Harley breaks cage in first crowdsourced ad

This should get picked over a bit more than your regular TV commercial. Harley-Davidson today breaks its first crowdsourced advertising since linking up with Victors & Spoils. The minute-long spot below, titled "No Cages," illustrates the customization options for Harley motorcycles by showing people who don't own Harleys moving around in cages in their everyday life. Whit Hiler, a Lexington, Ky., guy who owns an online T-shirt shop, hatched the idea. I have to say, I didn't know Harley had a NikeID-type bike builder. One quibble is that the commercial jarringly splices in the product info at the end. The real question is what this spot cost Harley. It's safe to assume it was a fraction of what it would have had to pay its former ad agency, Carmichael Lynch. Harley CMO Mark-Hans Richer is saying the spot "validates" its foray into crowdsourcing. What do you think?

Filed under Automotive, Crowdsourcing, Harley-Davidson, Morrissey, Victors & Spoils
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Y&R's ad awards now selling at flea markets

The ad industry's seemingly irrational obsession with creative awards has a rational basis: It can mean big bucks for the lucky winners. Now, it turns out some spare change can get you an award, at least if you head to Toronto's St. Lawrence flea market. Sean Ganann, creative director at Zulu Alpha Kilo, noticed this weekend that someone from Y&R Toronto decided to offload a passel of awards from the New York Festivals, Mobius and Clios. It's pretty funny to see these sought-after awards for sale next to model cars and used books. Then again, it's not as if Y&R was clearing out One Show pencils or Cannes Lions. Maybe those go for the big bucks on eBay. Second photo after the jump. UPDATE: Wait until the Brazilians get wind of this. No need to go to the trouble of making a scam ad. Just scrape together $5.

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Filed under Award shows, Canada, Morrissey, Y&R
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Will Crispin survive Tibet-gate at Groupon?

Groupon has wended its way through several of the stages of Kübler-Ross grieving process, finally arriving at acceptance that its Tibet ad just isn't going to fly. The company said yesterday that it would pull the ad, along with the others mocking celebrity-cause campaigns, in response to the overwhelmingly negative reaction after the Tibet spot aired during the Super Bowl. The move is a blow to the startup, which has been on a remarkable hot streak, and calls into question whether Crispin Porter + Bogusky will be next to get the boot. Groupon CEO Andrew Mason was involved in crafting the ads, I was told, and made an interesting statement regarding CP+B in his blog post about the company pulling the spots. "The execution was off," he wrote. He also made clear that Groupon employed "a professional ad agency." It's hard to see how this relationship gets repaired. There's equal responsibility here. Groupon went with CP+B because of its provocative campaigns. It's sowed seeds of controversy plenty of times previously, ranging from Orville Deadenbacher to Whopper Virgins. This was Groupon's first big ad campaign, so it's safe to assume it learned a valuable lesson. I'm told the company doesn't blame CP+B for the fiasco, but at the same time it's still figuring out whether they'll continue working together after what was, to be kind, a rough start.

Filed under Controversy, Crispin Porter, Groupon, Morrissey
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Egyptians actually want Kenneth Cole shoes

Finally. The philosopher/shoe salesman Kenneth Cole has weighed in on the Egypt uprising. The Great Man finds an angle nobody else thought of when he cheekily interprets the Cairo "uproar" as a clamoring for Kenneth Cole's Spring Collection, which features such revolutionary garb as the 2011 Sundance Film Festival vest. Funny stuff! Cole was already a walking case study of why megalomaniac CEOs shouldn't moonlight as ad copywriters. He's now becoming the poster boy for why you should keep those same characters off Twitter. Needless to say, his banter isn't going over so hot with the tweeting masses. The whole fiasco has already spawned a mocking Twitter account, @kennethcolePR. UPDATE: Cole has removed the tweet and offers this apology on Facebook: "I apologize to everyone who was offended by my insensitive tweet about the situation in Egypt. I've dedicated my life to raising awareness about serious social issues, and in hindsight my attempt at humor regarding a nation liberating themselves against oppression was poorly timed and absolutely inappropriate." The first reply to his apology sets the tone for most of the others: "You are an asshole! No excuses."

Filed under Footwear, Kenneth Cole, Morrissey
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Darth Vader set to lord over Super Bowl ads

In the old days, advertisers guarded their Super Bowl ads like state secrets. Nowadays, many want pre-game Internet buzz to stretch their big investment. Forecasts are dangerous, but it looks like Volkswagen has a hit on its hands with "The Force." The minute-long Deutsch/LA spot shows a child in a Darth Vader costume trying to use the Force to command objects around the house, from an implacable washing machine to a bored family dog. With "The Imperial March" playing, he eventually is able to use the Force on his dad's 2012 Volkswagen Passat, thanks to Pop using the remote car-start from the kitchen. It's pretty good. Guys will like it because it involves Star Wars, and it should get a 75 percent "Awww" reaction from the ladies. Thoughts?

Filed under Automotive, Deutsch, Morrissey, Star Wars, Super Bowl, Volkswagen
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Would Times Square be better without ads?

Filmmaker and corporate provocateur Morgan Spurlock has teamed with The Barbarian Group in an effort to crowdsource away the ads in New York's Times Square. The inspiration for this was São Paolo's decision to ban outdoor advertising as a blight to the environment. The Barbarians shot a panoramic photo of Times Square, replete with all the garish billboards. The site invites visitors to use online-editing tool Aviary to erase the ads. The idea is through collaborative work we can rid Times Square, at least virtually, of the taint of capitalist excess. There is, of course, a certain irony in the fact that The Barbarian Group works in the ad industry. That's par for the course, because Spurlock is paying for his new documentary about the evils of product placement through, yes, product placement. It will be interesting to see the response this gets. The project is billed as a way for the entire Internet to wipe Times Square clean of corporate graffiti. One potential problem is that most people without a design background would be pretty clueless when dumped into Aviary. But then, these kinds of collaborative efforts really only need a few dedicated souls, with the majority acting as spectators. The bigger question is whether an ad-free Times Square would be a better Times Square. Yes, as a New Yorker, I avoid the place like the plague. But tourists flock to Times Square in part because of the advertising hoopla. I don't know how many times I've nearly plowed into a group of tourists staring up at the huge video billboards. Like it or not, advertising is an inextricable part of the fabric of modern life. A Times Square without advertising might even be a little boring.

Filed under Barbarian Group, Morrissey
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Enjoy Twitter ad links without all the Twitter

A common and persuasive argument against Twitter is: "Who has the time?" It's true that Twitter can be a rabbit hole that sucks up big chunks of a day. On the other hand, Twitter is a gold mine for links to useful information. McKinney's Nick Jones hopes to reconcile the advantages and drawbacks with a neat new project called "Crowwws Nest." Jones pretty much quit using Twitter because it took up too much of his time, but he didn't deny the value of it. So, he used the time he wasn't tweeting to build something. Crowwws Nest gathers—oh hell, curates, if that's your thing—the links shared by 250 ad-world tweeters. The site then displays the top 10 most-shared links among the ad world's twitterati. The site updates itself every 15 minutes, eliminating duplications along the way. Jones tells us he worked off our own Adweek 25 list, of which he was briefly a member until he retired to work on more productive matters. Looks like he used the time well.

Filed under McKinney, Morrissey, Social media, Twitter
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Google brings world's great artworks to you

Google sure is currying favor with creative agencies lately. It has gotten many shops to do projects showing off its vast array of products and technologies. The latest is a very cool site from WPP's Schematic called Art Project. It's a stunning site that uses Google's Street View, Scholar, Picasa and other products to give visitors a virtual walking tour of 17 museums around the world and 1,000 pieces of art. It's a pretty sweet site that delivers on Google's mission of making the world's information universally accessible. (Of course, whether seeing the world's great art on a computer screen is a decent substitute for seeing it in person is up for debate.) Google's done a bunch of projects in this show-don't-tell mode of marketing, including the Chrome Speed Test (BBH) and The Wilderness Downtown (B-Reel, @radical.media and others).

Filed under Arts, Google, Morrissey, Schematic
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Wieden gets unpredictable for Honda's Jazz

Car commercials can be desultory affairs, stuffed with specs and the inevitable shots of a car wending its way down a serpentine road in the mountains. You have to hand it to Wieden + Kennedy London for convincing Honda to break with tradition in many of its ads, such as "Grrr." For its latest European effort, introducing the Honda Jazz, Wieden and production shop Nexus crafted this lovely minute-long animated commercial (again with a Garrison Keillor voiceover), which shows life's unpredictability. The car doesn't appear until 54 seconds in. The coolest part of this effort could be the mobile component. Wieden has an iPhone application that lets viewers "capture" the animated characters by swiping at the screen while the commercial plays on TV. (The app does this by syncing with the commercial's sound.) Once on the phone, you can play with the characters, if you're into that kind of thing. I'm not sure how many people will have the app handy to swipe when the TV commercial comes on, but I'm sure we'll see more integrations of the standard TV spot and mobile interactivity.

Filed under Automotive, Europe, Honda, Morrissey, Wieden + Kennedy
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Alex Bogusky set to invent a new capitalism

Alex Bogusky is putting meat on the bones of his plan to spark a consumer revolution. Along with collaborators Rob Schuham and John Bielenberg, he has unveiled nothing less than a roadmap for reinventing capitalism. Bogusky can't leave behind his agency roots in one key area: It's still all about creativity. This new kind of capitalism, he believes, needs to be built by creative people of all stripes. The end goal is a kinder, gentler capitalism that does more than help the rich get richer but "spreads love and prosperity to all stakeholders." The spiel in his presentation is pretty New Agey, opening with water ripples and the disclaimer that the ex-CP+B creative chief isn't a Communist. The overall point—that consumer empowerment, growing inequality and vast structural issues facing our planet are changing economic dynamics—is provocative. There's definitely a chance Bogusky is on to something. He's not alone: Havas Media Lab director Umair Haque is proposing many of the same capitalism reforms based on values like transparency, collaboration and sustainability. Whether what they're proposing—a new kind of capitalism imbued with more focus on meaning beyond the bottom line—is possible is up for debate. Bogusky and crew plan to attempt it through a new open-source brand, Common, which anyone with a sustainable idea can use. The Common brand is devoted to "rapidly prototyping many progressive businesses that unleash creativity to solve social problems." It's an interesting vision and certainly puts a lot more flesh on Bogusky's decision to turn his back on advertising to become a self-styled "consumer advocate." You can watch the entire presentation over at Bogusky's Fearless Revolution site.

Filed under Alex Bogusky, Morrissey
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Taco Bell response to beef lawsuit: sarcasm

Taco Bell wasted no time in hitting back against a lawsuit about what's in its ground beef. Taco Bell parent Yum! Brands took out print ads today in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications with a bold "Thank you for suing us" headline. The ads reiterate Taco Bell's denial that it's serving a "meat mixture" that's only 35 percent ground beef. Taco Bell says it's real "seasoned beef." The ads are a rapid response to a suit that was filed only just this week. (There are also Google ads with a letter from the Taco Bell president about its meat.) Judging from the comments Taco Bell is racking up on Twitter, the "mystery meat" claim has struck a chord with diners skeptical of what could go into a 99-cent taco. I can only imagine if this case goes to discovery. A nation will collectively turn away as the mystery-meat process is laid bare. The ironic part is, Taco Bell might be doing its customers a favor if it were cutting the red meat with filler like whole grain, since excessive red-meat consumption is the source of any number of health woes. Maybe making Taco Bell the cornerstone of your diet is a solid strategy after all. Full ad after the jump.

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Filed under Lawsuits, Morrissey, Restaurants, Taco Bell
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Rabbis pay Rupert Murdoch to whine to him

Four hundred rabbis took out a full-page ad in Thursday's Wall Street Journal to run an open letter to Rupert Murdoch. The letter (see the ad here, with the more readable text here) takes the News Corp. CEO to task for Fox News host Glenn Beck's attack on George Soros, who is a Holocaust survivor. The letter also brings up Fox News chief Roger Ailes's statements that those who criticize Beck are grumpy "left-wing rabbis." The irony is that the rabbis paid Murdoch's Journal some $232,000 to run the complaint, while at the same time drawing more publicity to another Murdoch media arm, Fox News. That dollar figure is based on the Journal's rate card (link goes to PDF); the rabbis probably got a discount. To recap, a Murdoch news arm creates a controversy, which leads to those offended paying another Murdoch news arm to publicly complain about it. My guess is Murdoch will ride out the controversy, content with Beck and Ailes stirring the pot while he cashes the checks of those who are aggrieved.

Filed under Morrissey, News Corp., Newspapers, Rupert Murdoch
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Poll: Has the Old Spice guy run his course?

Does the Old Spice guy still smell fresh, or has he passed his sell-by date? My colleagues Rebecca and Ellie are excited for Isaiah Mustafa's return. Still, I can't help but feel that in today's ADD culture, it feels like his time has past. Maybe it's just the new video, but I didn't find him all that funny or even particularly likable. Mustafa comes off as tired and played out. Others agree. GolinHarris's Len Kendall thinks he comes off as redundant. Mullen's Edward Boches thinks Wieden + Kennedy might have a new writer on the account. Commercial director Jason Zada dredges up a notorious Happy Days episode in which Fonzie leaps over a certain much-feared aquatic beast. I'm sure Mustafa still has a wellspring of support out there. (His "I'm Back" video already has 250,000 views.) And Old Spice is counting on that with its "superfan" idea, in which the brand will seed the next spot with a single fan and let him or her disseminate it with their friends before it officially breaks on Feb. 7. It's always hard to retire an ad franchise—look at how past their prime the "Mac vs. PC" spots were in the end—but it might just be time for Old Spice to hang up the towel. What do you think? UPDATE: The Old Spice guy explains the "Super Fan" idea in this video.

Filed under Morrissey, Old Spice, Personal care, Wieden + Kennedy
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Downy guy lives in Macy's window for week

The always-on nature of the Web is making live marketing stunts more and more common. Gap had its GPS-equipped reindeer, and the Old Spice guy, of course, did his live responses. P&G is tapping into this vein with a campaign for Downy that has comedian Mike Birbiglia living in a window of Macy's flagship store in New York's Herald Square for a week. The people of the Internet can go to Facebook to watch him hang out in his little space and communicate with him live via Twitter and Facebook messages. It'll be interesting to see the buzz he generates. Birbiglia's stunt is reminiscent of Mark McIntyre's 25-day on-camera cancer fundraiser with Canadian underwear brand Stanfield's—the main difference being, Birbiglia presumably has two testicles, to McIntyre's one. One good sign for the Downy campaign: Mike wasn't in the window early this afternoon because he was off doing interviews.

Filed under Downy, Macy's, Morrissey, Procter & Gamble
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Wheat Thins nabs ad hater in latest ambush

When Wheat Thins went after people last summer who were talking smack about the brand on Twitter, there was understandable skepticism about whether the whole thing was a set-up. The ad, done by The Escape Pod, was the real deal, agency founder Vinny Warren insisted. That led to the inspiration for this next installment, a 30-second spot in which the Wheat Thins crew doorsteps Derek Tzeo, a Portland, Ore., dude who dared to question the authenticity of the first spot, calling it "uber-fake." He's left with a pallet of Wheat Thins that are, in fact, "uber-real." As recently departed Euro RSCG creative chief Stefan Postaer notes on his blog, the candid-camera bit isn't very new, but the melding of social media with broadcast spots is certainly a fertile area to explore. Over on YouTube, the top comment is from another doubter, with the next being from Derek himself insisting he's real.

Filed under Escape Pod, Food and drink, Morrissey, Wheat Thins
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Gold's Gym peddles other kinds of strength

This is a nice campaign in a dreary category. Gold's Gym is looking to shed any lingering perceptions that its clientele is mostly steroid-stuffed meathead weightlifters. It had McKinney craft Web videos that show how getting fit has become a positive force in the lives of regular folks—like Erin, who lost her house in the recession, and Jim, who needs to get in shape to donate a kidney to his sick wife. My personal favorite is the story of 96-year-old Harry, who is staying active to make the century mark. The campaign has the standard social-media piece, collecting people's own "strong stories" and encouraging them to share on Twitter with the #strongerthan hashtag. Eliot Rausch shot the videos.

Filed under Gold's Gym, Gyms, McKinney, Morrissey
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Nike gets Kobe to unleash his black mamba

Kobe Bryant got lots of snickers when he told the world that his alter ego is the black mamba, a fierce serpent known for its uncanny ability to strike at any moment with pinpoint accuracy. Now, Nike's getting on board with a new "Black Mamba" campaign, including an eight-minute online video coming in February co-starring Bruce Willis and directed by Robert Rodriguez, the man who brought the world Spy Kids. There's a social twist to the site, created by R/GA. The idea is, if enough people chatter about Kobe on Twitter (determined by an algorithm that searches for his name and other terms like speed, champion, tenacity, heart, etc.), it triggers a "Mamba Moment" that changes the appearance of the site and causes some new Kobe videos to be posted. The threshold to start is 1,500 tweets per hour, but that may increase given the amount of global chatter the agency team is seeing. Such Mamba Moments last for six hours. (If they persist, you should probably call you doctor.) Nike is sweetening the pot by offering visitors a chance to win the new Nike Zoom Kobe VI sneaker by tweeting #mambamoment. We'll see if this takes off. It's always hard for brands to create these kind of groundswells because, well, they're pretty artificial. Then again, Kobe giving himself a nickname is pretty artificial, too.

Filed under Celebrity endorsements, Morrissey, Nike, R/GA
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Visa lauds men who prefer football to family

With two weeks to go before Super Bowl XLV, expect Visa to ratchet up its "Go fans" campaign, in particular its celebration of those four awful men who have attended every single Super Bowl without fail. Visa has lauded the "Never Miss a Super Bowl Club" almost all season long in ads from TBWA\Chiat\Day. The four old dudes have spent untold amounts of money traveling to and attending the Super Bowl for the past 44 years. At this point in their lives, they should be taking stock of what they've done with their time on this planet. There's no hint of regret over their singular priority. The worst of these malformed men is the droll, self-proclaimed "Mr. Excitement," Larry Jacobson (below), who proudly claims to have missed weddings and babies being born in order to go to games in which his own favorite team was most likely not even playing. (Larry also thinks fans can "telepathically" steer a field-goal kick. Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, that Larry.) You'd think he'd be chagrined about his behavior rather than bragging about it on TV. Larry's been taken to the woodshed over at YouTube, where commenters are hoping his funeral falls on Super Bowl Sunday, so his family can justify skipping it. Meet the other three morons after the jump.

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Filed under Finance, Morrissey, Super Bowl, TBWA, Visa
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Bud Light explains why it can't do 3-D spots

You can always count on Bud Light turning to slapstick for its Super Bowl ads. It is, after all, the brand that paid millions to air a dog biting a crotch during the game in 2004. Bud Light is apparently warming up for the big day with a commercial that aired during the NFC and AFC Championship games yesterday. "3-D Test Commercial" shows why the brand decided against running a 3-D ad—namely, because people will jump through their TVs and into walls trying to get at the beer. The spot's funny enough in a Three Stooges way, and ad agency Cannonball includes a clever little disclaimer: "No stunt people were harmed making this ad because, well, they're stunt people."

Filed under 3-D, Alcohol, Bud Light, Cannonball, Morrissey
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Pepcid offering subservient heartburn relief

You can imagine how many times The Barbarian Group gets a client asking them for another Subservient Chicken. (Probably as often as EVB gets "Elf Yourself" requests.) That's probably the case here with Johnson & Johnson, which turned to TBG for a Pepcid site. The result, MaxMyDreams.com, channels the Chicken by letting users enter their dreams, which it then recreates as Flash animations. The idea is that Pepcid gives you more time to spend with your dreams rather than sitting up awake, regretting the decision to order those chicken wings. The site certainly isn't as compelling as Subservient Chicken, recently given the nod as The One Show's Digital Campaign of the Decade, but it can lead to entertaining results. UPDATE: TBG worked with JWT New York on the effort. Also, the site has a natural language processor with 16,000 words. See more in the video below.

Pepcid: Max My Dream from Barbarian Group on Vimeo.

Filed under Barbarian Group, Morrissey, Pepcid
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Piers Morgan, dog-eat-dog celeb interviewer

CNN is betting a lot on Piers Morgan, whom the network has installed on Larry King's old throne. The company's PR department bombards me with a half dozen updates on him every day. (The latest mentioned in passing that CNN is covering the State of the Union. Well, I should hope so.) But the fact is, the British interviewer (seen above in a not-Photoshopped ad for Burger King) has an uphill road to climb if he wants to become an American TV personality on par with top celebrity interlocutors like Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey. In fact, Morgan made a bet with Oprah, his first guest, that he would get the first you-better-cry interview with Michael Vick, the football star and reformed dog killer. Looks like Morgan will probably lose that £200 bet. (Someone tell him we gamble in dollars here, please.) Vick yesterday said he's interested in doing Oprah's show, according to Eagles beat reporter Jeff McLane. Morgan? "I don't even know who that guy is," Vick said. Ouch. Chin up, old boy.

Filed under CNN, Morrissey, Piers Morgan, TV
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NFL pressures Toyota over spot's helmet hit

The NFL is notoriously overprotective of its image. No surprise, then, that it's now editing TV spots. The league has targeted a pretty mundane Toyota ad (below) that shows how the carmaker is developing technology that can be used to understand brain injuries. The Saatchi & Saatchi spot shows, for about a second, a helmet-to-helmet collision between non-NFL players. The NFL, which has dealt with a rash of concussions, along with credible accusations that it long swept the problem of brain trauma under the rug, freaked. Of course, all it could really do was bar the ad from airing during its games. But it asked Toyota to do more. An exec at the carmaker hints that the NFL wanted Toyota to pull the ad entirely, but Toyota was willing only to edit out the offending couple of seconds (though so far it has left the YouTube version intact). The move might be more trouble than it's worth for the NFL, which is now getting showered with abuse from the likes of Deadspin. It's sure to shed an unfavorable light on the league's late reaction to its concussion problem at a time when it's preparing for a major labor showdown with players. Sometimes it's best to just let things be.

Filed under Automotive, Morrissey, NFL, Saatchi & Saatchi, Toyota
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Here come latest 'banned' Super Bowl spots

Like the swallows to Capistrano, sketchy businesses are once again flocking to the old strategy of rolling out "banned" Super Bowl ads. Notorious cheating-spouse site Ashley Madison is going at it again this year. It is shocked—shocked, I tell you!—that Fox has put the kibosh on its rather demure 30-second spot (below) that uses a porn star to promote adultery. Have you no sense of decency, Fox? If you're scoring at home, this is Ashley Madison's second rejection in three years. Let's see how much PR they get out of it this time around. I'm expecting the indignant Mancrunch e-mail to hit my in-box any minute now. The kingpin of this racket, of course, is GoDaddy. More as it develops.

Filed under AshleyMadison.com, Morrissey, Super Bowl
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Ad barrage by China coincides with Hu visit

I must have missed it when the China ad account went up for a review. The pluses: an enormous client that's on its way to dominating its category. The minuses: the client has historically been quite demanding. China's State Council Information Office tapped Shanghai Lintas to buff up its image. Lintas is taking a pretty old-fashioned approach in an ad campaign that coincides with Premier Hu Jintao's visit to Washington to meet with President Obama: It hired a famous director (Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies coordinator Gao Xiaolong), got a bunch of celebs and bought out a bunch of Times Square ad space. Chinese celebrities including Yao Ming and Baidu founder Robin Li (along with regular citizens) are featured in a video that trumpets China's increasing mark in everything from the arts, sports, fashion, design and even bravery. (No, dissident and Nobel Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo didn't get the call.) The video ends with the faces of many regular Chinese under the banner of "Chinese Friendship." The Wall Street Journal reports that the ad will run 300 times a day on six screens in Times Square for the next month. It's too bad China didn't go bigger and buy out big commercial blocks during the Super Bowl. That would really get the message across that this century is fated to be dominated by the Chinese.

Filed under China, Morrissey, Politics
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2010's top Web site: 'Wilderness Downtown'

There's a certain irony in the fact that the FWAs—originally founded to celebrate Flash Web sites—has chosen a site built in Flash rival HTML5 as the best site of 2010. Now called the Favourite Website Awards, the group has given its top honor to "The Wilderness Downtown," a collaboration among Chris Milk, Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab, B-Reel and @radical.media. The interactive music video for Arcade Fire's "We Used to Wait" shows off a few Google products, including its browser and satellite mapping. The experience has you enter in your hometown address, which it uses to construct a personalized video splicing together windows of film with shots of your home. The judges lauded "The Wilderness Downtown" for straddling the line between technical pizzazz with good old-fashioned emotional storytelling.

Filed under FWA, Google, Morrissey
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