Evel Knievel combined content and commerce a full generation before the concept of integrated marketing was born. He was the show—and he knew how to rev the mass media’s engines. In skin-tight star-spangled jumpsuits, riding motorcycles that at times were (supposedly) rocket propelled, he jumped canyons, Greyhound buses and live sharks. He drew huge TV audiences. For jumping bikes over sharks. It was a different era—and this man was one of its most colorful icons. George Hamilton portrayed Knievel in a biopic. Classy! Evel starred as a crime-fighting version of himself in Viva Knievel, one of the goofiest yet most entertaining films ever made. Wanna know his secret? He was genuine: There was always a chance he’d wind up dead. Captain Lance Murdoch on The Simpsons is based on Evel. Evel’s Stunt & Crash Car was a cool toy. There’s one in my parents’ basement, next to the big Godzilla with the missile-firing claw. When I visit for the holidays, I’m jumping that car over the big green dinosaur. This stunt’s for you, EK. The Daredevil died Friday at age 69.
I don’t like the looks of that squirrel. Is it trying to send me a message? There’s also a hungry lion wearing high-tech goggles. Too bad I’m not a “cat person.” It’s a print campaign for DealerTrack, a provider of software used by auto dealerships. At first I wasn’t sure what the animal motif had to do with cars. Then I realized: the squirrel pic does capture how I felt in the showroom when I bought my last Civic. (DealerTrack’s latest magazine has sheep on the cover, too.) The agency behind the effort is called White Rhino. I guess you could say the ad business really is turning into a zoo. I wouldn’t say that, of course. The campaign’s tagline is “Tools for a competitive advantage.” How about an ocelot with a blowtorch next? No really, I need some work done on the bathroom pipes.
Sleater-Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein (shown here) writes in Slate this week about how she was apparently doomed to be a reluctant cog in the hype machine for Rock Band, an ambitious video game that took Guitar Hero to its logical four-player extreme. During a “short stint” of working at Wieden + Kennedy, she was asked to help concept marketing for the game, but the agency didn’t feel her ideas “were putting rock on a pedestal.” (You can see the eventual TV spots over here.) When the game finally came out, the PR team tracked down Brownstein again and gave her a copy to try at home. Her verdict? It’s fun, but wouldn’t it be better if teens spent all that time learning to play real instruments together as a real band? Well, what if you could do both? A friend of mine recently stumbled across the 340-page Guitar Hero Songbook, which would (theoretically) teach you to actually play all the songs you mastered in the game. Personally, I think it’ll mostly just frustrate kids into realizing why the world has so many more video gamers than it has rock stars. And maybe that’s a good thing.
And the crowd goes mild for Scotland, which just spent £125,000 to come up with the new tourism catchphrase ... “Welcome to Scotland.” The Daily Record newspaper moans that “top advertising brains” are responsible for the groundbreaking motto. Said one politician: “It sounds more like a road sign at Berwick than it does a must-do invitation to visit our country.” The Scots had been using the line “The best small country in the world” (take that, Luxembourg). “Welcome to Scotland” did beat out “The home of Europe’s fastest growing life sciences community,” but that’s not saying much. They could have just put up Sean Connery’s picture and saved themselves a lot of brainstorming. Just make sure it’s this picture, not this one.
Agency.com hasn’t had the best experience with posting videos to YouTube. But the Omnicom shop has an interesting one up on the site now, for a good cause. Called “Seed a Dream,” the animated video, narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal, is part of a holiday campaign Agency.com is launching for Trickle Up, a non-profit that helps the poor help themselves through something called micro-lending. The idea is that for $100 you get a charm necklace while helping to fund the launch of entrepreneurial businesses by poor people around the world. More information is available at TrickleUp.org. For those of you who aren’t buying a Lexus for your loved one this year, a Trickle Up necklace might be just the thing. Fist bumps to Agency.com for good work for a good cause.
Martin Scorsese’s newest short film, The Key to Reserva, is an ode to Hitchcock, done with typical Scorsese flair, meaning it’s an aesthetic (if overthought) triumph that’s way longer than it needs to be. But the kicker is that it’s an ad for Freixenet, a Spanish champagne that goes all out for its big Christmas ads. And by “all out,” I mean Gwyneth Paltrow and Melanie Griffith have been in past spots. In addition to the full nine-minute Key, viewers are treated to an interview with Scorsese, who babbles hyperactively about how Hitchcock’s movies resemble dreams and how he wants Hitchcock’s vision and legacy preserved in this ad for champagne that Hitchcock will never drink because he’s dead. Maybe Martin should have put this much effort into, say, Gangs of New York.
Amsterdam agency New Message is putting a damper on the festive holiday spirit with a gruesome DVD-release campaign, decorating area sidewalks with severed arms that clutch copies of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Let’s hope nothing similar is tried in Boston, where ever-vigilant authorities might just shut down the whole city.
The New England Patriots are 11-0, no doubt en route to a rare undefeated NFL season, the first since the Miami Dolphins in 1972. The Pats will surely win their fourth Super Bowl in seven years, cementing their status as a modern sports dynasty. On Sunday afternoons, my apartment building in the Boston suburbs rocks with the televised sounds of the game, cheers from my neighbors and blaring car horns from the street. Frenzied cries echo down Beacon Street: “Pats rule! Pats rule!” Oh, and in related news, the Pittsburgh Steelers have some kind of exhibit up at the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum. The ads, from Garrison Hughes, show deserted male hangout spots and lonely females—it seems all the guys are off at the museum! How are these things related? The Steelers travel east to play the Pats a week from Sunday, after which Steeler fans will feel the same existential despair shown in these commercials! The Steelers are 8-3. Man, they suck.
You’re prepping for a moment of passion with your true love, or bowling the game of your life—and some giant snack-food boxes run in and ruin everything. Don’t you hate when that happens? StrawberryFrog uses such scenarios in TV ads introducing Barilla’s Freelers treats. The amorous couple barely react to the intruders; the bowler leaps into the lane and knocks down the pins with his bald head. (See that spot here.) To me, being of Italian descent, this seemingly odd dichotomy makes sense. La dolce vita, baby! There’s a Freelers MTV contest, too, which invites viewers to film themselves, and here I quote from the press release, “while stopping a friend from taking a break in a funny, original way.” I’m going to dress up in a big cookie box, stalk into my boss’s office and interrupt his lunch. Not as part of the contest, just because I feel like it. Arrivederci!
Bank of America gets some stick from the Chicago Tribune this morning for running a new ad in which it promises “local commitment”—but shows a dated skyline. The photo in the ad shows the IBM building, the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower and the Sun-Times building—even though the latter was demolished a few years ago. Says a BofA rep: “We intend to have an impact on the Chicago banking landscape, but this was not what we had in mind. We’ll fix the ad.” Expect a poignant new song from Ethan Chandler shortly.
Most of adland frets about how rising gas prices and the collapse of the real estate bubble will curb consumer spending during the holiday season. But there is another danger: Rev. Billy’s Church of Stop Shopping. Super Size Me auteur Morgan Spurlock is featuring the Reverend in a new anti-consumerism documentary called What Would Jesus Buy? The billing is priceless: “The movie Santa doesn’t want you to see.” Rev. Billy, not surprisingly, turned up on public radio last week to promote his cause, which is really performance art. “We’re trying to save the holidays from the shopocalypse!” he preached.
Restaurants & Institutions magazine has helpfully compiled their picks for this year’s top 10 best-recalled restaurant commercials, many of which, they point out, “use humor to set the stage for business-building messages.” Among the many zingers you’ll find therein is an ad (shown above) in which a married couple decides that Sonic’s cranberry iced tea is “crantastic,” and a Subway ad in which a girl orders a “badonkadonk butt” from the drive-thru. Pardon me a second while I gather my sides—they seem to have split.
The “slow reveal” viral campaign for Batman prequel-sequel The Dark Knight continues to creep along, with this week’s highlight being the first full photo of Heath Ledger as the Joker. The image was unveiled with the same deliberate pace that has kept die-hard fans salivating for months. (Perhaps too deliberate, as it was actually leaked early, according to Movie Marketing Madness.) While most of the promotion in the campaign has been slim on content, fans were inundated recently with four full pages of exhaustive copy from an issue of The Gotham Times. The newspaper site contains a wealth of potential plot points and virtual Easter eggs, including a “Subscription Info” phone number that tells you how a rash of violent crime has shut down the paper’s print edition. There’s also been a “rash of clown sightings,” which would scare the crap out of me in any city.
Anomaly is the envy of many in the agency world. It does innovative work, dabbles in product design, gets paid for results, and even comes up with neat buzzwords like “branded utility.” What’s more, one of its partners is Johnny Vulkan. What a name! There isn’t a category in Cannes for this yet, but Anomaly might have created the airline safety video of the year (above) for Virgin America. As Experience Curve points out, making the uber-mundane enjoyable is a great way for a brand to deliver on its promise of a great experience.
For GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons, complaining about network prudes who reject his “hilarious” Super Bowl ads has itself become a large part of his annual marketing strategy. This year, he says, he’s only sending storyboards to Fox rather than waste money shooting anything before it’s approved. On his blog, Parsons says he’s submitted several “hilarious concepts” for the 2008 broadcast, only to have them rejected. One featured a sendup of the Larry Craig bathroom incident, with two GoDaddy girls toe-tapping in what they believe are adjacent stalls—only to realize they’re both actually toe-tapping with some old dude in a middle stall. The other resurrected Marilyn Monroe’s famous skirt-billowing scene—the hilarious payoff being an old dude hiding in the grate holding a giant fan. More groundbreaking ideas are surely in the works.
“He picks up a bus and he throws it back down/As he wades through the buildings toward the center of town/Oh no, there goes Tokyo!/Go, go Godzilla, yeah!” When I was 10, I thought that song was cool. OK, I still do. I would stomp around the living room, pretending to be Godzilla. OK, I still do. What I’m getting at is Reactrix Systems has developed a shopping-mall “Crush the Rainbow” video game for Skittles that, according to the press release, “actually brings the consumer into the game by encouraging teens and young adults to act as if they are Godzilla facing a crowded street corner and responsible for crushing different aspects of the scene.” Damn, I was going to act that way at the office holiday party; now I’ll just have to dress like an elf, like I do every other day of the year. Godzilla and Skittles? It’s almost as obvious a combination as Godzilla and Yellow Tail wine.
In the wake of Mr. Whipple’s death, a dirty squabble has erupted over who wrote the line “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin.” A pair of former Benton & Bowles scribes, Norman Schaut and John Chervokas, both claim to have penned the line in the early 1960s, perhaps while on leave from the Project Mercury program. By which I mean: This ain’t rocket science, gentlemen. And since I have no claim to fame whatsoever (beyond some traffic violations and a really nice Arrow shirt I snagged at T.J.’s), I can disparage your so-called claims to pop culture stardom as I see fit. I wrote “I’m lovin’ it,” by the way. Not the tagline, I wrote it once on a postcard during an especially memorable Yellowstone vacation. In related Charmin news (a transition I hope never to use again), Molly Shannon recently reopened 20 “fully-staffed” Charmin-branded public restrooms in New York’s Times Square. Couldn’t she just stay in the first one until she was finished? Fully staffed, huh? Where do I apply?! Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s something stuck to the bottom of my shoe. (Dirty squabble, get it? I know, my bathroom humor stinks.)
This old Motorola ad espousing the benefits of television fits in nicely with the “ultimately futile optimism” theme of this earlier post, doesn’t it? Different era, but similar idea. I certainly don’t recall any point when television (or video games, for that matter) produced well-behaved, smart children and/or stronger family ties. Especially back when this ad was made—the only things on TV in the ’50s were variety shows, Westerns and professional wrestling. But I guess that does explain why people of that generation can execute a spinning toe hold while riding a horse and playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” on the xylophone. —Posted by David Kiefaber
Long before Firebrand launched last night, the all-commercials Web site and TV show had already been debated ad nauseam. I personally don’t buy most of the arguments against Firebrand. (“It’s too much like YouTube,” “No one wants to watch commercials,” etc.) But now that I’ve been watching it for a while, I do have my own bone to pick. First, let me say, it’s hands-down the most elegantly designed and organized ad collection in the world. And yet there’s no way to comment on what you’re watching. This is especially bizarre, since Firebrand’s been championed by conversational-marketing guru Joseph Jaffe. Yes, they give you the code to embed any spot on your own comments-enabled site, and that’s great. But to have so much content in one magnificent space without the ability to weigh in yourself? That’s taking the TV-network model way too far (into the past), and it might be too late if they get around to adding a comment function after the kickoff buzz dies. I continue to have hope for Firebrand, which is still in its beta phase. That said, if they hang on to that horrendous blee-bloo noise between ads, they’ll deserve an especially dingy spot in the dustbin of history.
As if the country needed another point of contention, the debate on whether to say “Merry Christmas” or “Happy holidays” has become an annual December ritual. And where do Americans currently stand on the matter? A Rasmussen Reports poll asked adults which phrase they prefer to see in stores’ seasonal advertising. “Merry Christmas” won easily, with 67 percent of the vote, vs. 26 percent for “Happy holidays.” (Last year, the numbers were 69 percent “Merry Christmas” to 23 percent “Happy holidays.”) No poll results are complete these days without a partisan split, and this survey had one: 88 percent of Republicans favored “Merry Christmas,” vs. 57 percent of Democrats. On another holiday/Christmas topic, Rasmussen found Americans slightly more likely to describe gift shopping as “a fun experience” (43 percent) than “an unpleasant chore” (35 percent). One wonders if the “fun experience” cohort will still feel that way by the time stores close on Christmas Eve.
’Tis the season for luxury car commercials that make the non-rich feel horrible. AdFreak has long chafed at the Lexus “December to Remember” spots, which make viewers feel like it’s normal to give a loved one a luxury car for the holidays as a surprise. But then it turned out people really do. Toyota says 10 percent of the Lexi sold in December are given as gifts. Lexus is not about to give up on a good thing, it seems, as it’s ginned up a new round of commercials showing those infernal red bows wrapped around $70,000 cars. And it’s now courting an even lamer target: the self-giver. A new spot encourages those who only got socks or soap on a rope to buy themselves a Lexus to make up for their doofus relatives. BMW is also getting into the act with its own round of commercials that play up the idea that the perfect gift for your guy or gal is a high-end vehicle—again, making the 99 percent of us who can’t fathom that kind of gift feel like we’re not keeping up. No wonder average Americans don’t find advertising relevant to their lives.
As Apple continues to poke the festering wound that is Microsoft Vista, one of the best spots actually isn’t on TV. The new “Get a Mac” online ad offers a nice twist on multiple banners, which are usually just the same ads in different formats. It also shows Justin Long at his best—which is when he lets John Hodgman do all the talking. UPDATE: In a twist that must have Bill Gates gnawing on his glasses, the Apple banner apparently caused some browsers to crash—but that just seemed to get people to love it even more. Now that’s a company with a powerful brand.
Let’s beam down a sense of humor to New Mexico. The state’s tourism campaign, which we wrote about back in April, and which features drooling reptile-alien office workers, has drawn belated fire for potentially frightening and confusing visitors. “New Mexico has a lot to offer—we don’t need to bring our standards down,” says Ken Mompellier, director of the convention and visitors bureau in Las Cruces, which refuses to use the M&C Saatchi ads to boost local tourism. Ah, Las Cruces. I’ve only imagined the rampaging scorpions and busted air conditioners, but this guy is living the dream. The ads seem apt, especially since former governor Bill Richardson promised to reopen the investigation into the famous 1947 Roswell UFO incident if he’s elected president. But maybe some residents of New Mexico don’t want those files unsealed and the nation’s attention focused on invaders from another world—eh, Mompellier the Galactic Scourge? I mean, Mr. Mompellier?
There are some odd entries in this list of 15 movie trailers that made Entertainment Weeky readers cry. The one for The Green Mile has a pretty dry synopsis of the movie, which wasn’t even sad (minus the part where Tom Hanks has sex with his wife). Similarly, no tears are welling up for The Bucket List, which looks like two hours of Nicholson and Freeman using a movie as an excuse to do crazy old rich guy stuff. And the reader who missed out on Titanic because she “totally did not want to see the movie after having that reaction to just the trailer,” had the same reaction I did, perhaps for different reasons. But the oddest thing about this list is the idea behind it. Can two minutes of melancholy piano and a repetitive voiceover really hit someone that hard? Sure hope no one makes a movie out of this.
