If Gatorade's latest commercial from TBWA\Chiat\Day seems vaguely familiar, that's because it treads some of the same ground as Element 79's mid-'00s work for the brand, recounting the drink's 1965 creation in a lab at the University of Florida. From there, the TBWA spot mixes stock footage and new clips of Peyton Manning, Michael Jordan, Dwyane Wade and others as it assesses the brand's place in the history of modern sports. This heady concept works best in a pop-culture context. Gatorade is a beloved and ubiquitous game-day fixture, itself iconic, sloshing around in small plastic cups and giant buckets, ever ready to drench the winners in sparkling showers of limey-electrolyte glory. Sure, Gatorade might help gifted athletes—and by extension, you and me—win on the playing field. But more important, the brand is synonymous with triumph and superior achievement overall. That status gives Gatorade a shared meaning that transcends its sporty origins and helps ads like these appeal to anyone hoping to catch lightning in a bottle.
Have you heard of Hatsune Miku? Perhaps not, but Domino's sure has. Here's a hint: She's one of Japan's biggest stars. More precisely, she is a holographic avatar created for a "singing synthesizer application" from Crypton Future Media. So, what better way for Domino's Pizza to introduce a new iPhone app to the Japanese than by teaming up with its most beloved digital sensation?
Domino's did just that last week, as the chain's president and CEO, Scott Oelkers, introduced the new app in the corny, somewhat comical video below. Oelkers's enthusiasm, which comes off as more than a little forced and awkward, makes the video either awful or awesome, depending on how you look at it. The app, though, seems legitimately cool, as it allows you to "create vocaloid songs," among other snazzy features. "From the menu to the order, it looks very cute. Just like Miku," says Oelkers.
Sure, Oelkers may need some acting lessons. But it's not all bad. Now, when you order a pizza in Japan, you can get a mini-avatar augmented reality performance right on you pizza box. That's gotta be worth it, no?
A poorly frosted cake is a tragedy in The Martin Agency's new ad for Cool Whip. "Mistreated Cakes," which breaks today and pushes Cool Whip Frosting, plays out like a PSA on behalf of the "millions of innocent cakes [that are] mangled, mistreated and hurt" by rival frostings, which just aren't as smooth. Images of sloppy cakes give way to a shot of a supermarket freezer full of Cool Whip Frosting, as a plaintive male voice explains, "There is something you can do." After a lush close-up of Cool Whip Frosting being spread on a chocolate cake, the ad shifts back to a sad sack of a birthday cake just as one of its candles topples over. "Please help," implores the voice, amid sparse piano notes. "Cool Whip Frosting. Together, we can change the way cakes are frosted." Martin senior copywriter Bob Meagher said the mock-PSA approach stemmed from a simple idea: What if a cake had feelings? To get the mood right, Meagher and senior art director Pat Wittich watched old PSAs and, yes, baked a cake. The ad, which targets moms whose families bond over dessert, will run through May during shows such as Food Network's Cupcake Wars and ABC's Grey's Anatomy, according to Marjani Coffey, brand manager on Cool Whip at Kraft Foods.
You're just the average Heineken drinker. A 35-year-old hedge-fund manager who hit it big betting against the market in 2007. You're doing your jet-setting around the world thing, party hopping the most exclusive clubs in Vietnam and Nigeria. Because Thursday night is the new Friday night, and you work hard but you play hard, too. Anyways, of course the hottest ladies in the room are always gonna beeline it for you. Because come on, look at you, and because those private dance lessons you've been taking are really paying off. But see, it's just your luck that your would-be local flings always have jealous local boyfriends, who are also wealthy and thuggishly possessive. They don't take kindly to your grinding all up on their dates. It's cool, though, man, because, whatever, you're not looking for any trouble, everybody's just here to have a good time. You'll go sit at the bar and cool off with a Heineken, which by the way comes in this sexy new bottle, with a longer neck, instead of that old, stubby, chubby design you'd have never been seen holding in public.
When your global party circuit takes you back to New York—that is to say, to civilized society—where you're confident that stealing some mustachioed doofus's woman won't result in parts of your body turning up in seven different roadside ditches outside Ho Chi Minh City or Lagos, you're totally fearless, because what would 007 do? A little bad luck—or is it something more nefarious?—impedes and humiliates your rival. You meet your new dance partner at the bar. There, you'll each have a Heineken, bartender, because a $2 bottle of beer is definitely what the bombshell in the $10,000 dress at the cocktail party always finds most charming, cause she's just really cool and down to earth like that.
The spot is Heineken's latest from Wieden + Kennedy—and the first in its dazzling "Open Your World" campaign to come out of the agency's New York office (prior installments were created by W+K Amsterdam and by TBWA\Neboko). The ad was directed by Rupert Sanders, also director of Snow White and the Huntsman and, to the dismay of Twilight zealots everywhere, snogger of Kristen Stewart. The new bottle is already available in 170 markets, and is now coming to shelves across the U.S.
For the fourth and final Oreo Separators video, Wieden + Kennedy got a nonhuman to separate the Oreo cookie from its creme. Say hello to HERB (short for "home exploring robotic butler"), a robot built by scientists at Carnegie Mellon. After some trial and error, HERB is given an algorithm that allows him to perform the task fairly well—impressive, given that he can't even pronounce "Oreo" properly. (And what's with the British accent? You're from Pittsburgh.) More ominously, HERB displays some anti-social tendencies here, including being quite argumentative when it comes to his "precious creme." He's not quite HAL-like yet, but I wouldn't let him hold that giant knife in the future.
Doritos has built a 62-foot-tall, tweet-powered concert stage designed to look like a giant vending machine that turns your tweets with the hashtag #BoldStage into a real-time concert-control mechanism at SXSW. Confused as to how? They've made a handy infographic (below) to 'splain. You can not only use your furious tweeting power to choose the opening act at the Doritos gig, you get to choose their playlist, and then, just to mess with them, you control the special effects. That's right—smoke, balloons, pyrotechnics and fricking lasers are all in your hashtagged hands. So, of course, you can also send pictures of yourself having a freaking awesome time directly to the four-story-tall screen in the arena! There's a 9.6-second lag, presumably to make sure you don't tweet your beets. LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Ice Cube and Doug E. Fresh will be sharing the stage with Doritos' awesomely awesome creation of pure LED force. Listen to a low-energy LL ramble about it in the video below. But who really cares about the has-beens on the stage when they'll also be premiering new ads that launch the first Doritos global campaign titled "For the Bold" that will completely change the brand's look and feel?
Life is sweet and golden on the outside with a creamy middle, baby! Would-be summer interns at Campbell Mithun might want to ponder such points, because the Minneapolis agency is asking hopefuls to submit recommendations for "taking the iconic Twinkies brand into the future" as part of their application. I'm not sure the spongey cakes need much help in that department, since they don't biodegrade and will probably be viable centuries hence to nourish cockroaches as they dance on mankind's bones. Applicants are instructed to write a "Dear new owners of Twinkies" letter to share their ideas for reviving the brand. (I'm guessing those who recommend using "big data"—for, you know, whatever—are shoo-ins for the job.) Hostess, the long-struggling corporate parent of Twinkies, is in the midst of liquidating assets, and an auction to determine the snack brand's new owner is set for next Wednesday, March 13. Campbell Mithun created the "Where's the cream filling?" tagline for Twinkies 20 years ago, when agencies seeking to fill internships generally just hired their clients' kids.
"Maybe you should just use? a knife." That's one of the less charitable reactions to this latest Oreo Separators video from Wieden + Kennedy—part of a series in which inventors and technologists develop machines and tools that are much more complicated than a mere knife to separate Oreo cookies from their creme. (Yes, I know, what's even the point of doing that at all?) In this third video, a couple of guys from the London conceptual-art collective Dentaku do their best with a Ferris-wheel-style contraption that—well, to be honest, it's a disaster at first, though the guys do redeem themselves somewhat at the end. Our favorite is probably still the video with the toy scientists.
Domino's doesn't make much use of its namesake domino logo—until now. The pizza chain topples more than 50,000 dominos in the video below from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, as a thank-you to fans after crossing the 8 million likes mark on Facebook. I think we can all agree it probably should have been 8 million dominos, but that would have been 160 times the work—and required more than two years of nonstop work to produce, instead of the 120 hours it took for this one. Facebook milestone videos are something of a specialty for CP+B, which last year did the giant human coupon for Old Navy.
Oreo just released the second video in its Oreo Separators series from Wieden + Kennedy, dedicated to finding absurdly mechanical ways of separating the cookie part from the creme part. The first video featured "physicist" (also, W+K creative) David Neevel, who came up with a seriously involved contraption in his Portland, Ore., workspace. This time, the intrepid experimenters are Barry Kudrowitz and Bill Fienup, described as "toy scientists" from the Midwest. And you have to hand it to them—their machine is a lot slicker, and simpler, than Neevel's. Their solution involves popping off the top cookie with a swift jab of plastic, then melting and spraying off the creme part. Fienup, the creme lover, gets a little messy in the process, but it's worth it. It turns out these guys were perfect for the job. As students at MIT in the mid-2000s, they helped create the MIT Toy Lab, funded by Hasbro, which developed new concepts for Nerf and Supersoaker products. (The idea for the Nerf Atom Blaster came from the lab.) As he mentions, Kudrowitz is a product-design professor at the University of Minnesota now, though his areas of research are decidedly offbeat, including "play and humor in design." Kudrowitz and Fienup's previous collaborations include a remote-controlled ketchup-squirting car.
Oh grow up! This ad from Argentina's Schneider beer focuses on the time needed for the "slow-brewed" draught to achieve its optimal consistency and flavor. It does so by showing lots of guys who haven't quite matured. Doofus dudes urinate in the bushes at parties, play annoying air-guitar solos, hit on women in asinine ways—and in a brazenly un-P.C. moment of the ad, can't help "taking a no as a yes." It's an amusing spot and well made, but perhaps Ogilvy Buenos Aires should have aged the concept a tad more. If the guys start out like jerks but ultimately attain some degree of maturity—opening car doors and pulling out chairs for their dates, using the bathroom when nature calls—the point would be that much clearer. Instead, their development is arrested throughout, and I couldn't help thinking that if these semi-sapiens cut down on the booze, their behavior might improve. The approach is entirely different, but the central idea recalls Paul Masson's iconic "We will sell no wine before its time" commercials, though thankfully Orson Welles never took a whiz in those ads. (Actually, he was filmed from the chest up—and often soused—so who can say for sure?) Via Adverve.
Not content with the traditional advertising methods of TV spots and simple product placement in movies, Canada's Labatt Brewing is financing a feature-length film through its Kokanee brand. The film is called The Movie Out Here, and it's a buddy comedy written by Kokanee's ad agency, Grip Limited. Check out the red-band trailer below (NSFW). The movie hits theaters in western Canada on Friday—30 of them, in fact. It's essentially a 90-minute content marketing experiment, so don't expect it to be any good—although judging by the trailer, it is plenty crass. Also, if you've been wondering what happened to the guy who sang "Informer," he's apparently one of the stars. (Oddly, there's no sign of Kokanee in the trailer—would that absence constitute false advertising?) Before this, Grip Limited was best known for letting 10-year-olds run the agency. That may partly explain the movie's juvenile humor.
Red-band trailer below has nudity and profanity and is NSFW.
If you eat Abbott's Village Bakery bread, don't be surprised if it bleats a little, or feels a little woolly, on the way down. That's because Abbott's Village Bakery loaves are essentially free-range animals who roam the Australian countryside—judging by this amusing spot from ad agency BMF. "It may seem a little strange to some, but for us free range is the only way to raise bread," the company says on its Facebook page. "We like to shower our loaves with love, let them roam free and grow up in their own unique little way. It's what makes every loaf special." No idea what that really means, but hey, it makes for a kooky commercial. Credits below.
CREDITS Client: Abbott's Village Bakery Agency: BMF, Australia Director: Christopher Riggert Creative Director: Justin Ruben Art Director: Alex Booker Copywriter: Philip Sicklinger Producer: Michael Hilliard Digital Creative: Tim Hill Executive Producer: Rob Galluzzo Visual Effects: Colin Renshaw Graphic Designer: Phil Banks Visual Effects: marnie Ellis Director of Photography: Sebastian Pfaffenbichler Graphic Designer: Indah Shillingford Planner: Thomasine Burnap Account Director: Jason Carnew Agency Producer: Whitney Hawthorn Editing Company: The Butchery Editor: Jack Hutchings Photographer: Ross Brown Retoucher: Andy Salisbury Production Manager: Karen Liddle Music: Michael Yezersky, Nylon Account Manager: Nora Zenasni
I see dead people. In commercials. Eating Galaxy chocolate bars. Well, just one corpse, actually. It's Audrey Hepburn, 20 years dead but still cute as a button and seamlessly integrated into the advertising action thanks to modern technology. This British spot, approved by the actress's sons, finds Hepburn on holiday in Italy, tempted from her tour bus (not AC/DC's tour bus, thankfully) by a pretty boy driving a fancy convertible. When Audrey accepts the ride, she coyly sits in the back seat. Classy! The visuals are impressive, a big improvement on Dead Astaire's hot steppin' for Dirt Devil back in 1997. Of course, some find the trend ghoulish. Frankly, I'm surprised it's generating this much interest. It's been done to … well, death. Everyone from John Wayne to Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain have been resurrected for ads. And Clint Eastwood for Chrysler … close enough! Check out Hepburn's 2006 Gap spot after the jump.
Possibly in an effort to prove it's more than a Chuck E. Cheese for misogynists, Hooters hired Skiver Advertising for its new "Step Into Awesome" ad campaign. The work, including these "Burrito" and "Big Fan" TV spots, emphasizes the food (Hooters recently expanded its menu) and congenial atmosphere instead of just the state of its employees' undress. It also takes a pretty obvious stab at Chipotle in one of the ads. Both ads are disorientingly tasteful, and I guess that's a good thing. It's also good strategy for Hooters, because focusing more on the waitstaff would remind people of the chain's shady hiring practices, among other things. Fitzgerald+CO previously handled the Hooters account.
I was just thinking how much I'd like to eat a magazine ad right about now, and along comes this edible effort from OgilvyOne in Dubai for citrus-flavored Fanta. There's abundant text, which begins, "Just tear off a piece of this page, pop in your mouth & enjoy … !" Yeah, I'll get right on that. The vile concept is clearly designed to generate free-media coverage such as this post. (This includes calling it the first of its kind, which it is not.) So, choke on it, Fanta! Metaphorically, of course. Other stories about the ad have riffed about readers "eating their words" and pondering whether the work displays "good taste." Ad reviewers—what a bunch of buffoons. Ogilvy is becoming the go-to agency for edible ads, its Cape Town office having engineered Volkswagen's "Eat the road" print ad two years ago. David would be so proud.
Which way to the bar car? John Jameson returns in another fun, rollicking tall tale from TBWA\Chiat\Day, this time rescuing comely lasses and barrels of his namesake Irish whiskey from a speeding 19th-century train. The Iron Horse engine, however, shoots over a cliff and falls into the sea, where it smashes a Prussian ship and sends the would-be invaders sinking to the bottom. Poor Prussians, I bet they got swallowed by a giant octopus. Kidding, of course. I know the octopus is fictional, just like Prussia. (I'm not seeing it on the Google Maps, people! Oh, there it is in Pennsylvania.)
It's relatively easy to feel comfortable walking mostly naked on a beach if you're in the tropics. It's less easy when you're in Ireland. Huby Harton, an Irish singer who's probably been told a thousand times that he looks like the guy from the Southern Comfort ad, decided to embrace the resemblance—and re-enacted the classic Wieden + Kennedy spot one winter's day on Dollymount Strand in Dublin to promote his latest album. Hey, whatever's comfortable. The video made it to Southern Comfort's Facebook page today.
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