 Shell Belgium Grand Prix, Shell’s biggest PR blitz of the year? Greenpeace International set up remote-controlled banners. The banners, which read “SaveTheArctic.org,” then popped up during the winner’s ceremony, as the German national anthem played. The second banner popped up just after an angry official removed the first one. Much angry crumpling of the second banner followed.
Video of the incident, entitled “Shell’s priceless F1 moment” went viral on YouTube, before F1 management demanded it be removed for “copyright complaints” just before it hit 240,000 views. The reaction to the video should only fuel Shell’s embarrassment. As Greenpeace International Arctic campaigner Ben Ayliffe put it, “Bernie Ecclestone and Shell might know how to fill a racetrack, but they clearly have no idea how social media works. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen the moment Shell’s Arctic plans were uncovered at the Grand Prix, and removing the video will only encourage thousands more to laugh at the company too.”
Indeed, the video has been reposted by myriad other users, and is available at Vimeo and on countless blogs. Shell’s miscalculated reaction to the YouTube post will only add fuel to the fire of public ridicule. You’d think that a company that spends million on branding and PR would know better, but I guess there’s no underestimating Shell’s incompetence.
As we wrap up summer (went too fast, but FALL IN NY!), we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the happenings during the 2013 Art Directors Club Porfolio Night All-Stars. During the weeklong event from a couple of weeks ago, creative types from 24 countries were tasked with a brief to create a global platform for the Ford Focus to ensure the auto brand we see here in North America is the same we would see overseas. Here are just a few recollections from the All-Stars who made it to the event, which kicked off on August 5 and featured the likes of DDB Worldwide CCO Amir Kassaei, Barbarian Group co-founder/CEO Benjamin Palmer and AKQA CCO, Rei Inamoto. First up to bat, we have Sean Collander, copywriter and PN11 Chicago All-Star.
“Camaraderie is not exactly what you would expect when pitting 23 young creatives against each other in a competition to create work for one of the world’s biggest car brands, but that is exactly what I’ve found over the last few days here at the Portfolio Night 11 All-Stars competition. Now, don’t get me wrong, we all want to win, but it’s coming out in the work, not in our relationships with each other. I’ve had conversations about the future of advertising, European politics, the merits of both Texas BBQ and Kansas City BBQ, rap videos, and Robin Thicke’s hair. Different teams will regularly get together to play a game of Pictionary to let off steam. At the end of a full day of concepting, we will all get together for a few drinks, and have made the bar down the street the unofficial after party location of the week.
I think I can speak for all 23 participants when I say we’ve experienced a lot over such a short amount of time, and it has been more incredible than any one of us imagined it could be. The Art Directors Club has been extremely gracious with their knowledge and resources, managing to bring together an unbelievable list of guest speakers, judges, and sponsors.
When I attended Portfolio Night 11 in Chicago back in May, I went simply looking to get feedback on my work and maybe, If I was lucky, a job. I had no idea that a few months later I would be selected to work on a brief for Ford with 22 other creatives representing countries all over the world. I can honestly say that this is one of the most fun and stressful experiences I have ever had, and am truly humbled to be a part of the very first Portfolio Night All Stars.”
After the jump, check out more from Isabelle Osterlund, another PN 11 All-Star from Stockholm.
We believe the Vimeo head sums it all up, but here we have a recent speech from Ivan Cash, the self-proclaimed “interactive artist” and co-conspirator behind projects like “Couchella.” If you have 35 minutes to spare, and can handle mentions of Urban Outfitters among other things, feel free to indulge your lunch break with this speech from Cash, who tells us that ads aren’t the key to success in the ad biz; personal projects are. Yep, it’s self-promotional and possible a little douchey, but can’t say the idea of side efforts from agency folks haven’t intrigued us in the past. Give it a whirl if you will.
It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with the 30-and-under global creative battle that is Young Glory. Well, season two is now in the books and just like last time, there are two creative teams–one professional, one student–that the YG folks have crowned the most consistent throughout the eight-month battle. The Australian duo of Tristan Viney and Kieran Adams –aka Invisible Pants–took home professional Young Glory honors, which this year were determined by judges including ex-W+K adman Jim Riswold, now-former CP+B ECD Tom Markham and TBWA worldwide digital CD, David Lee.
You can click through the image above for a visual narrative of the YG2 professional battle, which also included submissions from TracyLocke (which took 2nd place), Tribal DDB and BBDO creatives. Below and after the jump are a couple of examples of Invisible Pants’ work throughout YG2 and a full rundown of the competition, in both pro and student categories, can be seen here.
On June 21, the sun shone for 24 hours in Iceland. No darkness for an entire day thanks to our buddy, the Summer Solstice (you can watch a cool slideshow of the never-ending sun here). The phenomenon is actually called a “midnight sun,” and occurs in a handful of places around the world, including Alaska, but for Reyka Vodka, the celebration begins and ends with Iceland. Reyka teamed up with Red Tettemer + Partners for “A Celebration of Summer Solstice,” which probably conjures up images of the Nordic populous engaging in a nationwide rave with a lot of blonde hair swooshing around.
Prior to the blonde bash, Reyka built up momentum on the obligatory social media channels, even offering free trips to Iceland for winners of an Instagram photo contest. This is not a what-happens-in-Iceland-stays-in-Iceland party, either. Reyka also had solstice shindigs in Chicago and San Francisco. The brand sponsored a total of 54 solstice parties in America, including a main event in a Williamsburg bar. The sun may not have been shining 24 hours straight in Brooklyn, but when vodka is involved, drinkers won’t notice the difference anyway. Credits after the jump.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
