Hasta La Creative!

LeBron James can go home again. And again. And again.

The NBA star’s return to Cleveland from Miami was always going to be fodder for numerous ad campaigns. And indeed, we’ve already seen spots from Beats by Dre and Sprite this week. Now it’s Nike’s turn to get epic—timed to Thursday night’s Cavaliers home-opener against the New York Knicks.

It’s suitably goosebump-inducing, as LeBron leads not just his teammates but all of Cleveland in a massive pre-game huddle—the ultimate come-to-Jesus moment for the city’s once-and-again favorite son.

Nike Basketball partnered with Wieden + Kennedy for the spot, which was directed by the Malloy Brothers. LeBron’s mom, Gloria Marie James, makes a cameo, as do Coach Dru Joyce and teammates Kyrie Irving, Dion Waters, Anderson Varejao, Shawn Marion, Tristan Thompson, Matthew Dellavedova and Joe Harris.

Nike is also introducing the LeBron 12 Hrt of a Lion shoe today, and is currently working on the nine-hour process of unveiling a 10-story, 25,000-square-foot banner on Ontario Street welcoming James back to Cleveland.

Real-estate companies love haunted-house pranks. We saw it earlier this year with this gotcha video from Denmark. And now, digital real-estate brand Trulia is embracing scare tactics with its own hidden-camera prank for Halloween.

Trulia, with help from Olson Engage, held a haunted open house—inviting people in to see a property that was rigged up to mimic paranormal activity. Check out the video below to see the amusing reactions—capped off by the sudden appearance of a dead grandma in a bed. (This place won’t be on House Hunters anytime soon.)

Trulia has done a few other things for Halloween this year, including updating the local maps on its website to show the most likely spots to find zombies, vampires and ghosts (using its existing data on things like cemeteries). It also created the “Housing Scare Report” infographic below, which shows, among other data, the kinds of things that scare people off from buying particular houses—like having “666” in the address or knowing about a previous death in the home.

Click the infographic to enlarge.

Esquire recently asked three ad agencies to help with its male mentoring initiative. Today, Barton F. Graf 9000 unveiled its campaign: a political initiative to establish mentorship of children as a legal excusal from jury duty. The idea is that more mentors would mean better guidance for at-risk youth, and eventually, reduced crime rates and the need for fewer jurors in the first place.

The proposed Mentor Act is explained in a print ad in Esquire’s October issue. The ad itself could be mailed to state representatives, and it also points to TheMentorAct.org, which features a powerful film—directed by Michael Bonfiglio of Radical Media—asking prisoners who their mentors were. The bill can also be sent to lawmakers directly from the site.

“Ultimately, The Mentor Act aims to use the same court system that convicts people, to help children avoid committing crimes and entering the court system in the first place,” say Barton F. Graf and Esquire, which are “already beginning talks with state politicians to adopt this bill and hope to move the bill forward on a state-by-state basis.”

The other two agencies that got involved in the Esquire project are Makeable and 72andSunny. The former built a campaign around the website webuildmen.org, while the latter made ads with the theme “F*ck off, I’m helping.” See three of those ads below.

Fred Savage will soon be the new voice of Honda. But he’s not exactly a voiceover specialist (that’s Daniel Stern you’re thinking of, Wonder Years fans). So, Honda agency RPA came up with a fun way to help him practice—by having Fred narrate your home videos first.

Anything you’ve got, feel free to throw at him. Babies, animals, vacations, weddings. Whatever you have documented on film, Fred wants to describe in his presumably dulcet tones. Just tweet your video with the hashtag #HondaPromo to get on the actor’s radar.

But are his tones dulcet? RPA says, actually, that Honda is hiring Savage because his voice stands out and doesn’t feel like a traditional car spokesperson. So, we’ll just have to see how that goes. It’s a more reasonable option, anyway, that the plea from someone on Twitter to “bring back Burgess Meredith.”

Fred Savage is the new voice of our ads & wants to practice. Tweet your video w/ #HondaPromo & he might narrate it. http://t.co/imXQLL1RNf

— Honda (@Honda) October 17, 2014

It was 1958 when J. Walter Thompson’s Donald Gilles came up with the line, “Have a break. Have a KitKat.” Fifty-six years later, JWT London has found a fun new way to illustrate the line—with a half-finished billboard.

Awards bait? Sure. A creative wank? Perhaps. But you have to admit, it’s clever.

Via Ads of the World.

CREDITS
Client: KitKit
Agency: JWT, London
Copywriter/Art Director:Jeremy Carr
Designer: Mark Gardner
Account Supervisor: Antony Hill
Account Manager: Rachel Vares
Project Manager: Rachel Clutterbuck

Nestlé’s Fitness cereal brand, which last year brought us the tweeting bra, has upped the ante with the hidden-camera bra. Watch below as a woman walks around London capturing footage of men and women furtively (they think) checking out her boobs.

It’s a fun little social experiment from McCann Paris—and one, predictably, that has caused a bit of a flamewar in the YouTube comments. But it turns out the point of the video isn’t really to comment on objectification at all.

Also, check out the behind-the-scenes video here:

CREDITS
Client: Nestlé Fitness
Agency: McCann, Paris
Creative Director: Sarah Clift
Art Directors: Kate Pozzi, Sarah Clift, Caroline Gozier
Copywriter: Kate Pozzi
TV Producers: Sasha Mantel, Arnaud Lemens
Social Strategist: Mariam Asmar
Account: Cédric Vanhoutte, Cynthia Decant, Laurie Chappel, Leslie Adam, Julie Colombani
Production Company: Outsider | The Corner Shop
Director: Ellen Kuras
Producer: Mel Nwanguma
DOP: Ellen Kuras
1st AD: Julian Higgs
Costume Designer: Lydia Kovacs
Edit: Rock Paper Scissors
Editor: Ted Guard
Post Production: MPC LA
Music: Human

Droga5 has won raves for its Newcastle Brown Ale work, which skewers beer-marketing clichés. Now, the agency is bringing a similar sensibility to another Heineken-owned brand: Strongbow Hard Apple Cider.

The new “Cider at Its Bestest” campaign shows how the drink is best poured over ice. It launches with the 60-second spot below, featuring an image that will be familiar to booze-ad watchers everywhere: a horse running in slow motion on a beach. (In fact, a Clydesdale did just that in the very first ad for Bud Light—then called Budweiser Light—in 1982.)

But this Strongbow horse—well, let’s just say he’s not your typical excessively slow-moving quadruped. And he won’t elicit the typical (glazed-over) reaction from viewers, either.

“With cider brands trying to out-refresh each other, we went better than best, to bestest,” John McKelvey, creative director of Droga5 said in a statement.

“The overall campaign explores the absurd notions of making the best even more desirable. In this case it meant enjoying a Strongbow with your horse that only runs in slow motion. That’s the bestest,” added creative director Hannes Ciatti.

An additional 15-second spot, “Three Sunsets,” will debut later this fall. The campaign will include a mix of traditional and paid media, digital, PR and experiential marketing.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Heineken USA / Strongbow
Brand Director: Alejandra De Obeso
Global Marketing Manager: Olivier Darses
Senior Director, Portfolio Brands: Charles Van Es
Chief Marketing Officer: Nuno Teles
Agency: Droga5, New York
Creative Chairman: David Droga
Chief Creative Officer: Ted Royer
Creative Director: John McKelvey
Creative Director: Hannes Ciatti
Copywriter: Molly Jamison
Art Director: Eric Dennis
Chief Creation Officer: Sally-Ann Dale
Head of Broadcast Production: Ben Davies
Broadcast Producer: Verity Bullard
Chief Strategy Officer: Jonny Bauer
Digital Strategy Director: Dan Neumann
Group Account Director: Dan Gonda
Account Director: Nadia Malik
Production Company: Rattlingstick
Director: Hamish Rothwell
DOP: Ben Seresin
Executive Producer: Joe Biggins
Producer: Sam Long
Editorial: Workpost Editorial
Editor: Rich Orrick
Assistant Editor: Adam Witton
Executive Producer: Erica Thompson
Post Production: The Mill
Head of Production: Sean Costelloe
Producer: Alex Fitzgerald
Colorist: Fergus McCall
Flame Artist: Nathan Kane
Music: Human
Founding Partner: Marc Altshuler
Producer: Jonathan Sandford
Sound: Sonic Union
Studio Director: Justine Cortale
Producer: Pat Sullivan
Mix Engineer: Stephen Rosen

You can be proud of your ads. But re-enacting them in real life? That can get awkward.

Carlos Moreno, though, takes one for the team in the video below—a promo for the Bessies, which is a big ad awards show in Canada. The executive creative director at BBDO Toronto masterminded the weird Skittles Touch ads back in 2011, and here he re-enacts the famous one with the cat—complete with eager licking of the screen.

The line at the end explains everything.

Though Moreno works at BBDO, the Bessies spot was actually done by JWT Canada.

Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: TVB
Agency: JWT Canada
Chief Creative and Integration Officer: Brent Choi
CD: Ryan Spelliscy
Art Director: Denise Cole
Copywriter: Saro Ghazarian
Account Lead: Dori Applebaum
Producer: Andrew Schulze
Production: Axyz
Sound: Eggplant
Talent: Carlos Moreno

The stars really aligned for Corona—well, one did in particular—in this clever outdoor stunt from Toronto agency Zulu Alpha Kilo.

Check out the video below to see how the brand brought some extra hours of sunlight to some drinkers on a patio. It’s a great realization of the brand’s tagline, “Find your beach,” and surely has extra resonance in Canada, where summers are short enough.

Corona, of course, loves any marketing that involves celestial bodies—as seen in New York City last summer, when the brand made the waxing crescent moon look like a slice of lime resting in a Corona bottle on a billboard.

It’s no secret that Marshawn Lynch loves Skittles. And now, the brand’s real-life No. 1 fan is helping to kick off its official NFL sponsorship by showing how he (probably not in real life) works out with the candies.

The spot below, from Olson Engage—the first in a series of NFL-related Skittles marketing—claims that Skittles make game day “awesomer.”

Lynch, 28, whom Skittles honored last year with a special-edition “Seattle mix,” has known this for years. As his mother told Seahawks.com a couple of years ago: “When Marshawn was 12 or 13, we’d go to his games and I’d always have little candies in my purse,” she says.

“Before the game, I would say, ‘Here Marshawn, come and get you power pellets.’ I would give him a handful of Skittles and say, ‘Eat ’em up, baby. They’re going to make you run fast and they’re going to make you play good.’ “