Hasta La Creative!

How do you sell a car to people who live in a city with plenty of transportation options? Simple. Offer them personal space. From there, it's cake.

This new ad for Honda's City vehicle by Leo Burnett's Melbourne office may be geared for Australians, but showing the sheer variety of ways that some jerk can invade your personal bubble works for any metropolis.

It could be my Northeast upbringing (I'm uncomfortable if someone outside my immediate family tries to hug me), but I appreciate just how annoyed these people are. Contrasting that with the visible space and relief the vehicle's interior offers is a nice effort.

Environmentally friendly mass transit, be damned!

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Honda
General Manager, Communications: Jason Miller
Brand Communications Manager: Melissa Altarelli

Agency: Leo Burnett, Melbourne, Australia
Executive Creative Director: Jason Williams
Creative Director: Andrew Woodhead
Head of Copy: Sarah McGregor
Senior Art Director: Rob McDowell
Senior Agency Producer: Cinnamon Darvall
Group Account Director: Chris Ivanov
Senior Account Director: Jaime Morgan
Account Manager: Jacquelyn Whelan

Production Company: The Sweet Shop
Director: Noah Marshall
Producer: Tony Whyman

The McDonald’s Owner/Operators of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana have dropped Leo Burnett and named Toronto-based agency Cosette as their new local advertising agency, reports the Chicago Tribune.

The move, which was announced yesterday, shifts the marketing for almost 500 mid-west McDonald’s away from Leo Burnett, who have represented the McDonald’s Owner/Operators of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana since the mid-80s.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Cossette and their fresh creative ideas to MOCNI,” said Ed Schmitt Jr., MOCNI co-op president. “They have a clear passion for our business, and a proven track record with our counterparts in Canada.”

Cossette is already McDonald’s lead creative agency in Canada, where they handle national brand and regional owner/operator business. This appointment marks their first U.S. assignment, and the agency will be opening up a Chicago office to handle the new business. The new office will be headed by Alyssa Huggins, a veteran of Cossette’s McDonald’s Canada business in Toronto, and staffed by around 20 people, including both Cossette Canadian team members and local Chicago talent.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Agency: Leo Burnett, Dubai, UAE
Executive Creative Director: Malek Ghorayeb
Senior Art Director: Rafael Augusto
Senior Copywriter: Sunny Deo
Communications Manager: Lara ElBarkouki
Communications Supervisor: Layal Nammour

The post National Geographic : Wild Month : Leo Burnett Dubai appeared first on desicreative.

Esurance is doing a fun little stunt tonight that should get some attention.

The online insurance company has bought the first commercial slot after the the final whistle of the Super Bowl. The company says that cost $1.5 million less than running an in-game execution—and it's using the ad to announce a Twitter sweepstakes in which it will give that money away to a lucky viewer who tweets the hashtag #EsuranceSave30.

To keep as many viewers' attention from drifting as possible, Esurance has gotten The Office star John Krasinski, its voiceover talent since 2012, to appear on camera for the first time in this spot, created by Leo Burnett.

After the ad airs, you will have 36 hours to tweet #EsuranceSave30 for a chance to win. Krasinski will unveil the winner on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday.

Leo Burnett Chicago (and, we hear, New Zealand digital shop Resn) have created the Holiday Home Decorator for Allstate.

The site lets you enter your home address or use a standard house, and then decorate with a number of items including lights, candles, trees and presents. You can also control the intensity of the snowfall. Depending on your actions, you will be interrupted by a different kind of mayhem, which acts as an extension of a readily recognizable Allstate campaign. If you put up a bunch of lights, for example, you’ll probably get faulty wiring that causes the house to catch on fire. It’s a fun little diversion, and probably the only holiday site that will let you burn your house down. What’s not to like?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Special K believes positivity is key to weight management success. So, it's taking aim at its opposite—"fat talk," or the negative things some women say about their bodies and others. The Kellogg's brand says 93 percent of women fat talk, "and it's weighing women down." Now, ahead of the New Year slim-down season, Special K and Leo Burnett have launched a whole "Fight Fat Talk" campaign, with social, video and other efforts aimed at getting women to talk more positively about themselves.

The two-minute spot below, directed by O Positive's Peyton Wilson, has a pretty aggressive strategy for dealing with fat talk: It ambushes women with it while they're shopping for clothes (a prime occasion for fat talk). Actual fat talk, taken from Twitter and elsewhere, is printed on signs and labels in the store—and is meant to make women realize how terribly self-defeating it is.

The spot is clearly going for an empowering vibe, à la Dove or Pantene. And the women do get emotional upon seeing the signs, realizing they're being too hard on themselves. But in some ways, it doesn't feel as natural. Without any positivity at all, the signs just don't seem very inspiring—unlike the Dove and Pantene ads, which had the stranger-described sketches and the "Don't let labels hold you back" elements as springboards for positivity. Plus, there's also the inconvenient fact that Special K is expressly meant to make you thinner—rather than making you more accepting of yourself.

What do you think of the video? Does it work for you?

Four months after parting ways with TBWA\Chiat\Day New York, where he was replaced as creative chief by Matt Ian, Mark Figliulo is now collaborating with Team Sprint–Leo Burnett, DigitasLBi and MediaVest– via his new agency, Figliulo & Partners. From what we’ve been told, “Bringing in new partners and ideas who complement an already strong multi-agency team, is both healthy and consistent with the dynamic needs of brands, consumers and the marketplace.” From what sources tell us, Figliulo will continue working out of New York City with a focus on broadcast. During his career, Figliulo, who replaced Gerry Graf at Chiat NY, served as chief creative officer at Y&R Chicago.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If job interviews had a skip button, would anyone be willing to hear out an ex-con? That's the question Leo Burnett and a U.K. nonprofit try to make you answer in the innovative interactive clip below.

As the video opens, a young man recently released from prison speaks directly to the camera, as if the viewer is the hiring manager. As he awkwardly tries to tell his story, a "Skip Ad" button appears on screen. Each time the button is pressed and the video restarts, the applicant grows increasingly apprehensive and downbeat, until he's almost begging to be heard. Finally, he becomes resigned to his fate.

"I'm sorry that you don't want to listen," he says to those who've skipped their way to the end. "I hope you can find time in the future to give an ex-offender like me a second chance."

If viewers don't press the button, his pitch, though tentative, gets increasingly upbeat and ends on a hopeful note: "A lot of people just write me off pretty much straightaway as soon as they hear I've been inside. Today's been different. Thanks for that. Yeah. Thanks for listening."

The video by Leo Burnett Change, an activism division of the agency's London office, is part of the "Ban the Box" campaign from the nonprofit Business in the Community, which is pushing for the removal of mandatory check-off boxes on U.K. job applications that ask about criminal convictions. "With the subject of ex-offenders being such a contentious issue, we wanted to create a thought-provoking idea. Something that would make people reassess how they feel toward ex-offenders," agency cd Hugh Todd says in a statement on Leo Burnett London's Facebook page. "Using and subverting the 'Skip Ad' button gave us the perfect opportunity to do this."

That unusual approach underscores the broader message that denying this guy a chance to be heard is like locking him up all over again and throwing away the key.

Try out the video for yourself here.

In a spot that brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Inception, doctors observe and interact with a sleeping Luigi to alter the dream world he resides in while sleeping.

At the beginning of the spot one of the doctors announces that the Nintendo 3DS “Will allow us to view the strange dreams of our friend Luigi.” The doctors probing a sleeping Luigi premise is balanced nicely with gameplay footage, including tiny Luigis forming a hammer and then a ball to battle enemies. At one point a doctor pulls on Luigi’s mustache, which acts as a slingshot for Mario in Luigi’s dream world. The typical Mario franchise charm is in full effect here.

“Sleeping Problems” incorporates gameplay into the spot in an organic way (not always easy to do), while making the game seem like a lot of fun. In fact, this makes me really want a 3DS. This is a problem, mostly because I can’t afford a 3DS any time soon. So thanks for that. Jerks.

Christopher Nolan could not be reached for comment. Credits and “bloopers” video after the jump.  continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We’ve received confirmation that Tony Rogers, most recently SVP/creative director at Arc Worldwide/Leo Burnett, is no longer with the agency. What we’re hearing is that there were a few cuts made on Sept. 25 and Rogers was one of those affected. During his brief stint at Leo, Rogers worked on a range of accounts from Coca-Cola to Purina. We’ve also been told that Rogers wrote the last two Leo Burnett Breakfast shows. No word yet on what other “top-level employees” were cut last week, but we’ll keep you posted if we find out more.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.