Hasta La Creative!

In one of the more ridiculous clips you’re likely to see this Halloween, Honda sent a paranormal investigator to check out Wilmington, California native Ernie Santos‘ 1996 Honda Civic.

Santos has (supposedly) long complained of paranormal encounters in the Civic, including unexplained noises, items disappearing and reappearing in the trunk and friends complaining that they feel hands on their shoulder when no one else is in the car. When he commented about these occurrences on Honda’s Facebook page, Honda sent “nationally recognized” (whatever that means) paranormal investigator Erik Vanlier of Valley Investigators of the Paranormal to explore his vehicle.

In the video, we see Vanlier do his whole paranormal investigator schtick. He claims to feel a hand on his shoulder and communicates with the spirits, who contact him via “electronic voice phenomena” which sounds suspiciously like a radio dial being tuned in and out to pick up random words. Eventually, Vanlier is able to get the spirits to leave. He is, after all, a “nationally recognized” paranormal investigator. A relived Ernie Santos enters the car and claims it “feels different.”

As you can tell I’m a skeptic when it comes to the whole paranormal investigator thing, and Vanlier isn’t especially convincing. If you’re into this kind of thing and watch any of the slew of paranormal reality shows on TV, you might find this an interesting little clip. If you’re not a paranormal enthusiast and you’re just looking for a little Halloween fun, you might want to look elsewhere. This video is mostly just Erik Vanlier in the back seat of a 1996 Honda Civic screwing around with some electronic devices, unconvincingly playing at making paranormal contact. I don’t mean to be a big downer on Honda’s Halloween theatrics, I just think they could have come up with something a lot more interesting than this.

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Appealing to morbid philosophy students and paranoid individuals everywhere, the folks (and one dog) over at New York digital shop Fig (which counts agency vet Al Kelly among those in its leadership team) are creating an alarm clock that wakes you up by telling you how long you have to live (with a projected life expectancy “based on age, health, lifestyle, diet, family history and other factors”), how much money you have, and how popular you are online. No need to wait to get out your smartphone or laptop to experience crippling anxiety about your health or social and  financial well-being, Fig’s ALARMclock will wake you up with a panic attack!

ALARMclock is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. In Fig’s words ALARMclock will help you to “Jump start your ambition. Reconnect with powerful motivating forces such as financial instability, social insecurity and fear of death.” If you’re the kind of person inclined to desire such a soul-crushing device, you can donate to make ALARMclock a reality. The project is currently at $2,121 of its $7,000 fundraising goal, which it must reach by November 26th. It wakes up every morning aware of its current Kickstarter status (I imagine) and impending death, should its fundraising goal not be met.

The ALARMclock doesn’t just wake you up every morning with a rundown of why you’re inadequate and a reminder of your impending mortality, though. It may work so well at waking you up in a state of dread that you never get to sleep in the first place. There’s nothing like completely eliminating sleep from your life to jump start your ambition and boost productivity.

ALARMclock: waking you up with all the pressures of modern day existence. You may never sleep again!

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Cosmic Joke has created a mini-documentary about a satirical LARP ad agency called PanoptiCorp. For those who don’t know LARP stands for Live Action Role-Play. Usually it involves a bunch of nerds running around pretending to be wizards and shit. PanoptiCorp is different.

Created in Norway in 2003 by Eirik Fatland (and recently reimagined in Copenhagen, Denmark), PanoptiCorp skewers the “sometimes Orwellian nature of the late-capitalist workplace,” as Fatland puts it. Its players, who mostly have no experience in advertising, play cynical, morally corrupt characters. PanoptiCorp pitches ideas to sell everything from adult diapers to plush My Little Pony vaginas. They help restore the credibility of African dictators and promote euthanasia with cats.

Due to the nature of the morally corrupt characters they play, many of the players have an interesting psychological relationship to the game. Several of them have had to quit the game for different periods of time. It’s this unusual nature of the game/player relationship that makes the documentary (as well PanoptiCorp itself) interesting. Some players find the game psychologically damaging, losing themselves too completely in their roles. Others say their roles have forced them to reevaluate their real-life values in positive ways.

“When you leave a LARP, you always take something with you,” says PanoptiCorp Game Master Claus Raasted. So what have PanoptiCorp players taken with them? “Point one: They don’t want to work in the ad world ever. Point two: They’d probably be quite good at it. And three: The world of advertising is a crazy, crazy, fucked up place.”

PanoptiCorp creator Eirik Fatland hopes that PanoptiCorp will make players who are again “again confronted with institutions that have ideologies” to be aware of the process and “be more critical of the ideologies [they] adopt.”

You can learn more about the 2013 running of PanoptiCorp here. The mini-documentary is part of Cosmic Joke’s feature-length LARP documentary, Treasure Trapped. It’s a really intriguing look at an unusual phenomenon if you have 15 minutes to spare during your lunch break.

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Bi-coastal creative studio/prodco Logan & Sons somehow enticed Jane Fonda to voice a new spot for Prada called “The Future of Flesh” and the results are really creepy. I guess that’s to be expected when the word “flesh” is right there in the title.

Whether or not intentional, the Luke Gilford-directed spot leaves me feeling a little uneasy. According to a release, the spot is “set in a strange futuristic world where humans evolve to fit the style of the season.” Without that bit of clarification, I have to wonder how anyone would figure out what the hell is going on. The answer: they probably don’t. Actually, even with that info it’s still kind of hard to piece together. Gilford, offers this further explanation (not that it helps all that much), saying, “Compare magazine covers over the decades, you’ll see how much hair and physique change with the clothes. Now as body modification accelerates, facial features and bone structure are changing as well. The body is beginning to merge with fashion in very interesting ways…I find this sexy as well as strange – a science fiction fantasy becoming a reality.”

The spot takes place in some kind of futuristic society, one seemingly set apart from the rest of the world. Jane Fonda‘s voice really ads to the creepiness factor as she describes the process of joining this closed-off society (or something like that) and says nonsensical things like “each tear authenticated.” Throughout the spot there are close ups of people’s creepy-looking flesh, which seems to morph throughout the spot. Again, this is weird stuff. The wardrobe, provided entirely by Prada, does look pretty fetching, however. I’m certainly no fashion expert, but my girlfriend (who knows a thing or two about fashion) confirmed that the clothes in the spot do look quite appealing. So maybe in a fashion ad, that’s all that matters. Or maybe Logan & Sons and Prada want to scare you, you know, since it’s October.

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M&C Saatchi gained the attention of passing pedestrians in Milan by creating an installation that looks like a submarine emerging in Milan’s Piazza Mercanti, crashing into a nearby motorist.

The surreal stunt was created for insurance companies Genertel IT and Europ Assistance IT as part of their “Protect Your Life” campaign. It featured a rescue team, a group of stunned sailors, and one irate Smart Car driver. To make sure the point (Which is what exactly? It’s really hard to extract from this confusing scene) was not lost on pedestrian witnesses, “a man in scuba diving gear was on hand to speak to people about the importance of safeguarding their possessions.” Because anytime people need something explained to them: bam, a man in scuba gear.

I’m a fan of good old-fashioned Italian surrealism, so I can appreciate this from that point of view. But I can’t really make much sense of it from a marketing standpoint. Protect your possessions because you never know when a submarine will emerge out of nowhere? If you can make some sense of this, let us know in the comments section.

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If you’ve already burned through Friday Night Lights, Parks and Recreation, New Girl, Bob’s Burgers, The League, Orange Is The New Black, and basically any other TV series worth watching on Netflix, set phasers to the documentary section for the 2011 film Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Directed by David Gelb, the movie is a portrait of 85-year-old world-renowned sushi master, Jiro Ono, who’s dedicated (literally) almost every waking moment of his life to perfecting his craft.

The film goes to great lengths to show how far Jiro strives to make the most perfect sushi in the world while simultaneously begging the questions, “What if your entire life was dedicated to only one pursuit? How would that affect your personal relationships? How do you then define success, if the concept of ‘success’ is even an ascertainable goal in your mind?” It’s as troubling a portrayal as it is fascinating, causing the viewer a level of introspection that few other films can achieve. It only made sense, then, for Gelb to follow-up his documentary on the world’s best sushi by filming its American equivalent, Papa Murphy’s Take and Bake pizza, for a new campaign from Wong, Doody, Crandall, Wiener.

It’s clear that Gelb employs some Jiro Dreams of Sushi-style camera work here. However, whereas his documentary focuses on getting to know the people behind the food, his spot has no time to do so. So, we instead get some creepy anonymous hands, kneading pizza dough in slow motion. We get some mom feet, with a mom arm shooting into frame from above to half-hug her child. Finally, we get some assorted family hands, each reaching out of nowhere to grab pizza slices (again, in slow-motion). All of this while creepy piano-plinking plays menacingly in the background.

While watching Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I was nervous that perhaps someone in Jiro’s immediately family would comment on his coldness, or his chef-before-father mentality. While watching this spot for Papa Murphy’s, I was worried that someone would be murdered. Credits after the jump.

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We actually had no idea this was being turned into a series of sorts, but since we’ve already broached the topic today, why not keep the party going. A month after Atlanta-based agency Ames Scullin O’Hare unveiled its short parody film, “The Merger,” which of course happened to take aim at you know what, the agency returns with part two. In the second installment, we jump ahead four months post-merger of fictitious agency network, Uniglobal Advercom, and see how an agency-client relationship has evolved (or devolved in this case). Obviously, subtlety has no place in ASO expressing their thoughts on the actual Omnicom-Publicis merger. But hey, we don’t really mind when the frustrated little guy wants to throw a few stones and take the piss.

ASO managing partner/creative Patrick Scullin says, “We want to show how this “Bigger is Better’ relationship withers, and we suspect this scene will be played in many corporate offices in the  upcoming months. This ad agency network merger is going to entail a lot of growing pains and we’ll be there to document it and offer a better solution.” We’ll see what that solution is when the time comes, but in the meantime, you can expect at least one more installment in this series. Hooray?

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Jung von Matt/Alster Werbeagentur GmbH go for the “just throw a bunch of crazy shit together” approach over the “actually makes sense” approach with their “Add Power” spot for Vodafone.

The 1:38 spot, directed by RadicalMedia’s Sebastian Strasser, feels more like a trailer for a Michael Bay movie than a commercial for a telecommunications network. It features everything from robocats and shark riding to a rocket train (that the spots’ protagonist somehow manages to keep a grip on while it’s moving at supersonic speed).

Presumably, all this craziness is a testament to the Vodafone high speed network. It’s pure testosterone over common (or any other kind of) sense. The spot certainly left me with a lot of questions: What kind of drugs is this dude on? How exactly does one ride a shark? How might I acquire a robocat? Will Vodafone be partnering with Axe Bodyspray in the future? These and other questions remain unanswered.

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Men with comb overs look hapless. Little boys with comb overs look creepy. To see the difference, please watch the latest Jell-O television spot, appropriately titled “Comb Over.”

In the forty-five-second ad built by CP+B, a balding father whose depressing life resembles a deflated balloon schools his son on the importance of the little things, like a cup of Jell-O pudding. In turn, we see some surreal daydream where the son, still about six years old, goes through a day in the father’s life, only now he has a giant cone head and a comb over. If you ever wanted to know what the male offspring of Lord Voldemort and Francis Dolarhyde (Manhunter version, not Red Dragon) would look like, here you go. Is that not the definition of creepy, a little boy who somehow resembles two fictional psychopaths all because of a comb over? Still, the commercial’s surrealist twist manages to make it stand out in an otherwise standard concept. It’s almost sweet, if not for the whole hapless/depressing/pitying reaction that comes along with comb overs.

Credits after the jump.

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I’m the Rooster guy apparently and I’m back to cover some more irreverent Rooster shenanigans. The above video, “How to Take a Punch,” epitomizes what a side project should be: easily digestible, fun to watch, and humorous. A slow-mo gif of James Franco taking a punch to the face has been making the blogging rounds before his Comedy Central roast airs on Labor Day. Vice co-founder/Rooster boss Gavin McInnes decided to join in on the slow-mo fun and take a harder punch to the face. The result is a side-by-side 13-second video comparison of the punches that is probably too stupid for its own good. Something makes me think Rooster likes that. These guys seem to have fun in the office.

After the jump, you can watch a longer video of people getting punched in the face slowed down to 1000 frames per second. It’s violently elegant and directed by Cody Kern, a man who has no relation to Rooster. As you watch, feel free to let the catharsis of watching others get walloped improve your day. Jiggling jowls have the affect on people.

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