Campbell-Ewald goes all Modernista! online
It seems like ages ago, but it was only 18 months ago that Modernista! debuted its "un-site," which just framed agency information from places around the Web like Wikipedia and Facebook. The site was clever, and smart enough that Agency.com paid homage to it with its controversial Skittles site. And now, another homage: Campbell-Ewald has revamped its site to offer a similar experience. It frames Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr to show off the agency. It's really not a bad approach to an agency site, despite the fact that Modernista! got there first. After all, the agency world is still filled with dreadful Flash-heavy sites that are seemingly designed to frustrate visitors into leaving. —Posted by Brian Morrissey See also: |
|
Published on September 10, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (4)
|
Re-ignition spot is no giant leap for Cadillac
Modernista! blasts off in this Cadillac commercial called "Re-Ignition" to launch some new cars, including the CTS Coupe, which is available next summer. The cinematic spot is extremely well executed. The problem, at least for me, is a conceptual disconnect. Caddy is touting sleek, high-tech vehicles, so why use 1960s Apollo-era concepts in its ad pitch? Heck, the ad's even a month late in capitalizing on the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. The morphing cars mimic the stages of a rocket blasting into space; but I doubt most folks, even from my generation, will remember that. And if they do, it will make them feel old, or maybe wistful at best, but probably not like buying a new car. The space program was hip in the Mad Men era, and for pop-culture and marketing purposes, became obsolete shortly after it was used to sell Tang. Sigh, I'm old, gray and ancient. Like moon rocks. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
|
Published on September 1, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Call the Palm Pre Girl crazy at your own risk
Life is obviously quite difficult for the woman in Modernista!'s new Palm Pre commercials. As she explains in her (unofficial) Twitter feed, she's trapped on a rock and worshipped daily by a dancing orange cult. And in her newest commercial, above, she admits that when she does venture out in public, people seem to think she's crazy. Let's see if they're so brazen in their mockery when her kung-fu army shows up to spirit her back to the land of surreal beauty and plain garments. |
|
Published on July 29, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
New Palm Pre ads: Eerie, excellent or both?Here's the new installment of Modernista!'s surreal ads for the Palm Pre smartphone. This time, they've gone pretty minimalist, especially considering the debut spot featured 1,000 choreographed dancers. But the new spots, "Deja Vu" featured above and "Go With the Flow", also give you a chance to appreciate the campaign's ethereal beauty, which is easy to overlook in the epic launch spot. That said, what I consider the "ethereal beauty" of both the production and actress Tamara Hope, most online viewers seem to consider "SO CREEPY." |
|
Published on July 20, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (14)
|
Hairy, naked copywriter finds work
Back in April, AdFreak asked, "Who wants the hairy, naked copywriter?" Most of us hoped we'd never learn the answer. Now, Boston-based Modernista! reports employing Lawson Clarke on a freelance basis. Not content with his initial 15 minutes of fame some years back as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy's first makeover contestant, Clarke on his portfolio site recreated Burt Reynolds' hideously hirsute 1972 Cosmo centerfold shot. Clarke hid his private parts behind a portable TV, giving new meaning to the term "vertical hold." He claims he did it to get noticed after being laid off by Arnold. For all we really know, the agency booted the scribe for staging the photo session in its studio during his lunch break. Regardless, Clarke's busy working on the Palm Pre business at Modernista! and, scamp that he is, probably giving the shop's lucky staff a whole new perspective on just how casual Fridays can be. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
|
Published on July 10, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (4)
|
Modernista! auctions dozen beer-ad scripts
With the Palm Pre spots long finished and Hummer not exactly doing a ton of ads these days, Modernista! has some time for self-promotions. The agency spent this week auctioning off a 12-pack of beer-commercial scripts on eBay. After 11 bids, the package sold for $45. That's pretty damn cheap. You have to pay a lot more than that for just one Crispin Porter + Bogusky intern (and they would probably bring their own beer to the office!). The eBay thing is a bit tired, too. Talk about Web 1.0. Why can't Modernista! do something clever to generate buzz, like launch a Web site that illustrates social-media transparency by sending users to Google, Wikipedia and other resources for agency info? |
|
Published on July 2, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Modernista! choreographs grand Palm spot
Here's the first spot from Boston's Modernista! for the new Palm Pre phone. According to USA Today, the ad "features 1,000 dancers directed by three choreographers, including Sun Yupeng, who helped create the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony." The commercial, which takes places in an expansive field, shows the dancers forming circles around actress Tamara Hope, who sits on a rock and operates the new phone. The voiceover says something about bringing everyone closer together. It was probably a good idea for the agency to try some Chinese imagery now that its showpiece client, GM's Hummer, is being acquired by a Chinese company. Still, this ad looks like it was extremely expensive to create. You could probably whip up something pretty similar with a graphics program on an iPhone. Don't they have an app for that? |
|
Published on June 5, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (7)
|
Ads take a closer look at sneezing, laughing
These two new spots were made a long way from each other, but still seem separated at birth. The ad above, created by Jamshop for the South Australian Department of Health, promotes flu shots—by showing super-slow-motion footage of people sneezing. The ad below, created by Modernista! for the Dutch version of Comedy Central, hypes the channel's laugh-out-loud humor—by showing super-slow-motion footage of people laughing, with many of them spewing water all over the place. In a head-to-head battle, the Australian ad would probably win due to its sheer disgustingness. Modernista!'s only hope would be to reshoot and try to get people to laugh even harder until they shot milk out of their nose. |
|
Published on April 21, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Fallon tries to improve on Modernista!'s site
Fallon wants to get its mojo back as an innovative shop steeped in the latest and greatest interactive. After all, it's been eight years since BMW Films debuted. The Minneapolis agency was inspired by Modernista!'s fresh take on the agency Web site when it decided to recast its own site, according to Chris Wiggins, creative director at Fallon. "There was something there," he said. "I thought there were a lot of ways that it could be improved." The Fallon twist: It created a "lifestreaming" tool it calls Skimmer to aggregate Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social tools. It's an Adobe AIR desktop application that visitors can download and try out. (The site's actually been up and down all morning, making it hard to download. Goes to show how the digital stuff is tough to execute.) Fallon's 175 employees are using Skimmer and showing the world their innermost thoughts, photos, videos and pokes in this new "We are Fallon" section. Give it a whirl, and see if Fallon has raised the bar for rethinking the agency site. |
|
Published on March 24, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (28)
|
Agency.com redeemed by its Skittles work?
Skittles took over Twitter yesterday. Discussion of Agency.com's extreme social makeover of Skittles.com swamped the service, with people posting profane messages to get on the brand's site and various social-media gurus, ninjas and black belts offering chin-stroking analysis of the effort. Is the site the breakthrough humankind has waited for? The stock market sadly didn't think so. Whether the stunt has any legs remains to be seen. In any case, when was the last time a consumer packaged-goods Web site got so much buzz? At some point, you have to hand it to the folks at Agency.com for having the guts to sell this idea through to Mars. The question, though, is whether this finally exorcises the ghosts of the infamous Subway pitch video, or if it just adds another black mark to Agency.com because it took an idea from Modernista! Vote below. Photo: Special on Flickr. —Posted by Brian Morrissey |
|
Published on March 3, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (24)
|
Agency.com pulls a Modernista! for Skittles
In the offline ad world, creatives are always quick to cry "rip-off." Pretty much everything strikes me as derivative of the Bible and Beowulf, but protecting the originality of "the idea" is hard-wired into ad culture. Does that translate into online? Agency.com has built a new site for Skittles that is pretty much a carbon copy of Modernista!'s much-lauded "un-site," which of course some claim is a rip-off of an earlier Zeus Jones site. The Skittles site is an interesting case study for a consumer goods company. Let's face it: Why would anyone go to a packaged-goods Web site? But nowadays, in social media, people are talking about all sorts of stuff. Agency.com gets that with a "chatter" link that pulls up the results of a "skittles" search on Twitter. It could be on to something. Does it really matter if Modernista or Zeus Jones got there first? —Posted by Brian Morrissey |
|
Published on February 27, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (31)
|
Downturn not kind to Modernista!'s anti-site
Of all the new agency Web sites out there, Modernista!'s probably created the most buzz when it was introduced last March. It acts as an anti-site, using the greater Internet to point visitors to info about the shop. Of course, nowadays, not all the info out there is pleasant. This week, an eagle-eyed AdFreak reader visited the site and clicked on the news. This generates search results about Modernista! from Google News. The first headline: "Modernista lays off two dozen." Ouch. There's a school of thought that says situations like this just show how companies need to maintain some control of their image. But there's another that says it's just keeping it real. Layoffs are just part of the territory nowadays, and probably not even something a company should be particularly ashamed of. |
|
Published on February 13, 2009 | Permalink
| Comments (2)
|
Wipe your backside with Mr. Alec Baldwin
Modernista! is rolling out (ha ha!) a toilet-paper-based promo for 30 Rock in The Netherlands, where it airs on Comedy Central. I dunno. I'm holding out for Tina Fey. —Posted by David Gianatasio |
|
Published on November 14, 2008 | Permalink
| Comments (10)
|
What is Zeus Jones doing with its new site?
Modernista! took the cake for reinventing the agency Web site, normally a drab and frustrating affair, by creating a meta-site. It was even cited as evidence of the shop's awesomeness in a recent fawning profile. Some, however, claimed Modernista! ripped the idea off from Minneapolis shop Zeus Jones. (Lance Jensen, avid AdFreak commenter, said that isn't true.) Well, Zeus Jones is back with a new site of its own. It takes a feed approach, aggregating employee feeds from Twitter, FriendFeed, del.icio.us, Vimeo, SlideShare and other social services. The site is comprised nearly entirely of widgets, in keeping with the Zeus Jones take of "marketing as a service." Users can even copy the widgets to their own sites, and use them to pull in the Web activities of their friends. The side panel features a scrolling feed from the shop's blog, From the Head of Zeus Jones. Check it out and let us know what you think. —Posted by Brian Morrissey |
|
Published on August 27, 2008 | Permalink
| Comments (3)
|
At gun shows, the terrorists always win
Modernista!'s new Stop Handgun Violence billboard throws a spotlight on the legal loophole that permits the sale of firearms at gun shows without IDs or criminal background checks. The ad's message is clear: "We sell guns! No ID required. No background checks. Criminals and terrorists welcome!" (See a larger image here.) The billboard, on the Mass Pike near Boston's Fenway Park, is huge—the nation's largest, supposedly, so none is likely to miss the point. Great. Now, all the criminals and terrorists will know where to go for guns. And, as shocking as it might sound, I've got enemies. Harry and Louise, for example—and they're gun nuts. Or was that Thelma and Louise? Plus, SHV's last big billboard brought out lots of vitriol here on AdFreak. Thanks a lot, Modernista. (I left the exclamation point off on purpose. I'm just not feeling it, OK?) —Posted by David Gianatasio |
|
Published on August 19, 2008 | Permalink
| Comments (4)
|
