Hasta La Creative!

So sometimes you’ll be sitting on the couch all relaxed watching your favorite TV show and an ad comes on that is so soothing and intriguing that you don’t hit the fast forward button.

(TrendHunter.com) I’ve been thinking of replacing my monkey butler for a while, but you know, good help is hard to find. Thankfully now there’s the ‘Robot Butler’ which in all honesty is amazing!

There were invented to help seniors. Apparently in Japan, there are tons of elderly who need more help in their day to da…

Rupert Murdoch has come out in favour of Microsoft taking over Yahoo, according to reports.

People in bars and clubs will be able to use their mobile phones to interact with flat screen panels driven by Touchtunes' jukeboxes, so they can send the jukebox requests for songs or gift songs to their friends.

(TrendHunter.com) If you can’t afford to type on a real golden keyboard, perhaps this hand-painted one is an alternative. The bronzed board is one of several painted computer keyboards from GeekStuff.

You could save the $214 and paint your own with nail polish or coat one in metallic spray paint. I think I’ll stick…

A trade group representing several large Internet companies sent a letter detailing “strong opposition” to a New York state bill that would limit the companies’ ability to collect information for targeted advertising.

“[The bill] is unnecessary, most likely unconstitutional, and would have profound implications for the future of Internet advertising and the availability of free content on the Internet,” wrote Jim Halpert, general counsel for the industry group, in a letter to Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, the Westchester County Democrat sponsoring the bill.

Mr. Brodsky dismissed the letter. “These guys want the unadulterated right to invade the privacy of the citizens of this state and we’re not going to let them do that,” he said. “This is why we have governments, not just corporations.”

By “these guys” Brodsky means yahoo, Google, AOL, Comcast, eBay, Electronic Data Systems, Facebook, Monster Worldwide and Reed Elsevier NV.

[via The Wall Street Journal]

Most up-and-coming Web 2.0 companies want a write-up in TechCrunch that will catapult them to fortune. Sometimes happens. But for budding media giant Someecards.com, we like to believe it began with our write-up on AdFreak last May. The site is the brainchild of Avenue A/Razorfish creative Brook Lundy and some pals. Brook burnished his comedy credentials by working on ShaveEverywhere.com at Tribal DDB. For Someecards, they wanted to create messages they’d want to send around, and came up with an astounding 1,900 offerings, including some immortal ones, like “I will love you no matter how dissimilar our tax brackets are.” The site works with its hilarious copy and ridiculous clip art. The site has done well—really well, to the tune of 1.4 million visitors last month and a burgeoning Twitter following. Lundy has now left Avenue A/Razorfish, and he his partners have taken $350,000 in seed money to make a go of it as a business. Awesome. “I’ve actually panicked a few times that we’ll run out of clip art, but we haven’t,” he says. Next up: improving the user interface, adding features like embedding, commenting and saving favorites. As for the ensuing write-up in TechCrunch, Lundy says, “I was like, what’s TechCrunch?”

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

Australia’s Cockatoo Ridge Wines thought it was pretty clever coming up with this line for one of its billboards. Its spokeswoman, former Miss Universe contestant Erin McNaught, is not as impressed. “I wasn’t thrilled with what that line was implying,” she says. The vineyard has stopped short of apologizing, saying it e-mailed all of the campaign’s lines to McNaught—and never heard back. McNaught says she was traveling and didn’t see the e-mails until it was too late. “You know, she is a bit of a cheeky thing,” says a Cockatoo rep. “But we certainly did not want to harm her image or ours.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Col. Harlan Sanders of KFC fame may have been a genius at marketing fried chicken. But in our meat-is-murder, health-obsessed world, his legacy hasn’t aged well. Oddly, the same can be said of Moby, whose new music video (shown above) stars an overgrown pimp-chicken who takes violent, blaxploitation-style revenge on a Col. Sanders lookalike. Blood flows. Eyeballs pop. Human limbs are devoured. The song, “Disco Lies,” still sucks, though. I know this because I like it, and my taste in music is terrible. Styx forever! As weird as this video is, some of these old KFC spots (here and here) are actually more disturbing. Look at this one, with those people parading around a big bucket. Man, they love that chicken. They look like robots. “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!” Sigh. Why do my co-workers shun me?

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, Auckland, New Zealand
Executive Creative Director: Mike O’Sullivan
Retoucher: The Lounge
Creatives: Debs Gerrard, Dave Mygind, Veronica Copestake
Account Service: Pippa Bonifant