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CP+B site becomes 'giant digital fishing net'
Crispin Porter + Bogusky is the latest agency to revamp its Web site with an eye toward aggregating content and letting others around the Web tell its story. The site, now in beta, collects videos, Tweets, news headlines and blog entries that mention the agency or its work—"the good, the bad, the mildly unnerving," as a large-afro-ed Alex Bogusky says in the video above (which, given all his gesturing about the navigation, makes more sense to view over on the site itself). The effort is less experimental in form than either the Modernista! site or BooneOakley's YouTube channel, but does cede control of the message largely to outside parties, which connotes authenticity these days—particularly with all the Crispin haters out there. It's nice to see @BogusBogusky make an appearance, too. |
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Published on June 30, 2009 | Permalink
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Air New Zealand also does long-form nudity
Last month, we posted the 45-second Air New Zealand spot that shows the carrier's employees naked, with painted-on uniforms, to emphasize that they have "Nothing to hide" (at least in terms of hidden fares). Today, The New York Times points out that the campaign also includes the three-and-a-half-minute on-board safety video above, which likely gets more attention than most presentations of its kind. It's still not clear that being nude improves the flying experience, but Air New Zealand is at least filling the void left by Naked-Air, whose first flight in 2003 was also its last. |
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Published on June 30, 2009 | Permalink
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Hardee's commercials dig even deeper hole
We already wrote about Hardee's new Biscuit Holes ads, where the words "hole" and "balls" get repeated a lot, but missed this particular spot, where people just come out and say "A-hole" over and over. In a taste test, regular donut holes are marked A, and Biscuit Holes are marked B. People side with the B-holes because "the A-hole seems kind of small," "the A-hole is nasty" and "the A-hole tastes funny." The campaign is by Mendelsohn Zien, which also did the Paris, Padma and Audrina burger spots. |
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Published on June 30, 2009 | Permalink
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Don't gut fish, or women, while they're alive
Dutch non-profit Animals Awake takes a page from PETA's playbook in this disturbing spot by getting festish model/Playboy Playmate/sexy vegetarian Ancilla Tilia to strip naked. But then the ad gets, well, Dutch, and the poor girl is gutted like a trout by some dowdy fisherman. The point is to discourage stripping fish while they're still alive. Similar consideration, we're sure, should be given to Ms. Tilia. But as PETA so often does, Animals Awake muddles the message here in the delivery. Gutting a fish, even while it's alive, and killing a human being in a room full of people just aren't the same thing. Animals Awake has a worthy message to relay, but it could do so without all the gimmickry. Via Osocio. |
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Published on June 30, 2009 | Permalink
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Dopey mammoths stump for San Diego Zoo
Two not-so-smart mammoths hit just the right notes in these humorous ads by M&C Saatchi for the San Diego Zoo's "Elephant Odyssey" exhibit, a production "12,000 years in the making." In the spot above, they make the mistake of taking a mud bath in a tar pit, and only one prehistoric pachyderm is left bobbing in the ooze at the end. In the spot below, the wooly wonders get more than they bargained for when they stop to play with a "sabertooth kitty." Tusk tusk tusk, what a shame. |
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Published on June 30, 2009 | Permalink
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Illinois lawyers using Lincoln, Obama in ads
The Illinois State Bar Association is trying to boost the perception of lawyers by carting around a big picture of Abraham Lincoln's face. Mobile ad trucks are arguably the least classy mass medium, better suited for local sandwich shops and the like, so this method essentially equates the bar's membership to baloney on rye. The Honest Abe mosaic, created by ad shop &Wojdyla, is made from images of more than 500 other lawyers from the Prairie State, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. See a larger version of the mosiac here. Reminding people that Obama and Clinton are lawyers probably won't do their images much good. And if the truck gets stuck in traffic behind an ambulance, well, that would be regrettable. |
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Published on June 30, 2009 | Permalink
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Davidoff cigars orgasmic or just plain stinky
"Every man has a D-spot," claim these three print ads for Davidoff cigars. I dunno, this guy here looks more catatonic than orgasmic. It's probably the emphysema. In another ad, Mustache Man seems to have sniffed a scent most foul. The sooty bouquet of a smoldering Davidoff, perhaps? Now, the young guy with the cleft-chin who looks a bit like John Travolta ... OK, yeah, he's feelin' it. I guess sometimes a cigar isn't just a cigar after all. Davidoff cigars probably go well with a Three Olives martini. Via Ads of the World. |
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Published on June 30, 2009 | Permalink
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Murro and Barrett, always on the same page
Director Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks and creative director Jamie Barrett of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, who have worked together a lot, held a seminar in Cannes titled "The Creative Relationship Between Agency And Director." According to the seminar overview, "Noam and Jamie do not profess to know all the secrets of a director/agency relationship. But they can certainly speak of their own experience." Which, judging by the video above, involves a common vision, a healthy creative give-and-take, some awkward and tender moments, and lots of sex. |
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Published on June 29, 2009 | Permalink
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Pringles banner ad worth a few dozen clicksI've long been of the opinion that creating banner ads should be punishable by stoning. But this Pringles ad from Bridge Worldwide in Cincinnati doesn't suck. If nothing else, I appreciate that it isn't flashing horrible circus colors and promising me a free Xbox or a spyware-laden "virus scan." It's also kind of neat that clicking on it repeatedly reveals a little story within the ad, an innovation that earned it a gold Cyber Lion at Cannes last week. According to its Cannes entry materials, the ad "shows a young, online audience how fun, eccentric—and even downright weird—life with Pringles can be." The best part? It doesn't even take you to the Pringles Web site. That's a quality I can appreciate in a banner ad. It does expose, however, that Pringles needs to make a wider can already. —Posted by David Kiefaber |
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Published on June 29, 2009 | Permalink
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Fiat makes green pitch via crash-test panda
I'm kind of surprised this (literally) panda-bashing Fiat ad from Marcel Paris hasn't sparked any significant outrage yet. Quite the opposite: It won a gold Lion at Cannes. If they wanted to demonstrate a truly low impact on the environment, couldn't they have given the panda a helmet or football pads or something? As it is, this is just cruel. And kind of adorable. —Posted by David Kiefaber |
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Published on June 29, 2009 | Permalink
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What are colives, and should you eat them?
The bar for wacky cow ads has been raised foolishly high of late. From Wieden + Kennedy's purified Cravendale cow (certified not racist!) to Draftfcb's talking-teat Oreo temptation, we've feasted on some bloody breakthroughs in bovine. Enter Campbell Mithun's "Colive" commercial above, touting Land O'Lakes Butter with Olive Oil. The setup, showing what happens when you cross a cow with an olive, would seem to present possibilities. A giant green heifer spurting pimento-flavored milk sprang to mind. (Though with me, that often does. Rough childhood, etc.) What we actually get is a cow-colored olive that rolls around a tabletop. It looks like a marble or a rodent dropping, not that appealing. At least they had the good sense to make it moo. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
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Published on June 29, 2009 | Permalink
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Audi does not want your stinking foreign oil
Oh, how I remember those slick Oil Parades of my childhood, when I'd barrel home to gasoline alley. ... OK, that's enough. Let's slam the brakes on the silly wordplay (had to slip in one more) to consider this "Oil Parade" spot from Venables Bell & Partners touting Audi's TDI diesel-powered cars. There are oil barrels, lots of them, shown rolling down the country roads and city streets of our great land, onto a tanker that will apparently transport them back across the sea to where they came from. Yes, we'd be free from the tyranny of foreign oil. Still, I'll be sad to see them go. Drums are the best part of any parade. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
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Published on June 29, 2009 | Permalink
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Iconic TV pitchman Billy Mays is dead at 50He was the man with no inside voice, the man who seemed to be on every late-night cable channel at once, the man who comprehensively convinced us we don't need a cabinet full of cleaners. And now, sadly, infomercial icon Billy Mays is dead. Details were scarce Sunday, though there were apparently no signs of foul play, so that probably rules out the Yakuza gangsters who were stalking Mays in the hilarious self-parody above. It's always been hard to pin down what made Mays so good at selling cleaning products, dubiously necessary inventions and just about anything else. Was it the beard? The wildly gesticulating hands? The tone that straddled the line between evangelism and straight-out screaming? Obviously it was all of the above that catapulted Mays from hawking wares at local garden shows to reality TV stardom on the Discovery Channel's PitchMen. So here's to Billy Mays, a one-man sales juggernaut who, like
fellow commercial legend Ed McMahon, was never afraid to laugh at his own public persona. |
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Published on June 28, 2009 | Permalink
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Meat-child ad wows Wrath of Cannes judges
At Cannes, you win awards by surviving round after round of rigorous judging and proving your unparalleled skill in the persuasive arts. At Wrath of Cannes, you win by inserting a giant piece of steak into an elementary school photo. (Click the image to enlarge.) The anti-Cannes festival was held Thursday night in Brooklyn. The winning work, for Lea & Perrins steak sauce ("Every steak has potential"), was done by Alan Kwon, an associate art director at RTC Relationship Marketing in New York. There he is below, holding (and possibly sucking on) the Grand Coney trophy—a statue of a man with his head up his own ass. He also won a bike. UPDATE: We were misled. Kwon won because of this tearaway print ad for Crunch gyms. The steak ad is still groundbreaking. |
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Published on June 26, 2009 | Permalink
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Scientology will repair your awful rotten lifeLike any crazy cult bent on extracting money from the punters, Scientology needs good marketing, which is why it's rolling out new commercials. The first two are similar, in that they propose replacing rewarding things like mountain climbing with a fake religion cooked up by a mediocre science-fiction writer. The third is a little different, stating that Scientology doesn't judge people by what they look like or where they live. We're all equal in the eyes of Xenu, which is true in that we're all neurotic little cash registers in his/her/its eyes. But at least they didn't use any celebrities to speak for them. They certainly could have. |
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Published on June 26, 2009 | Permalink
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Portland says you really suck at advertising
Portland, Ore., wants you to know that its excellent advertising is far superior to your stupid advertising. And it's decided to take on all comers with a spinning insult wheel. Ant Hill Marketing's promo for the city's ad-awards show, The Rosey Awards, includes the wheel as a handout and part of the Web site. Assuming you're a creative, but not creative enough to come up with your own smack talk, you can spin to get insults directed at New York, Seattle, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Boulder, Colo., and San Francisco, among others. A sample? For Madison, Wis., they've got, "When it comes to advertising in Wisconsin, they make great cheese." Ant Hill also plans to send taunting letters to other cities' ad groups. I presume they'll include at least one thinly veiled jab at your mom. Want to join the game and add to the animosity in the industry? Tweet them, and maybe you'll win the "Smack of the Week." According to Rosey's ambassador Kim Bratner, Portlanders are "tired of being the best-kept secret in the United States." Whiners. I have a dream—a dream that one day we'll be defined not by our city of residence but by the quality of our creative. Except for the people in Denver. Those people are all freaks. |
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Published on June 26, 2009 | Permalink
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What 'hole dreamed up these Hardee's ads?Hardee's takes a seat on the innuendo bus with the campaign for its new Biscuit Holes menu item. In the video above, a guy solicits other names for the product, which they might as well call Groaners, a term that applies to the suggestions they got. "Puffy Nuts"? Really? "Yayholes" sounds like New England slang for out-of-towners. The ad below shows a fornlorn Biscuit Hole wandering aimlessly and asking various objects, "Are you my hole?" It eventually reunites with its fellow Holes and feels happy, which is more than can be said for the viewer. |
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Published on June 26, 2009 | Permalink
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BK kitchen becomes a giant killing machine
Robots and obits are two of my regular beats hear at AdFreak. They go hand in hand, as robots are dedicated to the destruction of mankind. Which brings us none too smoothly to Burger King's tie-in with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. My colleague Rebecca Cullers has noted the "conspiracy" aspects of the campaign and warned us of "a series of worldwide robot sightings." Oh, it's far worse than that, people. As our flesh-and-blood world reels from the loss of the King of Pop, the metallic monsters have found their king: the Burger King! He's been robotized to massive proportions—transformed, if you will, into a digitized death-dealing demon! Someone would probably die if a giant King smashed through a BK like he does in the spot above. There’s be chaos and confusion, at any rate. And then my chance of getting no pickles, already abysmally low, would decline even more. Robots. They'll spoil your meal every time. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
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Published on June 26, 2009 | Permalink
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R.I.P. Michael Jackson, adland's king of pop
It seems fitting, ironic and ultimately tragic that Michael Jackson's best-known ad moment involved a freak accident. In 1984, at the height of his mega-fame in the wake of Thriller, Jacko's hair caught on fire while he was filming a Pepsi commercial for BBDO. Even in the pre-Internet age, and though he wasn't that badly hurt, the story was everywhere, all the time, for months. It became a media obsession. (It eventually inspired the title of Phil Dusenberry's book.) Such was MJ's blessing and curse. For a time, his celebrity rivaled that of Sinatra, Elvis or the Beatles. Far lesser celebrities have had their psyches crushed by the intensity and demand of the unclosing public eye. The biggest star of his generation, Michael Jackson cracked up in direct proportion to his fame. Cast as a god, the man embraced the role, seeking to remake himself in a pale, childlike image only he could understand. The endless cosmetic surgeries, the reclusive years at the Neverland Ranch and the bizarre pronouncements and behaviors are the stuff of legend. Of course, being reborn was something he could never achieve in life. The mighty, moon-walking King of Pop, largely a media construct himself, lost sight of the fact that we're simply not our own creations. Perhaps by now, an ever greater power has reminded him of that. Michael Jackson died on Thursday in Los Angeles at age 50. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
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Published on June 25, 2009 | Permalink
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Farrah Fawcett, always an advertising angel
Farrah Fawcett's ad history is rich and varied. She lathered up Joe Namath for Noxema, romped on the beach with a pooch for her own line of Faberge shampoos (above), and kept her famous smile fresh with Ultra-Brite. She was once married to Lee Majors, the Six-Million Dollar Man. It was a '70s Brangelina-type union that fueled tabloid headlines when many of the tabloids were still new. She gave several solid, serious acting performances, notably in The Burning Bed and Extremities. Of course, that swimsuit poster was her greatest claim to fame: In the Bicentennial year, its sales, reportedly 12 million, probably rivaled those of Old Glory. Farrah Fawcett died on Thursday at 62. She got her wings too soon. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
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Published on June 25, 2009 | Permalink
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Robots spotted promoting movie worldwide
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has unleashed a conspiracy campaign through a series of worldwide robot sightings. A bot jumps off a soccer stadium in Rome. A scooter transforms in the U.K. (above). Another climbs a water tower in Barcelona. There's are also sightings in Tokyo, Germany, France and the U.S. Paramount must have studied a lot of YouTube clips, because they're all convincingly boring until the CGI comes in. To track and find more clips, visit these companion blogs: The Real Effing Deal and Giant Effing Robots. I'm lovin' these sites, right down to the fabulous fake comments and the Real Effing Kitten Calendars that you can't purchase. I have to say, they clearly put more work into writing the blogs then they did writing the script, wherein the Decepticons are out to steal the sun. But if you don't like boring things like reading, don't despair: You can transform yourself into an autobot over at WeAreAutobots.com, where augmented reality software will install the face of Optimus Prime right over yours. Check out the sample vid from creators at PPC Interactive. It gets you pumped to be primed. I sure hope the movie isn't a letdown. —Posted by Rebecca Cullers |
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Published on June 25, 2009 | Permalink
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Appalachian Trail last refuge of a scoundrel
It's not uncommon for a brand to find itself tied into a scandal in the role of innocent bystander. The Appalachian Trail is a current case in point. Since yesterday, the news has been full of the fact that South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford was not hiking the trail (as he had claimed he'd be doing) but instead straying from the straight and narrow—all the way to Argentina and his extramarital lover. Under the circumstances, it seems inevitable that "I'm going off to hike the Appalachian Trail" will become a popular euphemism for "I'm having an affair with someone in Buenos Aires." Then again, if this is a misfortune for the image of the trail, it might help promote tourism to Argentina. —Posted by Mark Dolliver |
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Published on June 25, 2009 | Permalink
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Nokia video recreates classic album covers
This Nokia video by London-based enterThe7thChamber is impossible not to like. It portrays a stupid but amusing conversation between classic album covers via the speaking-in-song-titles routine popularized a few years back on Whose Line Is It Anyway. Blondie and Mariah Carey are disturbingly masculine; Ringo's in character as the lovable scene-stealer (I'm not so sure that isn't the real Mr. Starkey, in fact); the Rolling Stones crotch shot is good stuffing—er, good stuff; and Jim Morrison, fittingly enough, appears at "The End." It's designed to drive traffic to a "Playlist" competition promoting the Nokia 5800 ExpressMusic Phone. This ad makes me feel so old. Are any of these acts still popular anywhere other than Rock Band or Guitar Hero? Sigh. I'm reeling in the years. |
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Published on June 25, 2009 | Permalink
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Goodby opposed to this plumping business
Foster Farms' Say No to Plumping Web site, designed by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, sounds like some kind of gross anti-porn thing, but thankfully it isn't. It is pretty gross, though. "Plumping" refers to injecting chickens with seawater to increase their weight, which also increases the sodium content. And as the site's talkative chickens point out, high-sodium diets contribute to heart problems, and plumping adds to the price of store-bought chicken. Foster Farms, needless to say, opposes this. While they don't say how much of that seawater cooks out, it's still nice of them to illuminate the practice in the first place. I certainly didn't know about it. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is how cavalier those chickens are about being killed for food. In fact, "Martha" starts off with a sort of funereal glee about the price her processed corpse would fetch once plumped. So, not only does Foster Farms provide all-natural chicken, their stock has accepted the inevitability of death. Now that's heavy. —Posted by David Kiefaber |
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Published on June 25, 2009 | Permalink
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DDB offers glimpse of Brazil's other wild life
Good lord, they've created humanimals in Brazil! And these beast-people with razor-sharp claws and vicious fangs all drive sub-compact cars! Did we learn nothing from The Island of Dr. Moreau? We certainly didn't from last remake with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, because nobody bothered to watch it. Brando and Kilmer—what were they thinking? Seriously, these DDB Brazil ads for Zoo Safari are, in a word, seamless. The central images are simple yet striking and perfectly in sync with the "Blend in" theme. I just hope those park visitors aren't driving Chevy Impalas. That would make them stand out that much more as prey. Via Ads of the World. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
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Published on June 25, 2009 | Permalink
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