Hasta La Creative!

We all know a girl like Louise Delage. You’ve been on Instagram for years and are scraping by with 50 likes on a good day—then she appears on the scene, with her fun little life, and cultivates over 16,000 followers in a few months.

In the years following LonelyGirl15, we learned to be wary of that kind of success. Who is this girl, and what does she do? But “personal branding,” Instagram stardom and the overall pressure to demonstrate the most photogenic parts of our lives has perhaps blunted our critical knives. Aren’t we all stars for somebody? 

So when Louise Delage arrived on Instagram on Aug. 1, bearing drinks and a cheerful, sun-soaked smile, few wondered who she was. Many assumed she was one more chic Parisian. Maybe she had one of those depressed Instagram husbands whose sole role in life is to capture their muses for an insatiable audience.

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Gap’s been running ads celebrating “iconic Americana moments” and playing up the chain’s founding in 1969. But one of its retro choices left NASA fans flummoxed.

A tweet from the recent campaign, posted on March 1, featured a photo of a space shuttle liftoff, emblazoned with the text “1969.” As any fan of space history knows, that was the year Apollo 11 went to the moon on a Saturn V rocket, more than a decade before the space shuttle made its debut.

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Wieden + Kennedy has hacked the tagging function on Instagram to create an amusingly absurd “Choose your own adventure” social game for Old Spice, filled with robots, retro monsters and meta jokes.
 

 

You awaken in a dark cave. In the distance you see a faint light, in front of you is an open bottle of Old Spice body wash. Go toward the light—maybe it’s a way out? Grab the Old Spice? Tap image once to use tags to navigate.

A photo posted by Old Spice (@oldspice) on Jul 30, 2015 at 10:33am PDT

 
The story opens with the post above. Clicking on it reveals tags that function as the navigation, leading to a maze of newly created Instagram accounts where the story continues. Clicking on the Old Spice body wash in the first scene reveals the first of many comical dead ends, from which you have to backtrack and continue.

The game is pretty much one big joke, undermining itself at every turn and parodying the genre rather than presenting a real “adventure.” The ending, in particular, is intentionally anticlimactic, centered on an inside joke about the ad budget for the project—very much in keeping with the brand’s self-aware ethos.

Give it a spin, or click here to choose a different AdFreak story.

Under Armour couldn’t sit idly by on Tuesday when Misty Copeland was named the first African American principal dancer in American Ballet Theatre’s 75-year history—not after the famous TV spot that helped burnish both dancer and brand.

The sports apparel brand organized a social congratulations campaign, beginning with this simple tweet:

Thousands of tweets later—including love notes from UA NFL star Eddie Lacy and Zappos—and the brand had an SUV full of flowers to deliver to Copeland, who was clearly thrilled by the gift.

More pics below.

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

The viral success of Groupon’s Banana Bunker post on Facebook appears to be rubbing off on other brands. See, for example, Ikea Singapore—which has started a whole new Facebook thread clearly with the intention of replying comically to everyone it can.

The post asks people to send questions about how they might improve their bedroom and bathroom areas. A “Shelf Help Guru” then answers them. (It’s the same guy who appeared in BBH Asia-Pacific’s comical “Improve Your Private Life” video from a few years back.

The answers come in a peculiar form, though—a meme-style image, often with a pun, and a link to a product on the Ikea website that might solve the person’s issue.

It’s not quite as inspired as Groupon’s effort (the image replies are often repeated throughout the thread, and to be honest, they’re generally not that helpful). But joking with customers on Facebook one-on-one is clearly becoming a thing.

See a bunch of the replies below. Via Design Taxi.

Chipotle has come up with a pretty clever way to get people to express their deep love for burritos. Today, Chipotle is running a social media campaign asking people to post a haiku on Twitter or the brand’s Facebook page for the chance to win prizes. The Top 20 poems with the most Likes and retweets will win a dinner for two.

Usually, this sort of consumer-generated contest fare is pretty bad. But some of Chipotle’s fans are putting some impressive levels of creativity into it. 

On Facebook, someone submitted, “I used to date you/ But now you just serve me food/ One taco, no love.” Another user says, “Electric salsa/ Glides across beans, rice and meat/ dancing palate joy.”

Here are some of our favorite Twitter poems so far:

@ChipotleTweets And you shall find Him, Wrapped in Swaddling Foil, Burrito Jesus. pic.twitter.com/5mevITCQQS

— JakesTea (@JakeWethington) February 5, 2015

@ChipotleTweets There is a secret – love I have, for the heavy – handed employee

— Bob Plow (@bobplow) February 5, 2015

.@ChipotleTweets An original Haiku, by Nick Brewer. Alone without you You make my pants feel funny Please dance with my tongue.

— Nick Brewer (@ngbrew62) February 5, 2015

@ChipotleTweets I hate you haiku, you’re too hard to do. Burrito.

— Kathy (@Rollergirl116) February 5, 2015

@ChipotleTweets #haiku. Foil wrapped burrito Is it wrong to love you so? I don’t need a man. Please retweet!

— Catherine Weller (@cweller7) February 5, 2015

My wife said to write A haiku for this contest What am I, a moose? @ChipotleTweets

— David Learn (@marauder34) February 5, 2015

Dear people in line, Anticipate the questions. I ain’t got all day. @ChipotleTweets #ChipotleHaiku

— Gregory Joseph (@MrMcGregger) February 5, 2015

File this one under creative ways to get agencies’ attention.

In hopes of landing an internship at an ad agency, Dutch student Max Kurstjens, who’s studying in Sweden, took matters into his own hands. Kurstjens tells AdFreak via email that he struggled to get in touch with the agencies, so he targeted their Instagram hashtags instead.

“Why? To get their attention and to mock the hashtag phenomenon, especially in the advertising world,” he says.

Kurstjens created different Instagram accounts to flood the feeds of certain agencies, including TBWA, Droga5 and Wieden + Kennedy. Scrolling through an agency hashtag yields a composite of images that take the hashtag hostage and direct users to wehaveyourhastag.com. There, you’ll find a robotic arm dumping hashtags into shark-infested waters, holding them over a fiery grill and electrocuting them.

The only way to save your hashtag is to invite the guy for a cup of coffee.

It’s not clear yet whether he’s landed that elusive interview. But hey, the site’s pretty cool. We hope he graduates from hijacking hashtags soon, before they have to bring in the hostage negotiators.

Some people think animated GIFs are stupid. Some find them charming. Possibly because of this rift, Twitter seems caught in a pictorial purgatory that makes everyone unhappy.

Like it or not, animated GIFs have become a massively popular form of communication, quickly evolving from passive-aggressive zingers to earnestly useful bites of video that are convenient to watch on just about any platform.

While Tumblr and newer sites like Ello have readily embraced them, Twitter and Facebook have most certainly not. Aside from last year’s quasi-hoax from Giphy, Facebook’s been pretty consistent about not wanting animated GIFs in news feeds. (I originally took this as a stance on user experience, but now that all Facebook videos autoplay silently, I realize I was a chump.)

And then there’s Twitter.

Its love-hate relationship goes back a few years. Here’s a quick recap:

September 2012: Twitter bans animated user avatars but existing ones are grandfathered in (that’s why you still see them from time to time). In fact, other than nudity and profanity, this is just about Twitter’s only restriction on avatars.

November 2013: Animated GIF service Giphy announces it’s been integrated into Twitter’s Media Cards, meaning you can (kind of) post an animated GIF in a tweet. But they were more like attachments you had to expand and didn’t show up in most Twitter streams. And you were restricted to using Giphy images instead of any animated pic you liked.

June 2014: Twitter Support announces you can “share and view animated GIFs on Twitter.com, Android and iPhone.” But that’s not entirely true, since what you’re sharing is a GIF that’s been converted into a looping MP4 video file, meaning you have to click to watch it.

September 2014: Popular GIF service Twitpic announces it is shutting down due to the high cost of a trademark battle with Twitter. This is especially bad news for animated GIF lovers who rely on the third-party service to share animations on Twitter. However, Twitpic announces a few days later that it has been acquired and will stay alive after all.

Where things stand now
We did test runs on the three most common options for posting an animated GIF to Twitter. We tried out Twitter’s built-in media upload feature, the popular Giphy database and the scrappy third-party Twitpic. We tested each on the Web, in TweetDeck and in the official Twitter mobile app. The result are below.

Spoiler alert: Each is flawed, cumbersome and questionably worth the effort.

Excited? Great! Here we go!

 
1. Posting an animated GIF directly to Twitter or TweetDeck.
This is definitely the easiest route, but it has the huge setback of not actually appearing as an animated GIF in people’s streams, and on TweetDeck it looks like total garbage.

How it looks on Twitter:

Testing something w/ animated gifs. Please ignore. http://t.co/v9a3McVKRl

— David Griner (@griner) September 25, 2014

How it looks on TweetDeck:

How it looks on Twitter’s mobile app (Android):

(Clicking the thumbnail would play the GIF, which is actually converted into an MP4.)

Conclusion: It doesn’t autoplay, it’s not really a GIF, and it doesn’t work on TweetDeck, even though the desktop and Web app was acquired by Twitter way back in 2011. So I wouldn’t call this a great platform for sharing GIFs. Because it doesn’t.

 
2. Posting an animated GIF via Giphy:
I got a “forbidden” error when I tried uploading my test GIF to Giphy, but I was able to find a similar one already in the site’s database. I then clicked to share via Twitter, which automatically populates your tweet with a Giphy URL and lets you edit the tweet before posting. As you’ll see, the end result is mixed.

How it looks on Twitter:

Another animated gif test, this time via giphy. http://t.co/bKqjK8HO7C

— David Griner (@griner) September 25, 2014

(While Giphy was the only one of the three options that actually autoplays the GIF in a Web tweet, this only works if you embed the tweet like I’ve done here. In a user’s Twitter stream, it’ll just look like text and a link unless the follower clicks to expand the tweet. In other words, it’s likely to get overlooked by Web users on Twitter.com but would look good if dropped into a blog post.)

How it looks on TweetDeck:

How it looks on Twitter’s mobile app (Android):

(Clicking the link expands it to a video thumbnail, which you have to click again to watch on Giphy.com. Bleh.)

Conclusion: You still don’t get your animated GIF into the stream on TweetDeck, and on mobile it’s barely noticeable. It does look good on the Web when expanded or embedded, but not too many active Twitter users see tweets that way. I’m not altogether condemning Giphy as a service, but I would say its role as a tool for sharing animated GIFs on Twitter has likely been overstated.

 
3. Posting an animated GIF via TwitPic:
At AdFreak, we’ve been using TwitPic for a while now as our animated GIF tweeting service of choice. It autoplays GIFs in TweetDeck, which a lot of our readers seem to use. So you can see why we, like many others, were disturbed to hear the service was being shuttered and then relieved to hear about its stay of execution.

How it looks on Twitter:

Another animated gif test, this time with TwitPic. http://t.co/Rw3Z0wNvJc

— David Griner (@griner) September 25, 2014

How it looks on TweetDeck:

(Hey hey, it worked! Twitpic was the only one of these three options that actually played a GIF in stream on TweetDeck.)

How it looks on Twitter’s mobile app (Android):

(Clicking to expand the tweet only shows it as a still image. You have to click the link to view it as an animation on Twitpic.com.)

Conclusion: Twitpic is great for TweetDeck but looks pretty bad on mobile and Web. But with no TweetDeck support for animated GIFs from Twitter itself, playing in stream is a pretty good selling point for Twitpic.

It’s worth noting that my Twitpic posts were the only ones to get a positive reaction from followers, likely because many of my friends are TweetDeck junkies:

@griner FYI, I saw the twitpic one in my stream on TweetDeck, but just a link for the pic.twittter one…

— Jeremy A Williams (@jeremyawilliams) September 25, 2014

@griner Ironically enough. I would have expected the exact opposite

— Jeremy A Williams (@jeremyawilliams) September 25, 2014

@griner I can see this one in Tweetdeck. The others are links. I’m not good at ignoring Madagascar.

— Andrea Updyke (@AndreaUpdyke) September 25, 2014

In Summary
Tweeting animated GIFs, for now, is still like trying get to the grocery store by riding a tricycle made of wet cardboard and rusted coffee cans. You’ll eventually get there, but you’ll look and feel like an idiot most of the way.

Which service you should use really depends on your audience. If most of your followers are mobile-savvy millennials on the go, Twitter’s native upload feature is probably best, though it’s still disappointing and (again) doesn’t actually use animated GIFs.

If your audience is more likely to be Twitter power users savvy with TweetDeck, I’d stick with Twitpic (while it exists). 

Hopefully Twitter will get past its conflicted feelings on GIFs soon and decide to either support them 100 percent or block them outright by forcing them into click-to-play MP4 videos. I wouldn’t bet on seeing autoplaying GIFs in all your streams anytime soon, though. And with Twitpic being an outlier that’s already in the crosshairs of Twitter’s legal team, I wouldn’t get too comfortable with that being a long-term option, either.

Everything’s crappy and nothing works like it should. Welcome to the future, everybody.

What is it about law enforcement that makes it so delightful when they actually try to have fun in social media? It’s probably just enjoyable to see the softer side of people who are trained to use deadly force and deal with the bleaker aspects of society.

The Seattle police set in the bar in this regard, of course, with their fascinating and amusing Twitter account. But now, the Instagram account of the Reykjavik, Iceland, police force has been brought to our attention—and it’s a real mosaic of cute.

It’s full of fun pics of animals and kids and people on the force doing goofy things. “Police kitty in training,” says the caption on the photo above, along with the hashtag #copcat.

Sure, humanizing any police force can lead to better relations with citizens, and a safer community overall. But this is also just about being real, not taking things too seriously and delivering useful information in a more entertaining package.

More pics below. Via Demilked.