Hasta La Creative!

Carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, citric acid, sodium citrate, sodium hexametaphosphate (preservative), caffeine, taurine, natural flavors, acacia, potassium sorbate (preservative), glycerol ester of rosin, l-theanine, sucralose, yellow 5, calcium disodium edta (preservative), pyridoxine hydrochloride (vitamin B6), yellow 6, guarana, cyanocobalamin (vitamin B12)

And you call that a health drink? WTF has marketing and manufacturing come to? Those are the ingredients of Coke’s NOS Energy Drink that’s being touted in a new spot from Mistress which will air weekly during FOX’s The Ultimate Fighter and FOX’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.

In the spot, we see a grizzled old man who looks like he’s been through a life of hell. As the spot progresses, he get younger, trimmer, leaner and, generally more healthy looking. Maybe if he hadn’t consumed NOS his whole life, he wouldn’t have ended up looking so beaten down.

As if proud of how those who seemingly consume its beverage, NOS has relaunched its website which now features an app that lets visitors upload a picture of themselves, participate in a lifestyle questionnaire and the app will then reproduce the photo complete with scars and other elements of a “full life.”

Fuck. We’re sticking with water.

This Coors Light ad is definitely different and it’s definitely strange. It talks about going to bed not in your bed, paint fights, pantlessness, fuzzy handcuffs, magic tricks, ballerina, awkwardly-placed Japanese men, men on a bus wearing sumo wrestling suites, plastic balls with men inside and donkeys named Richard.

Oh and it’s narrated by a guy wearing a bear head hat. That talks.

Created by Leo Burnett Toronto, directed by Soft Citizen directorial duo The Perlorian Brothers, and edited by Rooster Post’s Marc Langley, the spot aims to highlight possible adventures of the impending summer season. While drunk, apparently.

Why do people do this? Why do they go to such great lengths to alter their looks when, in fact, all they’re doing is making themselves look like inhuman freaks? Oh sure, a little nose job and breast augmentation here and there is fine but when you get plastic surgery because you want to look like Justin Bieber or or Jennifer Lawrence, there’s a screw loose.

But if you’re Pesky Sunder Plastic Surgery and your patients are a bunch of plastic types who have formed a musical groups called The Plastics to make a plastic surgery commercial then you just throw your arms up and say, “Fuck it. Bring it on.” Otherwise YouTube would be filled with corporate product demo videos that could put an army of sugared-up kids to sleep on Halloween.

The press release for this campaign promoting South African news channel WWW News describes the efforts three videos as yawn-worthy. We’d agree. But we’d go a step further and call the entire campaign yawn-worthy.

Not only yawn-worthy but confusing. Why? Because it’s not even for a news channel. It’s for Unilever’s Wall’s Ice Cream.

The videos, though, do engage in some YouTube trickery and choose-your-outcome which – following the campaign’s “Say Goodbye to Serious” theme — do offer up some silliness.

But we still have zero idea how this sells ice cream. But, no doubt, some Unilever marketing analyst will call the campaign a success because all these goofy videos get shared. If, in fact, they actually do.

No embedding because the tricks won’t work:

Talks Could Dictate Outcome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6JYF4H2SNQ
Australian MP Expresses Concerns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz12xsFfZGg
Politician Thinking Ahead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SxpP6t1p60

During Nelson Mendela’s memorial service last year, a man named Thamsanqa Jantjie was exposed as faking his sign language interpretation of the event.

Jantjie has resurfaced in a bizarre, new ad for Israeli live streaming app LiveLens. In the video, Jantjie apologizes but before doing so, says (and signs) “Believe me I’m a real professional sign language interpreter.” But at the same time the voice of a woman says, “I speak sign language, not” and adds, “now, I do campaigns for money.”

Jantjie, who first appears in a press conference-like scene, then introduces LiveLens in the most awkward way imaginable while shedding his blazer and dancing. He even gets on that Old Spice horse. And his head explodes. Bizarre is sort of an understatement.

“Like a high five for your eyes.” Really? Seriously? In a lame attempt to somehow make a connection between the beauty industry and, yea, paint selection, Ace Hardware, with seemingly no help from FCB, is out with Helpful is Beautiful, a campaign which touts Valspar paints and the introduction of The Paint Studio.

The Paint Studio is supposed to offer up some kind of personal paint shopping experience rather than an industrial-feeling trip to the hardware store.

Of the experience, Ace Paint Division President and GM Mary Rice said, “The Paint Studio at Ace is truly a new and better way to shop for paint. With new colors, trusted brands and a boutique feel specializing in personalized attention and service, we are thrilled to provide consumers with a completely new paint shopping experience that’s designed to help them find their perfect color.”

And making an argument for the fashion approach, Valspar Vice President and GM John Anton said, “Valspar is committed to helping people find the perfect color to transform any space in the home,. Together with Ace, we are proud to bring this to life through the ‘Helpful is Beautiful’ advertising campaign which underscores the helpful Ace shopping experience and the beauty of our expertly-chosen color palette.”

What’s next? Paint shopping likened to a religious experience with cult-like hand waving and come-to-Jesus dramatics?

Oh poor Ron Jeremy. Here’s a man with decades of filmmaking experience and a boatload of awards to show for it. But, it seems, the Toronto Jewish Film Festival (jeez, talk about niche) won’t accept any of Ron Jeremy’s films.

With help from OPC and Skunk, Brian Lee Hughes has directed this short featuring Jeremy who waxes eloquently about his career and begs the Film Festival to reconsider.

And, yes, it’s all just a promotion for the film festival.

In perhaps the wackiest campaign for hard lemonade (or anything for that matter) we’ve seen in a very long time, Duval Guillaume is out with three goofy videos for Carlsberg Breweries featuring Seth and Riley, a couple of inventors who think they’ve got it all figured out. Sort of.

Like many other startups that are now hugely successful companies, Seth and Riley hope to make it big time too. But let’s just say, they’re results, perhaps, aren’t ready for prime time.

The first time we viewed this Being NY-created ad for Popped Wheat Thins we thought it was goofy in a bad way. With each successive viewing it became ever more goofy but in a good way.

Why? We have no idea. Perhaps it recalls decades of cop movie hilarity. Perhaps it’s the notion a hot air balloon just might be the most overlooked method of get-a-way transportation. Or perhaps it’s the silliness of grown men getting overly excited about yet another Whet Thins line extension.

Whatever the case may be, it’s one of those ads that grows on you.

As is always the case with amazing videos like this one uploaded by YouTube user Mia Munselle, a debate rages in comments as to its validity.

Munselle claims she found the camera — which everyone (without any facts to back up the assumption) assumes is a GoPro — 8 months after the video was shot.

The camera appears to have been dropped from a skydiving plane. It begins to spin faster and faster to the point where the spinning exceeds the camera’s frame rate which is why the picture appears to freeze.

The best part of the video is the ending. Once it lands in the pig pen, one curious resident decides to try and eat the thing.

All manner of debate is raging as to the ability of the camera to survive such a fall, the angle from which it landed, how it managed to land facing up, why the pig keeps trying to eat what clearly isn’t food and the fact the video comes from a one-video YouTube account. We think this is a job for MythBusters.