Hasta La Creative!

A high-tech house proves to be far from a “smart home” when two burglars arrive in “Welcome,” the latest amusing spot from Tribal DDB in Amsterdam for insurance company Centraal Beheer. The long-running comic campaign is tagged “Just call Apeldoorn,” the Dutch city where the client is located.

This minute-long ad is more subtle than previous installments like “Speedboat” and “Self-Driving Car,” which relied heavily on slapstick and noisy effects to deliver the message. Still, one key theme—technophobia—is carried over from past work, and once again viewers are promised a nasty future shock if we don’t take proper precautions (like buying insurance from Centraal Beheer).

The humor is pleasantly subdued, and the perfectly paced build-up leaves us slightly off balance until the satisfying payoff (not payout, however, unless you have Centraal Beheer).

You’ve gotta love those final scenes, with a cocksure, sweaty Silicon Valley-type hyping his home-control gizmo in a packed auditorium. Good luck with that IPO, Einstein!

Tribal Worldwide has a new campaign discouraging teen cough syrup abuse on behalf of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association and the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids.

Rather than take a typical scare-tactic approach, Tribal Worldwide instead decided to make a fun game. The game, entitled “DXM Labworks” lets players get a robot all messed up on DXM (the psychoactive ingredient, dextromethorphan, in some cough syrups) and see what the effects are like (spoiler alert: the robot pukes a lot). Billing the app as “your chance to see the effects of abusing DXM without trying it yourself,” the idea is that teens will try out the game and see an unglamorous portrayal of the effects of the drug.

“It’s not a sexy drug –- there’s loss of motor control, slurred speech and, of course, the uncontrollable puking,” Kinney Edwards, executive creative director at Tribal, explained to Mashable. “Social disapproval really matters to teens, and they can see first-hand how embarrassing and not cool this is.”

The campaign is mostly aimed at “on the fence” teens, those who are considering experimenting with the drug and perhaps researching its effects online. By presenting them with a game that simulates the effects of the drug, Tribal hopes the teens will make the judgement that DXM’s negative effects are not something they want to experience. The agency decided that teens easily dismiss PSAs but that they might be more receptive to a fun, mobile game. And what’s not fun about a robot puking?

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Some aspects of the techno-utopian fantasy are especially worth skewering, and Dutch insurer Centraal Beheer does a pretty nice number on one of them: the self-driving car.

The brand has a knack for making disaster funny by casting some obnoxious stereotype as fictional villain. A couple of years back, it was a moron in a red Speedo doing circus tricks with his speedboat wheel. Now, in a new ad, it’s a self-important ass reading the paper in the backseat of a Volkswagen that’s being driven by a computer.

The commercial does bear a resemblance to Liberty Mutual’s 2012 spot about human error, but adds another layer to the slapstick joke, and keeps it au courant by blaming the escalating fiasco on the disbelief of spectators distracted by the driverless VW. That premise is a stretch, but it’s definitely good for a chuckle.

Now, if only the computer chauffeur would take its passenger into the ocean, or maybe just into a shipping container bound for a remote island inhabited entirely by robots.

CREDITS
Client: Centraal Beheer Achmea
Agency: DDB & Tribal Worldwide, Amsterdam
Production Company: Passion Raw
Director: Owen Trevor
DP: Tim Hudson
Producer: Dan Scott-Croxford, Kwok Yau
Editor: Guy Savin
Grading : Brian Krijgsman
Online: Ton Habraken, Stephen Pepper, Jeroen van Berkel
Soundstudio: Rens Pluym, Wessel-Jan van Zijderveld
Music: Massive Music

DDB and Tribal Worldwide Amsterdam have an interesting social campaign brewing for the beermeisters at Heineken.

Entitled “Share the Sofa,” the campaign invites fans to join star UEFA Champions League players on Twitter for a chat during select games. Players involved include Ruud Gullit, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Owen Hargreaves, Hernan Crespo and Fernando Morientes. Owen Hargreaves was featured recently, with his “Share the Sofa” generating 2,600 tweets and 55.6 million social impressions. Dutch star Patrick Kluivert was the most recent player to be featured, during Tuesday’s Manchester City Vs. Barcelona match.

Fans questions need not be about sports, but can range from “What’s your favorite sandwich?” to just about anything. While it’s easy to be cynical about the overcrowded social media marketing space, this seems like a fun initiative offering fans real insights into their favorite players (even if it’s just their favorite sandwich) with a unique opportunity to ask them just about anything. The initiative makes good sense for Heineken as well, offering a large part of their fan base (those looking for watery beer to guzzle during matches) a unique second screen experience they’ll associate with the brand.

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An estimated 1.1 billion photos and videos were shared online during festivities this New Year’s Eve, a fact celebrated by Deutsche Telekom with their “Share 2014″ video.

The 90-second spot “was a tight and successful collaboration between Deutsche Telekom’s two roster agencies: Saatchi & Saatchi and DDB Tribal.” The agencies used crowdsourcing in ten European countries — Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Netherlands, Croatia, Montenegro and Macedonia — to compile some highlights of European’s New Year’s Eve celebrations. There are plenty of fireworks, people drinking, 2014 glasses, smooches, and dancing. But there’s also a little girl waking up an old man (possibly her grandfather) sleeping in a chair by blowing a party blower in his face — which is a good enough reason to give this one a view. The spot ends with the fitting #Share2014 hashtag and “Life is for Sharing” tagline.

The idea was to tap into people’s feelings of hope and excitement for 2014 “and use it to welcome a whole new year of sharing”, explains Jason Romeyko, Saatchi & Saatchi European creative director Deutsche Telekom. Links to the video on YouTube are being promoted via social media platforms in the ten participating countries. We expect lots of people will check it out to see if their footage made it. You can view “Share 2014″ above — it’s a perfect way to stoke your excitement for the new year while nursing that second day hangover.

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Have you thought about your toilet today? November 19th is World Toilet Day, and Tribal Worldwide chose today to a launch a new campaign for UNICEF called “Access Denied,” which seeks to draw attention to the lack of clean toilets worldwide. While you probably take your home or office bathroom for granted, 36% of the world’s population lives without access to a clean toilet and around one billion people worldwide must defecate out in the open.

To draw attention to this overlooked problem, Tribal Worldwide created a series of posters (examples above and below), a website, and, our favorite message-spreading tool, an 8-bit game. That’s right, to illustrate to an audience who has no idea what it’s like to find a clean, safe place to relieve themselves, Tribal Worldwide created an 8-bit game called Toilet Trek. The game in no way makes light of the issue, as during the course of the game, players are bombarded with obstacles paralleling those of individuals without ready access to a clean toilet. Players are also periodically given facts and information about the problem while advancing to new obstacles within the game. It’s a clever touch, as people who may otherwise gloss over the posters or website can be drawn in with a fun little game that is also educational.

The game is difficult enough to take a few minutes, during which time players can learn how toilet access is linked to issues of sanitation, disease, privacy, and increased risk of sexual assault. Toilet Trek is also available on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5s, with an Android version coming soon. If you have a few minutes, give it a shot, it’s pretty fun and you may just learn something about the plights of those for whom a clean toilet is often just out of reach. And the next time you sit down on your porcelain throne, be grateful. Credits after the jump.  continued…

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The Hiscox Reactor? Gee, that sounds fancy. Sounds like something a character from The Big Bang Theory would reference. It turns out that it’s not all that fancy, save for some elegant animation reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg machine courtesy of Tribal Worldwide NY. The gist: users log in to their Linkedin accounts and can follow a whirling red ball that moves through customized graphics revealing education and work history.

The experience is personalized in the way that asking a Magic 8 Ball a question is personalized. A finite number of combinations and animations have little use after the first watch. However, if you feel like watching the red ball spin – and it is a Friday, so why not? – the chain reaction may make you think about your winding career path that has taken many turns and dips. It didn’t for me, but it might for you. And it might make you want to purchase small business insurance from Hiscox, which is actually important. Or it just might make you wonder why a company would spend money on a custom animation gimmick that lacks value. Credits after the jump.

continued…

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We rarely give love to the UX folks for whatever reason, so..what the hell. It looks like Peter Gallo has his own little PR machine going (or he’s a pretty decent self-promoter, either way) as we’ve received a handful tips from different IPs over the last week or so that the Brooklyn-based creative has joined up with Tribal DDB as director of UX. Truth be told, Gallo has indeed updated his job status to reflect the fact that he has joined Tribal as director of user experience strategy, to be exact. From what we’re hearing, Gallo started his new gig today. Most recently, he served as a a senior UX strategist at Grey New York–though we’ve been told that he was more “junior” at the agency.

Embellishment (or lack thereof) aside, prior to Grey, Gallo spent nearly five years at @radical.media, last serving as information architect, working on apps for the ONE campaign and Sting among other projects.

Update: Well, why leave well enough alone. Gallo succeeds Vincent Higgins at Tribal New York. Earlier this year, the latter was promoted to executive director of UX at DDB’s office in San Francisco. While we’re on the DDB tip, the agency has hired Y&R’s Andrew McKechnie, who last served as ECD out of the latter’s New York office, to serve as group creative director on its Reebok account. If you recall, DDB and Reebok reunited at the beginning of this year. Along with his three-plus years at Y&R, where he helped lead creative on LG, Land Rover, etc., McKechnie had stints at the likes of JWT, Modernista! and BBDO during his career.

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