FitzCo//McCann created a holiday spot for Coca-Cola and Walmart entitled “Earn It” which features a sentimental twist designed to tug at heartstrings for the holidays.
The spot shows a teenager working odd jobs around the holidays to earn some extra money. After finally earning enough money he heads to Walmart to make his purchase, which is revealed in the next scene. Without giving too much away we can say that the spot is built around this reveal, which positions Coca-Cola and Walmart alongside some cute holiday sentimentality. Splitting an ad between two brands is no easy feet, but FitzCo//McCann manages to avoid shortchanging either party. In the opening shot, the protagonist is seen thumbing through a Walmart catalog while drinking a Coke. One of his money making schemes involves selling bottles of the soft drink for $1.25 each and he drinks a bottle again at the conclusion of “Earn It.” It also works surprisingly well with Coca-Cola’s larger “Open Happiness” campaign, albeit with the kind of sentimentality that might seem too much at any other time of year. (more…)
RPA recently debuted a new campaign for recently-won client ARCO, following Tesoro’s purchase of ARCO from BP.
The campaign celebrates ARCO’s “top tier” designation, as its gasoline “exceeds EPA minimum detergent requirements to help clean engines and maintain optimal vehicle performance.” To highlight the benefits of treating your car right with ARCO gasoline, RPA chose to show some of the ways mistreat their vehicles in a series of four 30-second broadcast spots.
The light-hearted approach works best in “Treat” (featured above), when a woman decides “If top-tier gas at ARCO helps clean my engine, maybe I should clean the rest of my car.” She then imagines all the hard work inherent in undoing the neglect, including some pretty gross tasks, before tossing an empty coffee cup in the backseat and deciding “I’ll do that another time.”
Other spots in the campaign take a similar approach, with “Embarassing” focusing on some of the moments your car shouldn’t have to witness and “Mishap” taking on minor vehicular abuse. “Try It” changes things up, focusing instead on a couple’s misguided decision to go somewhere other than ARCO for gas. Each spot ends with the tagline, ““Your car puts up with a lot. Help protect it from harmful engine deposits. ARCO has quality TOP TIER® gas for less.” emphasizing ARCO’s quality and top tier designation. The campaign began last month with one broadcast spot and an outdoor component, and currently supports the four broadcast spots with online and radio elements, as well as a revamped website.
“We have a long history working on the ARCO brand, and appreciate the challenges of the competitive motor-fuel category,” said RPA EVP, Management Account Director Tom Kirk. “The agency’s goal is to further support ARCO’s brand positioning, and this new work focuses on ARCO’s holistic value proposition around product quality and affordability.” (more…)
Today, Saatchi & Saatchi New York is launching the first ever campaign for the gun responsibility organization Evolve, encouraging people to take personal responsibility for gun safety and generally not be dumbasses.
Saatchi & Saatchi’s pro-bono campaign features a short, satirical video called “The Bill of Rights for Dumbasses.” The 1:40 video portrays Thomas Jefferson and other historical figures debating the language of the second amendment. Jefferson thinks the amendment runs a little long, and after much debate, convinces the rest of the council to remove the “as long as they aren’t being dumbasses about it” part from the amendment. While the founding fathers are debating the matter, viewers are treated to a humorous montage of gun owners engaging in questionable practices, before Jefferson concludes it’s common sense that you shouldn’t act that way with a gun. The video ends with the founding fathers playing pinata with a gun, followed by the tagline, “It’s the right to bear arms, not the right to be dumbass” and a message prompting viewers to go to takeonthecode.com and sign the code of gun responsibility.
Evolve co-founder Rebecca Bond hopes that “Humor can be a gateway to taking away the defensiveness that is the legacy of these discussions.” Joe Bond, also an Evovle co-founder, added, “We want the ‘Dumbass’ concept to catch on in popular culture the way ‘friends don’t let friends drive drunk’ did for safe driving.”
Since it’s rare to find people discussing guns without getting hysterical about it, Saatchi & Saatchi’s employment of dumb humor is somewhat refreshing. But will it really chip away at the defensiveness that gun rights activists feel when discussing anything related to guns? Or are they more likely to take offense at the video depicting gun owners, and even founding fathers, as dumbasses? Unfortunately, I doubt the video will convince many viewers to “take on the code,” because even though Evolve professes to be a “third voice” in the gun debate without political affiliation, gun rights activists will still likely view the video’s satire as an attack on them. Meanwhile, the video will appeal to plenty of gun reform proponents — people who don’t need any convincing on the importance of gun safety, and mostly don’t own guns (and therefore have no need to take Evolve’s pledge). That’s too bad, because Evolve’s responsibility code is really just common sense and something any gun owner should be able to get behind — which makes this feel like a missed opportunity. Credits after the jump.
CP+B originally ran with the idea of a blow-up doll lunch decoy last year, suggesting that people could secure more time at Applebee’s by tricking their bosses. In 2013, the same old bag of tricks comes in the form of a longer ad – 102 seconds – showing various worker bees running out of the office to indulge in some Applebee’s. I’ve never been a fan of the fine dining cuisine at such establishments, but I’m told customers can enjoy hundreds of lunch combos starting at $6.99. If you can get a restaurant combo for that cheap, you may want to think twice.
The spot itself isn’t digging much into new ground. There is one interesting bit, when a black construction worker uses a white lunch decoy. I’m not sure what that is trying to say, if anything at all, but the man’s boss must not pay very good attention to his staff if the lunch decoy can be effective while using a different skin color than the man who is jolting to Applebee’s (Ed. update: CP+B clarifies that it did use the likeness that most resembles of its construction worker as part of the campaign. Go here). Maybe the man’s boss is using his own lunch decoy, at which point the men would run into each other at an Applebee’s and ruin the trick for everyone. Credits after the jump.
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