Lots of ads have used 360° video lately, but here’s one where the VR technology really suits the message—and delivers a powerful coda for those who absorb it.
The latest installment of MTV’s “Look Different” anti-bias campaign looks a whole lot different than last month’s showing, an over-the-top, multichannel satire about a Geek Squad-style team of uber-white corporate consultants eager to help people of color hail cabs, rent apartments and handle courtroom appearances.
Now, fresh PSAs and digital assets tackle gender bias in starker, more straightforward terms. They invite viewers to consider the unintended consequences of various preconceptions and misconceptions that may, to some people, appear benign, but can actually cause a great deal of harm.
In series of 30-second ads, phrases in blue flash across a canary-yellow screen. They include: “This is a man’s job,” “She’ll hook up with anyone,” “You’d look prettier if you smiled,” “She’s built like a man,” and “Boys don’t cry.”
We’ve all heard, and probably even used, at least some of this language in casual conversation. In that context, the biased nature of the words can easily be ignored or, at times, not even register. But strung together over a half-minute ad with no storyline, splashy visuals and special effects as distractions, the cumulative effect hits home.
MTV has also beefed up its online tools, adding an “Implicit Bias Quiz.” The quiz was designed with Harvard’s Project Implicit and features images of Emma Watson, Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling and others. At first, the test seems ridiculously simple, but it took about 20 seconds for my own bias to seep through. There’s also a “Gender Bias Cleanse,” developed with the Kirwan Institute, that suggests activities like setting nonstereotypical images as screensavers.
“The majority of millennials are aware of gender bias throughout society,” explains MTV public affairs chief Ronnie Cho. “But many do not recognize how pervasive and insidious it truly is and need support in identifying ways to tackle it.”
(A new national study touted by MTV found that three-quarters of young people believe openly discussing gender bias would be helpful, but only one-quarter know where to turn for information about the subject or tools to help them deal with such issues.)
This new initiative makes inroads by prompting viewers to contemplate their own biases and consider the cues that perpetuate stereotypes and allow prejudice to fester. After all, self-awareness is the first step on the road to enlightenment. Here, the network challenges viewers to take that journey without seeming heavy-handed or judgmental.
This quietly terrifying multi-channel campaign from the British Heart Foundation strives to keep its audience off balance in more ways than one.
Surprise is the key theme of the campaign, breaking today via DLKWLowe in London. Each facet mimics the swiftness and unexpectedness of the malady itself.
“Compared to other terminal illnesses, like cancer, heart disease can be especially cruel,” Dave Henderson, chief creative officer at DLKWLowe, tells AdFreak. “Its suddenness means families often never get the chance to even say goodbye, which has a huge emotional impact on those left behind.”
A minute-long TV commercial, “Classroom,” directed by Tom Tagholm of Park Pictures, shows a whispered conversation between father and son, hinting from the very beginning that something isn’t right.
The twist itself isn’t that hard to guess. But the dawning realization of what’s coming increases the story’s power—it becomes more and more unsettling as it progresses. In the end, it’s clear that as that as sad as this conversation is, it’s sadder still that when dealing with heart disease in real life, people don’t get to have those talks. The tagline drives home that point: “Heart disease is heartless. It strikes without warning.”
Ultimately, the organization is seeking help from viewers. “By making people contemplate the unexpected devastation that heart disease causes, we hope to inspire people to donate funds to continue BHF’s lifesaving research,” says Carolan Davidge, the client’s director of marketing and engagement.
“I don’t think we can tip toe around a disease that’s so cruel anymore,” adds Henderson. “We have to hit people with the reality of what we’re dealing with here. And the impact and reality of heart disease is personal to every person so each piece of creative in this campaign seeks to speak to different audiences.”
Several online spots created by Make, the DLKWLowe’s in-house production company, have a different tone and feel than “Classroom,” though they ultimately pack a similar punch.
In one, a Skype chat between a youngish mom and dad on their fifth wedding anniversary ends particularly badly.
In another, a backyard game of catch turns into a tragic afternoon for a cute pooch and its owner.
For some, that approach may seem unintentionally humorous (in a dark sort of way), even verging on parody. Still, the sense of disorientation and confusion—the WTF! moment, if you will—is exactly what the spots are all about. This is how quickly lives can irreparably, irreversibly change for the worse.
Meanwhile, in a mini-doc, real heart-disease patients keep the beat to remind us that one in four who are stricken don’t survive.
In an effort to make the message even more personal, there’s even a “Heart Attack Simulator.” A mobile app that asks users to hold their phones against their hearts, it delivers a jolt that isn’t so much physical as emotional—the phone rings, and a chilling recorded message, the kind no one wants to receive, begins to play.
Overall, each element of the wide-ranging campaign has a distinctive flavor, but they all manage to stay on point, memorably delivering the message. And while fear-based advertising can be tough to stomach, that’s a small price to pay for the possibility of preventing more lives from suddenly sliding into ruin and despair.
Kyle Chandler’s got one more inspirational speech in him, and we’d all better listen up.
The Austin-based actor reprises his best role—as Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights—in this great spot for the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater. We don’t want to spoil the ending, so just watch it first:
It’s a delightfully meta bit of work—his annoyance is our annoyance—and hopefully it’s effective.
Seriously. Please. It’s 2015 and going to the movies is expensive, especially if you’re going out in cities like New York or Los Angeles or even Austin, where the Alamo Drafthouse was founded. So, when you’ve shelled out $10, $12 or even $15 dollars to see the latest flick and someone in the audience is texting away, distracting you from the experience you’ve paid for, it’s obnoxious in the extreme.
The killing of majestic animals is big news this week. And now, the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd has unveiled a brutal PSA protesting the slaughter of whales by demonstrating how they die at the hands of humans—as acted out by a human.
The spot is skillfully horrific, as Australian character actor David Field mimics getting shot, convulsing, choking and coughing up blood. The PSA aims to draw attention, in particular, to the method of using an explosive harpoon to shoot the mammals, which causes massive internal injuries, and to the time it takes for them to die, which can be up to an hour.
“The cruelty inflicted on whales is shocking, and while most people abhor whaling, I think many don’t realize just how brutally these sea mammals are butchered,” Field said in a statement. “As a supporter of Sea Shepherd, I want to bring this barbaric practice to the attention of as many people as possible in the hope that we can get it stopped.”
As with many animal-rights PSAs, this one aims to evoke empathy by inviting people to imagine how they’d feel in the animal’s situation. This spot goes further by imagining the outcry if whaling were to happen to humans on a large scale. That’s a rhetorical device, yet it undermines the message a bit because it’s so easy to refute—it’s not happening to humans, after all. Yet that kind of hyperbole isn’t surprising following such violent imagery. (The excessive nature of the campaign also extends to the hashtag, #UltimateDeathScene.)
“Those who care about marine wildlife really feel something deeply when they see whaling taking place. We sought to harness this feeling to generate the maximum impact,” said Paul Swann, creative partner at Sydney agency The Works, which created the campaign. “The idea of a human experiencing what a whale does, combined with a graphic execution, will come to life across video, social, radio and print.”
CREDITS
Client: Sea Shepherd
Aegncy: The Works
Creative Partner: Paul Swann
Creative Leads: Adam Bodfish and Leo Barbosa
Digital Strategy Director: Damien Hughes
Planner: Leo Hennessy
Head of Digital Production: Dave Flanagan
Content Production Manager: Tristan Drummond
Senior Digital Designer: Kim Sanders
Social Media Strategist: Vanessa Hartley
Social Community Manager: Anna Lai
Project Management: Catriona Heaphy, Gillian Snowball and Juliette Hynes
Director: Tony Prescott
Director of Production: Robert Morton
Post Production: Method Studios
Sound: Nylon Studios
Anyone who’s ever played a war-themed video game like Call of Duty has effectively imagined what it might be like to be a soldier. But it’s far less common for people to imagine themselves as children victimized by military conflict.
A potent new PSA from nonprofit humanitarian group War Child U.K. invites viewers to do just that by adapting the camera angle of first-person shooter computer and console games, and making the protagonist a girl named Nima who gets caught in the crossfire.
It goes almost without saying that the storyline is heartbreaking—all the more so because the scenarios are based on testimony from real children caught up in actual conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. The stylized approach is gripping in its own right, driving home the point that people aren’t thinking seriously or often enough about protecting children—or, to put it differently, spending enough money on the issue.
At the same time, the secondary implication that video games trivialize warfare and inure players to its real human costs is also a hackneyed, and generally ineffective argument that ends up becoming a bit of a red herring here.
Plus, the creators seem at moments to have gotten a little too carried away with the concept, like when Nima gets shot within an inch of her life then finds a magical first aid kit which she administers to herself before continuing on her mission. It’s a sequence that strains a powerful metaphor into exactly the fantastical terrain it’s criticizing, and risks making the issue seem less immediate. On the other hand, the ending doesn’t leave any doubt.
If the spot does drive you to action, War Child is working to raise awareness around the issue leading into the World Humanitarian Summit.
CREDITS
Client: War Child U.K.
Agency: TOAD
Creative Directors: Guy Davidson, Daniel Clarke, Heydon Prowse
Production Company: Mother’s Best Child
Director: Daniel Lucchesi
Co-Director: Heydon Prowse
Editor: Elliot Windsor
Producer: Heydon Prowse & Guy Davidson
Postproduction Coordinator: John Thompson
SFX Producer: Andy Ryder
Colorist: Jack McGinity (Time Based Arts)
Postproduction: H & M Ogilvy One
Audio: Liam Conwell
Music: Jamie Perera
A graphic sexual health campaign aims to combat rising STD rates in Omaha, Neb., by grossing out young people with giant flesh-and-pus letters that deliver off-putting puns.
Billboards and bus posters around the city, as well as digital ads, feature twisted plays on sentimental clichés, with lines like “Him and Herpes” and “Ignorance is blisters.”
The Women’s Fund of Omaha’s Adolescent Health Project created the visually striking ads, with all-volunteer ad agency Serve Marketing, to encourage viewers to capitalize on free testing, and ultimately lower infection rates. (Serve was also behind these fake storefront businesses in Omaha with STD-type names.)
But, especially with flourishes like toupees and tattoos, the humor-meets-horror approach may also risk coming across as ridiculous—if not just too terrifying to get through—to the target audience. In any case, they make Unilever’s hideous-germs-on-holiday ads look gorgeous by comparison.
CREDITS
Agency: Serve Marketing
Executive Creative Director: Gary Mueller
CD/Art Director: Matt Hermann
Art Director: Carsyn McKenzie
Copywriters: Bruce Dierbeck + Evan Stremke
Illustrator: Shawn Holpher
Retoucher: Anthony Giacomino
Account Executive: Heidi Sterricker
AT&T’s “It Can Wait” texting-and-driving campaign from BBDO New York has included many notable executions, including the painful Werner Herzog documentary from 2013. And the latest spot is no exception, featuring quietly gripping storytelling from Anonymous Content director Frederic Planchon that suddenly explodes with horror.
The almost four-minute film is remarkable. (It’s supported by three 30-second spots, one of which will run on TV.) Slow-motion cinematography, shot at 1,000 frames per second, captures the brutal consequences of taking your eyes off the road to glance at your smartphone, even briefly. The footage then plays in reverse, ending on the cause of the terrible crash.
That cause, notably, isn’t that the driver was texting. The “It Can Wait” campaign has always focused on texting, but it’s is now evolving based on new research that revealed the prevalence of drivers engaging in other smartphone activities, like social media, web surfing, video chatting and more.
The campaign is evolving in other ways, too. AT&T, working with Reel FX, has developed an app called the It Can Wait Driving Simulation that uses virtual reality to give an immersive view of what it is like to text, post or video chat while driving. The VR simulator is freely available for iOS and Android and works with Google Cardboard.
A souped-up version of the simulator—running through the Samsung Gear VR headset, with premium sound from Bose QuietComfort 25 acoustic noise canceling headphones—will soon go on tour, visiting schools, fairs and partner companies in 100 U.S. cities.
CREDITS
Client: AT&T
Title: Close To Home
Agency: BBDO New York
Chief Creative Officer, Worldwide: David Lubars
Chief Creative Officer, New York: Greg Hahn
Executive Creative Director: Matt MacDonald
Senior Creative Director: LP Tremblay
Senior Creative Director: Erik Fahrenkopf
CD/Art Director: Grant Mason
CD/Copywriter: Kevin Mulroy
Director of Integrated Production: David Rolfe
Group Executive Producer: Julie Collins
Executive Producer: Dan Blaney
Music Producer: Melissa Chester
Senior Integrated Business Manager: Cristina Blanco
Managing Director: Mark Cadman
Senior Account Director: Brian Nienhaus
Account Director: Gati Curtis
Account Manager: Johnny Wardell
Account Executive: Sigourney Hudson-Clemons
Production Company: Anonymous Content
Director: Frederic Planchon
Executive Producer: Eric Stern
Producer: Paul Ure
Director of Photography: Jody Lee Lipes
Editorial: WORK Editorial
Editor: Rich Orrick
Assistant Editors: Adam Witten and Trevor Myers
Executive Producer: Erica Thompson
Producer: Sari Resnick
Visual Effects: The Mill
EP/Head of Production: Sean Costelloe
Line Producer: Nirad ‘Bugs’ Russell
VFX Supervisor : Gavin Wellsman
2D Leads: Gavin Wellsman; Krissy Nordella
2D Compositor: Michael Smith; Chris Sonia, Keith Sullivan
2D Assists: Heather Kennedy; Sungeun Moon, Yoon-sun Bae, Marco Giampaolo
3D: Yili Orana , Corey Langelotti
Pre Vis Artist: Jeffrey Lee
Editor: Charlotte Carr
Designer: Clemens den Exter
Color: The Mill
Colorist: Aline Sinquin
Music House: Grooveworx
Executive Producer: Dain Blair
Sound Design: Brian Emrich
Original music composed by Rob Simonsen
Sound: Sonic Union
Sound Mixer: Steve Rosen
Motions Graphics and Titles: Polyester
It’s easy to give kids healthy, farm-fresh snacks like pizza, taquitos and fish sticks. Just grab them straight from the vine at Nick Offerman’s pizza farm.
The actor gives you a tour of the agricultural marvel in this amusing video from Funny or Die. Those sloppy joes, in particular, look earthy and crunchy—literally so.
The whole thing, of course, is a parody. It’s aimed at getting the public to pressure Congress to reauthorize the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which set strong nutrition standards for schools and after decades of meals loaded with sugar, fat and salt.
“What’s the worst that can happen?”
That’s a loaded question, especially for a road-safety campaign. And it’s posed in a series of graphic spots from Albuquerque agency RK Venture for the New Mexico Department of Transportation.
Director Sean Broughton, a Hollywood visual effects expert, delivers three 30-second PSAs about drunk driving, seat belts and texting while driving, respectively. (There’s also a 45-second mashup of the first two ads.) Tires shriek, glass shatters and crimson spurts in all directions. The texting spot is the real corker, presenting a nightmare vision I hadn’t previously seen in such spots. (“It’s not my blood!? IT’S NOT MY BLOOD!” You’ll be hearing those words in your dreams.)
Warning: All four ads are very graphic.
“We wanted the ‘What’s the Worst That Can Happen?’ campaign to reflect the reality of just how deadly impaired and distracted driving is [and hopefully] instigate behavioral changes among drivers,” says RK Venture executive creative director Richard Kuhn.
This realistic, upsetting approach rises above category clichés owing to a strong element of hope that’s lacking from many similar initiatives (the NWDOT’s classic “ghost girl” spot creeps to mind). Here, each story presents the possibility that disaster can be avoided, if only people ask the right questions—and think carefully before they answer.
CREDITS
Agency: RK Venture
Principal and ECD: Richard Kuhn
Broadcast Creative Director and Writer: Nick Tauro
Executive Producer: Akash Khokha
Director: Sean Broughton
Director of Photography: Dean Mitchell
Editor: Phil Perri
Effects and Color: Left Field Labs
Flame, CGI and SFX: The Brigade
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?
WaterAid wanted to draw attention to the 1.25 billion women worldwide who don’t have access to a toilet during their period. So, the charity made an ad suggesting if men had periods, they would need manpons.
When you figure out how those things are connected, you can let me know.
They made two other strange spots—one about how men having periods would change football (soccer to us Yanks), and another about how men having periods would change office interactions. But the true viral standout is the fake spot for ManPax Manpons, which people seem to be sharing because men using tampons is funny, and of course, they’d have to be super manly manpons designed by NASA.
Manpons are more advanced than your average feminine product, with their Kevlar skeleton and heated therma-core. The bait-and-switch appeal is also fairly advanced. Perhaps WaterAid was getting tired of no one giving a damn about the myriad of other videos on their channel—the heartfelt true stories of those living without clean water and the transformative effect that sanitation makes in their lives.
So, they made a spot about men needing tampons, and lo, the attention started to flow. Even more amusingly, they actually collected a bunch of speculative data about how people think the world would change if men did have periods, and created a press release out of it.
Charities, take note. If people don’t care about your cause, find something for them to care about, even if it’s a ridiculous hypothetical question. Now let’s hope they care enough about it to actually change something.
Here are the two other spots:
With Memorial Day on Monday, here’s a look at a sad and remarkable ad campaign from Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Mission 22, an initiative the agency started to raise awareness of veteran suicide.
Mission 22 is named after a horrible statistic—that 22 veterans commit suicide every day in the U.S., often in their own homes. This is a real war being waged far from the field of battle, and so CP+B enlisted war photographer David Guttenfelder for the new campaign—to take photos of the homes where veterans died.
The images are haunting and heartbreaking, and powerfully communicate the grief that comes from war. The photos are running on print ads in Fortune, Money and Esquire, and on outdoor boards in four of the cities that these veterans called home.
Also check out the website and the video above, which explains the project.
Mission 22’s goal is to both raise awareness of the issue and to give veterans an idea of where to get help—with a list of vetted organizations on the website.
A children’s helpline in Sweden just released an upsetting set of emojis showing kids being physically and verbal abused—in the hope that young victims of violence might use them to communicate their situation when words fail.
“A complex reality demands a complex set of symbols,” says the nonprofit group, BRIS, which helps at-risk children and teenagers. “The Abused Emojis make it possible for kids and young people to talk about situations where they felt bad or wrongly treated without having to put words on the situation. If you or somebody you know have been hurt, mistreated or feel sad, Abused Emojis makes it easier to talk about.”
Among the images are kids with bruises and cuts; a baby being struck; a child thinking about a skull (suicide); images of parents drinking; and a literal shithead (a boy who’s presumably having thoughts of being ugly or worthless).
It’s pretty fascinating and bleak. Would kids really use something like this?
Full set of images below.
How do you get beach bums to take a break from the sun? If you’re one nonprofit, by luring them into the shade with free WiFi.
The Peruvian League Against Cancer has built a special tower on the Playa Agua Dulce, which offers wireless internet connectivity—but only to people standing in the tower’s shadow.
On top of the structure, a directional antenna attached to a sensor limits the scope of the signal and rotates with the sun. The login page for the network, which supports some 250 users at a time, includes prevention information about skin cancer. Agency Happiness Brussels helped set up the rig and is planning similar installations in partnership with local organizations in San Francisco and New Zealand.
It’s pretty clever to capitalize on the fact that pretty much everyone these days will follow their smartphones around blindly, even if the beach seems like one of those places WiFi is least essential. Then again, why not have your cake and eat it, too — catch some rays, then catch up on your latest Netflix binge while you take a break from spending time doing something other than having your face glued to a mini computer.
Adult movies have suddenly become the hot place to put cancer PSAs.
M&C Saatchi in Sydney worked with adult film studio Digital Playground and the Nonprofit Blue Ball Foundation to place an unexpected testicular-cancer PSA inside Game of Balls, an X-rated Game of Thrones parody, last month.
During one of the flick’s steamy scenes, actress Eva Lovia—who really should try harder with her porn name—briefly breaks character (such as it is) to demonstrate a cancer check on a male member of the cast. She also tells viewers to visit PlayWithYourself.org for more information. It’s stroke of genius, I’d say! (But I say lots of silly things.)
Check out the case study below, which is not explicit but might be a bit NSFW anyway.
So far, 200,000 people have visited the site, and total video views have passed 1.5 million, according to the video. “We’re overwhelmed with the amount of feedback we’ve been getting, from emails to Facebook messages to phone calls from all over the world,” says Blue Balls founder Jamie Morgan.
This isn’t the first ballsy way of generating exposure for the cause. McCann Lima and PornHub recently dispatched adult performer Charlotte Stokely—now that’s a porn-star name!—to show men how to perform self-examinations, and Cancer Research U.K. went all-in with last year’s selfie-sock campaign. (There was also DDB Bolivia’s breast-check adult clip, though Pornhub has questioned that case study’s claims of success.)
In any case, hopefully some of the messaging will rub off on the intended audience.
The striped patterns on dresses, shirts, tunics and sweaters become prison bars—with small, sad faces peeking through—in this Brazilian campaign against child labor.
Lew’LaraTBWA created the print ads for the Abrinq Foundation, which is affiliated with Save the Children, in the style of high-fashion magazine spreads. Each one features a single line of copy, such as, “A dress shouldn’t cost a childhood.” Brazilian model Caroline Ribeiro appears in some of the ads, which were shot by top fashion photographers.
#Dress4Good is the hashtag, and the public is encouraged to post “positive fashion-foward images” on Instagram. According to the agency, the initiative is not intended as an attack on the fashion industry per se, but is designed to spread the message that “child labor crimes are closer to the consumer than they might think.”
The work is similar in theme and execution to “What’s Behind,” a recent public-service effort from Brazilian human-rights group Cepia (though Abrinq’s use of stripes—note how the kids’ fingers clutch at them in desperation—really drives the point home).
Ultimately, both campaigns do a fine job of encouraging consumers to dig beneath the surface and find out what’s really going on.
CREDITS
Agency: Lew’LaraTBWA
Client: Abrinq Foundation – Save the Children
Campaign Title:
CCO: Manir Fadel
Executive Chief Creative: Felipe Luchi
Copywriter: Gabriel Sotero
Art director: Rodolfo Fernandes
Art Buyer: Ale Sarilho, Sabino and Caio Lobo
Image treatment: Arms Image
Photographers: Jacques Dequeker, Jayro Goldflus, Henrique Gendre, Daniel Klajimic and Gil Inoue
PR: Bia Ribeiro
Client: Victor Alcântara da Graça, Yeda Mariana Rocha de M. Pereira e Denise Maria Cesario
DDB has uploaded what it claims is the first fake erotic video on Pornhub. The video starts off porny and then morphs into a (still NSFW) PSA from the Alcázar Gynecology Institute, showing men how to perform a breast exam on their wives or girlfriends.
Traditional ads targeting women simply aren’t working, DDB says. And the agency points out that the potential reach of this approach is impressive—given Pornhub’s sizable audience and the fast that 94.73 percent of men watch porn online, according to research. (What portion of those don’t mind being tricked into watching else is another matter.)
And of course, there’s the further problem that this campaign blatantly sexualizes breast cancer, which is an approach many cancer activists despise.
Check out the case study below, which is NSFW. What do you think of the strategy here?
Via Adeevee.
CREDITS
Client: Alcázar Gynecology Institute
Agency: DDB, La Paz, Bolivia
Co-founder & CCO: Henry Medina
Co-founder & CEO: Emanuelle Medina
Head of Art: Christian Morales
Copywriter: Henry Medina
Producer Company: Rebeca
Director: Miqy de la Barra
Executive Producer: Alejandro Noriega
Music & Sound Company: Vinylo Sound
Music & Sound Designer: Ricardo Núñez
In Australia, “ice” is anything but cool.
Ice addiction—that is, a taste for crystal meth—has become a terrifying scourge Down Under, prompting the federal government to launch a six-week, $9 million ($7 million U.S.) PSA blitz that contains several shocking sequences.
Upsetting scenes in the 45-second spot below, which has been edited into shorter commercials, include a scraggy-looking dude violently robbing his mom, a young woman peeling open her skin because she believes bugs are crawling inside, and an addict’s startling, psychotic attack on hospital staffers.
The message: “Ice destroys lives. Don’t let it destroy yours.”
Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash says a graphic campaign is required because “nobody sets out to become addicted, and many users think addiction won’t happen to them. It can and does, and these ads aim to show the realities of ice addiction.”
She has a point, and the approach in and of itself is provocative, memorable and obviously well intentioned. That said, I can’t help feeling we’ve seen this kind of stuff before, and I wonder how impactful it will be. (The mom and bug scenes, though strong stuff, might have packed more punch pre-Breaking Bad. That emergency-room freakout, however, feels startlingly fresh and really crashes through the clutter to lodge inside your head.)
Australian Anti-Ice Campaign founder Andrea Simmons gives the work a mixed review on her organization’s Facebook page. “Its a good start, however it will take more than a couple hundred ads” to effectively deliver the message, she says. Simmons argues that since the spots are airing on late-night TV, they’ll probably get lost in the shuffle, concluding, “We can’t use a band aide fix with this epidemic.”
We’ve seen a few different Tinder hacks from marketers, but here’s an interesting one that gets at the heart of the dark side of relationships.
An organization called Women in Distress created fake profiles on the popular dating app for three different “abusers.” As users swiped through their photo albums, the guys went from nice to nasty, eventually going to far as to throw a punch.
The point, says ad agency Bravo/Y&R, is that even nice guys can become violent fast, and that women need to “look for help at the first sign of things turning ugly.”
There are certainly a few problems with the execution. The guys look a little cartoonish in the images. Plus, the whole thing is a bit spammy—and the lack of a trigger warning might be problematic. Still, it’s well intentioned and might get Tinder users thinking about what they really want out of a relationship.
CREDITS
Client: Women In Distress
Project: Tinder Beater
Agency: Bravo/Y&R, Miami
Chief Creative Officer: Claudio Lima
Art Director: Gabriel Jardim
Photographer: Mauricio Candela
Motion: Fernando Lancas
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.
