Hasta La Creative!

Halloween tends to lend agencies a certain leniency with how over-the-top, ridiculous and gory they can make their ads. Even so, Superior’s new ad for Lithuanian mineral water brand Vytautas stretches the limits of appropriateness for even this holiday, and is easily the most fucked up Halloween ad you’ll see this year.

Superior teamed up with director Tadas Vidmantas, who was responsible for this spec ad, which Adweek named “the single craziest commercial of 2012? for the ad, which debuted online yesterday. In the spot, a man is visiting his friend, who lies unconscious in a hospital bed and enjoying a Vytautas. Then he gets the idea to replace the friend’s IV with a bottle of Vytautas, reviving and, uh, arousing the friend as a nurse walks in. What happens next is unexpected, to say the least, and involves flying buttons causing considerable damage. You really need to see it for yourself above because it kind of defies description. And, yes, this is a real ad (not a spec). According to Adweek, there’s even a (slightly tamer) broadcast version for Lithuanian television. The bar for Halloween craziness in advertising has officially been raised, or lowered, depending on your point of view. (more…)

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So how did Fiat make the new 500X? According to this spot from The Richard Group the answer is a certain blue pill.

The ad opens on a woman making amorous advances on an elderly gentlemen. He tells her he will be back in a minute, rushes to the bathroom, gets out a bottle of erectile dysfunction pills (presumably) and goes to take the very last one. But he misses his mouth and the pill falls out the window, slowly, and improbably, making its way into the gas tank of a nearby Fiat, which transforms the car into the new Fiat 500X.

And that has to be one of the most ridiculous premises for an ad to come across our desks in some time. The spot is beautifully shot, — in Pitigliano, Tuscany, according to Adweek, — but it doesn’t do a whole lot to sell the Fiat 500X, amorous glances of women following its transformation aside. Plus, if the Fiat 500X is the result of a Fiat on a certain impotence-treating drug, what does that say about the rest of Fiat’s vehicles?

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San Francisco agency Eleven has a strange new campaign for Virgin America centered around an extremely long online video.

The ad, entitled “Have you been flying BLAH Airlines?” depicts, in real time, a flight on the imagined rival airline from Newark to San Francisco: a five hour and forty-five minute flight. If that sounds boring, well, that’s the point. It’s also a bit strange and creepy, since the passengers are all mannequins. There are long shots of the mannequins doing absolutely nothing in their cramped seats, punctuated by occasional “action” such as a woman devouring some ribs.

“There’s a very distinct odor coming from somewhere nearby,” says a man on the flight, while the woman goes on and on about the ribs she’s eating. And that’s about as much action you can expect as you (inevitably) skip around. Still, there’s actually a kind of strange charm to the ad and its surreal humor when taken in small doses, and you kind of have to appreciate the great lengths Eleven went to to make its point.

“The passengers have no choice but to be on ‘autopilot’ to get through the tedious journey,” Virgin told Adweek. “Just trying to watch the video is downright painful—and that’s the point. If you wouldn’t sit through the entire film, why would you pay money to experience it in real life?”

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Barton F. Graf 9000 delivers one of the stranger campaigns you’re likely to see this week, with “Dead Mouse Theatre” for Tomcat mousetraps.

In the campaign, Barton F. Graf 9000 dreams up a solution for all the dead mice left in the wake of Tomcat, repurposing the corpses as puppets for theatrical purposes. It’s a pretty dark premise, but it’s certainly attention-grabbing. In the best of the 30-second spots (or my favorite, at least), a washed-up old-timey baseball player named Fitzy Gibbons revisits the scene of his downfall when questioned by a young fan. Other spots feature a leprechaun confronting a gangster who stole his gold and a lifelong friendship destroyed by a Viking raid. Strange stuff, indeed. (more…)

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Comedian/filmmaker John Freiler took issue with GEICO today.

Specifically, in a tumblr post and a series of related tweets, Freiler claims that the newest spot from The Martin Agency stole its premise from a film he and his co-creators released last year:

“GEICO, a company that is essentially a sentient collection of irritating pop-up ads for your TV, copied our film down to its marrow. This is not awesome or fun or great.”

Here’s the film in question, which scored more than six million views by inverting all the cliches that drive the horror genre:

…and the latest GEICO spot after the jump.

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This won’t go over well. In a story we missed yesterday, Omnicom media operations CEO Daryl Simm told The Wall Street Journal that everyone needs to spend less money on TV spots and more money on…digital video.

This isn’t exactly a surprise. Simm argues that it’s just a way of re-framing the same old relationships:

“Online video ad spending is growing at a considerably faster pace than overall media budgets have been growing…So TV money is traveling to all of those other alternatives.”

And how large is the shift?

“We are counseling our clients to move between 10% to 25% of TV dollar to online video, depending on the target audience…A significant portion of the dollars are actually going back to TV owners for their online properties.”

But:

“The amount of quality online video is still an issue…What does it mean for a brand to be associated with a particular piece of content? And what does that mean for the consideration of that brand by consumers?”

Despite all this, Simm says that “The desire for more measurement and accountability is getting higher and higher.”

His message to traditional ad folk: expect more of the things you don’t like.

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On a day filled with short film commercials, here’s a spot recycling/paying tribute to an earlier Peugeot ad by French agency BETC.

We weren’t familiar with the 1984 original “Bombardier”; because it’s all French, David Hasselhoff, Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds are conspicuously absent.

The real star here is the post-production team: the release tells us that 90 percent of the film is, in fact, 3D animation.

And here we thought the bold stuntmen really did chase the new 208 GTi in a combat helicopter.

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BBDO New York has received a fair deal of attention for its recent work for GE, including an Emmy nomination for wistfully surreal “Childlike Imagination.” More recent spots like “Ideas are Scary” and “The Boy Who Beeps” followed in a similar tone, celebrating ideas and innovation in imaginative ways. So the agency’s fake infomercial for GE Lighting, directed by Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim (better known as Tim & Eric) and starring Jeff Goldblum, comes right out of left field.

The over two minute-long mock infomercial (mockfomercial?), entitled “Enhance Your Lighting” sees Goldblum playing “Terry Quatro, Famous Person” as he hocks the GE Link light bulb, which offers “successful guy lighting at normal guy prices.” It’s also so easy to install, you can do it while painting a portrait of yourself. It should come as no surprise that the spot is all over the place with random humor, but Goldlum plays the part perfectly and when it’s on it can be pretty funny. And while it may seem like an odd approach for the brand, especially coming off BBDO’s recent spots, it should garner some attention for the new product as the YouTube views (currently at around 115,000) inevitably pile up. (more…)

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Today we learned that TechCrunch blogger Kyle Russell doubles as an advertising critic. More specifically, he criticizes the websites of ad agencies.

There’s a reason he was interested in this one: it’s West, the San Francisco shop founded by former Apple marketing chief Allison Johnson and top Facebook PR Brandee Barker with a bit of capital from Twitter originator Jack Dorsey.

About a year ago, we posted on West in response to tipsters’ claims that all the real ad people hired to staff the agency were leaving. West’s web presence doesn’t help clarify that matter, because it provides absolutely no information about the organization itself.

Still, Russell lingered on the page long enough to call it “a new champion in the endless battle to have the most pretentious startup website.”

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This “film about a smile”, created by London-based agency Beattie McGuinness Bungay for client Thomson Holidays, reminds us of the best, most obvious way for washed-up celebrities to stay relevant: get weird.

The spot stars a teddy bear and a Ben Folds/William Shatner version of Mike Myers’ favorite Queen song, taken from one of the former Captain’s many Twin Peaks lounge singer-style “comeback” albums:

Lots of great details in this one. We’re particularly fond of the broken glasses and the extended pony moment.

The spot even somehow manages to make Shatner’s version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” tolerable. We’re just glad he didn’t actually try to hit any notes or attempt the impossible a capella section.

Credits below via Adweek – note the “teddy bear wrangler” title.

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