Time was, McDonald’s put toys in their Happy Meals to promote movies. Now they just dye their burgers, we guess. McDonald’s China is making chicken and pork sandwiches with special red and green buns in advance of the Angry Birds Movie, and they’re hardly a welcoming sight.
Snickers has dreamed up one of the cooler online/offline advertising-meets-point-of-sale hybrid campaigns of the year, introducing a “Hungerithm” that gauges the mood of the Internet and adjusts the price of its candy bars in 7-Eleven stores accordingly, in real time.
The angrier the Internet, the cheaper the candy—to make everyone a bit happier.
The restaurant business in Brussels has been suffering tremendously since the terrorist attacks of March 22. The bankruptcy rate of eateries in the city has increased by 1500 percent since then, according to ad agency Famous—with a nation of gourmands frequently staying home instead of enjoying dinner out.
Famous decided to do something about this. So it teamed up with De Tijd and L’Echo, the leading national business newspapers in Belgium, for a social campaign called #DiningforBrussels.
Here’s a fun if punishing way to get people to think about the ingredients in your beer.
Heineken, the official beer of the UEFA Champions League, with help from Publicis Italy, put up hundreds of outdoor ads around Milan recently featuring a gargantuan 100-character hashtag (that’s the most allowed by Twitter). People were encouraged to share the hashtag in social for a chance to win tickets for the UCL Final.
For this year’s Cannes Film Festival, BBDO created four limited-edition beer-can designs for Stella Artois. But instead of promoting the brand’s values in a traditional way—flashier takes on the logo and the like—the series of cans tell a comic book-style story that takes place on the legendary Croisette.
This week is American Craft Beer Week. To celebrate, craft brewers have teamed up to create a single beer, which is being made using the same recipe by more than 100 craft brewers—and in an act of even greater unity, features the names of 4,490 craft brewers from all 50 states on the can.
Kyrie Irving has an arsenal of secret tricks that make him great at basketball, but his latest reveal may be his most surprising edge yet—his own personal donut.
Here’s a gum for people who feel they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.
Wrigley’s Orbit is rolling out a new campaign tagged “Time to Shine,” a shift from the brand’s familiar “Just brushed clean feeling” to something more aspirational.
“The idea is that when you have a clean mouth or fresh breath, you feel more confident,” John Starkey, regional vice president of marketing at Wrigley Americas, tells AdFreak. “The scripts are a celebration of what can happen when you feel ready to take on your ‘Time to Shine’ moment.”
British cereal brand Alpen sends up sunny start-your-day-right clichés in two fun 30-second ads by BBH London—because a good breakfast cereal can’t guarantee you’ll have a good day … but at least you’ll enjoy the meal.
As completely invented, marketing-driven rituals go, Corona Extra has a fun one on its hands with the #LimeDrop, a campaign the Mexican brewer is running across social media for Cinco de Mayo.
Taking care of yourself and eating healthy is all well and good when life is going smoothly. But when does life ever go smoothly?
That’s the message of a comical new campaign by Droga5 for Pure Protein, maker of protein bars, powder and shakes. (Pure Protein is owned by NBTY, for whom Droga5 is also working on the MET-Rx brand.)
Three online spots focus humorously on the “Derailers” who totally muck up your plans for the day, making you much more likely to go for an unhealthy snack. Which is why you should always carry a Pure Protein bar with you, the ads say, so you can get your 19-21 grams of pure whey protein with only 3 grams or less of sugar.
April Fools’ Day was a month ago, but KFC is only just now announcing that it has made two edible nail polishes that bring the classic tagline, “Finger Lickin’ Good,” grossly to life.
The first campaign for Grandma’s cookies from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners wrestles with a timeless question: “Are you my grandma?”
This twisted take on the kids’ classic Are You My Mother? combines the delightful naiveté of the 1960 P.D. Eastman book with a deepening sense of confusion. It seems the nostalgia sparked by the smell of a cookie can quickly lead even straight-laced adults astray.
Wasn’t it fun when we were kids to doodle on restaurants’ paper placements with crayons? Well, McDonald’s has introduced a high-tech, musical version of that sort of play with McTrax—a snazzy placemat that acts like a little music production station.
TBWANeboko in the Netherlands created McTrax. The placemat, developed with This Page Amsterdam, uses conductive ink, a small battery and a thin circuit board with 26 digital touchpoints. You put you phone on it, download an app and make music with in-house produced audio loops, synths and musical effects. You can also record your own voice.
Playing on the double-sticked nature of the product, Twix in the Nordics pulled a modern—and more discomfiting—version of Doublemint’s “Double Your Pleasure.”
Patchwork Group in Denmark helped prep the campaign, which will run in all Nordic nations. In the video, unsuspecting café patrons sit down at a table and immediately start to notice something slightly off.
They are surrounded by various sets of twins.
Livestreaming brand stunts are getting more and more popular—one of our recent favorites being the Waitrose campaign from the U.K. that showed live feeds from the grocery chain’s farms. Here’s a more gimmicky one from Portugal that tries to combine livestreaming with GIFs—or rather, a live-action imitation of GIFs.
Earlier this year, Organic Valley launched a brilliantly idiotic campaign to save bros from synthetic protein. Now, the dairy marketer wants you to know the work isn’t done.
A new video from Alex Bogusky-backed agency Humanaut introduces an anonymous bro-themed hotline, where would-be good samaritans can try to help without risking juvenile retaliation (recounted in the ad as 60 Minutes style confessionals).
The hotline promotes an online component that asks users to name the Twitter handle of a bro in need of saving, and select up to seven of his bro qualities, like whether he has a tribal tattoo. Each quality comes with its own special video appeal.
Overall, the new work’s best part might be the spokeswoman’s crazy eyes—clocking in at a higher degree of intensity than in February’s more deadpan launch spot. The basic concept here is, at its heart, the exact same joke as the original, just stretched further, at moments to the point of feeling thin.
But it does benefit from new gems, like suggesting that if bros weren’t propping up the market for gold chains, the value of precious metals (and ultimately the world economy) might collapse. Other excellent little touches include an edit halfway through the clip on tanning, when the spokeswoman suddenly turns orange, or the video on puerile innuendo, when she addresses the viewer as “a real Edgar Allen Bro.”
And anyway, the whole thing wouldn’t really capture the essence of bro if it didn’t harp on the same gag over and over again.
CREDITS
Client: Organic Valley
Product: Organic Fuel
Campaign: The Brononymous Hotline
Agency: Humanaut
Creative Advisor: Alex Bogusky
Creative Director: David Littlejohn
Strategy: Andrew Clark
Account Director: Elizabeth Cates
Copywriter: Andrew Ure / David Littlejohn
Art Director: Matt Denyer / Daniel Edelman
Senior Designer: Stephanie Gelabert
Creative Intern: Sam Hazelfeldt
Production Company: Fancy Rhino, Chattanooga, Tenn.
Director: Daniel Jacobs
Producer: Katie Nelson / Ivannah Flores
Director Of Photography: Phil Dillon
Photographer: Jaime Smialek / John Goodridge / Cooper Winterson
Editor: Colin Loughlin / Tyler Beasley
Colorist: Andrew Aldridge
Production Designer: Chad Harris
Music Company: Skypunch Studios, Chattanooga, Tenn.
Composer: Carl Cadwell
Media Partner: Redwood, Inc.
Peyton Manning is back to shame more lazy people into earning their Gatorade with sweat, and this time he’s brought his brother with him.
In a new reality-style ad series from TBWAChiatDay, Peyton, quarterback of the Denver Broncos, and Eli, quarterback of the New York Giants, play coach to college students who are foolishly trying to use money to get drinks out of a Gatorade vending machine. Rob Belushi, who starred as the convenience store clerk in a similar series last year, returns here as a deadpan janitor.
Despite the possibility that everything is staged, the reactions of the kids, when it dawns on them that the two adults hovering over him are actually football stars, are pretty priceless. And it’s refreshing to see an automated dispenser that refuses to comply, no matter what you do. (The kids are advised that they have to “Sweat it to get it,” but that doesn’t seem to work, either.)
Some other spots show Houston Texans defensive end J.J. Watt putting other students through the wringer in various ways.
The concept first launched last August. The “Sweat it to get it” tagline is still charmingly snide, but seems to cut out a significant portion of the population who drink Gatorade only to recover from hangovers—unless that counts as hard work, which it should.
Regardless, the Mannings can’t easily beat their ridiculous rap bit for DirecTV—at least not by sitting back and letting everyone else do the heavy lifting.
Wheaties is wheat cereal. Hefeweizen is wheat beer. Now, General Mills has done the inevitable and created a Wheaties-branded Hefeweizen in partnership with Minneapolis craft brewery Fulton.
“We were intrigued from the get-go on this idea for many reasons, including that we’re both Minneapolis companies, and that the beer and the cereal both started from the same place in terms of raw ingredients and the same city,” Fulton president and co-founder Ryan Petz says in this General Mills blog post.
“We had been sampling a number of Hefeweizens, so we had been discussing with the Wheaties team what we liked,” says Petz. “Someone on the team said HefeWheaties, and it kind of sprung out from there.”
Everything from the recipe to the can design was a collaboration, which came about simply because some General Mills employees are friends with some of the folks at Fulton. (Petz even worked at General Mills for a while.)
At least for now, you’ll have to travel to Minnesota to sample the stuff. Beginning Aug. 26, it will be available in the Twin Cities market in 4-pack cans of 16oz. tallboys. it won’t be available for shipment or purchase outside Minnesota.
“We’ll see how people react to it,” says Petz. “If it’s something everybody loves, we’ll obviously consider doing it again in a bigger and more widely distributed way in the future.”
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