Yesterday, metal legends and running joke Metallica performed a concert at Antarctica’s Carlini Scientific Base to 120 people in a transparent dome of some sort. Of the 120 attendees, 20 were scientists from Russia, Korea, China, Poland, Chile, Brazil and Germany. These winners of “Music Zero” “enjoyed the talent of Metallica in a quite exceptional way: through headphones, to respect the harmony of the environment,” which…wait, what?

It’s impossible to blame anyone at the concert for rocking out at this concert. After all, once you get bored of watching penguins slide around on their stomachs, there’s not a lot entertaining that happens on the most-desolate of continents. But, I have to wonder, why is a brand that seems to target college-aged youth trying to make a statement with a band like Metallica, who the average millennial may remember first from their douche-y drummer getting pissy about Napster and again from the 2004 couples therapy session, Some Kind of Monster?

Now, this could be a sign of things changing at Coke Zero, and a decision from on high to start marketing to a consumer who remembers that Metallica was actually a pretty solid band pre-Load. It’s also very possible that Coke Zero had some money to burn and no other band was willing to travel to Antarctica to throw a concert. But, in a world where metal is getting an awesome resurgence via bands like METZ, Deafheaven, and Liturgy, there’s gotta be a better alternative to Metallica. Set list after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Have you ever noticed how much Kanye West has in common with your Creative Director? The over-inflated egos, aimless pontificating, batshit crazy quotes. Well, you’re not alone: some mystery genius (or geniuses) created Kanye Vs. Creative Director, a site that supplies quotes and asks you to identify whether they came from self-proclaimed genius Yeezus or a self-proclaimed genius Creative Director. Or, as they put it on the site, “They both talk like they’re God’s gift to the Earth, but the lines have gotten so blurred that it’s hard to tell who said what. Until now.”

Once you enter the site you’re given the option to play Kanye Vs. Creative Director, or to submit quotes from your own Creative Director — a nice touch that ensures the site will continue to grow. Then the fun begins, and it’s harder than you might think to distinguish which quotes are from a Creative Director and which are from a famous, narcissistic rapper. A sampling: “Sometimes I get emotional over fonts.” Sounds like a sure bet for Creative Director, right? Nope, that one was Kanye. Now picture Kanye crying over Comic Sans. There you go, fun, isn’t it?

“You won’t understand my genius until, like, two years from now.” Okay, that seems like a safe bet for Kanye, no? Actually no, that was a real thing said by an actual Creative Director. You get the idea. Of course, some of them actually are easy, but you’d be surprised how often it’s difficult to distinguish who said what. When you answer a question you get a little message from either Kanye or the Creative Director, offering encouragement for a right answer and ridicule for a wrong answer. The Creative Director might say, for example, “I thought you were better than this,” or “Great job rolling with the punches,” while Kanye might offer up, “We don’t wanna hear that weak shit no more” or “You actin ballerific like it’s all terrific.” It’s a funny, clever idea, and the site is a fun way to spend a few minutes at work (provided your Creative Director doesn’t catch you). The only problems with Kanye Vs. Creative Director are that it doesn’t track your progress, and the quotes just keep coming in an infinite, seemingly random loop (which means you might get stuck with some repeat quotes after only a few minutes). Nitpicking aside, we’re glad someone thought this one up. Hopefully Kanye doesn’t find out about it.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

R/GA  Ignition and Prettybird are behind the latest viral marketing campaign for X-Men: Days of Future Past. The timely campaign (coming just days after the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination), positions Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) as President Kennedy’s convicted killer. It’s a compelling and immersive story that ties together the X-Men universe and American history.

The above video, “The Bent Bullet,” is just the beginning. The Bent Bullet website contains a wealth of other material (in addition to the video), mixing text with video and interactive elements, including a look inside Magneto’s Trask Industries designed cell. If you’re a fan of the X-Men, it’s pretty fascinating stuff. There’s even a full-length article, attributed to Harper Simmons, profiling Erik Lehnsherr and questioning his involvement in the JFK assassination. In the article, Lehnsherr finally speaks, and seems to implicate a different X-Men character in the assassination.

The Bent Bullet’s alternate history claims Kennedy had prepared a speech addressing the tumultuous relationship between humans and mutants, calling on Americans to accept those with the X-Gene, if only implicitly. It also addresses Kennedy’s CIA-led Project: WideAwake, which led to the assassinations of Azazel and Tempest and was presumably the motive for Kennedy’s assassination by the mutant Lehnsherr. X-Men obsessives will love this (and probably have already experienced the whole site), but it’s well worth the time of even casual fans or curious parties. Kudos to R/GA and Prettybird for pulling off such an immersive, intriguing, and just plain fun web experience to promote X-Men: Days of Future Past. 

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

AKQA senior art director Andrew Wendling has, in his own words, “decided to finally give in and make the logo bigger” on his new Tumblr dedicated to enlarged versions of famous logos. We’re not sure where the perceived pressure for this project was coming from, but if you’re a design junky, this kind of thing should be right up your alley.

Logos featured on the site include Batman, Playboy, Starbucks, Red Bull, Panda Express, Shell, NBC, and others. So far the project includes two pages of blown-up logos, but check back for updates. Seeing the logos in the zoomed in, larger format does help cast them in a different light. The Starbucks logo, in particular, reveals details you might miss from the regular sized version.

This reminds us a little bit of  Nick DiLallo and Doug Zaner‘s project animating the evolution of famous logos, which we covered last month. Check out Wendling’s logo-enlarging project here, and sound off in the comments section with your opinion.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

After forever tainting beards and depressing me by winning the World Series (disclosure: I’m a Baltimore Orioles fan), the Boston Red Sox said goodbye to their playoff-grown facial hair in a mass “Shave Off” at Gillette World Shaving Headquarters on Monday, November 4.

If you’d like to commemorate that event, you’ll be glad to know that the “Gillette Fusion ProGlide razors that were used to shave each champion beard,” as well as the beards themselves — called beard ball trophies — are up for auction on eBay thanks to agencies Grey and Ketchum. It’s kind of gross and creepy, but at least it’s for a good cause. All of the proceeds for the auction are being donated to Movember, the global mens charity raising awareness and funds for prostate health through the growth of November mustaches that you may have read about here this month. If you’re interested, you can bid on Shane Victorino‘s beard ball here (the current bid is $1,550), or World Series MVP David Ortiz‘s beard here (current bid 3,050). “I’m glad that the beard that helped me throughout the series can now help raise funds for a great organization like Movember,” said Ortiz.

Gillette senior brand manager Hooman Shahidi says of the Red Sox shavings, “their facial hair has been the symbol of the team since spring training and became part of baseball lore. We hope the shavings help raise awareness for important men’s health issues and find good homes with passionate fans.” I know this is for a good cause and everything, but I’m trying to imagine the type of fan who spends thousands of dollars to obtain and display the facial hair of their favorite player, and “passionate” is not the word that comes to mind.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You may have read about Victors & Spoils’ pro-bono (and, actually, fictional) campaign for broccoli in the New York Times, or possibly somewhere else around the Internet. The Havas-owned crowdsourcing agency, as you may know, have put together campaigns for Coca-Cola, Quiznos and General Mills over the years. So they know a thing or two about selling food products, although they normally deal with huge corporations selling hyper-processed foods rather than a vegetable. The interesting process they went through attempting to create a broccoli campaign is well-documented in video format over at The New York Times site and is well worth a gander.

Rhett and Link (Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal), whose IFC program Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings (in which they went around the country creating low budget ads for real, local companies) lasted one season, satirize the broccoli campaign in a new segment for their YouTube show, Good Mythical More. They created six fictional ads for the program. Unfortunately, while these ads themselves are pretty funny, the banter in between them drags the show out past the ten minute mark, and is significantly less worthwhile. So I’ve been a good sport and tracked down the start times for the six broccoli ads for you: 3:53, 4:42, 5:20, 6:09, 6:41, and 7:10.

The first of the broccoli spots plays on the superfood’s healthy aspect with the tagline “Be Old Longer,” since living longer essentially means being “old and crotchety” for a longer period of time. In the second spot, they channel a disgruntled father with the tagline “Broccoli: Quit your whining and eat it.”  One of the funnier ads is the “vintage” spot, selling broccoli as “the only vegetable with an afro.” Strictly speaking, this isn’t true, since cauliflower could also be said to have an afro. But that’s just nitpicking. The next spot advises you to “eat it raw, because it smells like a fart when you cook it.” My personal favorite tells you to eat broccoli “if you don’t want to feel guilty when your mother dies,” ending with the tagline, “Broccoli: Your dead mom would have wanted you to.” Using guilt to advertise broccoli? Pretty genius. The last of the spots is probably the goofiest: it runs around the idea that broccoli looks like little trees, which would make you a giant. Rhett and Link both take bites out of a piece of broccoli, pretending to be giants eating a tree. Silly stuff, indeed.

You might wonder if a satire of an already tongue-in-cheek fictional campaign was really necessary, but it’s all in good fun. And we could all use some fun on a Monday. Credits after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last year, AgencySpy brought you coverage of graphic designer Jason Sadler, some guy who wanted to make selling himself out as crazy and overblown as possible.

He began his foray into the world of turning himself into a walking billboard for money with IWearYourShirt.com, a website where people could volunteer to wear sponsors; t-shirts around for a fee because they were really hard up or something. Next, Sadler decided to take his experiments into human commercialism to the next level with BuyMyLastName.com, a site that allowed him to auction off his last name for the entirety of 2013 for $45,500 to Headsets.com.

Now, evidently out of ideas, Jason HeadphonesDotCom will auction off his name once more for 2014 before taking his great-grandfather’s name until he dies or gets bored. What’s in it for brands? Well, check out this little nugget from the press release:

The company associates $250,000 in sales and just over $6 million of advertising impressions in less than two months directly to purchasing the rights to Jason’s last name. “The publicity impact was beyond belief. Our recognition factor jumped right away and still lasts now. Best $45k I have ever spent,” said Mike Faith, Headsets.com CEO.

So, there you have it, if you’re a brand on par with Headsets.com. The winning sponsor will also have their brand name appear on the cover of Jason’s new book (which you’ll find info about at, what else, SponsorMyBook.com), so really, you can’t go wrong. Bid at BuyMyLastName.com.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We originally had no idea what’s doing with this GIF-tastic site, but tipsters tell us it comes BBH Labs’ Tim Nolan and Jen Lu, which has been around for a couple of months but seemingly keeps adding to the hysteria. According to an original Vimeo description, Cachemonet “is an exploration into paired randomness. The site uses two separate random arrays that generate animated compositions using two planes, a fixed foreground element, and a repeated background element. A new random composition is generated by page refresh every four seconds.” We emailed Nolan for further background, but have yet to hear back. For now, we think you get the idea. We’ll update if and when.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

From TBWA\Paris comes a new spot for AIDES which depicts a wooden man dry-humping some girl he picked up at a bar. Titled “Woody” (because PENIS BONERZ HAHAHAHA), the spot is a reminder to girls everywhere that the dude you meet out at the club might have AIDS or Herpes or something but might not know it. Wrap that rascal, as the kids say. Rubber up! (As I say.)

As you may recall, AIDES is no stranger to provocative, weiner-laden advertising. Why just a few years ago they sent a CGI penis on vacation with the help of Goodby, Silverstein + Partners to remind us that you don’t know where that penis you’ve randomly encountered has been. It could be rubbing itself all over Aztec ruins for all you know.

On the same subject-ish, an aside: I attended a “Friendsgiving” party this past weekend where we all went around the room and said what we were thankful for. A rather intoxicated friend of mine stood up when it was his turn and announced loudly to the room, “You know, my penis has been a lot of places over the course of my life.” He then pointed to his girlfriend and said, “You’ve been the best!” Somehow, he managed not to get slapped. On that note, full super-French credits, and a making-of video, follow after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Dana Larson, chief content officer at San Francisco-based agency Extractable, has returned with another column, this time *gulp* tackling what is basically the most controversial/notorious aspect of this site, the comment thread. Larson, who has spent 20+ years in the biz, holding a wide range of positions including copywriter, CMO, content strategy director and ECD, asks a question that has been posed to us by many an agency staffer–whether they be in PR, creative or in senior exec level–over the years. We only wish her the best. Read on and chime in if you please.

Writing a post for AgencySpy is not for the faint of heart. It’s a bit like splitting the lanes on the Bay Bridge—there’s always a chance that you’re going to find yourself in the comments equivalent of eating asphalt. (For those of you who don’t ride, the drawing of blood is involved here.) Sure, there are plenty of posts that get no comments at all, but when the comments start flying, they really get going and they’re usually not very kind.

In a review of 220 posts on AgencySpy over the last month, 25 posts had 10 comments or more. That’s a fairly engaged audience, but don’t confuse engaged readers with fans. Only two of these posts garnered predominately positive comments—the rest were mostly snarky, and some were downright mean. Here are a few select gems for you:

SpewInThis  type99 

• 25 days ago

Ugh. I think I just choked on my own vomit. Are you for real? I’m guessing yes, probably because you’re one of Justin’s bosses and not someone who actually had to work with him. If you did, you’d realize what an arrogant, overrated douche he is.

 

Chim-Chim  Spritle 

• 20 days ago

You’re right. If you work in advertising you should have zero moral compass and cling to the dogma that got you that Porsche. Keep believing that you can manipulate dumb Americans into buying whatever bullshit you’re selling the same way you always did because nothing’s changing.

In 5 years you will have no career.

 

Nigel

• 11 days ago

Did you just accuse Sigma Beta Bogusky of being insensitive to women and people of other races who play video games? Preposterous! Us mountain honky bros love chicks and darkies.

 

And trust me, this isn’t even the worst of them (or best of them, depending on how you look at it). So what gets people commenting? I found that there are two breeds of posts that get people’s fingers flying on the keyboard—the “people on the move” post and the “commercial spot review” post. In the latter category, it was interesting to see how often the comments were more directed at the creative talent or agency that worked on the piece than it was about the creative itself. That said, the comments on the post “Dietzen Out at Energy BBDO” expressed pretty much united love for Jimmy Dietzen’s Wrigley’s Extra spot, which was a pleasant surprise.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.