Hasta La Creative!

Honeymoon, the Boulder, Colorado-based creative collective launched by CP+B/Victors & Spoils vet Noah Clark, launched a new campaign for organic nutritional products brand Orgain, calling on viewers to “Get Picky With Your Protein.” 

A 60-second (or thereabouts) spot features a picky youngster explaining some of his food specifications: cheese must be cut into triangles, pasta noodles no longer than his pinky finger and, of course, his apple slice can’t touch his blueberries. His mother, he explains, isn’t quite so selective, downing a gross nutritional shake every morning. Mom, it turns out, doesn’t enjoy her morning routine and lets fly a string of expletives after drinking the gross shake.

The spot ends with the message that there’s a better way, and you can get picky about your protein with Orgain’s plant-based protein powder. “Get Picky With Your Protein” relies on the relatable premise that children are picky eaters (true enough) before contrasting that with the nutritious but, let’s face it, kind of gross things adults will sometimes down in the name of staying healthy, highlighted by mom’s foul-mouthed reaction. It makes a point of calling out the grit found in most of its competitors, a selling point for a brand which claims to avoid that unpleasant texture.

“We found great inspiration (and irony) in the fact that parents often hold their kids to high nutrition standards but fall far short of them ourselves. We want our kids to eat right, yet we as adults choke down products with awful ingredients and a bad taste without thinking twice,” said Clark. “Somewhere along the way we decided it was okay to put horrible tasting things in our body just because we thought it was good for us. With this video, we hope to let people know it doesn’t have to be this way.”

EVB and Victors & Spoils give “The Gift of Giving” in a holiday campaign for JCPenney which asks shoppers to give a gift to a complete stranger.

Filmed last month in JCPenney stores in Illinois and Indiana the video follows as customers are told to find someone in the store to give a gift to. That person then travels with them around the store and together they pick out a gift, with JC Penney picking up the tab. The gifts range from jeans and a jacket to a sofa and even an engagement ring as participants engage in tearful signs of appreciation and hugs. It’s designed to be a heartwarming affirmation that giving is better than receiving; in other words, the polar opposite of Harvey Nichols’ cynical “Could I Be Any Clearer?” spot from adam&eveDDB.

“The idea of having to give something to a complete stranger can be very scary,” JCPenney CMO Debra Berman told Adweek. “And it’s that vulnerability that made this experiment so real and interesting. It brought out emotions in both the giver and the receiver.”

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After running one of the most widely reviled ads in recent Super Bowl history, Groupon today launched its first TV spot since 2011. 

Created in partnership with crowdsourcing agency Victors & Spoils, the new work is quite a bit more straightforward than the faux charity ad that starred Timothy Hutton. That spot, "Tibet," was one of four in a campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, but it was Hutton's smarmy dismissal of Tibetan independence that sparked the most outrage. Some even attributed Groupon's rapidly declining sales in that period to the ad's rancorous reception.

In the new ad, we see Groupon customers delighting in their great deals on blenders, sushi, yoga and flight lessons. (As a longtime Groupon subscriber, I have to say this is possibly the most accurate list of its offerings ever assembed.)

The new spot likely won't incense any angry mobs, but will it recruit a new crowd of customers? Watch it below, along with the 2011 Super Bowl spot, and decide for yourself.

Via Mashable.

EVB and Victors&Spoils are banking on the effectiveness of 90s nostalgia and/or attempting to make you feel old with their remake of Blackstreet’s 1996 hit “No Diggity” for JCPenney. The song has been changed to “Go Ligety,” for J.C. Penney’s campaign in support of U.S. Olympic skier Ted Ligety.

“Go Ligety,” which is performed by C-Black of Blackstreet, informs viewers that when you round up your purchase to the nearest dollar proceeds go to the United States Olympic Committee. “”I like the way you work it. Go Ligety. You got to round it up.” rhymes C-Black, a fun, if cheesy, way to get the word out about the promotion. Ted Ligety doesn’t make an appearance himself, but J.C. Penney has a small Lil’ Ligety puppet act as a stand in. C-Black has a puppet doppelganger as well, who handles piano duties on the song. Between the puppets and the reworking of Blackstreet’s mid-90s hit, “#GoLigety” is a lot of fun, with enough going for it to get people to sit through its 2:15 duration.

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It's agency holiday-card season, and we're going to start posting some of the more interesting and amusing examples—beginning with this one from Victors & Spoils. It's a parody of Tim Piper's "Body Evolution" video showing a model being airbrushed within an inch of her life. (Piper also did Dove's earlier "Evolution" video.) The results of the parody are not as attractive—but are undeniably more festive. Via The Denver Egotist.

The original "Body Evolution" video:

You may have read about Victors & Spoils’ pro-bono (and, actually, fictional) campaign for broccoli in the New York Times, or possibly somewhere else around the Internet. The Havas-owned crowdsourcing agency, as you may know, have put together campaigns for Coca-Cola, Quiznos and General Mills over the years. So they know a thing or two about selling food products, although they normally deal with huge corporations selling hyper-processed foods rather than a vegetable. The interesting process they went through attempting to create a broccoli campaign is well-documented in video format over at The New York Times site and is well worth a gander.

Rhett and Link (Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal), whose IFC program Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings (in which they went around the country creating low budget ads for real, local companies) lasted one season, satirize the broccoli campaign in a new segment for their YouTube show, Good Mythical More. They created six fictional ads for the program. Unfortunately, while these ads themselves are pretty funny, the banter in between them drags the show out past the ten minute mark, and is significantly less worthwhile. So I’ve been a good sport and tracked down the start times for the six broccoli ads for you: 3:53, 4:42, 5:20, 6:09, 6:41, and 7:10.

The first of the broccoli spots plays on the superfood’s healthy aspect with the tagline “Be Old Longer,” since living longer essentially means being “old and crotchety” for a longer period of time. In the second spot, they channel a disgruntled father with the tagline “Broccoli: Quit your whining and eat it.”  One of the funnier ads is the “vintage” spot, selling broccoli as “the only vegetable with an afro.” Strictly speaking, this isn’t true, since cauliflower could also be said to have an afro. But that’s just nitpicking. The next spot advises you to “eat it raw, because it smells like a fart when you cook it.” My personal favorite tells you to eat broccoli “if you don’t want to feel guilty when your mother dies,” ending with the tagline, “Broccoli: Your dead mom would have wanted you to.” Using guilt to advertise broccoli? Pretty genius. The last of the spots is probably the goofiest: it runs around the idea that broccoli looks like little trees, which would make you a giant. Rhett and Link both take bites out of a piece of broccoli, pretending to be giants eating a tree. Silly stuff, indeed.

You might wonder if a satire of an already tongue-in-cheek fictional campaign was really necessary, but it’s all in good fun. And we could all use some fun on a Monday. Credits after the jump. continued…

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