Hasta La Creative!

The Subservient Chicken may be long gone, but its spirit of unquestioning obedience lives on at one of the agencies that spawned it.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s staffers in Stockholm, Sweden, are subjecting themselves to the musical whims of Twitter users this week, in a self-promotional campaign titled Subservient Speaker. Tweet a song title to @cpbscandinavia, with the hashtag #subservientspeaker, and a speaker at the agency will play it.

It’s a not-so-subtle nod to the classic Subservient Chicken campaign that CP+B created with The Barbarian Group for Burger King in 2004, featuring streaming video of a humanoid chicken that followed online orders. Last year, a sequel by WPP’s David saw the Chicken return, in a commercial, as a defiant prima donna.

So far, the handful of requests under the #SubservientSpeaker hashtag include reasonable picks like the Beastie Boys, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Holy Ghost (plus that X Ambassadors and Jamie N. Commons song, “Jungle,” from all the Beats By Dre ads).

The only rule that CP+B posted: “No Coldplay please.” That seems shortsighted, given the wealth of worse options, like Creed. And for an illustration of the potential danger in turning over the DJ keys to the masses, just look at the smartass who immediately demanded, in Swedish, a 200-minute mix of ambient techno from Matthew Hawtin.

Why is the agency bothering with thos in the first place? “We’ve run out of inspiration,” reads the promo. CP+B certainly isn’t alone in that regard, but it does get kudos for admitting it.

Sweden is getting its high cheekbones all up in America’s grill once again, asserting its Scandinavian superiority with this online spot for Wasa Crispbread.

An American woman in Sweden takes a yoga class and happily discovers that it’s filled with hunky, English-speaking dads and their adorably flexible babies. Because in everyone’s favorite progressive paradise, family leave for fathers can last a very long time… and, apparently, babies are frighteningly good at yoga.

“I wrote the Yoga Baby script after a visit to Sweden when a friend noted that the Swedes seemed to have more male nannies than anywhere else,” says Scott Goodson, CEO at StrawberryFrog, which created the campaign. “But they weren’t nannies, they were daddies who get 6 months parental leave for each newborn. That deserved a film!”

Sweden has been flexing its blond muscles in ads lately, with this Wasa campaign following the popular “Like a Swede” initiative from trade-union group TCO earlier this year.

“The naturalness of Swedish life, the fit lifestyle and the Nordic mindset is very different and fun and in many cases inspiring for American men and women,” according to Goodson.

Well, America’s pretty cool too. We’ve got … um … Tim Howard … when he’s not playing in the U.K., that is. And we’ve got other great stuff. Like GM Cars and grade-A produce. U-S-A! 

Patriotism notwithstanding, this particular yoga class feels like an exercise in strangeness for its own sake. I guess I shouldn’t get all twisted up about it, though.

Afghan officials, however, continued to back a theory that Western intelligence agents were to blame in the death of Nils Horner.

We've seen plenty of women get makeovers in advertising lately—either in pursuit of some market-driven ideal of beauty, or in critique of same. In this video, though, a woman is transformed for a different purpose.

Annelie Nordström, chairwoman of Kommunal, Sweden's biggest union, was made over as a man to protest unequal salaries between men and women in the country. It's all a stunt for International Women's Day this Saturday. At the website, BeAMan.se, women can also connect to a Facebook app and become men themselves through some photo manipulation.

The campaign is by ad agency Volontaire, which won the Grand Prix in the Cyber Lions at Cannes in 2012 for its "Curators of Sweden" campaign—a fascinating experiment in which ordinary Swedes took turns running the country's official Twitter account.

Sweden's One Hour Agency is the brainchild of interactive art directors Ben Langeveld and Ingmar Larsen, who, along with a half-dozen other creatives from the Hyper Island program, want just 60 minutes of your time. "You give us one hour. We generate quality ideas," they say.

At typical client-agency meetings, awkward pauses and efforts to reboot PowerPoint can last longer than an hour, but this startup remains undeterred. "It's not that you deliver a final solution," says Larsen, who believes 60 minutes is plenty of time to "build relationships by showing how you work, who you are and what you can do." OHA's approach seems more genuine than some previous gimmicky models—like "World's Fastest Agency" or "Pay What You Want"—because it doesn't overpromise. "If the meeting works from both sides, then we offer different kinds of packages depending on the brief," says Larsen. The crew is currently working on a project for Swedish Public Radio.

OHA has a handy pie-chart that breaks down the first hour: 10 minutes each for greetings, evaluation and presentation, and 30 minutes for ideation. That's pretty packed. Demands for bigger logos and "guaranteed viral" videos presumably require buying more time.

In America, you'd need to have a rich, overindulgent father to have the lifestyle of your average Swedish worker, says a bizarre new ad from a Swedish trade organization. 

TCO, an umbrella confederation that includes a number of unions, presents to you "Like a Swede," a three-and-a-half-minute ode to the many benefits—like long vacations and employer pensions—enjoyed by Swedish employees. 

The story is told, quite surreally, through character Joe Williams, a resident of Beverly Hills. His dad, also his boss, treats him to six weeks of annual vacation and six months of paternity leave. Williams all-around enjoys a life of opulence thanks to his decision to live "like a Swede."

For the uninitiated, living like a Swede means using your friskvårdskbidraget, a Swedish health-care stipend, to hire a celebrity personal trainer—but only for a few minutes a year, because, you know, such social support only goes so far. It also includes playing kubb, a Swedish lawn game involving the tossing of wooden sticks; drinking nubbe, a Swedish liquor; and, we're told, singing a song about how the Swedish labor negotiation model is the greatest.

In other words, Swedes are, in a roundabout way, poking fun at Swedes for being spoiled. Credit for their advantages, the spot sort of explains, goes to the Swedish model of labor negotiations, which depends on a high level of collaboration between workers and employees groups and limited government involvement. 

If you're still totally clueless as to what the hell is actually going on, a spokesperson for TCO sheds some light on the campaign in English-language European publication The Local. "It's to make the Swedish Model more visible in a different way. People often know very little about it, which makes it harder for the unions to justify their own existence," says the spokesperson. "The Swedish Model means that the two parties can talk about what is needed in that particular industry, and be supple, rather than have very rigid legislation that we don't think is good for the Swedish economy."

The spot is one of the most intricately produced awareness ads you'll ever see. But if you're a non-Swede like me, by the time you're done unraveling it, you'll probably be too exhausted to laugh.

Via Ads of the World.

Interested in being ein Berliner?

German airline Lufthansa is running a contest in Sweden, dreamed up by the pranksters at DDB Stockholm, that features an impressive grand prize—a free trip, a free apartment in Berlin, a bike and "everything else you need to start a whole new life." All you have to do? Change your name, legally, to Klaus-Heidi.

Clearly that name would suit either man or woman, so that's the first hurdle out of the way. DDB tells us: "The first person to change their surname and upload a new legitimate passport or ID at the campaign site wins the whole shebang. So who wants to become a real Berliner? Who will he or she be? Who is Klaus-Heidi?"

For those not willing or able to take such drastic action, you can also change your name only on Facebook and get a discount on plane tickets to Germany.

Written by the 17-year-old Mr. Larsson, the short story will be included in an anthology of Swedish crime fiction and could entice fans of his Millennium trilogy.

Une série de clichés impressionnantes par Sven Prim, photographe et publicitaire suédois. Il exprime avec talent son amour des situations étranges et surréalistes en mélangeant photographies et retouches. Des visuels supplémentaires dans la suite de l’article.

Previously on Fubiz

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Un véritable sens de la mise en scène dans les différents travaux découverts sur le portfolio du photographe suédois Philip Karlberg. Une belle exécution et d’assez bonnes idées pour le placement d’objets. Une sélection à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.

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