BBH ready for British Wimbledon champion
Robinsons drinks and BBH London made a decent bet with this commercial, which has been airing during Wimbledon coverage in the U.K. over the past fortnight. It dreams of the moment when a British player will once again win the prestigious London tennis tournament. (The last British men's winner was Fred Perry in 1936; Virginia Wade won the women's draw in 1977.) The ad is a clear reference to Andy Murray, the Scotsman who's ranked No. 3 in the world. And sure enough, Murray is heading to Friday's semifinals. There, he meets Andy Roddick, the American player who so memorably screwed up AmEx's 2005 U.S. Open ad campaign by losing in the first round. UPDATE: Murray lost to Roddick on Friday. Oh well, there's always next year. |
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Published on July 2, 2009 | Permalink
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Evil children can't wait to get to McDonald's
DDB Stockholm remains king of the weird McDonald's commercials with new spot above, in which the prototypical childhood car-trip question takes on a sinister aspect. "Not there yet? Stop at McDonald's!" a bird screams at the car at the end. In terms of weirdness, it's up there with some of the agency's other creations, including the cliffhanging french-fries eater and, below, the two dudes with the same nose. |
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Published on July 1, 2009 | Permalink
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Isn't it just wonderful to wake up Canadian?
Happy Canada Day to our northerly inclined readers. To celebrate, here's an ad that the Canadian government put together this spring to alert non-Canadians that one day (April 17, actually), they might wake up Canadian, too. It's a stirring commercial. Just ignore the excessively long URL at the end, and the confusion over what a forward-slash looks like. |
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Published on July 1, 2009 | Permalink
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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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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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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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Spot any suggestive imagery in this BK ad?
Also not the subtlest ad ever made: this Burger King poster now making the rounds online, for something called the Super Seven Incher. Copy: "Fill your desire for something long, juicy and flame-grilled." It's from Singapore. It's not from Crispin Porter. And it's not competing for a Lion at Cannes. Source: Flickr's joezandstra, via @michaelGregoire. |
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Published on June 24, 2009 | Permalink
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Another lovely New Zealand safe-driving ad
Ah, New Zealand road-safety ads. Always so subtle and understated, except when they show children's bloody heads smashed on windshields or, in the new PSA posted above, a dead guy flopping around and terrifying his injured buddy after their drunk-driving accident. The spot is meant to be brutally unsettling, but there is a bit of unintentional comedy—the dead guy's body looks a bit like a dummy at times. Though of course, the point is that both of the guys are dummies. The tagline is: "If you drink then drive you're a bloody idiot." By Clemenger BBDO in Wellington. |
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Published on June 24, 2009 | Permalink
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French Alzheimer's ad not quickly forgotten
It's French PSA day on AdFreak. Here's a powerful Alzheimer's awareness ad from Saatchi & Saatchi Paris. Compare it with the fluffier British Alzheimer's spot below, produced by Red Bee Media. |
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Published on June 22, 2009 | Permalink
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Adweek launches RealTimeCannes.com site
The 56th International Advertising Festival opens this weekend in Cannes, France. To cover the proceedings, Adweek is launching a brand-new Cannes site, RealTimeCannes.com, where digital editor Brian Morrissey and creative editor Eleftheria Parpis, armed with video cameras, will post news reports and video interviews throughout the week. They'll also be Tweeting their various adventures through their @bmorrissey and @eparpis accounts. In addition, we'll be embedding plenty of Cannes-related stuff from Twitter, Flickr and YouTube in the sidebar. (We'll be rotating people in and out of our live Twitter modules, starting today with the Cyber Lions jury, which is already chatting about the judging process.) To get you in the mood, we've also posted all of the Grand Prix winners in Film and Press from each year since 2000, and are asking you to pick your favorite from each batch. Hope to see you there. |
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Published on June 19, 2009 | Permalink
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Another ad filmed from the POV of a vagina
Commercials shot from the point of view of the vagina are becoming ever more popular. Last year, we had that Grey Amsterdam spot for GlaxoSmithKline's Lactacyd vaginal cream. Now, Cossette in Vancouver offers up this cinema spot titled "Eye of the Cervix" for the B.C. Cancer Agency and its Cervical Cancer Screening Program. At this rate the vagina will soon be a regular walking-and-talking character in commercials. |
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Published on June 17, 2009 | Permalink
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Talking teats teased by child's Oreo cookies
We'll sign off this week with this lovely commercial featuring a set of moaning, frustrated udders that are craving Oreo cookies about as badly as you're craving that happy-hour cocktail. Courtesy of Draftfcb, which always has such a way with animals. |
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Published on June 12, 2009 | Permalink
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Ray-Bans withstand bursting paint bubbles
Here's the latest Ray-Ban "Never Hide" video from Cutwater, directed by Francesco Carrozzini of GL-X. The last few Ray-Ban clips weren't that great. This one is visually pretty entertaining, and actually connects to the product being advertised: a new line of colored Wayfarer sunglasses. Carrozzini says he was inspired by Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon from 1956, which also featured a sentient red balloon, though not an explosive one. (Balloons are also flying high lately thanks to Pixar's Up.) Carrozzini shot the ad in high-speed Phantom HD, which captured the detailed slow-motion images. |
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Published on June 12, 2009 | Permalink
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Swim with the mermaids at Portfolio Night 7
Tim Piper, the Ogilvy creative behind Dove's famed "Evolution" spot, did this hilarious promo for Portfolio Night 7 New York, which is happening this coming Tuesday. (The clip might be NSFW due to a few F-bombs, but just watch it anyway.) It's a shame we'll never get to see this guy's proposed commercial get produced. It sounds like a winner. Portfolio Night 7 is taking place in 20 cities around the world this week and next. |
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Published on June 11, 2009 | Permalink
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Red Tettemer makes war on its 'Frienemies'You have to like Red Tettemer. Not only is the Philadelphia agency sticking with summer Fridays during these lean times, it's enforcing the tradition with obscenities, threats of violence and accusations of bestiality. If you're a "Frienemy" who works past 1 p.m. on Fridays this summer, these posters will remind you that 1) you're no better than a "shithead"; 2) you deserve "blows to the groin" ("Not good blows. Hard punches"); and 3) you're probably just staying late "to molest Woodbine," the agency cat. Do any other agencies even have summer Fridays anymore? |
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Published on June 9, 2009 | Permalink
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Whitey braves downtown in liquor-store ads
Chicago-Lake Liquors in South Minneapolis has great prices on alcohol. The only problem is, it's located in "the hood," where you might actually run into some black people. What's a white person living in the affluent suburbs of Minneapolis to do? Well, you can learn to talk "black," maybe get some gold teeth, perhaps even take off your nice clothes and strut around in a wife-beater with your belly hanging out. No one will know you're not actually black, and you might even make it out alive. That seems to be the message of this campaign from Brew in Minneapolis. See the print ads here, in which wealthy white folks from Bloomington and Eden Prairie say things like, "Oh no you dih-n't!" and "What's crack-a-lackin'?" |
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Published on June 9, 2009 | Permalink
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Modern dancers interpret the art of Cadbury
The performing arts are taking a beating from advertising today. First, we had the Breathe Right nasal-strips guy who quietly snoozes through a pretentious theater performance. Now, we get this Cadbury Caramilk ad from Saatchi & Saatchi New York, in which the process of creating the candy bar is "revealed through modern dance"—which is another way of saying, revealed through a bunch of jiggling, costumed buffoonery. A commercial ridiculing an orchestra would round things out. |
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Published on June 8, 2009 | Permalink
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Audrina Patridge is latest Carl's Jr. ad babe
Following in the footsteps of Paris Hilton and Padma Lakshmi, reality star Audrina Patridge is the latest thin, beautiful person to pretend that she eats loads of Carl's Jr.'s fast food, having shot an ad for the chain that will break June 24. The star of MTV's The Hills tells People.com: "I had an absolute blast shooting. It was my first experience shooting a spot with food, and when I pulled up, I was literally salivating looking at all the rows and rows of perfect burgers waiting for me!" (Hopefully it was explained that she wouldn't have to eat them all.) Patridge, who wore a reversible bikini on the big day—"in case of any ketchup or teriyaki mishaps!"—talks more about the ad in this behind-the-scenes video from the shoot. "Carl's Jr. is known for having sexy and cool commercials," she says. "This one's going to be at the beach, and it's going to be sexy and funny and just great." |
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Published on June 5, 2009 | Permalink
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JWT builds giant doll for Aussie candy spot
Pediophobes (that's people who suffer from a fear of dolls) hopefully stayed well away from the April ad shoot in Brisbane, Australia, that produced this commercial from JWT Sydney for Allen's Confectionery. It shows a 30-foot-tall doll, created with help from animatronics expert John Cox (an Oscar winner for his work on Babe), delighting a crowd by blowing huge oblong candy bubbles that explode and rain down normal-size candy. There's a lengthy behind-the-scenes video here. The doll, at least in its stature, resembles a similar giant puppet created in 2006 by French theater company Royal de Luxe. That doll was more frightening-looking, like something out of a fairy tale. This one, dressed in pink with blonde pigtails and walking along to the nursery rhyme "This Old Man," is more baby-like, in keeping with the candy theme. |
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Published on June 4, 2009 | Permalink
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Is Bud Light's porn ad really that shocking?
Time.com today weighs in on this Web ad for Bud Light, in which a guy tries to buy a porn magazine with his six-pack of beer, only to see events comically unfold in the most outlandish and shameful way imaginable. The writer wonders if the ad, coming from such a huge brand, "seems to mark some kind of cultural tipping point, where pornography has soaked so far into the fabric of mainstream culture that it's no longer seen as a stain." She quotes an anti-pornography activist and a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, neither of whom are laughing. But is it really that transgressive? Joking about the awkwardness of buying a dirty magazine is about as conservative a reference to porn as you're going to get. Plus, the joke still works because porn is still taboo, not because it's suddenly acceptable. Anyway, harder to argue with is Rob Frankel's take: "This ad is about a guy who would like a brew and some ass. That's right in [Bud Light's] strike zone." |
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Published on June 4, 2009 | Permalink
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More screaming, this time from Volkswagen
The Canadians this week professed their love for screaming. Now, it's time for the French to do the same. This new spot for the Volkswagen Touran, from Agence V in Paris, depicts fatherhood as an endless nightmare of being screamed at by the kid, from the delivery room through the teenage years. The Touran is perfect, then, because it's cheap, and "being a father already costs enough." Screaming seems to be getting more common in ads lately. See, for example, the CareerBuilder spot from the Super Bowl with the miserable office drones; this Bridgestone ad with the would-be roadkill; and, of course, the Heineken commercial with the walk-in fridge. |
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Published on June 3, 2009 | Permalink
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Tetris: five cheesy ads to celebrate 25 years
It's been 25 years since Alexey Pajitnov, then a 29-year-old artificial intelligence researcher, came up with Tetris while working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. "A quarter of a century later," the Guardian reports, "it has a legitimate claim to being the videogame that has truly conquered the world. In all its forms, Tetris has sold more than 70 million copies around the globe; it has spawned architecture, art and music; it has earned multiple Guinness World Records; and is regularly voted one of the top games of all time." It's also enjoyed its share of goofy ads. Here's five of them. Other brands have gotten Tetris fever over the years, too. For example: these bizarre spots for Honda and Toyota.
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Published on June 2, 2009 | Permalink
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Ad for self-help CD is inadvertently uplifting
Today is quickly devolving into silly infomercial humor, but that's OK, because this "Cheers to You" spot from The Good Cheer Company, hawking affirmational CDs filled with eight tracks of "encouragement" and "cheering applause," is undeniably great. The acting is refreshingly wretched, and whoever shouts the "Hooray for you!" line at the end is a certified genius—you really can't tell if the guy's being just totally sincere and happy and positive or if he's secretly filled with disgust and loathing. The affirmative jewelry is pretty sweet, too. Via @woodlandalyssa. |
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Published on May 28, 2009 | Permalink
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