BBDO New York tells the story of “The Boy Who Beeps” in a new online spot for GE.
The two-minute ad begins with the boy’s birth, and the beeping sound he makes in place of the usual baby’s wail. It’s soon apparent that the boy can communicate with machines. This starts off small, with him using his voice to change the channel or hit snooze on his alarm clock, but soon he’s using his power for greater purposes. Maybe it’s the great soundtrack by Beck, but the strange story is oddly touching somehow. Coming on the heels of the recent “Ideas,” it seems that BBDO is going in an emotional direction in their online work for GE. (more…)
BBDO New York‘s latest series for General Electric (almost) travels to the globe’s most remote corners to remind viewers that the company isn’t just responsible for creating trivection ovens and six-second video loops.
With “World Firsts”, the agency uses three disparate stories of isolated communities to illustrate GE’s ability to bring the benefits of the digital world to those living on its margins.
The first spot in the series of three concerns the challenges of delivering medical technologies to one of Japan’s most remote inhabited islands:
After the jump, the second spot plays on the same outsider themes (while lightly referencing World Cup fever) in relaying the tale of a young boy’s first big trip and his love of all things football.
It seems like there’s an awful lot of Back to the Future nostalgia invading the Internet these days, with posts about the series on sites like Reddit leading to listicles about the trilogy on nostalgia-aggregators like Buzzfeed which then go viral on Facebook and eventually find themselves on large emails your mom sends to her friends and CC’s you on for some reason. And, what with it being 2013 and all, where advertising campaigns are becoming increasingly informed by memes, we get GE and BBDO NY using the “1.21 gigawatts” thing to sell you technology or something. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads to perdition; we just fly there through space and time.
And yet, nostalgia has a way of endearing you to things in a way totally out of your control. Call it manipulation, call it “effective advertising” using one of the oldest tricks in the book. Any way or slice it, it’s hard as even a casual fan of the series not to get a little giddy when you see what are ostensibly Marty McFly’s Nikes pop out of a souped-up Delorean. While Pepperidge Farm dares us to remember a time when people died of dystentary and snakebites like in Oregon Trail, Back to theFuture‘s original audience has aged to the point where brands see the 1980s as a way to get consumers on board 30-something years later.
In fact, I hope this becomes a whole campaign where GE powers David Bowie‘s castle from Labyrinth, E.T.‘s glowing finger, and the computer from Weird Science. And, though it wouldn’t make much sense, maybe Michael J. Fox could narrate those spots too. Maybe in another 30 years, GE will power the ships from Avatar and Robin Thicke can provide us with his own deep-voiced VO. Trust me, it will make sense by then. Credits after the jump.
We figured we’d hold off on posting about this until this afternoon because it’s Friday and you might actually be able to view this in full, if you haven’t already, because it deserves to be. Werner Herzog, the legendary director, writer and/or producer of a million projects including Grizzly Man during his 50-year career, has gone behind the camera once again for the above documentary, From One Second to the Next. This is the epic, poignant, sad and important extension of the ongoing “It Can Wait” PSA campaign initially launched by AT&T that has now been supported by the other major wireless carriers including Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.
Herzog, along with BBDO New York, continues to hammer the message home that texting while driving doesn’t shouldn’t mix via the tales of four different people who were affected by it on either end of the spectrum. Be safe this weekend and if you’d care to, take the “It Can Wait” pledge here. Credits after the jump.
Has it really been ten years since The Matrix: Revolutions tarnished the Wachowskis’epic saga? Time flies, but while we’d rather forget the third and final Matrix installment, we’re happy to once again see Hugo Weaving as the relentless Agent Smith, whose dapper yet menacing visage appears along with several doppelgangers in this latest effort from BBDO New York for GE called “Agent of Good.”
The spot, which was directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), debuted over the weekend and showcases GE’s industrial internet technology and how the corporate giant connecting its medical hardware to its software is benefiting hospitals–or something to that effect. Despite being a decade removed from the Matrix films, Weaving shows no signs of rust as he brings the snarl of his most iconic character to the most sterile of environments. Stick around for the final moments for your most obvious Matrix reference, minus Morpheus. Credits after the jump.
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