Hasta La Creative!

So how did Fiat make the new 500X? According to this spot from The Richard Group the answer is a certain blue pill.

The ad opens on a woman making amorous advances on an elderly gentlemen. He tells her he will be back in a minute, rushes to the bathroom, gets out a bottle of erectile dysfunction pills (presumably) and goes to take the very last one. But he misses his mouth and the pill falls out the window, slowly, and improbably, making its way into the gas tank of a nearby Fiat, which transforms the car into the new Fiat 500X.

And that has to be one of the most ridiculous premises for an ad to come across our desks in some time. The spot is beautifully shot, — in Pitigliano, Tuscany, according to Adweek, — but it doesn’t do a whole lot to sell the Fiat 500X, amorous glances of women following its transformation aside. Plus, if the Fiat 500X is the result of a Fiat on a certain impotence-treating drug, what does that say about the rest of Fiat’s vehicles?

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ULTA Beauty operates 675 retail stores across 46 states and also distributes its products through its website. Yet the company recently decided to spruce things up a bit with an agency review.

CEO Mary Dillon, who has been at the helm for just over a year, exceeded investors’ expectations before deciding to trade Dallas-based Richards Group for Boston’s Mullen this week.

“ULTA is focused on continuing to build a leadership brand in beauty, and Mullen’s combination of outstanding brand strategy and breakthrough creative will help us accelerate our efforts,” said Ulta chief marketing officer Dave Kimbell said in a statement.

ULTA spent $17.7 million in measured media in 2013, up from $13.5 million in 2012. The review was managed by Mercer Island Group.

Here’s the most recent campaign Richards created for ULTA, titled “Trading Faces.”

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Roaches, rats and other pests had the starring roles in Orkin's campaign from The Richards Group in recent years. And while those spots were amusing, in a creepy way, it's the Orkin man himself who takes center stage in the new campaign, which broke today. And a resourceful man he is. Each spot shows a different Orkin man in some kind of undesirable position—wedged into a crawlspace with rats scurrying around; hanging from a tree above a parade of ants; suspended halfway up a wall to see cockroaches inside an air vent. "To catch a pest, you've got to think like a pest," he says in each ad. And then, you pretty much have to act like a pest. As this campaign suggests, that's not something most people want to do, or would even be able to do. The tagline is: "Pest control down to a science," which makes it seem even less DIY—a sly way of getting people to call Orkin instead.