Hasta La Creative!

There’s one thing almost everyone watching Monday night’s first presidential debate will be able to agree on—that this new Audi commercial, “Duel,” airing during the telecast, is a brilliant bit of perfectly timed entertainment.

read more

Amnesty International will issue a challenge to the advertising industry at The Drum’s Plan it Day and Do it Day events, calling on advertisers to change perceptions surrounding refugees. 

“Everyone knows the challenge in the broad sense,” Amnesty International communications director Osama Saeed Bhutta told the publication. “We have 20 million refugees worldwide and in the last year there have been some attempts by the United Nations (UN) and President Obama to get people to help sort it out because they realize our generation is going to be judged by future decades on how we dealt with this.”

The goal of the challenge will be to shift public opinion at a time when anti-refugee sentiment seems to be growing in certain circles. Such sentiment is often attributed as a contributing factor in the U.K.’s Brexit decision this summer, for example, while xenophobic anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment also seem to at the heart of Donald Trump‘s campaign. Just yesterday, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., generated controversy with a tweet comparing the “Syrian refugee problem” with a bowl of Skittles with three that “would kill you.”

Media surrounding the refugee crisis hasn’t been limited to documenting such xenophobic fearmongering, however. Bhutta points to the inclusion of Team Refugee at the Rio 2016 Olympics, which included ten refugees from around the world brought together by the International Olympic Committee and UNHCR as an initiative that could help “shift the debate towards a more positive and humanitarian direction.”

“It showed the rest of the world that refugees are people with hopes and aspirations and determination as well. That’s no better represented than by [Syrian swimmer] Yusra Mardini, who saved so many lives by swimming and pushing a boat over to Greece and then ended up at the Olympics,” he added. “That’s a movie story right there.”

“For us, this challenge is about changing public opinion – something marketers do every day,” Bhutta said. “We could have framed it in many different ways – it could have been about aid or targeting governments – but we’ve focused on public opinion because these industries (advertising, marketing, digital) are going to be essential in changing the way this is dealt with and coming up with creative solutions.”

Amnesty International’s Do It Day challenge will run simultaneously in the U.S. and the U.K. but Bhutta notes that the problem requires a global outlook. “We’re a global movement and we have real global muscle so what we’re looking for is ideas that can be implemented everywhere,” he said. 

“There’s an immediate two-year horizon we’re working towards and have an ambitious target of having two million refugees resettled by then, but that by no means solves things. We’re open minded and looking for possibilities. Short term ideas are great, but what we really want are ideas with longevity that can bring debate to the fore in different ways.”

Jason Kander, a Democrat, is challenging Republican Roy Blunt for his U.S. Senate seat in Missouri. And Kander will be getting plenty of attention for his cause thanks to this remarkable new campaign ad he just released in response to Blunt attacking him on the issue of guns.

read more

First the good news: A wacky digital video starring “Dead Abe Lincoln” that stumps for Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson has logged upwards of 18 million views and 420,000 shares in two weeks, introducing potential voters to the former New Mexico governor and the movement to land him a spot in the upcoming presidential debates.

And now the bad news: Johnson turned into a trending topic and a hashtag on Thursday after a disastrous appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in which he asked, “And what is Aleppo?” in response to a question about conflict in the Syrian city.

read more

All delegates, superdelegates, former college basketball coaches and garden variety political junkies attending next week’s Republican National Convention will be greeted by an unusual and unavoidable sight: Sen. Ted Cruz going in for a passionate kiss with presumptive presidential nominee Donald J. Trump. 

A non-profit advocacy group called Planting Peace placed the ad directly outside the entrance to the convention at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena as a “message to the GOP.”

read more

Some of the top creatives in the ad business have been weighing in on this year’s loony presidential election—and predictably, they haven’t been lining up with Trump.

Droga5 has been doing advertising for Hillary. And now, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein—the co-founders of Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco—have made their own ad for this campaign season, wondering aloud whether Donald Trump is qualified to be president—over slow-motion footage of Trump infamously using a water bottle to mock Marco Rubio back in February.

read more

The White House doesn’t publicize changes to its brand identity. But something fishy has been going on with its logo over the past decade, according to a design agency that worked on refresh ideas for the famous mark several years ago.

read more

Climate change isn’t your problem—it’s your children’s problem. At least, it will be if the world’s current crop of adults fail to act. 

A new campaign from the government of Ontario, brought to you by Grey Canada, makes that very argument with help from pop environmentalist David Suzuki. In the first ad, Suzuki lectures an auditorium full of kids on the failure of grownups to sufficiently address global warming: 

read more

It’s a shame when a person introduces herself as “a human” and it actually seems necessary.

A new video, titled “Meet a Muslim,” aims to mitigate some of the fear and misperception currently pervading the American dialogue—by putting the camera on a diverse cross-section of U.S. citizens who share the Islamic faith. 

There’s a pediatrician, a mom and a handful of adorable kids. There’s a woman who calls herself the “naughty Muslim,” a couple of parents who call their family “smiley Muslims,” and a man (who also—gasp!—drinks) married to another man. 

There’s also a white dude. And a young, Ohio-born woman who wears a floral hijab and describes herself as a “foodie.” They all share a little about themselves, then offer reflections—uniformly warm, sometimes baffled, often heartbreakingly insightful—about why they face so much animus from people who don’t know them. 

read more

Today we hear from reliable sources that San Francisco’s VB&P is one of several agencies that have been contacted in recent weeks by the staff of former Senator, Secretary of State and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. (In case you missed it, she is currently running for President of the United States for the second time.)

The Clinton campaign appears to have very specific taste in agency partners. Last November– approximately one year before the 2016 presidential election–spokespeople confirmed to The New York Times that the operation had chosen Droga5 to work on an unspecified project that turned out to be a series of spots starring individual women who explained their plans to vote for Hillary this fall. The Clinton organization is not like most clients, and it did not launch a formal review before reaching out to Droga5.

Various outlets also reported in November that the Clinton campaign chose Chicago’s Burrell Communications to work on a series of campaigns targeting African-American voters. David Droga himself later promoted his agency’s work on an ad called “Children” which compiled footage of the candidate restating her dedication to the titular Americans throughout her more than 30-year political career.

Details regarding the campaign’s current outreach efforts are quite sparse at the moment, as is expected. But we hear from multiple parties that Venables was one of the shops contacted by the organization. Tipsters tell us the ads we eventually see as part of a project that allegedly goes by the code name “Dragon Slayer” will be directed against one Donald J. Trump and that they may depict the man with the dubious hair as a divisive and even hateful character. However one may feel about the prospective candidates, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine that theme running through Clinton’s TV and digital efforts as we move closer to Election Day.

If VB&P ends up working for Clinton in an official capacity, the news would mark its first definitive move into the political arena. But the subject is not new to creative director Lee Einhorn: in a December 2015 Q&A with AdAge, he mentioned meeting then-Senator John Kerry while discussing a potential role in the latter’s ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign.

A VB&P spokesperson declined to comment for this post. The Clinton campaign’s PR department has not responded to multiple emails and phone calls today.

It’s also unclear at the moment whether the Clinton organization will continue working with Droga5 on future advertising efforts.