Hasta La Creative!

Hiring a fashion designer to make a T-shirt for a rat. Sponsoring a soccer team best known for its embarrassing losses. These seem like particularly odd ways to spend an ad budget.

But when the product is a new TV show that forces traveling celebrities to find entertaining ways of getting rid of cash quickly, it's actually pretty fitting as marketing.

To promote 24 Hours to Go Broke, a new series on the UKTV network, Wieden + Kennedy London did both of the above, as well as the following:

• Bribed a farmer to paint an ad on the side of his cows
• Paid a restaurant owner to temporarily rename his fish and chips shop, and its menu, after the show
• Paid a street musician to hand out money
• Perhaps most amusingly, got passersby in London's art-heavy Shoreditch neighborhood to shave their beards into buckets, then used the trimmings to create lettering for a billboard

See those videos below. Because even though it's gross to make a sign out of a salad of stranger facial hair, it's certainly original.

W+K Amsterdam is back with yet another sprawling, upbeat, frenetic spot for Heineken, which is part of the brew brand’s global campaign highlighting a man living it up in his cityscape. The latest spot, aptly dubbed “The City,” features a little Elvis swing as our hero goes on the hunt for a mysterious gal with the help of a host of lost business cards. Along the way, he experiences everything that makes his city so vibrant. The look, sound and feel is basically the template of what we’ve come to expect from Heineken ads in recent years, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Regarding the campaign concept, which revolves around encouraging men to explore their cities, Heineken global senior brand director Gianluca Di Tondo tells Marketing, “Men of the world want to make the most out of their time in the city, because they know life only gives them one shot. So they really live their city by seeking out new experiences and adventures and they have an underlying fear of missing out on the best ones.” At the very least, it makes our desk job writing about such experiences rather lame. Credits after the jump.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Wieden + Kennedy New York’s latest World Cup spot is a welcome departure from their previous World Cup work, foregoing focusing directly on the on-field action in lieu of the conversations and connections among fans sparked by the World Cup, leading into the “Every Four Years” tagline.

The new 30-second spot, called “Global Issues,” follows a linear conversation between soccer fans from diverse backgrounds. “Global Issues” stars real soccer enthusiasts — including a German butcher, an Italian barber, and a cab driver from the Ivory Coast, who support a vast array of teams, but all reside in the U.S. It’s a clever direction, executed well thanks largely to the precision editing, from editorial company Final Cut, necessary to pull off such an approach, and illustrates the excitement leading up to the World Cup well.

Wieden + Kennedy New York also debuted eight of its 32 original World Cup posters for ESPN, designed by Brazilian artist and graphic designer Cristiano Siqueira. Each features a likeness of key players and stories from the featured country competing in the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Stick around after the jump for a look at several of these posters, as well as campaign credits. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“What the hell was that?” — That is our (and, we’re guessing, your) reaction to “Oranjekoorts (Orange Fever),” W+K Amsterdam’s 2014 FIFA World Cup spot for Heineken, the agency’s first work for Heineken Netherlands.

The campaign actually began earlier this year with the search for Heineken’s first Chief Orange Officer (you can’t make this shit up), described as a “legitimate [cough] full-time role that sought a representative as Dutch as Heineken, but who shared the same international outlook and would be committed to spreading Orange Fever in The Netherlands and across the globe.” Heineken advertised the legitimate position on their own recruitment channels and throughout the Netherlands. After reviewing more than 2,500 applicants, the position was awarded to Marco van Houwelingen, who will fill the year long role at Heineken’s Amsterdam headquarters.

The 65-second spot features a float representing “everything great about the Netherlands and the Dutch,” making its way through a Brazilian Carnival. Lead by Heineken’s Chief Orange Officer, the float includes a windmill, illusionist Hans Klok, and Dennis Bergkamp, among various other weirdness. Float participants all dance to a samba version of the song “No Limit” by 2 Unlimited, “one of the world’s favorite 90’s anthems” (which is not how anybody outside the Netherlands would describe the song). Watch the confusing mess for yourself above, and stick around for credits after the jump. Maybe you just have to be Dutch to get it.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

W+K Portland went all out in getting celebrity talent for “Winner Stays” the latest iteration of their “Risk Everything”campaign for Nike.

The 4:12 film plays off the idea of pretending to be your favorite star players while playing a pickup game with friends. “Winner stays” says one side of one such pickup game, and soon players are claiming to be famous soccer stars and taking on their unique skill sets. It’s a fun idea, although it’s stretched a bit thin at over four minutes long. W+K is betting that with World Cup fever spreading people will stay around for the star power, which includes the return of Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar Jr. and Wayne Rooney, a host of other soccer stars from around the world, and a few unexpected cameos. During the action, the spot offers the first glimpses of Nike’s new Magista and Mercurial Superfly.

“We connect to players’ passion for the game, whether it is the world’s best in Brasil or players in the park or street, explains Davide Grasso, chief marketing officer for Nike. “‘Winner Stays’ taps into an experience that every young player around the world will recognize – competition with friends and the idea of playing with your heroes or pretending to be them.”

While it may be fun and expertly crafted, it’s pretty hard to get over the run time for the full-length “Winner Stays.” Four minutes is just a really long time to expect people to sit through an advertisement and the new product reveals are relatively deep into the spot. Thankfully, there are abridged versions, with run times of 3 minutes (still pretty long), 90 seconds, 60 seconds, and 30 seconds. Stick around for full credits after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Wieden+Kennedy has named Colleen DeCourcy as the newest partner in its global network.

DeCourcy most recently served as Global Coexecutive Creative Director; she joins Dan Wieden, Dave Luhr, Mark Fitzloff, Susan Hoffman, Tom Blessington, Bill Davenport, John Jay, Neil Christie, Tony Davidson and Kim Papworth on the partner team.

DeCourcy worked at W+K for only eighteen months before the promotion; prior to joining the agency, she founded her own shop called Socialistic, which she ran as CEO and chief creative officer. The release states that, during her time at W+K, she has “extended the creative department’s capabilities beyond advertising, into both experience and product design.”

Her full ad industry resume includes stints in leadership positions at TBWA New York, JWT and Organic.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a world with Starbucks at every corner and small, fancy artisinal coffee shops sprouting up everywhere, it would be counterproductive for an instant coffee brand to try to compete. So W+K starts a different conversation for Maxwell House, asking, “Whatever happened to good?”

The new “Say Good Morning to a Good Day” campaign features a series of broadcast and web spots centering around an affable, middle-aged everyman (everydad?) who laments that with all the attention on phrases like “Awesome,” “Amazing,” and “That’s epic, bro!” people have forgotten about “good.” In the 30-second spot, he goes on to explain that good is “Swinging to get on base” or “choosing not to overshoot the moon, but instead to land right on it.” This all makes “good” seem pretty appealing, with the spot ending with the resurrected “Good to the Last Drop” tagline.

While some may question the choice of admitting your product isn’t “amazing,” the strategy makes sense for Maxwell House, whose coffee is, at best, “good enough,” and whose best bet is to convince the older generation that all the fuss over fancy coffee just isn’t worth it. W+K pull off the execution really well, making the “good” approach about as persuasive as it can be. Credits after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The new campaign includes logos, packaging, products, a presence in digital and social media and advertising with the theme, “Say good morning to a good day.”

You probably remember popsicle stick jokes as a fun, charming, innocent part of your childhood. Jason Kreher and Matt Moore are here to wreck those memories.

The pair of creatives at Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Ore., have made a fake product called Schadenfreezers—popsicles with the most depressing jokes you can imagine. (For now, at least, they're just animated GIFs.) The tagline is: "The strawberry, blueberry and lemon-flavored joy derived from the suffering of others." When you read them, your sense of happiness drips away much like the sad melting treats themselves.

Kreher and Moore made the first GIFs last year. (Sample jokes: "How many lives does a cat have?" "Only one." "Why did the lifeguard wear pants?" "Because he was ashamed of his body." "Why did the clown go to jail?" "For his collection of child pornography.")

Now they're back with a whole new set. You can check some of them out below, and the rest over at schadenfreezers.com. There are 11 new ones, and more will roll out gradually.

We caught up with Kreher and Moore over email to ask them just what their problem is.

This is Round 2, but take us back a bit. Where did this twisted idea come from? Did neither of you have a happy childhood?
We honestly can't remember how these came about; it was probably just us wanting to visualize the awful things we think are funny. It's kind of like wagging your penis around in public when you're a little kid … it's the wrong kind of attention, but it's attention nonetheless.

Popsicle-stick jokes are generally corny. Why make them existentially bleak?
I don't think either one of us is particularly cynical, but it's fun to take something innocent and make it profane. There's nothing wrong with pondering life's greatest tragedies while enjoying a nice snack.

What's your joke writing process like? How do you know when you have a winner? And how do you know when you've gone too far?
We probably wrote around 200 of these to get to our final ones. I think they work best when the setup feels like it could be an actual popsicle stick joke, but then stabs you in the gut with the punch line. And with these, there's no such thing as too far. If we suspect one has gone too far that means it's probably going to make the cut.

What are your favorite jokes from the new batch, and why?
Jason: The janitor one is my favorite. It's probably the most dehumanizing and bleak thing that's ever occurred to me, which was kind of my bar for these.
Matt: That plane one feels like it's going to be some awful pun and then it ends up as an awful truth. Kids love that.

There was some outcry about the original round of jokes. Do you think people don't want to see innocent popsicle-joke humor messed with?
The only people who got really riled up were the few who thought this was an actual product, and that we'd somehow bribed the press to feature them. I like thinking of us as a corrupt, fat-cat popsicle corporation greasing the palms of the Huffington Post Arts & Culture editors.

The animations seem more sophisticated this time. Was that just a general improvement you wanted to make?
What a nice thing to say! Matt has been wanting to experiment with stop motion for a while now, and this new round was a great opportunity to make these stand out. We host the site on Tumblr for a couple reasons, but a big one is that Tumblr features a lot of funny stuff and a lot of artful stuff, but rarely do the two meet. These feel different because they're something you want to look at and also something you might laugh at.

Have you ever actually produced Schadenfreezers as a product? If not, would you be interested in that?
Sure. If any of your readers are popsicle manufacturers who secretly kind of hate themselves, please have them contact us at your earliest convenience.

"As we stand on the edge of possibility, we choose the path less traveled."

Set to to the grandiose tune of Richard Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," aka the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, this new Lurpak butter ad from Wieden + Kennedy London (and Blink director Dougal Wilson) takes place in a world that looks like the love child of Stanley Kubrick and George Lucas.

Advertising the brand's new Cook's Range of oils and butters, the ad transforms ordinary (yet dramatically lit) kitchens into basically the entire universe. 

Of particular note is the GoPro-meets-lunar-landing slo-mo shot of a woman dropping a yolk on an extraterrestrial landscape of beautiful flour. There's also an otherworldly shot that transforms a gas stove into rocket burners and a carrot into a spaceship. This is so cool.

Lurpak and W+K have a long history of doing food porn together, and have a couple of gold Lions in Film Craft from Cannes to show for it. (Their first collaboration that we covered, in 2011, was "Kitchen Odyssey," which we called "the kind of commercial Stanley Kubrick would make if he were still alive." So, they're certainly consistent.)

This new ad, though, is a close encounter of the nerd kind. So say we all.