Hasta La Creative!

In a campaign scheduled to culminate with tonight’s first-ever College Football Championship, BBDO New York focuses on a single fact for client AT&T: the provider offers customers “the nation’s strongest LTE signal.”

This is not a new claim from AT&T, which began promoting the superiority of its LTE systems over a year ago and now states that its LTE “footprint” is larger than all of its competitors’.

But the “strength” concept did allow the agency to riff on a theme with the help of four retired football legends. In the first spot, “Mental Strength,” Herschel Walker pulls a Jedi mind trick on Doug Flutie:

The second spot rearranges the group to put another veteran in the hot seat.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

With the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting coming up this Sunday, BBDO New York crafted a PSA campaign for Sandy Hook Promise, an gun violence prevention organization formed in the wake of that tragedy.

In the three-minute video “Monsters Under the Bed,” an interviewer has children draw pictures of monsters and then interviews parents asking them what they do to protect their children from these imaginary creatures, with parents offering up a range of responses. Then the interviewer changes the conversation, asking, “How do you protect them from gun violence?” Most of the parents just sit silently with a pained expression, and not one is able to offer a satisfying answer. BBDO New York drives the message home when text appears onscreen reading, “Last year, zero kids were killed by monsters under the bed. Let’s protect our kids from the real threats…so they can continue being afraid of the imaginary ones.”

The video ends by directing viewers to SandyHookPromise.org, where the organization offers parents, students and teachers tools and programs to prevent future gun violence, including mental wellness, social development and gun safety approaches.”Monsters Under the Bed” is being promoted on social channels including Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, and Twitter.

Additionally, BBDO New York worked with director Tarik Karam and executive producer Stephen Daldry to create a short documentary film called What They Left Behind. The documentary tells the story of three children who lost their lives to gun-related violence: “from a 17–year-old girl who committed suicide with her father’s gun; to an argument among young teenage boys in Iowa that  ended in bloodshed; to the Barden family who lost their 7-year-old son in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.”

“In the two years since I lost my son, I have been speaking with communities across the country to better understand the causes of gun violence,” said Nicole Hockley, communications director for Sandy Hook Promise and mother of six-year-old Sandy Hook victim Dylan. “What we have learned is that, as a nation, we can help to prevent tens of thousands of gun deaths, by first learning the warning signs of violent behavior and focusing on community-based programs to help and heal those most at risk.”

Stick around for the 35-minute What They Left Behind, along with credits, after the jump. (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The “Week of Greatness” is back via Foot Locker and BBDO New York.

The campaign debuted last night and scored coverage on ye old sports blogs; this spot starring Derrick Rose and the notoriously mild-mannered Tim Duncan already has a million and a half YouTube views.

Three more spots in the series after the jump; each one plays on a different, long-standing sports joke.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

BBDO New York has received a fair deal of attention for its recent work for GE, including an Emmy nomination for wistfully surreal “Childlike Imagination.” More recent spots like “Ideas are Scary” and “The Boy Who Beeps” followed in a similar tone, celebrating ideas and innovation in imaginative ways. So the agency’s fake infomercial for GE Lighting, directed by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (better known as Tim & Eric) and starring Jeff Goldblum, comes right out of left field.

The over two minute-long mock infomercial (mockfomercial?), entitled “Enhance Your Lighting” sees Goldblum playing “Terry Quatro, Famous Person” as he hocks the GE Link light bulb, which offers “successful guy lighting at normal guy prices.” It’s also so easy to install, you can do it while painting a portrait of yourself. It should come as no surprise that the spot is all over the place with random humor, but Goldlum plays the part perfectly and when it’s on it can be pretty funny. And while it may seem like an odd approach for the brand, especially coming off BBDO’s recent spots, it should garner some attention for the new product as the YouTube views (currently at around 115,000) inevitably pile up. (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

BBDO New York has a new campaign for Visa showcasing how quick and easy the brand’s Visa Checkout service is.

In the campaign’s first spot, “Surfer,” BBDO New York teamed up with professional surfer Kolohe Andino, with voiceover from the inimitable Morgan Freeman. Over the course of the 60-second ad, Andino demonstrates how quick and easy Visa Checkout is by using it to order a Pizza Hut pizza while surfing a giant wave. The spot ends with the tagline, “Everywhere you want to be” (it appears they’ve dropped the “it’s”) before directing viewers to sign up for the service at visacheckout.com. “Surfer” debuted this past Sunday during FOX’s NFL broadcast, as Visa is using its NFL sponsorship to promote the campaign and get the word out about its recently-launched payment service.  (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

BBDO New York’s latest offering for GE continues to celebrate innovation, but marks a stylistic departure from the agency’s recent work for the brand.

While “What Would Happen” and “Childlike Imagination” looked at innovation from a sense of childlike wonder, “Ideas” takes a sharp sidestep, personifying those ideas and focusing on how they often emerge as rough around the edges but grow into something beautiful. In the 60-second online spot, ideas are presented as an odd-looking creature that looks like something that could have crawled out of the reject pile at Jim Henson’s workshop.

Starting from birth, we follow an idea as it has a pretty rough time of things. Continually facing rejection, it resorts to sleeping on the streets until it is finally taken in by GE. “Ideas are scary, and messy, and fragile,” says a voiceover, “But under the proper care, they become something beautiful,” and then we see the fully-transformed idea, followed by the “Imagination at work” tagline.

Following the success of BBDO’s recent work for the brand, the shift in approach comes as a little off-putting, and the idea seems a bit dragged out at 60 seconds. But then maybe the spot being a little rough around the edges actually fits the concept. (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

There are an abundance (some might say an overabundance) of ads for television related products and services showing the viewer immersed in the onscreen action as a means of highlighting features, so BBDO New York’s latest spots for U-verse certainly don’t score many points for originality. Yet BBDO’s latest contributions in the category for AT&T’s U-verse get the formula right in a way not many do, thanks to deft editing and good transitions from the onscreen action to “real life.”

In “Police Drama” for example, a man is thrust into the action at a police station as a sergeant berates his officers to get leads on a case. He interrupts the sergeant, telling him, “We’ve got to move.” “That’s mu point,” the sergeant shoots back. “No, we’ve got to move to the den, my wife’s got book club in here,” he replies. He then marches through his wife’s book club crowed over to the den to finish the show. “Space Capsule” takes a similar approach with a sci-fi show on a train. It’s not anything viewers haven’t seen before, but the transitions make for a better execution than is typical for the approach. Now maybe it’s time to move on to a new idea?

“Space Capsule” and credits after the jump. (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A spot from BBDO‘s latest campaign for AT&T combines the 70?s sitcoms that our more mature readers all loved with what looks and sounds a lot like a 90?s metal show hosted in…a high school auditorium?

The point, of course, is that the quality of reception on many cellular networks leaves crucial calls all but indecipherable…and that subtitles aren’t just for Bergman movies that you can’t fully appreciate even after the translation.

We feel bad for the fake band in this spot, because we failed to see even one head banging.

More of the “Frank and Charlie” series plus credits after the jump.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We last encountered the #UpForWhatever tag in Bud Light’s spoof of the viral Mullen “World’s Toughest Job” ad (SPOILER: it was being a mom). That work came from Boston shop Relevant 24, but the newest sort-of-related spot comes to our inbox via BBDO’s Chicago and New York offices.

Here’s “Surprise Guest”:

You may notice that the spot is something of a tease: it’s only the latest in a series…

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This one’s been making the rounds for awhile, but we figured we’d add our two cents since it involves the ruining of a classic Beach Boys track. BBDO New York employs the Beach Boy’s “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” for their latest AT&T campaign. In the debut spot, “Sing Anthem” people in everyday situations randomly start singing the song as if they’re on Glee or something.

To be fair, BBDO does a passable job of connecting the song to AT&T’s message of helping “people and things speak the same language” and a good job of illustrating the point visually. But people of various walks of life (including an operatic news reporter) randomly bursting into song is a lot to swallow, and that the song is a personal favorite makes it even harder to take. The spot, which BBDO collaborated with Biscuit Filmoworks and editorial company Rock Paper Scissors to make, is part of a broader campaign that employs “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” as a theme song in each of its commericals. Thankfully, “Sing Anthem” is the only one of these to turn everyday life into a cheesy impromptu musical. Stick around for credits and “Sing Network” after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.