With an estimated net worth of $140 million, actor Bill Murray is a long way from his adolescence sweating it out as a caddie at the Indian Hill Club in Winnetka, Ill. But as fans know from his movies (notably Caddyshack, written by Murray’s brother Brian) and his books (Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf),…
It’s nearly Valentine’s Day, so it’s time for advertisers to bust out the big emotional guns. You know, wring a few tears, touch some hearts, melt our icy exteriors and make us genuinely feel something. Car rental company Sixt has chosen to tell a story of unrequited love and the idea that a passionate affair…
The Martin Agency has done plenty of experiments with Geico preroll ads–front-loading them with the marketing message so they’re unskippable; fast-forwarding through them to save you time; and crushing them down to a more manageable size. In the fourth year of their preroll shenanigans, they’re trying something a little different. They’re leaning in to the…
Many things in life don’t come easy, and that’s especially true for Olympic athletes. They train and train, and then train some more, all for a chance to compete against people who have trained just as hard, if not harder, in the hopes of winning a coveted medal. It doesn’t always goes as planned, and…
Kevin Hart’s career has taken him from stand-up comedy to hit movies (most recently Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle) to modeling Tommy John Underwear. But there was one place the comedian had never been until now: a frigid ice bath. That changed with his aptly named Cold as Balls sports interview series for his comedy…
Austin Russell, founder of Luminar Tech, and Michael Fleming, CEO of Torc, took the stage late in the day at the Autos2050 conference I attended in Washington, D.C., last week. Austin is a 22-year-old wunderkind whose company is building the future of transportation with LiDAR–a detection system that works on the principals of radar, but…
When Gerber baby food first appeared on store shelves in 1927, it freed countless mothers from the chore of straining vegetables for their own infants. But while the food inside the jar turned some heads, the label on the outside turned even more. It featured a pencil sketch of an idealized American infant. Her name…
Despite ESPN’s attempt to paint a rosy picture, the “Worldwide Leader in Sports” has been losing some of its luster for quite some time now. The company boasts an average of 2.058 million viewers in primetime in 2017 across TV and streaming–which is up 7 percent from 2016–and a 1 percent rise in average total-day…
Agencies use their Instagram accounts in dozens of different ways, often giving the feed over to employees to curate themselves. Leo Burnett Chicago does something a little different, though related–using a series of posts to regularly spotlight a “day in the life” of a staffer who’s doing interesting things. The series is called simply “Day…
This week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that Marketing Architects, Inc. (MAI), an advertising agency based in Minneapolis, Minn., agreed to pay $2 million to settle a false advertising complaint filed with the FTC and the State of Maine Attorney General’s Office. The decision is unique in that it represents the largest-ever penalty levied…
I had my first Big Mac circa 1982, when the sandwich was just a sprightly teenager. Now, the iconic McDonald’s menu item is turning 50, and celebrating in the U.K. with a stylish spot from Leo Burnett London that goes back to the ’70s and includes lots of fun d?cor and packaging shots from McDonald’s…
“I’m only watching for the ads.” We’re used to hearing this on Super Bowl Sunday, that annual bright spot for an industry in the throes of transformation. But during the rest of the year, consumers swat ads away like mosquitoes–skipping them on TV, blocking them on the web, dreading them on mobile. Imagine a friend…
When you hear a poem in an ad, especially a Super Bowl ad, it’s usually a safe and licensed choice lifted from the long-dead likes of Whitman or Frost. But Coca-Cola went a different direction with its Super Bowl ad, building it instead around a lovely and original poem about inclusiveness, identity, individuality and, yes,…
If someone told you they were going to make a film about how difficult it can be to see the world from someone else’s perspective, using different camera rigs as a way into each perspective, that might seem like a complicated, even worrisome conceit. How can you make a film about the difficulty of understanding…
OK, who ordered the Big Mac with cheeky, black-and-white, faux-artsy advertising–and bacon? Your burger’s ready! McDonald’s Canada is promoting its “Big Mac x Bacon Limited Edition Collaboration” with madcap monochrome commercials that present pretentious cultural “experts” with exaggerated accents waxing philosophical over the union of two all-beef patties and strips of salt cured pork. (Of…
“We’re trending!” High above the New York skyline, on the 36th floor of the World Trade Center, a team of roughly 40 brand marketers, agency executives, public relations folks and lawyers huddled around one big-screen television to watch their work get beamed to 100 million people. A second monitor showed TweetDeck, with tweets going by…
Do sick Twitter burns lead to sales? If a brand dunks in the dark, does it still make a sound? Five years after 360i’s real-time tweet heard ’round the world, brands are reassessing the value of maintaining an always-on social media presence, responding to competitors and desperately seeking the next Big Game “Oreo moment.” “Every…
If you noticed something missing from the slate of ads that ran during Super Bowl LII, you weren’t the only one. Conspicuously absent were the well-placed watermelons of Carl’s Jr’s heyday or GoDaddy’s “supermodel meets real-life nerd” fantasies. Even Cindy Crawford played second fiddle to her teenage son in Pepsi’s reimagining of its own 1992…
Saatchi & Saatchi New York’s “It’s a Tide Ad” campaign for Super Bowl LII got the stamp of approval from a group of top advertising creatives today, winning the Super Clio, presented by the Clio Awards, honoring the game’s best work. The four Tide spots, which were also chosen by Adweek as the best of…
Are you a woman who’s always wished she could indulge in a nice snack, but you’re just too darn ashamed of eating something so loud that you may repulse potential male suitors? If so, you’re in luck, because PepsiCo is working on a new project that absolutely no one asked for: women-only snacks. In an…
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.
