Hasta La Creative!

180LA introduced its new “Hold True” tagline for Miller Lite earlier this month in a continuation of the “Spelled Different, Because it’s Brewed Different” campaign TBWA/Chiat/Day launched for the brand back in March of 2016.

Miller Lite moved its business from TBWA to 180LA the following month without a review, and the latter agency effectively picked up where its predecessor left off with a series of spots this past September after taking over AOR duties in April.

The problem? Fold7 seems to have introduced the same tagline in a campaign for Irish hard cider brand Magners last June. And someone at Magners noticed.

The brand tweeted out the following message to Miller Lite minutes ago:

@MillerLite Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery they say… ? #HoldTrue pic.twitter.com/Z1ZLeNeDcS

— Magners (@MagnersUK) March 30, 2017

Here’s the Fold7 spot from the summer.

One of our British contacts describes Magners as a “cheap but popular” cider brand, noting that its pre-“Hold True” campaigns ran with the tagline “Earn It.” In recent years, Magners has seen increased competition from upscale brands like Rekorderlig, Bulmers and Carlberg, because lots of the young folks are into cider.

So, was this an honest mistake?

We’ve reached out to 180LA but have yet to receive a response. Updates if we get them.

We have no idea who the people behind the YouTube page “Zebra Corner” are.

But we do know a few things about them: they like comedy, they know some people from Boston, and they REALLY HATE Commonwealth/McCann’s “Real People” campaign for Chevy.

This afternoon someone sent us this takeoff based on a simple concept: what if those people were random “man on the street” types? And what if they were from Beantown??

Get ready for some Wahlberg-worthy accents.

So that was mildly amusing! And we didn’t realize this because we live in New York and don’t own a car, but Car and Driver magazine has pretty much confirmed that J.D. Power is, indeed, a whole bunch of bullshit.

What about the zero percent APR financing?? That’s another one we never really understood.

This spoof was only the latest in a series, by the way. It’s pretty much the same joke over and over again.

OK, now we’re bored.

These guys also mock pharma ads and The Bachelor and some other stuff, and we’re most amused by the awful production values, tbh.

And what’s so bad about Boston and its accents, anyway? Have they ever been to Queens?

• Are you attending SXSW in Austin this weekend?
• Are you somehow both a powerful marketing executive and a cheap bastard?
• Do you really need a place to stay, but also don’t want to pay any money and can’t get your employer to expense it?

If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, then VITRO has a sweeeet fucking Airbnb deal for you.

The MDC Partners agency, which announced plans to open in Austin just over a year ago, would love to give a depressingly empty room in said office to a “CMO or higher level executive from a nationally known brand with an annual marketing budget of at least one million dollars” for a few days for the low low price of FREE. Or $10 per night, depending on which section of the listing you’re referencing.*

The listing claims to include “a real bed” and a bathroom, but there’s an important disclaimer:

Enjoy a truly immersive and elusive “millennial experience” sleeping in an empty room just to be part of the buzz of a city lavishing itself in hedonistic celebrations of creative commerce. There are actually currently no beds, but you can drag a couch in from the lobby, or we’re always happy to provide an extra IKEA desk to shelter under.

The whole thing is kind of amusing, and it could theoretically eliminate the universal complaint from everyone who visits Austin for SXSW or any other event: the awful, interminable traffic.

Is VITRO simply desperate for new business?? Of course they are! They’re an ad agency.

“SXSW has grown so much, it seems like each year is a new exercise in what agency or publication or brand can out do everybody else with something bigger, newer or even more outlandish,” said CEO Tom Sullivan. “We wanted to take the opposite approach. To go scrappy rather than big. So rather than reinventing something, we used  an existing, highly popularized platform to make a point around an undeniable SXSW truth—that it’s impossible to find a place to stay. Plus, it never hurts to have a little fun with the (admittedly awesome) ridiculousness that is Austin during South By.”

A key question remains: what should one do at SXSW? Joe Biden or Ke$ha? Mastodon or Special Agent Dale Cooper? Whatever, just make sure you go to the GSD&M party. We hear Matthew McConaughey will definitely not show up.

Finally, check out that logo.

*VITRO promises to totally refund the lame $10 minimum fee required by the corporate suits at Airbnb.

Back in December, the Wall Street Journal broke news that the Department of Justice had launched an investigation into “bid rigging,” or the process by which certain agencies (allegedly) make things more difficult for both clients and production/post-production companies by lying about rates or making deals to score more contracts.

We later learned, via public statements, that all four of the largest holding companies had been subpoenaed as part of this probe.

Since then, the story has pretty much gone silent in terms of press coverage. But there has been movement within the industry and its various representative bodies.

Earlier this week, both the AICE and the AICP (which are completely separate organizations that happen to share an office building) released internal memos to members updating them on recent developments.

In short, the investigation continues despite the fact that Jeff Beauregard Sessions now runs the DoJ.

From the AICE memo, which begins with a summary of the events to date:

“As a trade association, AICE’s policy is to refrain from commenting on the investigation itself but rather to focus on our continued push to raise awareness among advertisers about transparency issues in an effort to affect change in the non-transparent practices employed by ad agencies with in-house capabilities.”

In what may be the most significant development, the Association of National Advertisers has quietly created a Production Transparency Task Force. So far, it has amounted to a series of webinars and meetings dating back to the month before the DoJ news went public, with the AICE invited to one event to present its own concerns about competition between agency production departments and independent shops. The memo continues, “The task force expects to complete their work soon and should have findings to share at some point this spring.”

This sounds quite similar to the Task Force on Media Transparency, which launched as a joint effort between the 4A’s and ANA in 2015. The former organization split from the pair last January and issued its own recommendations, which the ANA quickly called “premature.” ANA has also maintained a Production Management Committee for years.

On the bid rigging front, the ANA plans to “recommended contract language” that clients can use to prevent agencies from attempting to score production work without their direct knowledge.

The AICP has already drafted its own suggested language, taken from a separate note sent to members this week:

“[Production Company] is submitting this bid with the understanding that the Agency is soliciting bona fide, competitive bids and that the Agency is not soliciting a “Complementary Bid,” which is deemed an illegal, anti-competitive bidding practice according to the US Department of Justice. Furthermore, [Production Company] is submitting this bid with the understanding that to ensure a fair and non-conflicted bidding process, no entity in the bidding pool, directly or indirectly, is a parent, subsidiary, division, affiliate or sibling of the Agency.”

This January, ANA held a Transparency Day “designed to educate advertisers on several transparency-related issues.” Approximately 35 top marketing executives attended and said that “they are now paying very close attention to this issue,” and the AICE memo also claims that several individual companies have reached out to that organization seeking more information. It goes on to recommend that members should ” be wary of requests for any bid submission that feels like it might be solicited by the agency merely as a way of satisfying client requirements and does not represent an honest and fair opportunity to win a project.”

An ANA spokesperson declined to comment for this post, as did a rep for AICE.

But we hear there’s a mood of cautious optimism among the production community, with some hints of agencies complying with the groups’ proposed guidelines. According to at least one party, some post-production companies have recently scored contracts with clients who did not realize that their agency partners were giving themselves all related work until the news broke in December. We also hear that production consultants have looked to take a more active role in the process over the past two-plus months.

The Department of Justice itself has not announced any new developments in the investigation. But they didn’t announce the subpoenas, either. That’s just not how they roll.

In other news that everyone already knows, a longtime veteran of the production and post-production industries recently told us that, back in the day, related budgets would often include an item labeled “lumber” that was commonly understood to be shorthand for cocaine.

The more things change, etc.

So remember about a year and a half ago when Chuck Porter told a friendly crowd that PR had won the communications battle over paid advertising?

You probably don’t. But he was speaking to the global PR Summit in late 2015, telling attendees that “the best buzz is free buzz” because that is true. Everyone likes to get stuff without paying anything for it, even if it involves lots of manpower and work hours like most “earned” media efforts.

Now Faris Yakob agrees in an op-ed that happens to be promoting his own appearance at a trade event. In the Mumbrella (Australia) piece, Yakob argues that everything is already PR whether you admit it or not.

“We have seen a genuine discontinuity in the past couple of years, the last year even — one that requires us to fundamentally rethink our underlying communication assumptions … In a few short years the mediascape completely flipped, from scarcity to abundance.”

In short, he’s arguing that since nearly everyone is a publisher or “maker” now, we have to reconsider how we approach media, without which there would be no advertising.

“Anything and everyone became media, shouting endlessly into the void, millions of words and thoughts screaming for attention, which became suddenly scarce and increasingly valuable.”

He’s getting there, wait for it…

“Simple fragments of language, endlessly repeated, nicknames and soundbites, even when they were demonstrably false, got someone the most powerful job in the world.

The public is now the media and relating to it is the most important job. Welcome to the new paradigm of public relations.”

There we go. True is false, up is down, everything is spin.

But is he saying that every bit of content/information/messaging we receive should be read as an attempt to coerce us or a CTA leading down the digital rabbit hole to a purchase? Isn’t that what people already think of advertising?

And what about the fact that everyone in PR now accepts paid media as part of the equation and that comms firms are hiring agency creatives? Yeah, everything is communications. But the divide between people who make content and people who promote it is deep. Did Casey Neistat teach us nothing??

Anyway, go hear Faris speak in Melbourne next month. Or don’t. Everything will still be PR.

Back in December, we wrote about The Cast Station’s casting call for a Cadillac “Real People” ad searching to fill a role for an “Alt-Right (Neo-Nazi)”, specifying the call was in search of  “REAL Alt-Right believers/thinkers.” Following social media backlash to the casting call, and a statement from Cadillac condemning it the casting call The Cast Station claimed sole responsibility in a Facebook apology. In the apology, the casting company claimed that Cadillac (and presumably its agency Publicis) had not authorized the call and that it was rather “issued by mistake,” by “an employee, who was immediately terminated for her actions.”

A source identified the “immediately terminated” employee as New York, Chicago and Atlanta casting director Skylar Rote.

Now it seems something about the stories doesn’t add up.

Rote appears to still be with The Cast Station. She is still listed on The Cast Station’s contact page as a casting director in New York, Chicago and Atlanta. Her name also appeared on a recent casting call for a Beneful spot in the Austin area posted on the Corpus Christi Area Film Casting and Production Facebook page.

Clearly, this raises a few questions.

If our source was incorrect and Rote was not the employee that The Cast Station claims is solely responsible for posting the casting call, who is, and why was the call issued by someone other than the casting director? If, however, The Cast Station decided the casting call in question did not merit the termination of the employee who issued it, why did they claim the employee was “immediately terminated for her actions” and was there in fact outside authorization for the casting call in question?

We’ve reached out to Publicis and The Cast Station, but have yet to receive a response.

Is advertising art? Can it ever be?

Before you tell us how tired you are of people asking this question, some context: the Association of Independent Commercial Producers is promoting its upcoming awards events AICP Show and AICP Next Awards with a campaign hyping its collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film. This work plays on the idea that most creatives in the ad industry are former fine arts majors who had to find a way to make a living. (So are many of us in media, btw.)

Specifically, it compares some prominent creatives to big name artists by tallying the works they have housed in the MoMA.

First, it’s FCB’s Susan Credle versus that guy with one ear:

FACT CHECK: Credle did not, in fact, post 50 selfies in one day. We rate that claim #FakeNews.

Jeff Kling and Jeff Koons are also running neck and neck, though the pop artist manages to beat out the Fallon CCO by one.

We like how Kling hammed it up there. And of course, many “traditional” artists have always disliked Koons and pop artists like him for supposedly commenting on the shallow nature of our culture by celebrating it.

Now for perhaps the most shocking statistic: Gerry Graf and Paul Cezanne have the same number of works in the MoMA. No, you probably won’t see Snyder’s of Hanover ads airing on the wall next time you walk into the museum. But you get the point.

OK, OK. Slow clap. And that paternity suit thing is a joke. We Googled.

You can thank R/GA for the idea behind this one as Nick Law and Jay Zasa came up with it. Law is also 2017 AICP Next Awards Judging Chair. R/GA creatives Mike Donaghey and Chris Joakim contributed, and the subject of each short wrote its respective script—which explains the Graf entry.

Your press release quote from AICP president and CEO Matt Miller:

“The conversation about art and advertising is over—its now about Art vs Advertising as creative rivalries percolate across media platforms. The archive at MoMA is a huge achievement, offering unequaled prestige to artists of all walks as they strive for creative recognition.”

Is the conversation really over, though? If you want to get all technical, “art” is a creative endeavor that has no specific commercial purpose. So advertising, by definition, can never be art, no matter how groundbreaking it is or how many boxes of cereal it sells or how many Adweek covers it inspires. This is also why “art” in the traditional sense is dead, because who the hell can afford to spend countless hours creating stuff without the assurance that there’s money to be made? Remember how Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime?

The MoMA does have at least one thing in common with ad agencies, though: both organizations (allegedly) overwork employees while paying them peanuts. It’s barely a living, but the health benefits might be described as “kind of generous!”

The deadline to enter the AICP Awards is next Friday, March 3, 2017. Here’s your link.

CREDITS

Creative Concept
R/GA
Nick Law, Vice Chairman, Global Chief Creative Officer R/GA
Jay Zasa, SVP, Executive Creative Director, R/GA
Mike Donaghey, Creative Director, R/GA
Chris Joakim, Creative Director, R/GA

Writing Credits
Susan Credle, Global Chief Creative Officer, FCB Global (“Van Gogh vs Credle”)
Gerry Graf, Chief Creative Officer, Barton F. Graf (“Cezanne vs Graf”)
Jeff Kling, Chief Creative Officer, Fallon (“Koons vs Kling”)

Editorial
No6
James Duffy, Editor
Nick Schneider, Editor
Lucas Spaulding, Editor
Renn Cheadle, Assistant Editor
Connie Chuang, Assistant Editor
Malia Rose, Producer
Yole Barrera, Producer
Corina Dennison, Executive Producer

Production
Fallon
“Koons vs Kling”
Collin Goodspeed, Director
Valeska Bachauer & Lauren Carpenter, Art Direction
Jeff Kling, Talent

Music
JSM Music
Joel Simon, CCO/CEO
Jeff Fiorello, Executive Producer
Norm Felker, Producer

Audio & Voice Over Recording
COLOR
Josh Abbey, Engineer / Partner
Kevin Halpin, Engineer / Partner
JD Heilbronner, Engineer / Mixer / Tech Producer
Jeff Rosner, Executive Producer / Partner

Voice Over Artist
Alex Warner

Are you looking for work? Do you need a steady position in which you’ll always have something to do? Do you mind traveling to Pyongyang to interview?

A team of agency creatives based in South Korea partnered with a charity serving refugees from the North along with a twitter jokester and an easily fooled social media platform to create a spoof campaign in which Kim Jong Un, supreme leader of North Korea and certifiable criminal mastermind, seeks applicants for a new job offering: slave labor.

Here’s the video.

The creatives behind this effort also created a LinkedIn profile for Mr. Kim as both an individual and a business along with a full job listing that includes an explanation of why he’s hiring now:

“Due to a series of recent defections, deaths, and disappearances that were in no way suspicious, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is proud to announce a hiring drive available to everyone in the world. Vacancies are opening every day.”

The job perks items include “living in the second-richest country on the Korean Peninsula” and, more importantly, “permanent employment until death at the job of the government’s choice.”

All Kim Jong Un wants in return is loyalty, respect and more child laborers.

North Korea is also more inclusive than our beloved advertising industry. It only asks that applicants be “between the ages of 12 and 55” and that they’re able to “work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week with one lunch break (rice provided, famine permitting).” This might be what Donald Trump means when he references “stamina.”

The effort comes from a creative group calling itself Part Time Lab, which is led by Miami Ad School grad and art director/BBDO Hong Kong veteran Tomic Lee. Lee tells us, “Recently, we saw a slew of articles about more and more people escap[ing] from North Korea and it caught our attention. We [wondered] what it would be like for Jongun Kim to see North Koreans escape from their home country … of course we’ve never been to North Korea, but we have what they call ‘imagination.’”

Lee collaborated with three Miami Ad School students (two based in the U.S. and one in Hamburg) as well as the unnamed American behind this two-year-old Kim Jong Un Twitter parody account. He tells us that the campaign will soon have a corresponding “Greatest Recruit” website as well.

I held a debate once.

It was just me talking on a stage by myself for 90 minutes while everyone agreed with me.

I won by a landslide.

— Kim Jong-un (@_Kim_Jongun) September 27, 2016

Great news! I’m hiring. Warning: Only apply if you want the greatest job on earth in the greatest country on earth.https://t.co/SmIc4qdMw3

— Kim Jong-un (@_Kim_Jongun) September 27, 2016

Lee and his partners started the effort as a pro-bono campaign for LiNK or Liberty in North Korea, a legitimate charity based in California and South Korea that works to “fund a modern day underground railroad” with the goal of helping refugees escape, assimilate and hopefully lead normal lives.

“With this project, we hope to raise an awareness of people from North Korea and refugees who have to run away at the risk of their life,” Lee writes. “At every touch point, we direct people to LiNK’s landing page to let people learn about genuine stories of North Korea and how they can help.”

No, the production values are not as impressive as those in your agency’s latest auto campaign. But we liked it, so we posted on it.

CREDITS

Following last year’s “The Big Adjustment” spot last year promoting the brand’s underwear, Austin agency Preacher is back to promote Tommy John’s line of undershirts.

As with its predecessor, the spot cartoonishly lampoons uncomfortable alternatives before presenting Tommy John as the answer you’ve been looking for. While in “The Big Adjustment” the problem was that the boys were unhappy, this time around its an uncomfortable, itchy undershirt. To bring the problem to life in “Undershirt Undoing,” Preacher stuffed ferrets down actors shirts and filmed them awkwardly trying to navigate situations such as making a golf putt, giving a political speech and performing a routine dentistry procedure.

The results are humorous,and if the approach the problem of an itchy undershirt a little too much, it does help the brand stand out in a category where that’s difficult. And hey, at least Preacher didn’t go with their original animal choice.

“Our first idea started with cats,” Preacher founder and CCO Rob Baird told AdFreak. “That lasted one presentation. Once we got serious about pursuing this idea, the combination of logistics of size and concern about cat lovers’ response to putting them under dress shirts made us move to other options. Ferrets were on a shortlist of players, including hamsters and snakes. But once we found out they love to burrow and then Googled ferrets for a visual refresher—seeing their aggressive little faces—they seemed perfect.”

Aggressive. Little. Faces. Somehow we’re guessing the actors thought that less than ideal.

“Usually, once the ferrets were tucked inside the shirts for several fast-action takes, they wanted to sleep,”added Baird. “Our animal handlers had plenty of treats tucked throughout our actors’ shirts to keep them moving and causing annoyance for our guys. The smart ones usually ate their treats and found the quickest exit—usually through a neck or button opening in the shirt. We have to give our actors a lot of credit for playing it so well and staying calm—the discomfort was real. Fortunately, we had no bites.”

The agency also created a behind-the-scenes video, which those of you aren’t afraid of ferrets can check out below.
Credits:
Client: Tommy John
Chief Executive Officer: Tom Patterson
Chief Marketing Officer: Josh Dean
Senior Art Director: Fawad Khan
Producer: Allison Wicke
Director of Social Media: Monica Fineis
Agency: Preacher
Chief Creative Officer: Rob Baird
Copywriter: Mark Svartz
Executive Producer: Stacey Higgins
Agency Producer: Katie Stoller
Assistant Agency Producer: Zach Tavel
Brand Director: Amanda VanAntwerp
Chief Executive Officer: Krystle Loyland
Chief Strategy Officer: Seth Gaffney
Senior Strategist: Carson Mobley
Business Affairs: Miiko Martin
Production Company: Smuggler
Executive Producers: Patrick Milling Smith, Brian Carmody, Jacqui Wilkinson
Director: Neil Harris
Head of Production: Andrew Colon
Line Producer: Claire Jones
Director of Photography: Tat Radcliffe
Production Services (Lithuania): Nordic Productions
Services Producer: Greta Kleine
Edit House: Cartel
Executive Producer: Lauren Bleiweiss
Head of Production: Meagan Carroll
Producer: Dale Nicholls
Editor: Andy McGraw
Assistant Editors: Matt Berardi, Micah Chase
Music: Black Iris
Track: Misery
Composer: Trey Pollard
Executive Creative Director: Justin Bailey
Creative Director: Rich Stine
Executive Producer: Jon Spencer
Senior Producer: Amanda Patterson
Mix: Lime
Sound Engineer: Rohan Young
Assistant Sound Engineer: Ben Tomastik
Finish House: Cartel
Senior Flame Artist: Wes Waldron
Color: Ntropic
Colorist: Marshall Plante

The comments. Everyone loves them! An endless source of amusement and inspiration, aren’t they?

Nope. Not at all. In fact, some people really don’t care for The Comments, especially when they’re anonymous. Our minds were just blown, too.

Earlier this week, strategist Jamie Watson of M&C Saatchi Sydney wrote a piece for Campaign Brief bemoaning the sad state of said comments. Its headline reads, “A response to anonymous commenters: you’re killing our industry.” Watson theorizes that agency folks’ tendency to gang up on their contemporaries while pooping all over the work is screwing up the whole industry algorithm.

To start, Watson links to such choice proclamations as “You’re all hacks and I hope you, and your new character die horrible deaths.” And these are Australian people, remember.

He goes on to write, “I’m saddened because whatever your opinion on the result, people believed in the work. They put their heart and soul into it, worked late, missed putting the kids to bed or simply kept themselves up all night worrying.”

Watson continues:

“This is not a defence of any particular piece of work, any article or any one person, it’s a defence of our industry.

Call me naive, pathetic, a hippie, whatever you want (just head to the comment section, you know where it is), but things need to change.”

But how do these things need to change? Watson argues that cynicism is passe and that people in the ad industry, which “has always struggled with its reputation,” should maybe stop focusing on how much everything sucks and focus instead on making their own work and giving “bigger, better ideas” a chance to live before treating those ideas like some Wikileak and scrutinizing them until they suffocate.

Our favorite comments on the post are, of course, the bitchiest. For example:

• “Can we have some more cotton wool to wrap these poor souls in?”
• “My name is Banksy. So much for anonymity. It’s never created a climate in which people could speak truth to power anyway.”
• “Good shit. Well writ.”
• “If you’re highly intelligent you can’t help but be cynical. Cynicism creates insight. Insight creates brilliant, breakthrough advertising. It also creates the ability to see through and critique average work masquerading as brilliant work. It helps if you’re articulate enough to explain why you think the work is so-so, rather than just hurl insults.”

Someone buy that last guy a shot.