Hasta La Creative!

Venables Bell & Partners have an off-center campaign for Skyy Vodka, introducing the new tagline “West of Expected” for the California brand.

The new campaign sees improv actor Paul Welsh play a spokesman for the brand, lecturing in some kind of planetarium setting and using cosmic terminology as an analogy for drinking/bar culture. In the 30-second “Tipping” for example, Welsh explains that tipping (in this case giving a mouse in a maze a piece of cheese, for some reason) brings order to chaos, forming a connection with the bartender and getting you good service all night. In the similarly-toned “Attraction” a wing lemon (used to exemplify a wing man) bring together opposites: apples and oranges. It’s a strange approach, for sure, but then Skyy Vodka is an unusual brand — a California company with mostly Old World competition. The “West of Expected” tagline fits Skyy perfectly, and leaves room for a wealth of different approaches going forward.

“In the industry as a whole, and especially vodka, everyone is trying to out-cool themselves and appeal to people’s ego and vanity,” VB&P Executive Creative Director Will McGinness told Adweek. “We wanted to push off the industry norms and the Russian or Eastern European vodka companies and do our own thing and celebrate this different kind of vodka.”

Stick around for “Attraction”and credits after the jump. (more…)

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Last year, Goodby Silverstein & Partners celebrated the holidays with their “BIG: Color” spot for the NBA, which they sometimes refer to as “Carol of the Balls” (sounds a bit gross to me.) Following on the success of that spot, the agency has put together another NBA Christmas carol for hoops fans, this time taking on the ubiquitous Christmas song known variously as “Jingle Bells” and “One-Horse Open Sleigh.”

The spot, “Jingle Hoops,” (the folks over at Goodby are undoubtedly referring to it as “Jingle Balls”) features five of today’s biggest NBA stars – Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, James Harden, Steve Nash and LeBron James – wearing Special Edition Christmas Day Uniforms and shooting hoops rigged with jingle bells, to a certain famous Christmas tune. Since the song normally ends with a shout of “Hey,” they had LeBron finish things out with an enthusiastic dunk. It’s a simple idea, well executed (personally I think they did a better job than with “Carol of the Bells” last year), that I imagine most NBA fans can appreciate.

Personally, I think it’s a bit early for Christmas/holiday stuff (Can we please wait until Thanksgiving?), but that’s a losing argument since the entire world has decided that November 1st (and sometimes earlier) is the proper time to start the winter holiday onslaught. Given that, the song choice is kind of appropriate, since “One-Horse Open Sleigh” was originally composed for Thanksgiving.

The Special Edition Christmas Day Uniforms are part of the Adidas Winter Court collection and will be worn by NBA players exclusively during Christmas Day games. Interested parties can purchase the uniforms online at the NBA store. Credits after the jump. continued…

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