Hasta La Creative!

Budweiser melted hearts with its “Puppy Love” commercial on last year’s Super Bowl, and is prepping a sequel, “Lost Dog,” that’s expected to break Wednesday online. But a day early, here is Go Daddy—amusingly deflating Bud’s balls a little bit with a spoof that even somewhat matches the plot of the sequel.

Yes, Go Daddy has its own adorable yellow Labrador puppy. And like the one in this year’s Bud spot, it’s gotten lost—after falling out of a pickup truck when it went over a bump. The little guy runs home as fast as his little legs can carry him … but it’s not exactly a sappy ending that awaits him there.

The spot was made by Barton F. Graf 9000. Check out our Q&A with Gerry Graf here, where he talks Go Daddy’s approach this year, and the ups and downs of making Super Bowl spots.

Newcastle just released its “Band of Brands” regional Super Bowl commercial, and it turns out Jockey, Boost Mobile, Lee Jeans, Brawny and Match.com are among the recognizable brands—along with some lesser-known ones—who are sharing the cost of the ad in exchange for a mention in it.

Jockey is particularly notable cameo, since, like Newcastle, it’s a Droga5 client. If Jockey signing up was a favor to its agency, it was a worthwhile one—the briefs get a less-brief appearance (close-up product shot!) than many of the brands here.

The creative approach is amusing, too, with a couple racing around their house, trying to make every brand’s pitch in time—sometimes cutting each other off in mid-sentence, as the house gets cluttered and things get desperate.

Unlike last year, when Newcastle punked the Super Bowl with the brilliant “If We Made It” campaign, the brewer is actually buying time in regional markets to air a version of this spot.

“It’s the most exciting, most jam-packed, most fiscally responsible big game ad ever,” Newcastle says. “It’s Newcastle’s Band of Brands big game ad, featuring 37 of the universe’s best brands … and a dental office in Pittsburgh.”

Here’s the full list of brands:

AmeriMerch.com, AprilUmbrellas.com, Armstrong Flooring and Ceilings, Beanitos Chips, Blettner Engineering, Boost Mobile, Brawny Paper Towels, Charisma, Detroit Beard Collective, District 78, Dixie, East End Leisure Co., Gladiator GarageWorks, Hello Products Oral Care, Hunt’s Tomatoes, JackThreads, Jockey, Kern Group Security, Kibo Active + Leisure Wear, Krave Jerky, Las Vegas, Lee Jeans, Match.com, McClure’s Pickles, Mr. Cheese O’s, Newcastle Brown Ale, Polished Dental, Quilted Northern, Quinn Popcorn, Rosarita Beans, RO*TEL, Second Chance Custom, Sharper Image, Tessemae’s All-Natural Dressings, The Ross Farm, Vanity Fair Napkins, YP.com and Zendure Batteries.

Katy Perry will be Pepsi’s top act for the Super Bowl halftime show. But how much better would it be if Craig Robinson and the Nasty Delicious were the headliners?

Pepsi might not want you to ponder that specific question. But the soft-drink brand has gotten the former Office star and his real-life band involved in its “Hyped for Halftime” campaign. Robinson, 43, stars in a new three-part online comedy series (the first part, below, was released Wednesday) in which a male friend turns into a fairy godmother and tries to get Craig to Arizona.

Ad agency The Brooklyn Brothers created the series with Pepsi, in partnership with Comedy Central. The Brooklyn Brothers have worked with Robinson before, having created an amusing episodic 2012 campaign for New Era caps starring Robinson and Nick Offerman as Chicago White Sox and Cubs fans.

Robinson and the Nasty Delicious will deliver a live “halftime” performance on Key & Peele’s Super Bowl Comedy Special on the night of Saturday, Jan. 31. And you have to figure they’ll be in Glendale, Ariz., the following night in some capacity—maybe as an opening act.

Meanwhile, here’s more from the “Hyped for Halftime” campaign:

So, this is why Newcastle Brown Ale hired Aubrey Plaza as its 2015 Super Bowl endorser: Her perma-sarcasm and lack of energy make her the world’s worst spokeswoman—or if you like, the world’s best anti-spokeswoman.

The brewer and ad agency Droga5—who specialize in deflating marketing’s overblown self-importance—continue their march toward the industy’s most overblown, self-important night by having the Parks and Recreation actress sullenly and amusingly milk a cow. This part of the brand’s email to us sums up the approach pretty well:

You can’t make an overblown Big Game ad campaign without releasing a semi-controversial clickbait video ahead of time to prime the pump and get people “excited” about the coming advertisement. (As excited as Aubrey, even.)

Newcastle is actually buying a regional Super Bowl spot this year. In an earlier video with Plaza, it announced a plan to crowdfund that spot with a bunch of other brands.

“In exchange for a small contribution, any brand can join Newcastle’s team and have its logo and messaging featured in an actual Big Game spot,” the brand says. Today is the last day for interested companies to submit their “Band of Brands” proposal for consideration at NewcastleBandOfBrands.com.

“At first we tried to sneak our way into the Big Game by entering a popular commercial contest put on by a certain snack chip brand, but that didn’t work out for us. Now we’re trying to leverage ‘strength in numbers’ to see what that does for us,” said Priscilla Flores Dohnert, brand director for Newcastle Brown Ale.

“Everyone loves a great underdog story. What’s more ‘underdog’ than being short on cash and not having the right to advertise during the game?”

Waka waka waka.

Bud Light on Friday released the 15-second teaser below for its upcoming 60-second Super Bowl commercial, in which—as promised—a man accepts a challenge to play a crazy, life-size game of Pac-Man.

As seen in the teaser, the dare is written on the label of his Bud Light bottle. That ties into a new Anheuser-Busch packaging campaign that began in December, in which Bud Light bottles now come with almost 50 different “Up For Whatever” messages to inspire drinkers to be more spontaneous and fun.

In the full 60-second Super Bowl spot, titled “Coin,” from EnergyBBDO, the man follows the hint on his bottle and “finds himself in a giant Pac-Man maze, having the time of his life,” says the brand.

The work builds on Bud Light’s buzzy 2014 Super Bowl campaign “Epic Night,” which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Don Cheadle and took the brand away from its usual scripted jokes and into dynamic real-life stunts. This year’s campaign will be supported by a three-day House of Whatever event in Arizona, near the site of the Super Bowl.

In addition to the Bud Light spot, A-B plans to air two 60-second Budweiser ads (one of them a sequel to last year’s chart-topping “Puppy Love”) on the Feb. 1 Super Bowl telecast.

You might remember Newcastle Brown Ale’s antics around last year’s Super Bowl—a little stunt from Droga5 called “If We Made It” that imagined what a Newcastle Super Bowl ad might have looked like if they could have afforded one.

The whole thing went pretty well, to say the least.

Given that success, Newcastle obviously had to screw with this year’s game, too. And so it begins its 2015 Super Bowl ambush with the video below—in which the brewer, which still doesn’t have $4 million lying around, pretends to crash a certain “Crash the Super Bowl” contest by a certain unnamed snack maker (OK, Doritos), so that it can get on the Super Bowl for free.

Newcastle’s fake Doritos ad, also made by Droga5, is amusingly bad—which frankly is a step up from some of the actual Doritos finalists, which are short on the amusing part. It’s full of stupidly obvious Newcastle product placement, in keeping with the brand’s ethos of undercutting typical marketing tactics. There’s even a case study (see below) about the “failed attempt to infiltrate a snack chip contest.”

“We had such a good time almost making that Huge Sports Match ad last year, we decided we’d stop at nothing to finally make our way into the Really Large American Football Contest in 2015. Even if we still can’t afford it,” the brand tells us.

It’s a bit of a convoluted premise—Newcastle’s meta anti-advertising stunts often have a kind of pretzel-like structure to them. But the brand confirms there’s more silliness to come in the next few weeks, so it should be fun to see what else they have in store.

CREDITS
Client: Newcastle Brown Ale
Campaign: Newcastle: Chores. A beer ad disguised as a snack chip ad.
Title: Chores

Agency: Droga5 NY
Creative Chairman: David Droga
Chief Creative Officer: Ted Royer
Group Creative Director: Scott Bell
Senior Art Director: Dan Kenneally
Senior Copywriter: Ryan Raab
Chief Creation Officer: Sally-Ann Dale
Head of Broadcast Production: Ben Davies
Senior Broadcast Producer: David Cardinali
Broadcast Producer: Bill Berg
Global Chief Strategy Officer: Jonny Bauer
Head of Strategy: Chet Gulland
Strategist: Nick Maschmeyer 
Social Strategist: Rebecca Russell 
Communications Strategist: Kevin Wang  
Group Account Director: Dan Gonda
Account Director: Nadia Malik
Account Manager: Ashton Atlas

Client: Heineken USA, Newcastle Brown Ale
Senior Director, Portfolio Brands: Charles Van Es
Brand Director: Priscilla Dohnert
Brand Manager: Brett Steen

Production Company: Droga5 Studios | Film
Director: Mike Long
Line Producer: Jessica Bermingham
DP: Brian Lannin

Editorial: Droga5 AV
Editor: Joseph Schulhoff

McVitie’s Victoria, the British biscuits brand, has been using puppies, kittens, tarsiers and owls in ads over the past year. Now, Grey London expands the baby-animal menagerie dramatically for McVitie’s first Christmas ad in 30 years.

The 60-second ad shows a family’s understandable surprise when Dad opens a box of McVitie’s Victoria biscuits and a bunch of adorable animals crawl out of the pack. The interlopers include an Alaskan Malamute puppy, a micro piglet, a Persian kitten, a baby rabbit, a duckling, a ginger kitten, a Pug puppy, a baby hedgehog, a baby reindeer and a tiny narwhal hiding in the punch bowl.

Turns out they’re talented animals, too, as they join together to sing a Christmassy rendition of the ’80s hit “Only You” by Yaz (or Yazoo, as they were known in the U.K.).

The spot breaks Thursday night on British TV. As in past ads, the baby animals are meant to reflect the cuddly, snuggly feeling you get when you open a box of McVitie’s.

“We’re delighted to introduce the latest additions to our McVitie’s Sweeet family, and hope that it brings chocolatey cheer to biscuit loving households across the UK for the festive season,” says marketing director Sarah Heynen.

CREDITS
Cient: McVitie’s
Marketing Director, United Biscuits: Sarah Heynen
Creative Agency: Grey London
Creative Director: Hollie Newton
Copywriter: Hollie Newton
Art Director: Hollie Newton
Account Team: Nicola Wardell, Kate Ilott
Agency Producer:  Thea Evely
Assistant Agency Producer: Jen Gillen
Creative Producer: Lucy Dunn
Planner: Daniel Sherrard
Media Agency: MEC
Media Planner: Nicola Tracey
Production Company: Smuggler
Director: Randy Krallman
Editor: Mark Edinoff at Work
Production Company Producer: Gustav Geldenhuys
Designer: Chris Chapman
DoP: Jean Noel Mustonen
Postproduction: Framestore
Soundtrack Composer: Vince Clarke
Audio Postproduction: Wave

While shy-bladder sufferers debate the offensiveness of Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe, DirecTV is plowing ahead with all sorts of other less-than-ideal Rob Lowes—you know, the ones with cable and not DirecTV.

The latest disturbing specimen is Scrawny Arms Rob Lowe. And thanks to some CGI, he certainly looks like a pathetic weakling. Hopefully Grey New York at some point will have time to do a digital composite of all the subpar Rob Lowes, and we’ll get to have a look at Creepy Less Attractive Painfully Awkward Crazy Hairy Scrawny Arms Rob Lowe.

CREDITS
Client: DirecTV
Spot: “Scrawny Arms”
Agency: Grey, New York
Chief Creative Officer: Tor Myhren
Executive Creative Director: Dan Kelleher
Group Creative Director: Doug Fallon
Group Creative Director: Steven Fogel
Agency Executive Producer: Andrew Chinich
Agency Producer: Lindsay Myers
Agency Music Producer: Zachary Pollakoff, Amy Rosen
Account: Chris Ross, Beth Culley, Anna Pogosova, Aaron Schwartz, Meredith Savatsky, Eddie Mele
Strategy: Michelle Leo
Production Company: MJZ
Director: Tom Kuntz
Producer: Emily Skinner
Production Supervisor: Daniel Gonzalez
Director of Photography: Hoyte Van Hoytema
Editorial Executive Producer: Sasha Hirschfeld, Mackenzie Cutler
Editor: Gavin Cutler, Mackenzie Cutler
Assistant Editor: Ryan Steele & Mike Rizzo, Mackenzie Cutler
Mixer + Sound Designer: Sam Shaffer, Mackenzie Cutler
VFX: Method Studios, NY
VFX Supervisor: Jay Hawkins, Method Studios
VFX Producer: Carlos Herrera & Christa Cox, Method Studios
Casting (OCP): Francine Selkirk, Shooting From the Hip
Casting (VO): Nina Pratt and Jerry Saviola, Avenue 3 Casting

Are you up for some BGCP3TV in HD?

Los Angeles Clippers stars Blake Griffin and Chris Paul have each shown, separately, that they can anchor comedy. In State Farm’s Chris and Cliff campaign, Paul showed that he’s perhaps the NBA’s most gifted endorser. And Griffin? Well, he’s done so much comedy that he has his own section on Funny or Die.

Now, they’ve teamed up for an interesting project from Wieden + Kennedy New York and Jordan Brand—a pair of five-minute videos that are full of quirky comedy sketches. Both are pretty amusing—not surprising, since Neal Brennan, co-creator of The Chappelle Show, served as director and co-writer on these.

Griffin and Paul are launching new shoes a month apart, but these sketches are a whole lot more entertaining than some action footage would have been.

W+K’s Eric Helin wrote some sketches, as did Brennan. There wasn’t too much improvising—most of what you see was on the page, though Griffin and Paul made it their own. “I’ve worked with a ton of athletes and can honestly say Blake & Chris are among the best,” said Gary Van Dzura, W+K creative director. “They’re natural in front of the camera and have a great comedic timing.”

“Pretty much what you see is what you get,” Brennan added. “They’re friends who clearly spend a lot of time together. They like and respect each other and are used to making jokes all day. I was also amazed at how quickly they were able to memorize the material.”

Asked if there was a limit to how goofy he wanted the sketches to be, Brennan said: “One of the sketches that got cut out was super crazy. But I don’t think anybody really thought of them as crazy/not crazy. At least I didn’t. I just thought of them as tonally correct and funny/not funny. The Ohhh Bros. sketch is about guys whose lives are ruined by reacting to basketball plays. That’s pretty crazy.”

CREDITS
Client: Jordan Brand
Project: BGCP3TV in HD
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, New York
Executive Creative Directors: Susan Hoffman, David Kolbusz
Creative Directors: Gary Van Dzura, Jimm Lasser
Writer: Eric Helin
Art Director: Erwin Federizo
Head of Content Production: Nick Setounski
Producer: Orlee Tatarka
Account Team: Jerico Cabaysa, Price Manford, Heather Morba, Cory McCollum
Business Affairs: Sara Jagielski
Production Company: Go Films
Director: Neal Brennan (Director & Co-Writer)
Executive Producer/COO: Gary Rose
Executive Producer: Adam Bloom
Line Producer: Marc Benardout
Director of Photography: Chuck Ozeas
Editorial Company: Starch Media
Editor: Bijan Shams,  Scott Ashby, Jeremy Hsu
Post Producer: Susan Applegate
VFX Company: Stardust & Elastic
VFX Lead Flame: Alex Frisch
Telecine Company: MPC LA
Colorist: Ricky Gausis
Mix Company: Eleven
Mixer: Jeff Payne & Ben Freer
Producer: Susanne Hollingshead
Song: “Junkyard”  (Original Composition)
Artist: James Poyser

GIFs have left the nest!

The digital video files first made a jump to TV a while back, thanks to Fiat. And now they’ve ventured all the way outside in a fascinating Netflix campaign from Ogilvy Paris.

For the streaming service’s launch in France, the agency created 100 different GIFs, some of which “reacted” to current events and even things like the weather (for example, a rainy scene from a film when it’s actually raining at a bus stop).

People who hate GIFs will surely be appalled at this. And yes, it’s a little jarring to see the hypnotic looping videos running on large formats outside. But they’re undeniably eye-catching in ways that other digital video just isn’t.

Check out the case study below.