Black Mirror Wishes You a Happy New Year (but Will It Be Horrific Instead?)

“It’s hard to imagine a bright future, but we must.” New Year’s is a time for looking forward, and Netflix does so with trepidation–including the line above–in a new campaign for Black Mirror, whose fourth season just rolled out on the streaming service yesterday. Through its first three seasons, the sci-fi anthology series has taken…

Tired of Togetherness? This Hypnotic Ad Incites You to Unleash Your Greed

“Greed: No one admits to feeling it, yet it is the purest of emotions. We had to be taught to be selfless.” The Middle East is renowned for its extended sales and shopping festivals, which makes standing out at this time of year a challenge. With help from Impact BBDO in Dubai, department store Centrepoint…

Joliet’s Minor League Stadium is Now ‘The Cards Against Humanity Baseball Place’

When the twisted minds behind Cards Against Humanity asked fans to pitch in $15 to help the game company “save America,” almost any potential scenario was on the table. This is, after all, the brand that used $100,573 in donations to literally dig a hole in the ground. But this time around, the “Cards Against…

Agency Holiday Cards 2017: The Most Creative Farewells to the Year (Pt. 4)

We’re going to wrap up our coverage of agency holiday cards today with a fourth batch of entries–and then later today we’ll pick our five favorites. Here are links to all the cards we posted this week: Agency Holiday Cards 2017: The Most Creative Farewells to the Year Agency Holiday Cards 2017: The Most Creative…

Gerry Graf Apologizes to Almost Everyone in Advertising in Barton F. Graf’s Holiday Video

As Scrooge taught us, Christmas is a time for repenting, for changing one’s ways, for being nicer to the people around us, for not making fun of self-important ad agencies with their superdesks and their fancy staff collaboration tools. Gerry Graf seems to have taken this to heart–maybe, possibly–as depicted in his agency Barton F….

Agency Holiday Cards 2017: The Most Creative Farewells to the Year (Pt. 3)

We continue today with more agency holiday cards, the ad industry’s fun farewell gifts to 2017. Here are the cards we’ve already posted: Agency Holiday Cards 2017: The Most Creative Farewells to the Year Agency Holiday Cards 2017: The Most Creative Farewells to the Year (Pt. 2) Below, check out the latest additions to our…

Why David&Goliath Built a Website That’s 9 Miles Long

Walking nine miles to school every day, through hellish heat and merciless monsoons, past poisonous snakes, swatting away mosquitoes that carry malaria, dodging human traffickers along the way. Sadly, this is a daily routine for many kids in Sierra Leone. The West African nation is in dire need of new schools, forcing youngsters, particularly those…

A Little Girl Treats Her Parents, for Once, to an Epic Surprise in Theme Park’s Holiday Ad

There’s nothing worse than the emotional hangover following a day at a theme park. Well, that’s not true: Holiday comedown is a pretty big bummer, too. In “Time for Each Other” by Winter Efteling, you kinda get a solution to both. Winter Efteling is the biggest theme park in the Netherlands. In typical holiday ad…

Agency Holiday Cards 2017: The Most Creative Farewells to the Year (Pt. 2)

We are continuing to post the most creative agency holiday cards of 2017. We posted 28 holiday cards on Monday, which you can see here. Below are some more fun ones. Email yours to holidaycards [at] adweek [dot] com, and we’ll try to post some more on Thursday. On Friday, we’ll pick our five favorites…

Samsung and Casey Neistat Turned an Abandoned Shopping Mall Into a Winter Wonderland for Kids

The abandoned shopping mall: A hotbed of broken capitalist dreams, blooming graffiti artists, concrete-starved skaters and possibly rats. Short of razing them and turning them into parking lots for driverless cars, what the hell are we supposed to do with them? Try what Samsung did: Convert a dead mall into a winter wonderland for kids…

Agency Holiday Cards 2017: The Most Creative Farewells to the Year

Ad agencies are great at crafting holiday messages for advertisers. But at this time of year, after the client work is done, they move on to the more important stuff–their own agency holiday cards. And the pressure is on. Freed of client constraints, who can make the year’s coolest, most creative expression of seasonal cheer?…

This Perfect Agency Holiday Video Shows Exactly What We All Want for Christmas This Year

We’re still collecting agency holiday cards, and will publish our roundup of 2017’s best on Tuesday morning. (We’ll also update it throughout the week.) But first, we thought we would share one of our favorites ahead of time. “A Holiday Wish” was directed by Tim Mason, an actor and writer who’s been part of the…

How Twitter Celebrated The Last Jedi in Style With Real-Time Billboards

The breathless social buzz leading up to the launch of the latest Star Wars movie on Friday needed a marketing stunt to match. So, Disney teamed up with Twitter to plaster fan tweets across giant billboards in real time. From 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Dec. 15, the 90-foot digital screens at Toronto Eaton…

These Clever Reversible Print Ads Show There’s a Way Out of Addiction

A striking new print campaign from Germany seeks to battle addiction this holiday season with fresh spin on a familiar trick–reversible copywriting. Each of three short poems–one for alcohol, one for pills, and one for gambling–spirals into total despair when read from top to bottom. But read backwards, from bottom to top, they offer a…

A Miniature KFC Opened in Portland, Serving Tiny $5 Fill Up Boxes

KFC was thinking small on Saturday, opening a miniature KFC for one day only in Portland, Ore., and actually serving $5 Fill Up Boxes (that probably wouldn’t fill you up, but were free of charge), at one-twelfth their normal size. The chain also released the video below, showing how to make tiny fried chicken–similar to…

How Interscope Teased Eminem’s New Album With Fake Pharma Ads That Were Almost Too Good

If you come down with a bad case of Atrox Rithimus, you don’t need a doctor. This particular affliction isn’t deadly, though it could send club patrons screaming for the exit. Atrox Rithimus, Latin for “bitter rhyme,” is, in fact, a made-up malady. It was injected into the mass-media corpus through a website, videos, billboards…

10 Things We Learned About Wendy’s Twitter From Its Reddit AMA

Social media marketing nerds got an early Christmas present Thursday, as Wendy’s Twitter account sat down for a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” Q&A. The specific marketing execs who took part in the Q&A weren’t identified–Wendy’s answered questions using the wendys_irl Reddit handle–but likely included Meredith Ulmer, the senior social media specialist who leads the fast-food…

How Disney Managed the Tricky Marketing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi

There’s been a lot of Star Wars recently. When The Last Jedi hits theaters on Friday, it will be the third Star Wars movie in as many years, twice the rate of theatrical output as either of the previous trilogies. Even accounting for how Rogue One: A Star Wars Story wasn’t a “Saga” entry (meaning…

TBWA Is Turning a Speeding Train Into an Escape Room for Murder on the Orient Express

Escape rooms have become old hat, but once in a while you see a spin on the approach that makes them worth mentioning again. This is one. Inspired by the 20th Century Fox film Murder on the Orient Express, based on Agatha Christie’s classic novel, Finnish Railways tapped TBWA Helsinki to produce the longest escape…

Grey London Made an Album of Feminist Christmas Carols, Rewritten to Stick It to the Man

It’s been a banner year for women, in great part because of a system that drove its boot so deep into our necks that we all lost our epic sense of composure. In record numbers, we marched. We ran for office. We called bullshit on sexual harassment (and are still calling bullshit). And those who…