AdFreak: Leo Burnett

Raisin Bran Crunch turns alien's life around

A chatty British alien explains how his life is so much better now that he's eating right—more Raisin Bran Crunch, less human meat and cerebral fluid—in this amusing three-minute video from Leo Burnett in Chicago. The creature looks a lot like one of the H.R. Giger creations from the Alien movie series. He even has the smaller inner set of jaws, which turn out to be perfect for eating spoonfuls of the cereal.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on December 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Cereal, Food and drink, Kellogg, Leo Burnett, Nudd

Burnett moved to poetry in McDonald's spot

Leo Burnett in London classes up McDonald's in this poetic U.K. spot about the types of people who pass by (or rather, through) the Golden Arches on a typical day. By focusing on the patrons, and not on the food, the ad does a nice job of presenting McDonald's as something slightly more than a boring, omnipresent fast-food chain serving unidentifiable meat to people in a hurry. The highbrow poetry is also balanced out by the lowbrow, unpretentious claim that McDonald's is literally for anyone and everyone. The rhyme scheme is unforced and smooth, too, which couldn't have been that easy to do. I wish they'd export this kind of stuff to the U.S., where all we've been getting is that faux-hipster McCafe crap.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Previously on AdFreak:
Caucasian idiot hypes McDonald's in Japan
Evil children can't wait to get to McDonald's

Published on October 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Europe, Food and drink, Leo Burnett, McDonald's, Nudd

Burnett plays its trump card in housing PSA

We missed this powerful "House of Cards" PSA when it broke in February, so here it is now. Leo Burnett in London created the spot for housing charity Shelter.org.uk. It features the Radiohead song "Videotape" and actress Samantha Morton doing the voiceover. As part of the campaign, Shelter also commissioned 53 artists, including Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, David Bailey and Vivienne Westwood, to design one card each for a special deck. Only 1,000 decks were made. They're going for £70 on the Web site, while they last, with proceeds benefiting the charity. Via idsgn.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on October 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Arts, Europe, Housing, Leo Burnett, Nudd, PSAs

Subaru protects you from gimpy hitchhikers

Channeling The Hitcher (the good version from the '80s), this Australian spot by Leo Burnett for the Subaru Liberty GT is more setup than payoff, but it still offers some good dark-night, deserted-road, that-limping-hitchhiker-is-a-maniac fun. I never saw the punch line coming. That's not to say there's an OMG/WTF twist. There are no motorcyclists dropping from the skies. (That only happens in Norway.) Here, we get an effective denouement in keeping with the tone of the ad: The scary drifter gets spooked and won't climb in the car. Did I spoil the ad for you? That's OK. Imagine what will happen to the non-Subaru driver who stops to pick the guy up. Like the tagline says: "Not for the faint of heart."

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Published on September 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Australia, Automotive, Gianatasio, Leo Burnett, Subaru

Zombie milkmen gotta have their Corn Pops

Earlier this year, Kellogg's Corn Pops served up a triple-bypass of ads from Leo Burnett that defied the old-school notion that elements within a campaign should somehow be related. We got a full-scale, costumed high-school musical, a Japanese monster-movie riff, and the rainbow dreams of a Komodo dragon. The ads had me confused but paying attention. Now, with the beautiful stop-motion spoof-horror masterpiece above, titled "The Spooning," I finally understand: Singing zombie milkmen are the true horsemen of the apocalypse. I also understand that Corn Pops is trying to circumvent short attention spans by not repeating themselves. Instead of taking the easy out with outright non sequiturs, they're trying to tell stories that are ostensibly about the need to have one's Pops. A different cut of "The Spooning," with full Pop nudity, and an educational video spoof called "Harvest" can be seen in the video section of the Waveplant Studios site (they did the music).

—Posted by Rebecca Cullers

Published on August 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Cereal, Cullers, Kellogg, Leo Burnett

Ozzy phones it in again in new Samsung ad

Ozzy Osbourne. A chimpanzee. Which one never evolved? That question popped into my head as I watched the chimp invite the corpselike Ozzy to join his band in this commercial for Samsung's Solstice phone. If you thought Leo Burnett's earlier Samsung spots with Ozzy were soul-crushing, check out this iteration. Does Ozzy mumble incoherently? Are his "expletives" bleeped out? Do he and the chimp make goofy faces? Lord have mercy, it's all in there! Come to think of it, since every word Ozzy says is impossible to understand, his profanity would also be incomprehensible. Why bleep him at all? Eons ago, when Ozzy was a heavy-metal god, some folks worried that his music would rot people's brains. His music won't, but this campaign will! And hey, wasn't there a movement to ban the use of great apes in commercials? Can we add Ozzy to the list of creatures that should never be used in ads again?

—Posted by David Gianatasio

See also:
Ozzy Osbourne still somehow gets ad work
No more chimps and gorillas in advertising?

Published on August 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under Celebrity endorsements, Gianatasio, Leo Burnett, Samsung, Telecom

Leo Burnett distances itself from Buick ads

In the ad industry, there's no shortage of desire to mock the misfortune of agencies like Leo Burnett, which is reportedly being criticized by GM's top marketing executives for the lame new Buick campaign shown above. But AutoBlog makes a compelling case for the agency, which it says is being pilloried for ads actually created by a subcontractor that Burnett was forced to work with: "Mark LaNeve, GM's head of marketing, allegedly instructed Burnett to hire Gary Topolewski, a former creative director at Burnett who worked with LaNeve on Cadillac's Break Through ad campaign, and who now runs another ad agency." So who's in the wrong here? My money's on Buick VP Susan Docherty, mainly just because she apparently thinks the campaign is good.

—Posted by David Griner

Published on July 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5)
Filed under GM, Griner, Leo Burnett

Tampax perfect for guys who have girl parts

Is Tampax marketing to guys now? If not, there isn't much point to this bizarre 12-minute ad from Leo Burnett in which a boy wakes up with "girl parts ... down there." Don't get us wrong, periods are nothing to be ashamed of, and guys should be understanding about that time of the month. But those are messages that can be conveyed in under a minute, aren't they? This video has its moments, and it's nice to see P&G trying interesting stuff, but it feels more like the pitch for a bad sitcom than an ad designed to sell stuff. That said, we'd still like to see the reverse, where a girl wakes up with guy parts and quickly learns to fear tetherball.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Published on June 19, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7)
Filed under Kiefaber, Leo Burnett, Personal care, Tampax

Weaning them off the fabric softener is hard

"Do you need to go pee-pee? If you have to go potties, let Mummy know." That line, and others like it, are spoken by a caring mum and directed at a grown-up slacker type who apparently still lives at home in this Fairy Fabric Softener campaign from the U.K. (See all three ads here, by Leo Burnett and Partners Film director Aleysa Young.) The guy makes sour faces at being treated like a kid, but appears to be in no hurry to move out. The message is: "You can only baby them when they're babies. Soften their world while you still can." The humor is nicely low-key. I'm not sure what the work says about the brand, but I'm not going to get all pissy about it.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Published on June 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Europe, Fairy, Gianatasio, Leo Burnett

Attract weird strangers with Gain detergent

"It smells that good" is the tagline on these Canadian print ads from Leo Burnett Toronto for Gain detergent, showing strangers getting awfully close to people who are wearing Gain-laundered clothes. Basic problem: Public sniffing is only enjoyable for the sniffer. It's usually an invasion of privacy for the sniffee. What's worse, the airport, art gallery and subway stations in these ads are so sanitized, lonely and overly bright, it creates a kind of horror-film effect, like the calm right before the crazed slasher claims another victim. This impression is particularly strong in the subway ad. If someone gets that close to you on a train platform, you know you're in for a mugging, some lovin' or a trip headlong into the 6:05 express. Besides, how effective can the ads be if readers have to squint—and perhaps look twice—to get the message?

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Published on June 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4)
Filed under Canada, Gianatasio, Leo Burnett

Leo Burnett sees opportunity in every crisis

If you're sick of reading about crises, whether of this economic or pirate variety, help has arrived. Leo Burnett Lisbon has created a Firefox browser plug-in that will swap out the word "crisis" on sites you visit with "opportunity." (The word gets highlighted in a sickly green.) It works in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The idea is to remind people to see the positives in the drumbeat of bad tidings. It's a neat trick and useful reminder, although I'm not willing to go as far as the agency's executive creative director, Chacho Puebla, in preaching its world-changing possibilities. "Thousands of words were considered, studied, and analyzed, but none of them sounded better than 'opportunity.' Both words are feminine, and between them there is a known relation in the Chinese alphabet where the last ideograms of the word 'crisis' are the first ones of the word 'opportunity.' This, without a doubt, reflects the reason why we want to make this hateful word disappear. We want people to start seeing things from a different point of view. We want to help make the world a better place, and that is an opportunity for sure."

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

Published on April 16, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under Leo Burnett, Morrissey

Terrify the children into respecting the road

There's something really creepy and awesome about these "Tales of the Road" animated rhyming PSAs from Leo Burnett London, encouraging kids in the U.K. to be safe near roadways. They have a great Edward Gorey/Gashlycrumb Tinies feel to them. The top one tells the sad tale of "The Boy Who Didn't Stop, Look and Listen." The bottom one bemoans the fate of "The Girl Who Didn't Dress Bright in the Dark." The actual inspiration for the campaign was evidently the Edwardian poet Hilaire Belloc, whose "Cautionary Tales" attempted to frighten young children into doing the right thing. (They included such timeless classics as "Matilda, Who told lies, and was burned to death" and "Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion.") We can barely wait for the third spot in the series: "The Boy Who Didn't Find a Safe Place to Cross."

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on January 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Filed under Europe, Freaky, Leo Burnett, Nudd, PSAs, Road safety

Giving to a food bank is always fashionable

Leo Burnett did this decent pro-bono campaign for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, featuring photos of models lounging around sensuously with various grub. The theme is, "Food shouldn't feel like a luxury." The TV commercial below is perfectly ludicrous, and refreshingly comical for the PSA sector. It's easy to donate to the food bank as well: Just text MEALS to 90999 to give $5. The ads are running on CTA trains and buses and other outdoor spaces through New Year's Eve.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on December 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Filed under Leo Burnett, Nudd, PSAs

Ozzy Osbourne still somehow gets ad work

Ozzy Osbourne turns up in this new Samsung Propel campaign from Leo Burnett, and what a surprise: the big joke is that no one can understand him because he mumbles. It's like a flashback to 2002, when his reality show was popular—but then Ozzy probably has flashbacks that go back a lot further than that. So, he uses the phone's multicolored text messaging to make himself understood. It's tough to buy Ozzy texting. Even if his hands stopped shaking long enough, you know his spelling would be atrocious. Most important, the Oz Man is one of those pop-culture figures who doesn't need to speak a word, via digital technology or otherwise. There's no looking away when he's on screen, regardless of the anemic material, so I guess these spots succeed in spite of themselves. Here's Ozzy with Black Sabbath live on U.S. TV back in 1975, when he really had something to say.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Published on November 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Gianatasio, Leo Burnett, Samsung, Telecom

The arts, now part of a nutritious breakfast

Holy crap! Not only is Johannes Brahms the best Kool-Aid man ever, but his breakfast cereal makes you grow a beard. Who wouldn't fund the arts after seeing a commercial like this? The spot is part of an Ad Council campaign by Leo Burnett for Americans for the Arts. Another commercial, this one featuring Van Gogh, tries a little too hard with the Van Goghgurt pun, but the kid's reaction to the painting makes it work. It's odd that they chose a fruit loop like Van Gogh to push art on middle America, but he's still a more wholesome choice than someone like Caravaggio.