Hasta La Creative!

Believe it or not, there are a few situations where dressing up as a giant penis and spraying people with confetti is inappropriate. Promoting condom use on behalf of a sex education charity is one of those situations, according to thirtysomething Norwegians.

To clarify, sex education charity RFSU hired ad agency Involve! to come up with something for a condom use campaign, which began as a response to rising chlamydia rates in Norway. Involve! then hired 19-year-old student Philip van Eck because he was tall enough to fit in the giant penis suit they’d built. Once properly fitted, Philip ran around spouting golden confetti at total strangers in service of the campaign’s tagline, “Tiss kan overraske,” which means “Penis can surprise you.”

If they’d set the ad to Da Vinci’s Notebook’s “Enormous Penis,” it would have been perfect.

Involve! meant for this to be cheeky and fun, and kind of gross, and they succeeded, but not across all audiences. Young people apparently loved it, but the over-30 crowd didn’t like it one bit, and many of them called the stunt pointless and banal.

Philip thought the whole thing was hilarious, because he’s 19. But it wasn’t without a few hiccups. “If I can do a good thing for others, just by being a dick, there is nothing better,” Philip said. “The filming was not unproblematic, as passers-by wanted selfies with the giant penis. Suddenly, lots of people wanted to touch the penis and take pictures with the penis. I almost felt harassed.”

Have I mentioned how fortunate we are to live in this time?

The well of inspiration apparently never runs dry for Denver Water’s long-running “Use Only What You Need” campaign. And while Sukle Advertising’s lauded conservation initiative often features eye-catching public installations, this year’s installment is brimming with artistry.

The agency used diverse materials such as colored pencils, Post-it notes, clay, crushed soda cans, Legos, yarn and string to create 10 original piece of art. Each depicts water in various forms, such as drops, splashes, cascades, showers and spray. The work adorns bus shelters around Denver, as well as print and online ads. The headline, “You can’t make this stuff,” drives home the message that water is a non-renewable resource.

Most of the results are quite splashy. For example…

I’d love to see this “fluffy” Lego cloud hovering over my block:

These pencil-tipped waves make a good point:

Someone should put a cap on this knitted-yarn faucet:

Here’s a fresh take on string theory:

This Post-it note poster is good to the last, well, you know:

“Consumers often see conservation as a sacrifice, something they have to give up, which they often aren’t willing to do,” says agency founder and creative director Mike Sukle. “We have, instead, used the approach of ‘not wasting.’ Consumers see waste differently than conservation, so the messaging of ‘Use Only What You Need’ follows the mind of the consumer that wasting is wrong.”

Water use in Denver recently hit a record low, so it appears the campaign, now in its ninth year, is having an impact. Alas, a local Lego shortage looms large, as Sukle reports using 6,000 of the colorful plastic bricks for the new ads.

Check out more executions below.

Sampling is the oldest play in the book. Sampling works where ads do not, because people often need to “see it to believe it,” or taste it, as the case may be. Take Coke Zero. How can it possibly be as good as full-calorie Coca-Cola? The idea defies logic. It’s a problem that requires new […]

The post You Can Rest Now. O&M Has Integrated Marketing for the Digital Age All Figured Out. appeared first on AdPulp.

How easy would it be to parallel park if you always had a friend to help you—even when you were driving alone?

A new Fiat billboard created by Leo Burnett Germany invites viewers to imagine just that. The agency hooked up a digital screen with special software and a sensors to measure how far a driver’s rear bumper was from the car behind it, and then projected synchronized images of human helpers guiding the driver’s parking job—just like a passenger might get out and do.

It’s a simple, clever concept, appropriate to promote Fiat’s Parking Assist technology, an alarm system that warns drivers in reverse of objects behind them. The billboard even offers a range of different playful avatars for the computerized assistant—a biker, a child, a wise old-man. And the brand’s marketing team couldn’t resist designing one of them—a woman in a skimpy bunny outfit—to appeal to the leering set.

Unfortunately, that seems like the kind of thing that might make some drivers more likely to hit the car behind them.

Via The Inspiration Room.

Costa Rican drivers are getting an eyeful when they pass this billboard for Republica Parrillera Pilsner beer. Looking at the front of the billboard, nothing seems amiss. But when viewed from behind … well, yeah, that does look like a giant penis, doesn’t it?

As always with such placements, there’s debate over whether this was intentional or a mistake. Proponents of the former say it’s brilliant marketing, as drivers who approach the ad from the back are probably fairly likely to check out the front of the ad as they pass—behavior that precious few billboards provoke. Those who think it’s a mistake can’t fathom the kind of balls it would take to put a giant dick on a billboard.

Via AgencySpy.

This interactive outdoor campaign by Lew’LaraTBWA is a real yawner—which is exactly what the Brazilian agency intended.

The shop set up a digital panel equipped with a motion sensor at São Paulo’s busy Fradique Coutinho subway station at morning rush hour. When commuters approached the sign, the face on the panel would yawn. Naturally, many of the commuters themselves also began yawning—yawning being notoriously contagious, after all—at which point the screen made a product pitch.

In case the sign wasn’t enough of a wake-up call, perky glamor gals arrive on the scene with some product samples. (Watch the clip to savor the big reveal.)

That last bit—the glamor gals—might strike some viewers as gratuitous, but otherwise this a prime example of what prankverising has been morphing into over the past few years.

Shocking stunts have by and large been replaced by a fusion of technology and street theater as brands create positive real-world experiences designed for subsequent media consumption. Of late, they’ve run the gamut from fun to moving to doggone adorable.

As long as such campaigns remain clever and inclusive, it will be along time before the public tires of this approach.

Via Ads of the World.

CREDITS
Client: Café Pelé
Agency: Lew’LaraTBWA, Brazil
Chief Creative Officer: Manir Fadel
Executive Chief Creative: Felipe Luchi
Copywriter: Lucas Veloso
Art directors: André Mezzomo, Digo Souto

Last summer, Russia imposed a full embargo on food imports from the European Union (as well as the U.S.) in retaliation for sanctions over Ukraine. This left authentic European food merchants in Moscow in a bit of a bind.

But one Italian grocery store there, Don Giulio Salumeria, kept selling its real Italian food—and came up with a bizarre out-of-home stunt to advertise to consumers without tipping off the police.

With help from agency The 23, the store developed a unique outdoor ad that could recognize police uniforms. Whenever the cops would appear, the ad would cycle out of its rotating display—in essence, physically hiding from the authorities.

The agency insists this was a real stunt. And if so, it is clever and amusingly weird. After emailing the case study all over the world, though, I’d think twice about answering the door when the Moscow police come knocking.

CREDITS
Client: Don Giulio Salumeria, Moscow
Owner: Giulio Zompi
Marketing Director: Anna Ipatova
Agency: The 23, Krasnogorsk
Creative director: Evgeniy Shinyaev
Creative director: Mikhail Tkachenko
Technology Director: Alexander Selifonov
Account Supervisor: Vera Kriulets
Director Of Photography: Nikolay Shinkarenko
Technical Assistant: Valeriy Oreshnikov

A new Japanese campaign aims to combat domestic violence in the country with inventive coasters that hope to tame excessive drinking, which can contribute to the problem.

Yaocho, a bar chain, and agency Ogilvy & Mather Tokyo created the coasters, each of which features a portrait of a woman’s face printed in thermal ink. When a cold drink rests on the coaster, the portrait changes to include cuts and bruises.

The visuals are—no pun intended—chilling, and it’s a clever use of media, though perhaps a touch too much so for its own good, with mechanics that may undermine the spirit and gravity of the message.

“This drink will turn the woman on this coaster into a beat-up woman—just like you might do to a real woman, if you drink too much,” is essentially the subtext of the ads. “Can you have another round without wanting to hit your significant other?”

But as Lucia Peters points out over at Bustle, while alcohol can be a factor in domestic violence, “placing the blame for domestic violence on alcohol excuses the people who commit the crimes in the first place—which is classic abuser behavior.”

Yaocho deserves credit for openly addressing domestic violence, and trying to raise awareness, theoretically at the expense of its own business. But while a drinking establishment is, on its face, the right place to reach viewers with a message about alcohol and domestic abuse, there’s also a bit of cognitive dissonance in an anti-drinking ad that requires the viewer to be drinking to deliver its full effect.

The tagline, at least in its translated version, isn’t even “Don’t drink too much.” Rather, it is “Don’t let excessive drinking end in domestic violence.” In other words, “It’s OK to spend your money on a bender, so long as you don’t beat your wife or girlfriend afterward.”

And if you are the type of person who gets violent when you drink, you probably shouldn’t be drinking at all. 

More info below. Via Design Taxi.

BBDO New York continues its run of great work for Snickers with this irresistible out-of-home campaign, in which the candy brand found goofy mistakes all around New York City—and put stickers next to them that read, “You make mistakes when you’re hungry.”

The fails are curious and amusing in their own right, of course, which is what makes this idea work so well. Adding a little snarky sticker caps them off perfectly. It helps that Snickers has had affection for people’s mistakes for a long, long time.

The agency tells us the creatives scouted for mistakes throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn over the past few weeks and selected the most absurd ones for the campaign. For instance, the flipped tiles in the subway were found on at a 4-train stop. The door sign (Enter, Do Not Enter) was found in the entrance of a building in Williamsburg. The “7st floor” sign was in a commercial building in Midtown.

The campaign extended to social media, as the brand encouraged fans to share any #hungrymistakes they found or had made themselves.

More images plus credits below. Click to enlarge:

CREDITS
Client: Snickers

Agency: BBDO New York
Chief Creative Officer, BBDO Worldwide: David Lubars
Chief Creative Officer, BBDO New York: Greg Hahn
Executive Creative Director: Gianfranco Arena
Executive Creative Director: Peter Kain
Senior Art Director: Bianca Guimarães
Senior Art Director: Florian Marquardt
Senior Art Director: Fernando Mattei
Senior Copywriter: Rodrigo Linhares
Photographer: Billy Siegrist

Managing Director: Kirsten Flanik
Global Account Director: Susannah Keller
Account Director: Joshua Steinman
Account Manager: Dylan Green
Group Planning Director: Crystal Rix
Senior Planner: Alaina Crystal

Thinking of littering in Hong Kong? You could soon be a poster child for the problem.

A remarkable campaign from Ogilvy & Mather takes DNA from trash on the ground and uses Snapshot DNA phenotyping to generate physical likenesses of the litterers, who then end up on outdoor ads telling people not to litter. (DNA phenotyping is the process of predicting a person’s physical appearance based on their DNA alone.)

The legalities of labeling people as litterers this way must be awfully complicated, and it’s not entirely clear how close the images might be to the real people. But the campaign is certainly fascinating in a CSI kind of way.

“This campaign is one of a kind,” says Reed Collins, chief creative officer at Ogilvy Hong Kong. “It’s interactive. It’s innovative. It’s our own science experiment that we’re using to create social change. Litter is such a major problem in Hong Kong, and thanks to technology, we can now put a face to this anonymous crime and get people to think twice about littering.”

Read more at Ecozine. Via Laughing Squid.