Hasta La Creative!

“We hear” may not be the most appropriate category for this post; “we see, on Twitter” would be more accurate.

But it certainly looks like Karen Kaplan, CEO and chairman of Boston’s Hill Holliday, met with Wieden+Kennedy managing director Tom Blessington at Fenway Park to say goodbye to Derek Jeter this weekend.

As to whether Kaplan’s merger mention is serious or not, it would make sense given the Cadillac account’s recent move from HH to Lowe Campbell Ewald and the subsequent disbanding of IPG’s Rogue unit.

It would also be particularly interesting because W+K remains independent while HH, as part of the IPG conglomerate, is a publicly traded entity.

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In honor of Presidents Day, the folks behind LasVegas.com/Vegas tourism are offering full presidential pardons for your long weekend debauchery. To get your Twitter-based absolution, just confess your sins and tweet #VegasPardon. Or if you just so happen to be at the Las Vegas airport today, you can get pardoned in person and start your shortened work week anew tomorrow.

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David&Goliath, perhaps most well-known for their Blake Griffin and now Jack McBrayer-co-starring spots for Kia, have decided to celebrate the new year a little differently. Instead of focusing on empty resolutions and self-improvement, they’ve created a “post-holiday card” thanking friends, family, clients and colleagues, which they’ve dubbed “The Gratitude Wall.”

David&Goliath invited employees to “appreciate and thank those who have helped us get to where we are today” via posts to Instagram, then assembled the Instagram images on The Gratitude Wall webpage. It’s a nice, positive message that D&G designed to “look back on our combined challenges and successes and to look ahead with a sincere thank you to all involved.” We appreciate the shift from the normal New Year’s naval gazing, new diets and resolutions that will be broken before February rolls around towards gratitude and appreciation. Plus, D&G can refresh the page with new photos next November for an easy Thanksgiving card.

If you need some affirmation that not all is wrong with the world this gloomy, snow-covered Friday, head on over to The Gratitude Wall for something unabashedly and straightforwardly nice. How often do you get to see that?

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One of the last items in our holiday coverage (we hope) may also be one of the strangest agency submissions of the season, which comes to us from New York-based Berlin Cameron United.

BCU’s version of the agency video holiday card is a weird one indeed, answering the question “What can Berlin Cameron bring you for the holidays?” with a barrage of gnomes, yeti costumes, dancing, beat boxing, and more yeti costumes, to name a few. Just don’t expect it all to make much sense as it’s more a menagerie of random, goofy ideas. We’ve definitely seen worse holiday cards this year, but I’m not sure we’ve seen a more bizarre one.

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As we he slowly shut it down for a little bit and try to get last-minute shopping done (yeah, we’re that person), here’s an effort featuring an illuminated gingerbread house from Los Angeles creative studio, Whirled. If this doesn’t get you in the holiday spirit on this Christmas Eve, we don’t know what will. In case you were wondering, the song is “The Mother We Share” from one of the indie music blog-approved bands of the moment, Chvrches. Happy holidays everyone, see you shortly.

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Usually when you give a gift you want to show that you’ve put a lot of thought into picking out just the right item to express how much you care about the gift’s receiver. But sometimes, you want your gift to say “I don’t really like you, so I picked out something crappy that you probably won’t like.” If you find yourself in the latter situation, the good folks over at San Francisco interactive agency Traction have got you covered.

Traction created “The Amazing Crap-O-Matic Gift Generator” for all those times when you just need a crappy gift, fast. Simply pull the digital lever and it instantly generates a crappy gift idea, from the game Redneck Rampage to a shark-eating-a-baby necklace; from blank VHS tapes to Handerpants (exactly what it sounds like it is), it just keeps generating crappy gifts. If there’s a flaw with “The Amazing Crap-O-Matic Gift Generator,” it’s that some of the items are not crappy at all, but rather pretty damned cool — like the dead rapper nail art kit, or the aforementioned shark-eating-a-baby necklace. We’ve seen a lot of agency holiday cards this year, but Traction’s just may be the most useful. Happy holidays, everyone.

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Boston-based agency Viewpoint Creative has delivered one of the crazier (in a good way) agency holiday cards with their video imagining the worst that can happen from not unplugging the tree. Their funny, monstrous scenario is animated, if you can call it that, with toys. It’s one of the more original takes on the holiday card this year, and one of the most entertaining. The DIY amateurishness of the process only adds to the whacky charm.

The video begins with Lenny’s significant other reminding him to unplug the Christmas tree. Lenny doesn’t heed her warning, and as a result all hell breaks loose. We won’t give away too much, but there’s a giant New Year’s baby and a demonic Santa involved, so why not check it out?

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MRY, the New York-based shop that merged with LBi earlier this year, has done something a little different for their holiday card. Instead of just including all the winter holidays, they’ve gone ahead and created an Alliday Card with “13 days to celebrate the magic of mergers.” They decided that they like their holidays like they like their agencies: merged . So they merged together a bunch of holidays to create 13 “Alliday” celebrations.

Among the new creations are Momukah, Dia De Los Muertes Presidentes, 4Fathers20, Groundependence Day and Cat Tuesday. It all kicked off yesterday with Rosh Hashinese New Year; today is Black Friday the 13th, tomorrow is Diwalintines Day, and it concludes with Christombus Day. For each Alliday, MRY tells you how to celebrate (for Rosh Hashinese New Year have some egg drop soup with matzo balls), includes an Alliday greeting, and a gift you can bid on (like “8 days of phone calls from a handsome, well-educated Jewish son for Momukah).

MRY’s lighthearted take on the holiday card is certainly one of a kind, and the Allidays are mostly pretty funny. A few of them — Cat Tuesday, anyone? — even sound like a lot of fun. A funny holiday card that’s out of the ordinary, merges holidays, and has little to do with Christmas? Believe me, that’s much appreciated.

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Birmingham-based agency o2ideas just launched a holiday card generator, entitled “The Whimsically Wonderful Holidelightful Festively Fantastic Cardtraption.”

The card generator is a fun way to send along a digital card to a family member, friend or significant other. You begin by selecting your recipient; then choose your cheer level (from awful to amazing); after that you pick which holiday you’d like your card to be for, including Festivus and the Winter Solstice (which is tomorrow); finally, you press a button to choose a tone and enter your name, then out pops a holiday card. Want a sad card, to wish your ex a terrible Kwanzaa? You can do that. Or a weird card to wish your brother a happy Winter Solstice? You get the idea. Having seen so many holiday cards, 02ideas’ approach of instead spreading cheer by letting people create their own cards is a welcome change. And it’s a fun little contraption that generates some pretty funky holiday cards. Try it for yourself and let us know what you think.

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If you’re a frequent reader of this site (and especially if you’re a regular commenter) you may remember the “Hater Translator” from a few weeks back. Hater Translator would take a spiteful comment and translate it into something nicer. Since most comments on this site are made by hateful pricks, the Hater Translator kept pretty busy. It was kind of funny the first time, less so the second, and it quickly wore out its welcome. Pretty soon, everyone was annoyed and our inboxes were flooded with complaints. Sure, the haters are annoying, but Hater Translator only seemed to make things worse. Now, the folks over at Mullen have come out as the creators of the Hater Translator, with a new site and holiday-themed video (featured above).

The video tells the story of the Hater Translator’s creation by an IT guy at Mullen who looks kind of like Zach Braff. He noticed that all the internet hate was making people sad, “especially when they read nasty comments posted about their work.” The video then shows a bunch of priceless reactions to hateful comments from advertising folk, which is pretty funny. “Don’t they know that advertising is one of the most important jobs in the world?” he asks of the haters. So he decided to “turn the Internet into a friendlier place” with the Hater Translator, but, as well all know, this just redirected the hate back onto the Hater Translator. At any rate, Zach Braff IT guy walks us through how the crazy machine works — it turns the word “fuck” into real fudge, and then shows us the Hater Translator”in action.” In other words, translating comments from this site. They mention their four days translating “hundreds of nasty comments on Agency Spy into expressions of love and joy” and complain of being shut down on the fifth day. Apparently, that makes us Scrooges.

Mullen calls the Hater Translator “a really great way to spread some holiday cheer to a place that really needs it,” but we’re guessing you disagree. Take it away, comments section…

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