Hasta La Creative!

Sure, we’ve seen far more clever routes being taken by creatives in order to land an agency (we think this guy set the bar), but hey, we can always appreciate those taking more standard steps to sell themselves. Take for instance this enterprising Toronto guy/gal who among other things, boasts via Craigslist that he/she does one hell of an impression of characters from The Mighty Boosh, the U.K. comedy troupe that had a show on BBC years ago. Not sure if that will really help this digital copywriter’s cause, but hey, there’s this:

“Perks of working with me include:

-The submission of polished, timely work
-Full access to my knowledge of obscure rap music
-A delicious curry dish at every office potluck (it’s all I know how to cook)
– My impersonations of characters from The Mighty Boosh
-A two-week break from my Mighty Boosh impersonations at Christmas

Your duties will involve:

-Paying me every two weeks
-Occasionally supplying me with coffee
-Providing me with at least one healthcare benefit”

Not sure if this person’s looking locally, but if so, your move, Toronto agencies. Hey, we like the moxie.

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I’m the Rooster guy apparently and I’m back to cover some more irreverent Rooster shenanigans. The above video, “How to Take a Punch,” epitomizes what a side project should be: easily digestible, fun to watch, and humorous. A slow-mo gif of James Franco taking a punch to the face has been making the blogging rounds before his Comedy Central roast airs on Labor Day. Vice co-founder/Rooster boss Gavin McInnes decided to join in on the slow-mo fun and take a harder punch to the face. The result is a side-by-side 13-second video comparison of the punches that is probably too stupid for its own good. Something makes me think Rooster likes that. These guys seem to have fun in the office.

After the jump, you can watch a longer video of people getting punched in the face slowed down to 1000 frames per second. It’s violently elegant and directed by Cody Kern, a man who has no relation to Rooster. As you watch, feel free to let the catharsis of watching others get walloped improve your day. Jiggling jowls have the affect on people.

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I was just a kid when Charley Steiner yelled “Follow me! Follow me to freedom!” at the end of the “Y2K” This is Sportscenter ad. ESPN was a much simpler network then, before screaming heads led by Messers Bayless and A. Smith really damaged the reputation of everyone’s go-to sports network. Back then, the anchors of Sportscenter, like Steiner, were the stars, and the audience got to see anchor personalities shine through during these 30-second spots. Sometimes the spots featured professional athletes; sometimes they didn’t. But the spots were almost always funny and ripe with self-deprecation.

More than a decade later, Steiner is gone from the network. ESPN has chosen to count down the 50 greatest “This is Sportscenter” commercials from the past 18 years on August 1, with irrelevant host/SNL member Jason Sudeikis. As always, W+K New York ran point on this project with “the worldwide leader in sports.” I’m not sure why the network has chosen to unroll the countdown now, but we’re told that there will be bonus footage and interviews with the actors, athletes, and producers who helped shape the commercials. So for one last day, we can all follow Charley Steiner to freedom.

You can watch a few of the top spots after the jump, including a great bit featuring the entire Manning family from a few years ago.

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And now for something completely different:

A tipster points us to a quaint little discussion in Reddit’s Advertising sub-reddit that asks: “Do agencies drug test? Or is it something that’s on an agency by agency basis? I’m more of a creative and about to start entering the field, just wondering what to look out for.” We figure it’s our duty to distract you from this whole Publicis/Omnicom thing with a few of our favorite responses.

User auto-didact imagined an employee having to break the drug test results with the boss:

“Well, the designers all showed up positive for marijuana. So we fired them. Most of the creative directors too. All the account honchos came up positive for opiates. Most likely coke. They’re gone. All our PLD’s and software engineers tripped up for speed. Not surprising. We’ll have to offshore that work now. Oh, and almost all the senior leadership was clean, but bloodwork showed liver failure in progress. We caught our IT guy huffing cans of spray paint.”

User panthur offers a different experience:

They did at my agency. It was a local agency but now we are owned by a giganto agency conglomerate. A lot of them are owned by big companies and testing unfortunately tends to come with that.

Finally, user pugofwar responded simply with:

Never. (I’m at W+K.)

You can read the whole thread here, and we invite you to share your own experience in the comments.

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A week after he initially began his experiment, ad man Marty Weiss‘s search for friends in New York City soldiers forth, only this time with a little less success. Weiss’s man-on-the-street project, where he simply asks, “would you be my friend?” to total strangers, is essentially a self-promotional effort for his newly rebranded agency called, yes, Marty Weiss & Friends, which works with the likes of Grand Central and Sobieski vodka. If you stick around until the end, you’ll see Weiss, who seems like a friendly enough character though NYC passersby aren’t really having it, eventually catch up with a rather familiar name from the ad world. During his 25-year ad career, Weiss worked at the likes of TBWA\Chiat\Day and served as creative director/founding partner of another New York-based agency called Weiss Whitten Stagliano for well over a decade. You can check out his YouTube page here.

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Would you want to work for a company that asks you to do a blindfolded trustfall off of a building? Probably not, although if Goldman Sachs asked some young jobseekers to do the trustfall while calculating a probability brainteaser, I’m sure there are people who’d sign up. That’s the point of the new faux recruiting video from SpareFoot, an Austin-based storage finder start-up. You’ll find all the trappings of an exaggerated office culture: crazy bosses, scared underlings, and an HR rep who likes Vin Diesel. We’re guessing working at SpareFoot isn’t actually like this, but CEO Chuck “Commodore” Gordon does resemble a Gary Busey stunt double (well played on the self-deprecation).

These types of office-culture riffs have been done before, but SpareFoot has chosen an interesting path by linking the video on the company website Jobs page. I’m not sure if such a jokey pitch would make me want to apply to work there, because although we get to see what SpareFoot culture isn’t like, we never really get to see what it’s actually like in the office. The risk may turn people off, but during a time when using the wrong resume font can lead employers to ignore you, having a sense of humor in the workplace feels refreshing.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

And now, your silly aside of the day courtesy of, yes, another memo from Grey New York, which our tips box has been adequately filled with over the last couple of years. The latest opus comes from Grey NY president/CCO Tor Myhren, who decided to bless his staffers on this, the hottest of weeks in the Big Apple, by letting them wear shorts all this week. Why? Well, agency staffers helped find candidates for the apparent “hiring spree” Grey’s on (we’re assuming the newly won Gillette biz has plenty to do with it). Anyways, consider us jealous once we dare step outside and roast. Read on if you’d like, though we did redact a couple of the names just to be fair.

“I’m fighting against every fiber of my being as I write this. But it’s hot out there. Like, really hot. And as [redacted] has pointed out, you guys did a great job helping us fill the ridiculous amount of new hires we needed over the past few months. So it is with absolutely zero pleasure that I announce you can all wear shorts for the rest of the week. Run home now and change, [redacted], because this is the day you’ve been waiting for.

Michael and I agree this offer is only good for the rest of this week, so enjoy it people. You’ve earned it.

Love,
Tor.

P.S. In two hours I’m strategically off to LA for the rest of the week and won’t have to witness this atrocity. So in my head, it never really happened.”

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Seeing as it’s lunchtime and all over here on the East Coast, figured you may have a few minutes to view a new web series concocted by a handful of folks including current and former ad creatives/execs who decided to delve into a completely non-agency project. Ladies and gents, we bring you Transfurter, essentially an adults-only animated series filled with innuendo, breasts, phalluses and more. And that’s just one episode (“A Hotdogbit’s Tale, Pt 1/1000,” which you can see above).

You might cringe, chuckle or just shut if off, but whatever the case, you can blame it all on mastermind Joe Croson, a former VP group executive producer at BBDO and writer for [Adult Swim]. Obviously, Croson’s latter gig informs this current effort aplenty, but the Transfurter creator tells us that the seed was planted four years ago. He tells us, “It was a seed idea in 2009 that I drew on a post-it note and did some stupid VO for.  With the help of my friends Miguel, Mike, Rachel, Nick and Justin and some of my awesome interns, I pitched it to a few different cable networks, who either told us that it was too sick for broadcast, or wanted to see it in action online first.”

Along with Croson, Transfurter features the handiwork of Dan Cordella, currently a senior copywriter at Digitas, Monica Lo, whose day job is senior art director at kbs+, and Jake Grupp from Sound Lounge. If you have more time to kill, you can view more episodes from the ongoing series as well as learn more about the project here. Reminder: It’s kinda NSFW.

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With all the hullabaloo surrounding the Campbell Ewald news and everything else under the sun yesterday, forgot Whit Hiler‘s note to us that, yes, brands have latched on, literally, to his “Beardvertising” effort. Hiler, of course, is one of the parties involved in the “Kentucky Kicks Ass” tourism campaign launched towards the end of last year. Two months ago, the creative and his agency Lexington, KY-based agency Cornett Integrated Marketing Solutions decided to launch an effort called “Beardvertising,” in which still-patent-pending “beardboards”–or miniature billboards–would be placed on willing participants’ beards.

Well, suffice it to say, we were skeptical, but now Hiler tells us that “Beardvertising” is building momentum, in a sense, in that the project has nabbed brands including A&W Restaurants and most recently (and aptly enough), Dollar Shave Club. In a statement, the latter company’s founder Michael Dubin says, “We’re excited to be building our business of beardlessness with these badass, bushy Beardboards.” Yesterday, the Beardvertising effort officially took off with 25 participants from around the U.S. who will sport beardboards, and Hiler says there are 1,400 more “eager guys” willing to participate. Perhaps one of the most prominent beardvertisers for DSC thus far is Gerald Okamura (below), who you may recognize from films including Big Trouble in Little China and Showdown in Little Tokyo.

You can check out more Beardvertising hijinks on Instagram here.

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Never before has the “What The…?” category tag been used more appropriately. No, Gary Busey is not the new spokesman for Men’s Wearhouse, but the folks at Jimmy Kimmel Live! had some fun with the recent ousting of MW co-founder, George Zimmer. Zimmer’s velvety rasp has been replaced with Busey’s unvelvety crazy that complements his devious smile and plaid clown suit. When Zimmer said “You’re gonna like the way you look, I guarantee it,” it made you want to buy a suit. When Busey says the same line, you almost expect him to follow it with: “It puts the lotion on its skin.” Normally I’d be kidding, but not with Gary Busey. He’s one of few people who can make brand parody truly frightening.

h/t AR

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.