There are some rare death jokes on display in “17 Minutes,” the new longform Do.com ad, almost an FX brand of humor, not something you’d normally associate with a to-do-list website. An old man in a nursing home rushes to set up a farewell party after an oblivious doctor tells him he has 17 minutes to live. The man uses the collaborative features on the website to contact his friends and get the necessary party paraphernalia It’s edgy, mildly offensive, and pretty funny. There’s also a pregnancy joke that is way too good for a commercial. There were probably safer ways to get the Do.com message across to viewers, but we always appreciate creatives who take risks. Credits after the jump.
The new space thriller, Gravity, from Alfonso Cuarón,who helmed Children of Men and one of those Harry Potter films among others, hits theaters in less than two weeks. You’ve probably seen trailers for Gravity on TV with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock floating around space as classical music plays. It’s an unusual premise for a movie, and even though Cuarón is a brilliant director, one can understand how studios might be worried about box office sales. So, to generate some buzz for the film, production company B-Reel has launched an interactive website that digitally illustrates the experience of floating around space.
The site holds brief appeal – exploring a simulation of space can get boring after a few minutes of scrolling and listening to the eerie loop of someone panting – which is the point. Floating around knowing you’d be lost forever looking at blackness sounds tremendously boring and tremendously frightening. Of course, Cuarón (I hope) will focus on the threat of that boredom, so his space thriller is, you know, thrilling. But if you’re an astronomy geek or interested film buff, the spacewalk and links to the movie trailers should be enough fun until October 4.
A Adobe diz que realizou uma pesquisa com profissionais de marketing e a conclusão foi alarmante. Segundo a empresa, mais da metade dos profissionais da área não tem ideia do que estão fazendo. Bem, não usaram esses termos, mas em resumo revelam o óbvio: Todos querem bons números para colocar no relatório, mas não sabem fazer uma leitura adequada desses resultados.
Através de uma empresa fictícia de enciclopédias, a Adobe ilustra – com bom humor – toda uma cadeia de consequências quando métricas de uma campanha online não são avaliadas profundamente. O comercial promove o Marketing Cloud, um conjunto de ferramentas para auxiliar o monitoramento de publicidade digital.
When I say PSA, I don’t mean the sanctioned, usually preachy Don’t Do Fill-in-the-Blank clips. Some taboos are less dire than others, say, like the difference between being a bad Citibike driver and smoking cigarettes until lung cancer arrives. But for anyone who lives in New York City and has seen some oblivious riders swaying around the streets on those blue Citibikes, it can still be an important public service.
“Citypricks,” which comes from Citydoping creators Peter Cortez and Joe Sayaman, is about as an informal as a PSA can get – Citibike did not sponsor this, obviously. Citypricks are defined as “the pricks that can kill you while biking,” and the one-minute-and-forty-second clip sneakily shows bad bikers in the wrong lane, taxis blocking bikers, and crappy tourists taking pictures in the street. All of these problems are important, and even if they don’t kill you, they do cause an alarming increase in blood pressure and volatility. Citypricks are real. If you know someone who may be a Cityprick, please call….no, kidding, just tell them to use common sense. It shouldn’t be that difficult, right? Brief credits after the jump.
Well this one’s going to sting for life. After finding out her daughter lied about sleeping over with friends at an older boy’s house, the girl’s mother placed four One Direction tickets she had bought for her daughter and some friends for sale on eBay.
And she didn’t just place them on sale. Accompanying the ad was a scathing letter publicly chastising her daughter for her behavior. While punishment in this case is likely warranted, doing so publicly is questionable. Yes, it sent a strong message to the daughter but does she need to be scarred for life for committing a “crime” her mother basically admits to doing herself when she was a kid? Or at least that the mother’s friends did when they were kids. Of course, this doesn’t make what the daughter did right.
Hey, validity of parenting practices are in the eye of the beholder and only those immediately involved in the situation and the long history that led up to it are qualified to judge. The rest of us can say what we will but what we say is basically irrelevant.
“THIS AUCTION IS FOR ALL 4 ONE DIRECTION TICKETS IN SYDNEY OCTOBER 25th. You can thank my daughters self righteous and lippy attitude for their sale. See sweety? And you thought I was bluffing. I hope the scowl on your bitchy little friends faces when you tell them that your dad and i revoked the gift we were giving you all reminds you that your PARENTS are the ones that deserve love and respect more than anyone. And your silly little pack mentality of taking your parents for fools is one sadly mistaken. Anyhow. Your loss someone else’s gain who deserves them! THE TICKETS ARE SEATED IN ROW O section 57. REMEMBER AUCTION IS FOR ALL 4 TICKETS and will be sent registered post
…OH YOUR FRIENDS THOUGHT THAT A FEW PRANKS CALLS WOULD PUT ME OFF SELLING THE GIFT WE BOUGHT FOR THEM for YOUR BIRTHDAY because YOU all LIED to us about sleep overs so you could hang like little trollops at an older guys HOUSE????? Pffft!! I find it HIGHLY amusing that you girls think you invented this stuff. Tricks like this on OUR parents is how HALF of you were conceived …..And why a lot of your friends DONT have an address to send that Fathers day card to!!! I’m not your friend. I’m your MOTHER. And I am here to give you the boundaries that YOU NEED to become a functional responsible adult. You may hate me now….. But I don’t care. Its my job to raise a responsible adult..not nuture bad habits in my teen age child.”
Current Homeland star (formerly known as Angela Chase from My So-Called Life, which we’ll get to in a minute) Claire Danes stars in this new short film for Audi by agency Mediacom. Wait, hold up, let’s be real. It’s an ad, not a short film. It’s an ad for Audi’s gas mileage capabilities. This goes way beyond simple product integration. It’s just a long ad, okay? Stop pretending it’s anything else.
Anyway, Claire Danes stars in a nearly four-minute long ad for Audi that shows the Emmy-winning actress show up late to this year’s ceremony when she goes to jail for some reason. Why does she go to jail? I don’t know, I’ve watched this multiple times and can’t seem to find a crime that she’s committed. Cops, I guess, right guys?
Claire Bears (the nickname for Claire Danes fans that I just made up now) will enjoy this long ad for the reference that comes at the end. “I dated that girl in high school” says a patron at the bar in reference to hearing Claire Danes’ name mentioned on the television. “Jordan?” asks Danes. You see, her character dated Jared Leto‘s character Jordan Catalano on My So Called Life. That is why this is funny. That’s why we’re here today, everyone, watching a four-minute Audi ad. Hey, remember when Jim Beam made ads starring Willem Dafoe? I liked those. The Emmys happen on Sunday. There’s some football on tonight.
For $4, you can buy Brooklyn. Well, you can buy a tiny piece of it, at least, which costs almost as much as Jay-Z’s old ownership share of the Nets. That’s the shtick of the latest project from Floyd Hayes, the creator of “The World’s Fastest Agency” among many other ideas. Hayes also used to be ECD at Cunning, and his “Piece of Brooklyn Project” is not just a quirky gambit of guerilla enterprise. $1 of every purchase will be donated to the Brooklyn Arts Council. We can always get behind a good cause.
In case you are worried about ending up with a fraudulent chunk of BK, every item comes with a rubber stamp of authenticity, for whatever that’s worth. Check out the items here.
Advertising Week X, the tenth annual week for people in the advertising industry to celebrate advertising by talking about, awarding, and giving tips about advertising is only a week away. What more appropriate way to celebrate advertising than with an advertisement for celebrating advertising? Yay, advertising!
The above advertisement comes from SF-based advertising agency Mekanism, which doesn’t seem to be an official partner or sponsor of Advertising Week so we’re assuming this advertisment was made just for love of the game. (The game is advertising, by the way.) While the ad does a good job of advertising all of the hipster/yuppie advertising people you’ll meet at Advertising Week, it doesn’t advertise one of the week’s biggest events: The Battle of the Ad Bands, in which advertising industry folks with trace amounts of musical acuity compete to be the best at simultaneously being in advertising and being in a band. I mean, CMJ is in town next week, but as an member of the advertising community, your attendance at the Battle of the Ad Bands should be mandatory if it isn’t already.
It’s been a decade since the oddly shaped Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in Downtown Los Angeles, and the venue’s resident house band, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is celebrating offering you a chance to see the world through their eyes. That is: To stand in the middle of an orchestra without being able to move anything but your head. It’s like a nightmare where you want to run, but your legs just won’t work for whatever reason.
Created in partnership with Hello Design, a new “360-experience” video puts you right in front of the director and standing in the first row of musicians, stuck without being able to speak as they play menacing music at you without directly acknowledging you. It’s, in a word, enthralling. In three words, it’s creepily enthralling.
The site also encourages you to become a concert master, choosing performances throughout the LA Philharmonic’s season based on some really strange questions. Classical musicians sure know how to party, huh?
“For some people, fantasy football feels real. For others it is real.” So claims Tough Season, The Onion’s new fantasy football series, developed in cooperation with DigitasLBI and Lenovo. Most of us, I think, know someone for whom this is true. Someone who loses sleep over the draft, and talks about NFL players as “my guys.” Someone like Tough Season’s Brad Blevins. Brad takes fantasy football way too seriously, despite the fact that his team, Brad’s Awesome Team, never wins his league. But he’s convinced, of course, that this season will be different.
Brad’s creepy rival Harris is focused on humiliating him, but Brad is intent on avoiding “The Watermelon Dance” (You really have to watch to see this one, I won’t give it away) at all costs. As the owner of three consecutive championships, Huge Giant Robots is the team to beat, with their mysterious owner Mr. Z. keeping his identity a secret. Episode one of the show flashed back to last season, with Brad’s tearful goodbye to Matt Forte and end-of-season humiliation. Episode two focuses on the draft.
Following Google’s announcement Tuesday that the upcoming 4.4 version of Android will be named after its new partner Kit Kat, Nestle and JWT have launched a new advertisement on YouTube for the Kit Kat 4.4, with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
The ad pokes fun at Apple’s self-serious style of advertisement, with “Chief Breaks Officer” Chris Catlin doing a pretty spot-on imitation of Apple designer Jony Ive’s accent and dramatic speaking style, while bragging of the Kit Kat 4.4’s features. These include “adjustable orientation,” “global coverage,” and compatibility “with all liquid accessories.” The tagline? A rhyming riff on Apple: “There’s a Kit Kat for that.”
Kit Kat’s website and social media sites have also been revamped to make the Kit Kat appear like a smartphone. The site is broken into categories including, “Hardware,” “Features,” “Accessories” and “Tech Spec” where you can read about Kit Kat’s “praline software, crisp waferware, and …unique chocolate unibody.”
JWT also designed the packaging on over 50 million specially branded Kit Kat bars in 19 international markets, including the UK, Australia, Brazil, Germany and Japan. The packs will lead consumers to android.com/kitkat, where they have the chance to win Google Nexus 7 tablets, credits to spend in Google Play, and other prizes. JWT has also created local campaigns across TV, outdoor, ambient, retail activation and experiential to run in these 19 international markets. The Kit Kat branding marks the first time Android’s operating system has launched under a brand name. continued…
Innocean and Hyundai try to cash in on the Vine craze with their latest campaign for Hyundai’s Genesis R-Spec, releasing several spots in the social video format for those with short attention spans.
Unfortunately for both, the quick videos do little to capture that attention in the first place. Their predictable shorts mostly fall flat, seemingly put together on the spot with a creative process that couldn’t have lasted much longer than the Vines themselves. Examples include a jockey in the backseat, a flight attendant in the backseat, an astronaut in the back seat… I think you get the picture. The one Vine that even hints at being clever is when a medical professional with a box labeled “Human Organ For Transplant” says, “Not the deli, the hospital! Drive!” While Innocean’s idea of using the Vine’s 6-second platform to show how fast the Genesis R-Spec is makes a lot of sense, the execution just isn’t there. Perhaps others will follow their lead, hopefully utilizing the platform more effectively.
As you may have heard, real-time time bidding is a burgeoning practice in the interactive space. And, since we’re talking real-time here ans in, you know, real-time, making sure your ads get served as fast as possible is, well, kind of important. In this interview, engageBDR CEO Ted Dhanik explains why speed is important and why it’s crucial to a brand’s online advertising.
In the interview, Dhanik note that brands running global campaigns from servers in the US risk the possibility of consumers leaving the page before ad load.
In this instance, the advertiser loses a potential customer and the publisher loses revenue.
Dhanik claims one of the biggest challenges brands launching global ad campaigns face is that many ad servers are based in the US. Touting his own company’s offering, Dhanik says “engageBDR offers global ad serving on 9 date centers with hundreds of dedicated servers around the world with average load time of one millisecond.”
This article originally appear on the Central Desktop blog.
It’s a foregone conclusion that people hate advertising, right? More accurately, they hate interruption. They hate anything that takes them away from what they are doing in any given moment. Yet that’s the premise of most forms of advertising.
When the internet presented itself to marketers, many thought they could just replicate what they did offline in the online world. In other words, create video pre-rolls, interstitials and banners. All that accomplished (barring the first few years when everyone clicked on everything because, well, it was novel and new) was banner blindness and a rabid hatred of anything that got in the way of one’s online activities. Couple that with the DVR offline and things began to look bleak for marketers.
Now that marketers have realized interruption is not the way to go and the internet has given people the ability to find exactly what they want at the exact moment they want it, they have discovered that educational, informative content is what people want and need. And they have discovered that that very content can also be used to market their brands.
This “discovery” yielded what is now known as content marketing or inbound marketing. There are similarities and differences between the two, though I prefer the more all-encompassing term “inbound marketing.”
Would a Creative Director take advice from anyone, regardless of the source? What if that source is a recent UNC grad offering up satirical tips about the industry in exchange for a chance to work? Well, if you’re a CD looking to fill an open position, you might want to check out creativedirectorselfhelp.com.
The website comes from Jared Wicker, a young, nomadic copywriter looking to lose “nomadic” from his unofficial bio. We covered another of Wicker’s side projects – “Dining with Dems” – last September, when he was interning with BooneOakley. While his old site was more of a specific flavor of the week, the new site is essentially a long resume full of images, memes, and clever text. We’ve seen these types of self-promotional ventures before, some good, some boring. Wicker’s work finds a way to stand out with novelty ideas like Rapid Feedback Cards. He may not be the guy who modeled his resume after an Amazon Product Page, which is still number one in my book, but the effort shows. Give it a view, and help out a nomad.
A conectividade é um direito humano? É o que pergunta (e defende) o CEO do Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, que lançou uma iniciativa com o objetivo de conectar toda a população global.
A Internet.org quer que mais 5 bilhões de pessoas tenham acesso a internet, e propõe a criação de tecnologia de alta qualidade e baixo custo para atingir áreas isoladas, aumentando a taxa de crescimento da web que é de apenas 9% ao ano.
Além do Facebook, as outras empresas fundadoras da iniciativa são MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung. Segundo declaração oficial da rede social, a quebra de barreiras é fundamental para incluir os países em desenvolvimento na era da conectividade e economia do conhecimento.
For the last few weeks, all we ever think about during our waking hours is the Omnicom/Publicis merger and how lucky we are to be living in a time where something this momentous happens. Truly, we wake up now with a new sense of purpose and self-worth knowing that two giant holding companies merged to make the biggest holding company.
However, not everyone shares our enthusiasm, chief among them Atlanta-based indie shop Ames Scullin O’Haire. They made the above video to convince us that the merger wasn’t a good thing and doesn’t really benefit anyone beyond the rich people in charge of the agency networks who are now richer. “Bigger isn’t always better” says ASO, who is small and would totally say something like that to besmirch the good name of Publicis-Omnicom Groupe.
Will all of Atlanta’s biggest businesses pull their money from large agencies and invest in ASO after seeing this video? To be honest, yes. Definitely.
You most likely have never heard of the music-sharing app Pow Wow, but creator Greg Housset believes in his product so much that he left his agency job as an account exec at what was then EuroRSCG to launch it. Pow Wow is a collaborative app that lets users create joint playlists on different devices through Spotify (the lone catch is that one person needs to have a paid Spotify account for the app to work).
Pow Wow’s first ad hit YouTube three days ago and gives consumers a straightforward overview. It’s easy to see the appeal of such a program: multiple people using their smartphones to build a playlist without needing to debate or pass around an iPod. Ideal for bar mitzvahs, weddings, sweet 16s, block parties, barbecues, dance-offs, rap battles, etc.
Over at Mashable, Todd Wassermanpoints out that an annoying relative could co-opt the playlist and play “Afternoon Delight” 17 times in a row (his example), but we’ll give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to extreme idiocy. Playlist responsibly.
Days Inn Canada and Toronto-based digital/social shop Entrinsic are offering potential customers a unique perspective on staying away from home: no frills, nothing fancy, not trying to go above and beyond. The sort of approach that can be down-to-earth or lazy, depending on how you think about Days Inn and the hotel industry as a whole. It’s definitely original, since every other chain tries to maximize the number of amenities offered.
In the one-minute spot, a puffed up CEO-type removes all of the frills from his hotel and shows us why swimming pools should be used for swimming. Basically, basic price = basic service. P.S., if you like to wear ascots, you should avoid this commercial and all Days Inn establishments.
Toronto shop Capital C and Toshiba have teamed for a new online back-to-school campaign meant for silly college guys who need cool technology. Sometimes, these college guys use the technology for school, other times, for play. In “Chicken Prank,” a helpless dormer finds himself wrapped to his bed with chickens on the loose, and to get out of the rut, he waves his feet in front of a touch-controlled monitor. In “Math Notes,” handwritten notes on a tablet lead to an awkward moment of affection between roommates. And in “Black Light,” well, I’ll let you figure that one out on your own.
What’s most interesting about this trio of Toshiba spots is that they are clearly targeting only males. I’m not sure if any female-themed spots about woo girls and sorority hijinks are on the docket, but I’m curious to know why Toshiba is only looking for collegiate males to purchase products for this campaign, especially considering more girls than guys go to college. But, aside from the oversight, the creatives took care of business with some safely effective locker room humor.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
