Hasta La Creative!

Costa Rican drivers are getting an eyeful when they pass this billboard for Republica Parrillera Pilsner beer. Looking at the front of the billboard, nothing seems amiss. But when viewed from behind … well, yeah, that does look like a giant penis, doesn’t it?

As always with such placements, there’s debate over whether this was intentional or a mistake. Proponents of the former say it’s brilliant marketing, as drivers who approach the ad from the back are probably fairly likely to check out the front of the ad as they pass—behavior that precious few billboards provoke. Those who think it’s a mistake can’t fathom the kind of balls it would take to put a giant dick on a billboard.

Via AgencySpy.

In response to the mundane ease of modern travel, Hendrick’s Gin has developed the world’s only flying cucumber—a 130-foot dirigible that clips along at the civilized speed of 35 mph, just slow enough not to blow off your steampunk hat.

They are whipping out their big cucumber in 13 cities across the nation and giving a very small number of lucky gin lovers a brief yet glorious ride on the airship. They will be in New York on June 14, just in time to coincide with England’s National Cucumber Day.

If you are wondering why a cucumber, Hendrick’s Gin is flavored with both cucumber and rose—you know, a phallic symbol and a yonic symbol infused into one gin (it would be a lot harder to make a rose-shaped airship). And if you’re wondering why anyone in their right mind would build a blimp, you simply have to look to the history of gin itself.

Though the brand was created in 1999, Hendrick’s is sold in an old-fashioned apothecary bottle, and the visual essence of the brand seems quite nostalgic for the time when gin was the most popular drink in England, consumed at a rate of two pints per Londoner per week—you know, right before it was blamed as one of the main causes of crime and became strictly regulated with the Gin Act of 1751. But oh, to go back to the gay times of the gin craze! Back to 1785 and the first crossing of the English Channel by hand-propelled balloon.

So, sign up for this very limited engagement and what will probably be your only chance to sip “dirigible-inspired” cocktails in an actual dirigible.

Vodka has long been well known and well loved for being flavorless. For the last few years, producers have worked to expand the market by introducing exotic flavors that get stranger with every passing year. But unless you closely examine the vodka aisle on the reg, you might not be aware of how weird it’s gotten.

That’s why AdFreak asked me, a bartender by night and cocktail science blogger by day, to track down the weirdest vodkas currently available. For those brave souls who are truly curious about flavored liquors, I even came up with some recommendations on ways to mix them. Check it all out below.

—Clair McLafferty is a bartender, freelance writer and Mental Floss cocktail science blogger based in Birmingham, Ala. Follow her on Twitter at @see_clair_write.

Are you a greedy person who doesn’t like to share your nachos with your friends? If so, Taco Bell wants you to buy its giant nacho for one.

In a new ad from Deutsch LA, a young man with exactly the kind of dour demeanor you’d expect from a nacho hoarder rants about the injustices of sharing, the social institution. In all honesty, it’s a sentiment we’ve all probably felt in one moment of weakness or another, which gives it some resonance. And the spot scores extra points for working in some dings against Facebook—namely, the culture of excessive baby photos and cat pics (though let’s be real, people who don’t like babies and animals are, in all likelihood, soulless). The look on the actor’s face when he’s swiping through his tablet is pretty much perfect.

Overall, though, the commercial doesn’t do a great job of making the gloppy, cheesy mess of a ground-meat pocket that can’t rightfully be called a nacho (the “Grilled Stuft Nacho,” which the brand just brought back from the dead) actually appetizing. But at least the brand’s marketing team knows to embrace the sociopathic demographic—when it’s not busy railing against the evils of a certain totalitarian clown.

CREDITS
Client: Taco Bell
Chief Marketing Officer: Chris Brandt
VP, Brand Creative Director: Tracee Larocca
Director of Advertising: Aron North
Manager, Brand Experience: Ashley Prollamante
Associate Manager, Brand Experience: Alexandra Bunn
Food Consultant: Lois Carson Hunter

Agency: Deutsch LA
Chief Creative Officer: Pete Favat
Executive Creative Director: Brett Craig
Group Creative Directors: Guto Araki, Tom Pettus
Creative Directors: Erick Mangali, Ryan Lehr
Senior Art Director: Chris Adams
Senior Copywriter: Ross Cavin
Director of Integrated Production: Vic Palumbo
Executive Producer:  Paul Roy
Senior Producer: Alison McMahon
Music Director: Dave Rocco
Group Account Director: Walter Smith
Account Director: Sandy Song
Account Supervisor: Kim Suarez
Account Executive: Karah duMaire
Chief Strategy Officer: Colin Drummond
Group Planning Director: Lindsey Allison
Senior Account Planner: Kelly Mertesdorf
Director of Integrated Business Affairs: Abilino Guillermo
Executive Business Affairs Manager: Ken Rongey
Director of Broadcast Traffic: Carie Bonillo
Senior Broadcast Traffic Manager: Sarah Freeark

Executives:
CEO, North America: Mike Sheldon
President, Los Angeles: Kim Getty

Production Company: Hungry Man
Director: Dave Laden
Director of Photography: Stoeps Langersteiner
Managing Partner: Kevin Byrne
Executive Producer: Dan Duffy, Mino Jarjoura
Line Producer: Jason Gilbert

Editorial Company:  Cut & Run LA
Editor: Lucas Eskin
Senior Producer: Remy Foxx
Executive Producer: Carr Schilling

Post Facility: Jogger LA
VFX Supervisor/Flame Artist:  Tim Rudgard
Graphics: Jorge Tanaka
Executive Producer: Lynne Manino

Color Facility: Company 3
Colorist: Dave Hussey

Audio Post: Lime Studios
Mixer: Mark Meyuhas
Assistant: Matt Miller
Executive Producer: Susie Boyajan

Composed Music: Massive Music
Creative Director/Composer: Tim Adams
Head of Production: Jessica Entner

This interactive outdoor campaign by Lew’LaraTBWA is a real yawner—which is exactly what the Brazilian agency intended.

The shop set up a digital panel equipped with a motion sensor at São Paulo’s busy Fradique Coutinho subway station at morning rush hour. When commuters approached the sign, the face on the panel would yawn. Naturally, many of the commuters themselves also began yawning—yawning being notoriously contagious, after all—at which point the screen made a product pitch.

In case the sign wasn’t enough of a wake-up call, perky glamor gals arrive on the scene with some product samples. (Watch the clip to savor the big reveal.)

That last bit—the glamor gals—might strike some viewers as gratuitous, but otherwise this a prime example of what prankverising has been morphing into over the past few years.

Shocking stunts have by and large been replaced by a fusion of technology and street theater as brands create positive real-world experiences designed for subsequent media consumption. Of late, they’ve run the gamut from fun to moving to doggone adorable.

As long as such campaigns remain clever and inclusive, it will be along time before the public tires of this approach.

Via Ads of the World.

CREDITS
Client: Café Pelé
Agency: Lew’LaraTBWA, Brazil
Chief Creative Officer: Manir Fadel
Executive Chief Creative: Felipe Luchi
Copywriter: Lucas Veloso
Art directors: André Mezzomo, Digo Souto

Have you taken a selfie lately? If the answer is yes, then you’re the target audience for this new over-the-top parody PSA from Pizza Hut.

The brand wants to warn you about the dangers of the selfie stick—a device that creates the unfortunate illusion for the user that (gasp!) other people, places and objects exist.

The spot is delightfully cheeky, and the spokeswoman brings the right mixture of faux-fear and faux-anger—she almost seems to be doing a homage to the former host of Unsolved Mysteries. It isn’t until the end that you realize it is, in fact, an ad.

There’s very little branding, except for the pizza delivery guy. Pizza Hut spokesman Doug Terfehr said that’s because it’s meant to be entertaining first and branded second. 

The product being advertised, the two-foot-long Big Flavor Dipper pizza, “is so big that a regular out-stretched hand just won’t do it. If you want to snap a photo of it, with you in it, you’re going to need a bigger stick,” Terfehr says. “It was a fun, lighthearted way to communicate that message.”

The spot was created by Shareability, whose cofounder, Tim Staples, adds: “A lot of brands say they want to create shareable content but really what they want to do is make a traditional commercial go viral. That type of mind-set is a recipe for almost certain failure.

“Smart brands understand that you need to give the audience a valuable piece of content and then attach their brand in a clever and subtle way. Pizza Hut is a smart brand. The goal of this video is to start a conversation, not beat people over the head with a product message.”

Last summer, Russia imposed a full embargo on food imports from the European Union (as well as the U.S.) in retaliation for sanctions over Ukraine. This left authentic European food merchants in Moscow in a bit of a bind.

But one Italian grocery store there, Don Giulio Salumeria, kept selling its real Italian food—and came up with a bizarre out-of-home stunt to advertise to consumers without tipping off the police.

With help from agency The 23, the store developed a unique outdoor ad that could recognize police uniforms. Whenever the cops would appear, the ad would cycle out of its rotating display—in essence, physically hiding from the authorities.

The agency insists this was a real stunt. And if so, it is clever and amusingly weird. After emailing the case study all over the world, though, I’d think twice about answering the door when the Moscow police come knocking.

CREDITS
Client: Don Giulio Salumeria, Moscow
Owner: Giulio Zompi
Marketing Director: Anna Ipatova
Agency: The 23, Krasnogorsk
Creative director: Evgeniy Shinyaev
Creative director: Mikhail Tkachenko
Technology Director: Alexander Selifonov
Account Supervisor: Vera Kriulets
Director Of Photography: Nikolay Shinkarenko
Technical Assistant: Valeriy Oreshnikov

The Hamburglar got the Internet’s attention last week—the jury is still out on whether he’s hot or creepy—but he won’t be pitching the Sirloin Burger on TV, at least not this month. That job has been taken by New Girl’s Max Greenfield, whose cute—dare we say, adorkable—ads debuted Monday. 

The actor shot 25 spots in a single day, says McDonald’s vp of marketing Joel Yashinsky, telling Burger Business that the campaign is part of the brand’s mission to be transparent.

“That’s what really led to our doing 25 different TV commercials,” Yashinsky says. “They talk about different attributes and the flavors, about it being sirloin and North American sourced. That’s what the overall campaign is designed to get across to the customer. From everything we’ve seen, we think it will connect with customers.” 

Check out some of the new work, by Leo Burnett, below.

CREDITS
Client: McDonald’s
Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago
Campaign: “Sirloin Third Pound Burger Lovin’ Reminders”
Chief Creative Officer: Susan Credle
Executive Creative Director: John Hansa
Senior Creative Director: Tony Katalinic
Creative Directors: Michael Porritt, Frank Oles
Associate Creative Director: Gloria Dusenberry
Art Director: Scott Fleming
Copywriters: Brandon Crockett, Chris Davis, Leigh Kunkel
Head of Production: Vincent Geraghty
Executive Producer: Denis Giroux
Senior Producer: Scott Gould
Business Manager: Shirley Costa
Senior Talent Manager: Linda Yuen
Music Supervisor: Chris Clark
Managing Account Director: Jennifer Cacioppo
Account Directors: Josh Raper, Jennifer Klopf
Account Supervisor: Dave Theibert
Account Manager: Sue Rickey
Planning Directors: Claudia Steer
Legal: Carla Michelotti, Laura Cooney
Clearance: Michelle Overby
Editorial Production: Cutters Studio
Post Production: Flavor Chicago
Audio: Another Country

Absolut rolls out new advertising today from Sid Lee including a new short film and TV commercial, a never-before-heard song from Empire of the Sun, and a limited-edition illuminated bottle that lights up when you push a button on the bottom.

The short film and TV work, directed by Grammy-winning director Melina Matsoukas, collect footage from a series of “Absolut Nights” events hosted last year in New York, Sao Paolo, Berlin and Johannesburg that featured one-of-a-kind artistic collaborations—with Vita Motus, Marianne Krawcyzk, Studio XO and Charles Gadeken.

The short film:

The TV spot, launching Monday:

Those events were all about reinventing aspects of traditional nightlife in keeping with the brand’s “Transform Today” credo of rethinking nightlife through a lens of creativity.

The short film features a new track from electronic music duo Empire of the Sun. And the campaign features an intriguing packaging component—the Absolut Spark bottle, with a light that shines through the bottom and  “gives consumers the ability to shine a new light on their nightlife rituals for up to eight hours.”

The bottle:

“At Absolut, we believe in a world where there’s no such thing as a ‘standard’ night out,” says Joao Rozario, vp of Marketing at Absolut. “By infusing the unexpected into the ordinary, ‘Absolut Nights’ aims to inspire nightlife lovers to use the night as their canvas to explore what the future of nightlife looks like.”

More work from the campaign below.

The artistic collaborations:

CREDITS
Client: Absolut Vodka, Pernod Ricard USA
Agency: Sid Lee Amsterdam & Sid Lee New York
Managing Partner: Eric Alper
Executive Creative Director: Daniel Chandler & James Yeats-Smith
Creative Team: Maclean Jackson, Roeben Beddeleem, Eoin Mclaughlin & Thomas Glover
Group Account Director: Emily Creek
Account Director: Amy Manganiello
Production Management Director: Melanie Bruneau and Dave Isaac
Head of Strategy: Simon Wassef
Strategy Director: Nicola Davies
Editor: Thomas Schenk
Director:  Melina Matsoukas
Production Team: Jimmy Lee & Sid Lee Entertainment
Production Partners: Prettybird, Vice, O’mage, StudioNOW
Public Relations: Weber Shandwick

Here’s a nifty invention for people brave enough to eat McDonald’s—the new “BagTray” from DDB Budapest.

It is, as it sounds, a bag that’s also a tray. Just tear off a tab at the bottom of the brown paper bag, pull off the top and watch the whole thing turn into a cardboard tray that will reduce the odds of spilling your oversized soda all over the back seat of your car, or your laptop, or the lawn where you’re having a picnic (though surely the ants would love that).

Hopefully, you also won’t have to worry about the grease from your fries soaking through a flimsier vessel and dumping its golden payload on the floor, ruining your day and staining your property (though odds are there’s enough oil packed in there to eat through foamcore).

The product name is more or less perfect, clear and direct but also just the right amount of silly. It helps that the graphics in the demo video are charmingly twee, in a corporate sort of way—even if the willfully quirky ukelele-and-whistling-and-handclaps soundtrack wants so badly for you to be happy that it might make you claw your ears off instead.

Regardless, whether you’re a mom feeding her kids while shuttling them around (though she’s still pretty blasé about tilting the whole thing) or a cool kid just hanging out with your friends on your skateboard (are teenagers really that polite these days?) or a busy business executive cramming in lunch at your desk (that guy totally looks like he works at the ad agency), it’s clear the BagTray is the bag/tray for you.

Whether the tool actually works is probably a different question. And it’s also not clear whether you can use one without going to Hungary, which sort of undermines the whole convenience factor.

CREDITS
Client: McDonald’s
Agency: DDB Budapest
Chief Creative Officer: Péter Tordai
Head of Art/Art director: Guilherme Somensato
Copywriter: Vera Länger, Giovanni Pintaude
Illustrator: Adrián Bajusz
Product Designer: Márk Dávid, András Bálint
Animation: Réka Horányi, Anita Kolop
Business Director: Judit Majosi
Account/Producer: Rozália Szigeti
Promo film: Somnium Studio