Hasta La Creative!

Canadian agencies sure are good at doing videos excoriating the ad business. Just in the past week we’ve seen:

• John St.’s hilarious takedown of real-time marketing with Reactvertising
• Zulu Alpha Kilo’s obscene ’60s adman visiting a modern agency
• Rethink’s piss-taking idea to honor case studies with awards

Now, here is Toronto creative agency Union to add an amusing entry to the list—featuring its twisted take on employee appreciation day. You see, Union was shortlisted for Strategy magazine’s Agency of the Year awards, but that success didn’t come easily.

We’ll let agency principals Lance Martin and Subtej Nijjar explain:

As Union explains on its website:

This business of advertising isn’t easy. There are people who put their blood, sweat and tears into the campaigns they produce. That’s why, when an agency like Union gets shortlisted for strategy’s Agency of the Year awards, the painstaking time and effort that goes into the creative product is worth celebrating. And the shop knew just what gift to give its staffers for a job well done.

Check out more amusing videos made for the Strategy event here.

Lest you were worried that Axe had given up on dumb bro antics, the brand is reaching for a new low by putting the sweat of its employees on little pieces of paper and claiming those sweaty pieces of paper will help those employees get laid.

The "Pheromone Business Cards" campaign, created by Union in Toronto, shows Axe "associates"—aka, bros—excreting into headbands before lab techs "distill" each dude's body juice into "a concentrated solution," hopefully also including some kind of scent other than musk, and then drop it onto said business cards, which openly declare that they are, for example, "infused with the essence of Kyle."

Of course, the "essence of Kyle" sounds like something even more gross than sweat, but of course that's the point.

If the video is any indication, there are no women working at Axe—and if they're are, they're female lab techs who are also expected to find the men they're helping irresistible, and take them in back to show them a good time, because duh, that's the way Axe works, and more or less always has.

What is surprising, though, is the idea that Axe thinks its target would identify with business cards in the first place, since all the kids are probably just fist-bumping their phones or Facebook-ing to trade info nowadays anyways.

Or, you know, just meeting on Tinder in the first place.

CREDITS
Client: Axe
Project: Pheromone Business Cards
Agency: Union, Toronto, Canada
Executive Creative Director: Lance Martin
Associate Creative Director, Art Director: Glen D'Souza
Associate Creative Director, Copywriter: Mike Takasaki
Agency Producer: Julie Riley
Account Director: Kimberlee McCormack
Account Manager: Rhiannon Enss
Science Advisor: Rudolf Furrer

Video Credits
Agency Producers: Grace Lee, Jennifer Dark
Director: Joshua Chaiton, Touchpoint Films
Editor: Aaron Dark, School Editing
Audio: Brad Nelson, Cylinder Sound

Coca Cola, invented in the late 19th century and marketed as a “cure-all” for diseases like morphine addiction, dyspepsia, neurasthenia, headache, and impotence has come a long way in a century. A friend once told me that Coke’s special formula used cocaine. Which is true, although at the time I called him a “lying pooh-pooh head.” In fact, a single glass of Coke contained nine milligrams of blow. The nice thing? No crusty white boogers or mirror checks before going outside. ‘Cola’ was spawned from the Kola nut, which added caffeine to the mix. It’s a wonder Ritalin wasn’t invented sooner.

One thing fair to assume in a company the size of Coke; upper management probably doesn’t have a clue about work in the trenches. So, when a plant worker at a Coke bottling plant in Columbia was gunned down for trying to unionize, no one upstairs was any wiser. (It was actually seven murders…). Well, this week that all changes.

Activist organization “The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke” plans a negative PR blitz in Atlanta against the beverage giant. The group, which claims Atlanta-based The Coca-Cola Co. (NYSE: KO) is guilty of labor, human rights and environmental abuses, will have this week a mobile billboard truck on metro Atlanta streets campaigning against Coke’s alleged abuses. One billboard says “Unthinkable! Undrinkable! Murders in Colombia, Child Labor in El Salvador, Stealing and Polluting Water in India, El Salvador and Mexico.” A second billboard says “Killer-Cola: The Drink that Represses!”

Coca Cola’s response, stunned that a PR blitz consists of a single billboard, has called an agency review.

Jeff Louis is a Strategic Media Planner, Project Manager, and New Business Coordinator. His passion is writing, contributing to BMA as well as freelancing. He’d love to hear from you: www.linkedin.com/in/jefflouis or on twitter @jlo0312.