Hasta La Creative!

In the market for a Steampunk Buttscope, a Bananaganizer or some Medical Test Results Fortune Cookies? You can find these wondrous creations and more over at SkyMaul.

Sometimes a form of advertising becomes so ubiquitous and renowned that parody versions can stand alone as their own money-making franchises. Such is the case with SkyMaul, the book-length parody of SkyMall magazine that’s just published its second edition along with a microsite showing some of its more outlandish items.

While you might wish some of the things are real, like the $500 Condo Pony (cheap at twice the price!) or the $40 set of dunce hats for rocks (the perfect thing to give as a follow-up for a Pet Rock), the only thing you can buy on the site is the book from Amazon.

But let us wax poetic for a moment about the enduring popularity of advertisement parody. From every iteration of “Keep Calm and Carry On” you can imagine to sketch comedy’s enduring love for parody TV commercials, people love fictional ads for fake things often more than they love real ads.

Sometimes people love them so much that advertisers will make a real ad for a real product that looks like a fake ad, like GE’s overblown, amazing tribute to Jeff Goldbum’s affinity for pauses, or that time Liquipel created a real commercial so fake cheesy that people thought it actually was fake.

But whether art is holding up the mirror to advertising or advertising is taking a photo of what it sees in that mirror, you’re sure to waste a few amusing moments today reading through the hilarious copy and photoshop lunacy over at SkyMaul.

Xbox cannot explicitly advertise the launch of the highly anticipated first-person shooter Destiny. So, it came up with clever trick to draw attention anyway: Promote a non-existent cologne with the same name as the game.

“The new fragrance by Xbox,” reads the copy on a simple ad (posted to Xbox’s social channels late last week) with a blue crystal bottle labeled Destiny. The equally coy website encourages visitors to check with retailers about Xbox One offers.

Microsoft’s slyness is born of necessity, and is a de facto dig at its chief rival in the console wars. Sony has the exclusive rights from Destiny publisher Activision to advertise the game, according to CNET. The title is available on Sony’s PlayStation 4 with early access and bonus content, part of the console manufacturers’ fierce competition for users.

The perfume theme is a particularly cheeky touch given that Destiny, the game, is about a post-apocalyptic future where players try to save humanity by battling aliens across the solar system—not the stuff of most luxury ads.

It’s also nice to see that Microsoft’s cattiness isn’t limited to mocking Siri.

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s a horrifying latex mask.

The Onion just rolled out this spoof Maybelline ad mocking conventional standards of beauty. In it, the brand introduces a new product, the Ideal Woman Rubber Mask, a convenient replacement for the copious amounts of product that women are wont to put on their faces. Yes, it’s just as creepy as it sounds.

“By simply yanking it over your face, you can instantly achieve a fresh look that conforms to Western ideals of beauty,” praises the Fake-belline (I don’t know, I’m trying here) director of marketing.

“It’s incredible. You immediately see the difference,” adds a a focus group participant. “The very first time I tried it on, my pores were minimized, my skin tone was more even, and all of the idiosyncratic little wrinkles, physical imperfections and tiny irregularities that make my face unique were erased.”

As for the YouTube comments asking why all of the masks are Caucasian, I’m guessing that’s kind of the point.

The Empire might not be running the galaxy anymore, but it seems to be doing a stellar job running an airport in Germany. 

With more than 1 million views already (likely thanks to its red-herring title, “Leaked Star Wars Episode VII Filmset Footage!”), the video below shows Imperial Walkers and shuttles making good use of the Frankfurt Airport, where an orderly and rather uneventful invasion of Earth seems to be under way.

While not an official promo for the Star Wars: Episode VII, currently in development, the fan-made clip is still getting people pumped for the series’ return.

“Ok, I know it’s fake, but damn … I’m so looking forward to seeing new Star Wars material,” noted one YouTube viewer. “It got me straight back there, as a kid seeing this kind of stuff for the first time. It might as well have been real.”

It’s unclear how many Bothans died to bring us this footage.

Via Laughing Squid.

We’ve been had. It turns out that one man’s heroic billboard crusade to prevent celebrity divorce was actually a hoax by WEtv to advertise its new show Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars.

We caught up with WEtv President Marc Juris to find out how he hit the zeitgeist and tricked media outlets across the nation:

AdFreak: Is there a real J. Robert Butler?
Mark Juris: You’re speaking to him. No, he’s a fictional character we invented, played by a real actor.

Whom you made up a whole backstory for about his daughter’s divorce…
Because the most important thing you have to remember, is that the audience in incredibly smart. We created a whole character, a persona, and a motivation. Thought about why he would do this, what he expected would be the response. I think the inclination is to have him say some outrageous stuff, and we pulled all that back and had him be more realistic.

How did you hatch the hoax?
We went through a couple of ideas. We thought, “Could we make these billboards poking fun at celebrity couples who had divorced?” But it just felt too much like an overt ad campaign. And that’s the problem with overt campaigns; people just drive by them and just keep going. So we thought, “How can we really do this?” What if we made an organization that seemed ridiculous, but could be real and serious?

It seemed real and serious. You fooled us. Did you get anyone else behind the movement?
We had quite a few requests for interviews from some major broadcasters and some broadcasters who were upset because we weren’t getting back to them. Some got lightly pushy, saying things like, “We’re going to go to press without your comments.” But it got a lot of pickups because it was thought provoking. What it was saying kinda made sense, and by the end it was even making sense to me.

I think you could have actually started a movement.
I think you might be right. Some of those lines really resonated because marriage isn’t a sponsorship opportunity. I think the general population is a little sick of it. The Kim and Kanye wedding happened recently, and we weren’t invited, but when you see this sort of thing where everything is sponsored, all the brands there, and people are tired of it. The best messaging is what really resonates with people. People are getting smarter and smarter, and they don’t want to be played. I mean, when you see something like “consciously uncoupled,” it really seems like they [Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin] went to the same company that comes up with things like “Obamacare” to come up with the name!

The new banner across the signs says “help stop celebrity divorce,” and suggests tuning in for Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars. Do you think a show like this will really help prevent celebrity divorce?
No, I don’t think so. At this point we’re having a little fun.  But we wanted to make people think and link it to our show in a more meaningful way.

Well you got lots of people talking. Who was covering it?
There was a lot of online blog coverage. We had a very long piece on KPLA, we had an entire segment on Fox news referencing the billboards and talking about celebrity divorce.  We really had great coverage with just five billboards and a couple of buses. I love outdoor advertising because it really stands alone, and if it’s great you really see it. Outdoor can be really successful and very cost efficient. I also think you have to do city specific advertising when it’s appropriate.

It was definitely appropriate here.
Yeah, there’s really nowhere other than Hollywood you could have put those banners. But we also had banners running up and down Jersey Shore this weekend letting everyone know JWoww was going to be at the Jersey Shore this weekend, because she was at Marriage Boot Camp. And that got a lot of Twitter activity.

That’s great. Tell me a little about the design. How did you make it look so believable? Even the actor you chose…
I was very careful not to make it look like an ad campaign. It’s easy to go there, I really like to step back and be the cynical self that I am, and say, “Would I buy that that’s an ad campaign?” I will tell you this: We shot a video message from him, but I felt it didn’t ring true enough, so we didn’t use it. Because believability is key, and you can’t fall in love with your own stuff. I saw him on camera and I said, “I’m not buying it from him.” You would have to be De Niro to sell this stuff! You’d need an actor of that caliber to pull it off. I’d rather pull back in an effort to make it feel more real than to put it up.

And the design?
It was consciously done to make it seem like someone like him would think it was a good billboard, American values, low-fi. We placed him from Utah in our own heads. What would a guy from Utah who was a used car dealer use as his billboards? Right down to the logo, that’s the sort of logo he’d like. We knew we needed a website where he could say his piece. We even went so far to Google J. Robert Butler to see who would come up. You see, we did all our homework because we knew you’d be doing that.

Yeah, we looked through the site, and usually people don’t bother to hide the truth. The moment you get to the website the real advertiser is like, “Surprise! It was us all along!” And claims credit for the campaign.
That’s right. That was everyone’s inclination, but I didn’t want to do that. Because to be believable it simply can’t be connected to anything—no immediate messaging. You really have to be patient. I learned that from the Jimmy Kimmel twerking video, because that was, what? Two months they sat on their hands. I know our PR team was going crazy wanting to tell everyone about it. But you have to wait because that’s when things start to feel real—when you feel like there’s no ad message that’s behind it.

That’s a great point. Was there anything else surprising about the campaign besides the actual surprise at the end?
Well, J. Robert Butler, the actual actor we used, has been married four times. So that’s more than a little ironic. I’m wondering if he heard from any of his ex-wives about his billboard campaign.

Marriage Boot Camp: Reality Stars premieres tonight at 9/8 Central on WEtv.

While it's true HBO is not an ad-supported network, Last Week Tonight's John Oliver made an exception Sunday, uttering the words rarely heard on the premium cable network: "We'll be right back."

Of course what followed wasn't a real commercial, but instead a GM ad parody created to punctuate Oliver's hilarious (and disturbing) dissection of internal practices at GM, where a long list of defects in cars over the past decade led to an even longer list of no-go words and phrases compiled in a memo, which blacklisted phrases like "deathtrap," "defective," "catastrophically flawed," "Hindenburg"—you get the idea.

Obviously the point of the memo was to make sure none of those words ended up associated with the cars once they got to the market—a sensible notion, from a branding perspective, but probably not a directive that was terribly wise to put on paper. So after a lengthy segment eviscerating GM (remember, this is the guy who stretched potshots at quetionably healthy drink Pom Wonderful over two episodes), Oliver cut away to a fake GM ad containing almost all those words the car company didn't want associated with its brand.

Just to tie a bow on the whole takedown, HBO is even running Oliver's GM bit as a lengthy pre-roll ad on YouTube this week. From a comedy perspective, the segment is gold. From a marketing perspective, it's like watching a Hellraiser movie.

Syfy tells Adweek exclusively that it has green-lit a third movie in its increasingly silly Sharknado franchise before even airing the second one (official title: The Second One).

The first flick cost the network a scant $250,000, a cost repaid in social chatter and fan love. Now the network has committed to a third film to be set in a yet-to-be-determined city, presumably with the rest of the principal cast from Sharknado and Sharknado 2: The Second One, provided no airborne carnivorous fish spend their last moments on Earth munching on Tara Reid or Ian Ziering between now and then.

So here, without further ado, are five pitches we feel Syfy should consider while the network tries to figure out how next to fling a funnel cloudful of surprised apex predators teeth-first into the public imagination.

Oh, and for the record, Sharkando 2 premieres Wednesday, July 30, just after San Diego Comic Con. Sharknado 3 is slated to air in summer 2015.

3harknado

Starring Nathan Fillion, Portia de Rossi, Alison Brie and Joel Hodgson, the third Sharknado tears apart San Diego during the reunion of cult classic TV series SpaceShark 2025. During a panel Q&A with fans, the down-on-their-luck cast is rent asunder by the very monsters their fictional characters used to battle. Will they learn who engineered this catastrophe? And when they do, will the answer shock them?

Sharknado 3: Sharksplode!

Executive produced by Michael Bay with 35 percent new footage, the world really has a mess on its hands when a waterspout hits a once-in-a-lifetime … uh, thrice-in-a-lifetime … school of sharks—and then a mid-Atlantic oil rig! Now filled with flammable light sweet crude, the angry and frightened fish burst into waterproof flames on impact with the ground. Our only hope may be the brave men and women of the Navy's elite SHaRK unit, who must place themselves in harm's way between hundreds of sharksplosions… and Big Ben.

Wes Anderson's Splendid Third Sharknado

Directed by Wes Anderson from a screenplay co-written with Roman Coppola, Daniel Day-Lewis and Jeff Goldblum star as romantic rivals Commander Jonas Welk and Chef Brent Klein, respectively the captain and the cook of a six-story-tall, 700-foot-long airliner nearing the end of its six-year mission to explore cirrus cloud formations. Tensions run high during the biweekly midair refuelings, though discomfort is offset somewhat by the opulent ballrooms and smoking lounges aboard the jet. When a probe disturbs a nest of rare flying sharks atop the highest mountain in the world, the two men must put aside their differences—and their shared adoration of the first mate (Tilda Swinton)—to rescue the frightened creatures from a dizzying plummet to their demise. Meanwhile, Commander Welk comes to terms with the death of his sister.

Sharknado 3: Shark Fu

An action-packed anime set in the coastal Japanese city of Yokohama in the year 3015, this six-part miniseries follows five cyborg warriors unfairly expelled from the city for dishonoring their jetpack clan, though the fault actually lies with the duplicitous chieftan of an enemy gang of motorcycle-riding scalp-hunters. When the biker gang leader's rash actions trigger a waterspout over the radioactive-shark-infested Uraga Channel, our heroes must regain their honor by developing an entirely new form of airborne martial arts combat before the storm full of sharks tears through Yokohama … on its way to Tokyo.

Sharknado 3: POV

A happy-go-lucky shark, minding its own business off the Great Barrier Reef, is unceremoniously flung into the sky by a storm that propels it toward Queensland, Australia. Though the shark struggles to breathe in the sparse water of the storm, it manages to cling to life by bravely eating as many nourishing tourists as possible. But as the storm makes landfall, our hero begins to worry: will it be able to kill the wicked human leader and avoid the horrifying array of grenades, chainsaws and guns wielded by the human minions? And if so, how will it get back home?

Syfy, please select one or more of the above and make the check out to Adweek.

Next time you hear someone complain they can't do good marketing for a product because it's "too boring," show them this infographic for enterprise work management software AtTask.

Collaboration software is usually dry as a bone, but the team at AtTask created "The Working Dead" to share easily digestible bits of human flesh survey data about how poor workplace performance is linked to poor project management. 

Check out the graphic below. Which kind of zombie is plaguing your office—Shufflers, Crawlers or those pain-in-the-ass Howlers?

Bud Light's spoof of the super-viral American Greetings "World's Toughest Job" video was a bit underwhelming. But now Funny or Die has delivered a more amusing one—even if the "punch line" isn't really a laughing matter. The hashtag is: #actualworldstoughestjob.

Wisely, they get to the point pretty quickly, and also spend quite a bit of time mimicking actual lines from the original. Plus, thankfully, it has nothing to do with dads.

Pwnmeal Extreme Gaming Oatmeal goes way beyond steel cut. This hot, lumpy cereal is EXTREME!!!

Alas, the caffeinated glop won't be coming to breakfast aisles anytime soon. The "official porridge of e-sports," launched at last weekend's Pax East conference in Boston, is a satire of gamer marketing and culture cooked up by Digital Kitchen and the jokers at Cards Against Humanity, the party game for horrible people.

"The concept may sound ridiculous, but it's not far off from the realities at these conventions," the agency says. "Gamers are hit with marketing for everything from caffeinated gum to beef jerky."

From the faux brand's website: "It's a PWN or BE PWN'd world out there. Only a n00b would skip breakfast, the most important meal of the day. When you visit cyberspace to play your favorite shoot 'em ups or massively multiplayer online video games, ensure decisive victory."

Flavors include Strawberries and Carnage ("Prepped to fuel your next kill streak with a massive payload of phytonutrients") and No Scope Headshot Blueberry ("Line it up and pull the trigger with a sweet, warm BFG—the B is for blueberry").

The video shows buff guys and gals "dramatically" tearing open product packets, tossing around flakes and rubbing oatmeal on their ripped bodies. They roar, and goopy goodness gushes from their mealy mouths. I prefer to start my grueling day like a real hard-core gamer—by dragging my saggy ass out of bed, pounding a few Hershey's Kisses and cursing my wasted life.