Hasta La Creative!

With the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting coming up this Sunday, BBDO New York crafted a PSA campaign for Sandy Hook Promise, an gun violence prevention organization formed in the wake of that tragedy.

In the three-minute video “Monsters Under the Bed,” an interviewer has children draw pictures of monsters and then interviews parents asking them what they do to protect their children from these imaginary creatures, with parents offering up a range of responses. Then the interviewer changes the conversation, asking, “How do you protect them from gun violence?” Most of the parents just sit silently with a pained expression, and not one is able to offer a satisfying answer. BBDO New York drives the message home when text appears onscreen reading, “Last year, zero kids were killed by monsters under the bed. Let’s protect our kids from the real threats…so they can continue being afraid of the imaginary ones.”

The video ends by directing viewers to SandyHookPromise.org, where the organization offers parents, students and teachers tools and programs to prevent future gun violence, including mental wellness, social development and gun safety approaches.”Monsters Under the Bed” is being promoted on social channels including Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, and Twitter.

Additionally, BBDO New York worked with director Tarik Karam and executive producer Stephen Daldry to create a short documentary film called What They Left Behind. The documentary tells the story of three children who lost their lives to gun-related violence: “from a 17–year-old girl who committed suicide with her father’s gun; to an argument among young teenage boys in Iowa that  ended in bloodshed; to the Barden family who lost their 7-year-old son in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.”

“In the two years since I lost my son, I have been speaking with communities across the country to better understand the causes of gun violence,” said Nicole Hockley, communications director for Sandy Hook Promise and mother of six-year-old Sandy Hook victim Dylan. “What we have learned is that, as a nation, we can help to prevent tens of thousands of gun deaths, by first learning the warning signs of violent behavior and focusing on community-based programs to help and heal those most at risk.”

Stick around for the 35-minute What They Left Behind, along with credits, after the jump. (more…)

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Fellow New Yorkers and others around the world know that the 9/11 Memorial Museum finally opened in May after years of debate and ugly political infighting.

While the establishment is not free from controversy today, it has already become something of a city institution. Today sees the debut of the memorial’s first promotional campaign, created pro-bono by BBDO New York in collaboration with animation house Elastic.

The two-minute spot, narrated by Whoopi Goldberg:

Keep in mind that this is a true story: The Survivor Tree does exist, and it was indeed rescued by those on the scene. The poem, though, comes from BBDO creative directors Rick Williams and Marcel Yunes.

The campaign includes a social media fundraising component as well.

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BBDO New York’s latest offering for GE continues to celebrate innovation, but marks a stylistic departure from the agency’s recent work for the brand.

While “What Would Happen” and “Childlike Imagination” looked at innovation from a sense of childlike wonder, “Ideas” takes a sharp sidestep, personifying those ideas and focusing on how they often emerge as rough around the edges but grow into something beautiful. In the 60-second online spot, ideas are presented as an odd-looking creature that looks like something that could have crawled out of the reject pile at Jim Henson’s workshop.

Starting from birth, we follow an idea as it has a pretty rough time of things. Continually facing rejection, it resorts to sleeping on the streets until it is finally taken in by GE. “Ideas are scary, and messy, and fragile,” says a voiceover, “But under the proper care, they become something beautiful,” and then we see the fully-transformed idea, followed by the “Imagination at work” tagline.

Following the success of BBDO’s recent work for the brand, the shift in approach comes as a little off-putting, and the idea seems a bit dragged out at 60 seconds. But then maybe the spot being a little rough around the edges actually fits the concept. (more…)

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BBDO New York‘s latest series for General Electric (almost) travels to the globe’s most  remote corners to remind viewers that the company isn’t just responsible for creating trivection ovens and six-second video loops.

With “World Firsts”, the agency uses three disparate stories of isolated communities to illustrate GE’s ability to bring the benefits of the digital world to those living on its margins.

The first spot in the series of three concerns the challenges of delivering medical technologies to one of Japan’s most remote inhabited islands:

After the jump, the second spot plays on the same outsider themes (while lightly referencing World Cup fever) in relaying the tale of a young boy’s first big trip and his love of all things football.

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It seems like there’s an awful lot of Back to the Future nostalgia invading the Internet these days, with posts about the series on sites like Reddit leading to listicles about the trilogy on nostalgia-aggregators like Buzzfeed which then go viral on Facebook and eventually find themselves on large emails your mom sends to her friends and CC’s you on for some reason. And, what with it being 2013 and all,  where advertising campaigns are becoming increasingly informed by memes, we get GE and BBDO NY using the “1.21 gigawatts” thing to sell you technology or something. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads to perdition; we just fly there through space and time.

And yet, nostalgia has a way of endearing you to things in a way totally out of your control. Call it manipulation, call it “effective advertising” using one of the oldest tricks in the book. Any way or slice it, it’s hard as even a casual fan of the series not to get a little giddy when you see what are ostensibly Marty McFly’s Nikes pop out of a souped-up Delorean. While Pepperidge Farm dares us to remember a time when people died of dystentary and snakebites like in Oregon Trail, Back to the Future‘s original audience has aged to the point where brands see the 1980s as a way to get consumers on board 30-something years later.

In fact, I hope this becomes a whole campaign where GE powers David Bowie‘s castle from Labyrinth, E.T.‘s glowing finger, and the computer from Weird Science. And, though it wouldn’t make much sense, maybe Michael J. Fox could narrate those spots too. Maybe in another 30 years, GE will power the ships from Avatar and Robin Thicke can provide us with his own deep-voiced VO. Trust me, it will make sense by then. Credits after the jump.

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Has it really been ten years since The Matrix: Revolutions tarnished the Wachowskis’epic saga? Time flies, but while we’d rather forget the third and final Matrix installment, we’re happy to once again see Hugo Weaving as the relentless Agent Smith, whose dapper yet menacing visage appears along with several doppelgangers in this latest effort from BBDO New York for GE called “Agent of Good.”

The spot, which was directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), debuted over the weekend and showcases GE’s industrial internet technology and how the corporate giant connecting its medical hardware to its software is benefiting hospitals–or something to that effect. Despite being a decade removed from the Matrix films, Weaving shows no signs of rust as he brings the snarl of his most iconic character to the most sterile of environments. Stick around for the final moments for your most obvious Matrix reference, minus Morpheus. Credits after the jump.

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