It shouldn't really count as news when Dita Von Teese models something, but she recently showed off a 3-D printed nylon gown based on the Fibonacci sequence, which is cool enough to merit a little discussion, I think. The gown was designed by Michael Schmidt and Francis Bitonti, and Shapeways handled the 3-D printing. From there, the gown's 17 individual pieces were assembled, dyed black, and bedazzled with Swarovski crystals. The idea here was to show off the possibilities of 3-D printing as much as Dita's fabulous body, but she makes it difficult to gauge whether this project was a success or not. After all, Dita can make anything look good. Without her, the dress might just look like blinged-out mosquito netting. More images and video below.

So, you really love your girlfriend, and you want to ask her to marry you. But the old ring-in-the-champagne-flute has been done to death. What to do? Obviously, you try to scare the hell out of her by splicing her photo into a mashup of bloody-knife-fight-in-the-snow footage from thrillers like The Grey and The Bourne Ultimatum, then tack on some footage of yourself stalking her at the local movie theater, while getting said theater to run the whole package as a trailer before the movie she's out to see for girls' night. Then, you show up with a bouquet of flowers and microphone in hand, pop the question and waltz into a state of eternal happiness. No sweat. Of course, the weird wedding proposal is an already rich genre: You've got your banner ad proposals, your infographic proposals and your crowdsourced proposals, not to mention your fairly run-of-the-mill highway billboard proposals. This new one raises the bar for effort, and also for not being totally, nauseatingly saccharine in a really public way. It's really not a fair comparison, though. Every proposal would be better in tortured Liam Neeson voice. Via Mashable.

George Clooney has proven more than willing to shoot ads over the years—particularly overseas, and particularly when the advertiser in question isn't completely embarrassing. He appears to draw the line, though, at lame spots encouraging foreign investment in Poland. So, the Poles had to go with a Clooney look-alike—an actor named Parviz Ghodsi, who plays Clooney in the three amusingly awful ads below. Ghodsi looks enough like Clooney to have had a short documentary made about him, though he looks enough unlike Clooney to simply add to the cheesiness of this campaign. The ads urge investment in Małopolska. If that's located in Eastern Poland, I'm in.

Samsung's Unicorn Apocalypse, the fictional game featured in half a dozen ads that aired on the Oscars, was always begging to be defictionalized—and now it has been. Samsung held a developer contest to bring the game to life. The winning app, from Liquid Gameworks, is now available in the Google Play store. Here's the description:

Play as the unicorn, the harbinger of the apocalypse. Race across urban rooftops avoiding the deadly unicorn traps and soldiers that the Anti Unicorn Force (AUF) has deployed. Beyond the foot soldiers exist enemies both cunning and strong, so use your magic dash and rainbow lasers to blast through your enemies, avoid your own death, and prolong the Unicorn Apocalypse!

Unfortunately, the game hasn't exactly been a smash hit with users. It's averaging 2.2 stars out of 5. Of the 517 reviews, 308 give it the dreaded 1 star. Sample review: "If you're going to make a series of commercials and then release the game they advertise, you have to know significant quality is expected. This game is nothing more than another poor ripoff of Robot Unicorn Attack." Oh well, there's always the Tim Burton film to look forward to.

Via PSFK.

Add it to the pile of amusing agency side projects: Instasham, an online collection of stock photos specially designed for posting to Instagram, showing all those things you wished you had done just so you could post them to Instagram. Didn't get to hang with Kanye? Instasham it. Didn't go to the Coliseum? Instasham it. Didn't sunbathe on a yacht in the Caribbean with beautiful bikini-clad women? You get the idea. Because Instagram is now well past the what-all-the-cool-kids-are-doing upswing, and well into the why-is-everyone-in-such-a-reflexive-narcissist stage, and oh, by the way, all of your photos already look the same as everyone else's, and it turns out the contents of your closet aren't really that fascinating after all. From Mother, New York, creative team Andy Dao and Stacey Smith. Site development by Joseph Valle. Made all the better by the website's "how to" instructions on using your smartphone to take a picture of the pictures on your computer screen.

Doritos go boom on the big screen! Never mind what they do when they land in your belly. As part of an all-out commercial assault for its newest hybrid taco, Taco Bell has created the first 3-D fast-food ad for movie audiences. Launched last week by agency Draftfcb, the spot's three-dimensional wizardry shows a single Cool Ranch Dorito exploding and morphing into a Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco. From your seat in the multiplex, you'll feel like you can reach out and grab one of those fatty shards of salt and maltodextrin. And when you leave, you'll be a short skip—somewhere within a five-mile radius—of a local Taco Bell, according to research from the ad seller, NCM Media Networks. It's little surprise that Taco Bell chose the 40-foot screen as a media buy: There are 700 million moviegoers a year at NCM venues like Regal Entertainment, Cinemark and AMC theaters, and one out of three already hit Taco Bell at least once a month. That's a whole lot of hungry 18-year-olds who are unconcerned about their cholesterol levels. Last year's debut of Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Tacos was the most successful product launch in the chain's history. The sequel was inevitable—or as the ad calls it, the world's most obvious idea. Folks have already been miffed that they couldn't get their hands on a Cool Ranch taco quickly enough, taking to social media to bitch about it. To which Taco Bell says: Keep calm and "Live Más."

Leprechauns are creepy, whether they're starring in a horror movie or plastered on the front of a cereal box. There's no telling if that's why General Mills briefly tried another mascot, called Waldo the Wizard, for its Lucky Charms cereal. Anyway, the marketer got it really wrong with a skeevy-looking middle-aged man in a bow tie and bedazzled robe. Buy your kid's breakfast from this guy? No thanks, consumers in 1975 said. So, the spokes-elf returned, and went through a few style and fitness makeovers in the past several decades—an evolution captured by the nostalgia blog Do You Remember? With some subtle tweaks and twists, Lucky the Leprechaun has been hawking the sugary cereal for much of its nearly 50-year life. Trivia game: How many marshmallow pieces can you identify? And just in time for St. Patrick's Day, who can explain where the pot o' gold went? Wasn't it magically delicious and stereotypically perfect?

It says something about banner ads that the best ones—with a few exceptions, like this and this—are the ones that are laughably, shareably bad. You've seen them. And now Old Spice is parodying them. Or rather, its new marketing chief, Mr. Wolfdog, is parodying them. He posted the five banners below to his Tumblr today, with the same note on each: "I have achieved another mountain of a business achievement. I have made effective banner ads." Wolfdog may be a shameless, talentless moron, but he's not wrong—and in that sense, he may be the most hilariously prototypical CMO ever. Since introducing himself to the world on Monday, Wolfdog—the marketing brains behind the Old Spice Wild Collection "smell products" (influenced maybe a little by Wieden + Kennedy)—has been busy all over the Internet. He's posted more YouTube videos; made a Pinterest page, Vine videos and an album of inspirational business music; hosted Google+ Hangouts with his Twitter followers; posted a toll-free number (866-695-2407) to help those who need to look busy at work; played Call of Duty: Black Ops II on Xbox Live; made animated GIFs; and whipped up websites like worldsbiggestchart.com. In short, he's done everything (and much more) that a marketing director should do in social media—while inherently poking fun at how hollow and rote and mindless it all is. Which of course is what makes it actually amusing and worthwhile. Such self-referential anti-advertising could feel overly cynical, but here it rises above—as usual for this agency and client—by the quality of the writing.

It's a big day for Samsung, which is unveiling the Galaxy S4 in New York City later today. But leave it to LG to preemptively let a little air out of that balloon—with this gloating billboard in Times Square, designed just like the Samsung one below it. "Be ready 4 the next Galaxy"? Well, the "LG Optimus G is here 4 you now." Bickering billboards, of course, are a time-honored tradition, from Newcastle's takedown of Stella Artois to the famous BMW/Audi spat out west. Via CNet.

It's a hit! Pete Rose mistakes a recliner for a couch and pretends to eat pastry in these awesomely awkward, sublimely stilted low-budget commercials for Muenchen's Furniture in Cincinnati. There's so much to savor: Pete's plaid pajama bottoms … his "I love baseball" T-shirt with a baseball representing the heart … the hat that makes him look like somebody's confused grandpa … Pete's 40-years-younger Playboy-model fiancée, Kiana Kim, overemoting in the last seconds of her 15 minutes of fame now that their TLC reality show, Hits & Mrs., is fading to black. "Wow, we'll take it all!" they cry at one point in the furniture showroom, displaying the same greedy attitude that led Pete to gamble on sports as a player and manager and get banned from baseball for life. I'd wager he still "smells like a man," as he did in his mid-'70s Aqua Velva commercials, and I'm betting his status as the all-time leader in base hits, celebrated in this Wheaties spot, stands for decades to come. Charlie Hustle may be barred from Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame, but the Advertising Hall of Fame should welcome him with open arms. Via With Leather.

Just watch this astounding Tide commercial from Saatchi & Saatchi in New York. It came out in January, so quietly that we didn't even notice it. And that's the beauty of it. See the dad? He's an ordinary dad. I'll let that sink in. He's not a buffoon, the butt of a joke, a clueless child who needs his wife to take care of him. He's not afraid of washing his daughter's clothes, or even a guy who has to supplement his masculinity by doing pull-ups and crunches after he handles a princess dress, like Tide's overcompensating dad-mom from 2011. He's just a guy with a daughter—who also bucks gender roles, by the way, by managing to be a messy tomboy even while she's wearing a princess dress. Judging by the YouTube comments, parents are loving it. Tide deserves a standing ovation for this bold statement in the movement to take back fatherhood.

Nothing gets people familiar with a new social tool quite like making a competition out of it. And so, Dave Rolfe, head of integrated production at BBDO in New York, got almost everyone in his department to learn Vine, Twitter's six-second video app, by challenging them to create the best videos they could with it—for its first Vine Film Festival.

For Rolfe, it was a contest born from a certain amount of shame. "I joined Vine through Kate Upton," he tells AdFreak. "We were doing a shoot for Gillette with Kate Upton. And we were sitting there talking, and she was like, 'Are you on Vine?' And I was embarrassed because I was like, 'I've heard of Vine, but I don't really know what it is.' I had definitely heard of it, but I didn't use it. And here's Kate Upton telling me about a social-media platform."

Once he did get up to speed, Rolfe saw value in having the producers in his department learn it collaboratively in a fun way. So, he set up four categories: Sweet, Funny, Cool and Series. He got more than 200 submissions in all. "This is the epitome of conversational media," said Rolfe. "It's instructive in terms of how people share stuff, and how they'll do it on video, and it's also interesting to see how people create narrative around an intense short-form format."

Check out the winners below. Now that the production guys have thrown down the gauntlet, BBDO's creative department will surely be next to give this a try.

 
#Sweet
Elise Pavone, "Baby"

 
#Funny
Daniel Blaney, "Single White Producer"

 
#Cool
Lawrence Chen, "Took a Fall in the Hall"

 
#Series
RaniV, "Concert Series"

 
Grand Audience Gold
Mike Gentile, "Park"

 
Honorable Mentions
Anthony Curti, "Get Back in There"

 Julian Katz, "Being Followed"

With chillingly accurate typography and scrolling VCR recording lines, fans on YouTube have been reimagining their favorite current shows as cheesy '90s sitcoms. User Goestoeleven started the trend with a masterful 1995 take on Breaking Bad as a family comedy and The Walking Dead as a cop show. (Breaking Bad was also recently reimagined as a Mentos commercial.) Then, Hunterlsanders uploaded Game of Thrones Circa 1995, managing to find every smile in the entire series and set them all to Queen's epic ballad "I Want It All." It's amazing how far show credits—and well, the shows themselves—have come in a decade. Though TV watching itself has declined, the content keeps getting better. We may yearn for the viewership numbers of 1995, but none of us wants to go back to a time when Highlander was one of the best shows on TV.

"Just because I fart at parties now and then, it doesn't make me a farter." That's how I plan to begin my memoirs, and it's also a key line in the Ontario Ministry of Health's "Quit the Denial" campaign from BBDO Toronto, directed by the Perlorian Brothers. We meet a gassy lass who lets fly when partying with friends, dancing or chatting up guys. She asks one dude coquettishly, "Do you want to go outside for a fart?" (Where's this noxious angel been all my life?) She is, of course, in denial, just like people who claim to be "social smokers" and insist they're not addicts. (A companion spot features "social nibblers" who mooch food from other people's plates. But there's no farting in that one, so who cares?) It's a splendidly sophomoric approach and definitely diverting, though I wonder if it's ultimately too light and insubstantial, lacking substance—like, oh I don't know, a passing wind, perhaps? Besides, if there were no more smokers, who's going to add some spark to these farty parties by lighting a match?

First, Amazon treated gay marriage like it was no big whoop in its latest Kindle ad. And now this. Microsoft has juxtaposed becoming a professional stuntman with getting gay married in its latest Outlook.com ad from Deutsch in New York. Much like the Kindle spot, the lesbian wedding here is treated as nothing out of the ordinary. That's right, a truck explodes (you'll remember the stunt driver from the launch ad for this campaign), and then some lesbians get married, and it's no big deal—as the happy Outlook.com user congratulates her newly married friend, pressing her hands together with an expression of sheer delight. Truly, when juggernaut advertisers decide that endorsing gay marriage won't hurt their bottom line, there's been a sea change in society.

Cookie or creme? Perhaps not surprisingly, Oreo says it's both. Following the "Whisper Fight" Super Bowl spot, the #cookiethis/#cremethis Instagram campaign, the Oreo Separator videos and the "Life Raft" TV spot, Wieden + Kennedy today wraps up its "Cookie vs. Creme" campaign with SuperImportantTest.com, an amusing grab bag of a website which makes it clear that there's no wrong answer to the question of which part of an Oreo is better. Submitting a vote on the site takes you to one of more than 30 silly videos—from 2-D horse animations to robotic cats and everything in between. Directors, production companies and YouTube personalities from "six different time zones" (!?) created the clips, the agency says. After each one, you can go back and cycle through the others. All in all, the campaign was a pleasant confection—six weeks of inspired silliness which proved that even with kind of a dumb premise, Oreo can still have plenty of fun. Credits below.

CREDITS
Client: Oreo
Project: Super Important Test
www.SuperImportantTest.com

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
Creative Directors: Jason Bagley, Craig Allen
Digital Director: Matt O'Rourke
Copywriter, Digital Creative: Jarrod Higgins
Art Director: Ruth Bellotti
Account Team: Scott Sullivan, Jessie Young, Ken Smith
Broadcast Producer: Katie Reardon
Broadcast Production Director: Ben Grylewicz
Interactive Producer: Robbie Veltman
Executive Interactive Producer: Lori DeBortoli
Information Architect: Jake Doran
Digital Designer: Paul Levy
Creative Technologists: Ryan Bowers, Billy McDermott
Executive Creative Directors: Joe Staples, Susan Hoffman

Video Creators
Carl Burgess
Cat Solen
Tony Foster
Fatal Farm
Jimmy Marble
Max Erdenberger
McRorie
Power House
Agile BrandTelligence
Visual Arts and internal W+K resources, including W+K Motion Department and Don't Act Big Productions

Development Partner
Hook LLC

The vendor contracts for New York's pay phones expire next year, so the city put together a Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge to get some free labor out of an already overworked design community. Oh, and to keep its pay phones relevant, I guess. Still, I like the idea of keeping these phones from total obsolescence. Sage & Coombe Architects won the public vote with its really cool "NYFi" design, reimagining pay phones as multipurpose kiosks comprising free WiFi hubs, bus-ticket machines, MetroCard dispensers and bicycle share stations. There were six others finalists, which you can see here. The city won't use any single design in its entirety, but was simply looking for ideas—and gauging what residents want. When the project is finished, whatever the finished design looks like, we'll surely have to explain to future generations what those weird boxy street-corner things are when they watch movies made before 1997. Via Wired.

If anyone out there needs a car or a piece of TV memorabilia—or ideally, both—they can head out to New Mexico and buy the actual 1984 Toyota Tercel that Jesse Pinkman drives in Breaking Bad. The car is for sale at Mike Faris Auto Wholesale in Albuquerque, although it can't actually be sold until after the final episode of Breaking Bad airs this summer, so you've still got time to make a bid if you're interested. Just keep in mind that Jesse Pinkman isn't real, and his car isn't full of drugs. Probably.

Floyd Hayes, the former executive creative director of creative agency Cunning, includes a quote from a 2007 AdFreak story in materials touting his new venture, the World's Fastest Agency—although when my colleague David Kiefaber described the guerilla advertising veteran with a penchant for self-promotion as "pregnant with marketing genius," it was with anvil-heavy irony, and perhaps some confusion about which gender is able to conceive. Back then, Hayes was offering to think really hard about a client's products at least once an hour for a week in exchange for $10,000. Now, he's hawking a quick-turnaround service—selling concepts for $999. Send that amount via PayPal, DM your creative brief to @FastestAgency, and he'll issue a 140-character response within 24 hours. "Make the logo bigger" and "Put the CEO in the commercial" easily fit the space and would probably satisfy most clients. But Hayes offers this example, based on a real project he helmed at Cunning in London: "Brief: Gain media and buzz for our park-anywhere small car. Idea: Attach replica cars to landmark city buildings." Hmmm, that sounds like a $997 solution to me. And I don't see anything about a money-back guarantee. The World's Smallest Ad Agency should piggyback on Hayes's publicity by offering next-day ideas for 99 cents. Via PSFK.

UPDATE: Hayes tells AdFreak that the nonrefundable $999 is actually a plus for clients because "they will be forced to FOCUS on their challenge and get the problem to its essential core. Yes, they could do this without paying but money makes it happen." (The emphasis is his, so you clients better FOCUS!)

Airplane! director David Zucker is taking his second stab at tourism advertising for his home state of Wisconsin. And after a rather lackluster first effort, this time he's brought in reinforcements—in the form of actor Robert Hays, who played the lead role of Ted Striker in the iconically silly 1980 comedy. This new spot, from Laughlin Constable in Milwaukee, is certainly more entertaining than the orchestra snowball fight from last winter. It shows Hays fishing off a Wisconsin dock when all of a sudden things take a turn for the worse in exponentially slapstick fashion.

The comedy is as broad as it gets. Hays's voiceover yells and grunts are so cartoony as to be borderline insufferable. (The classy Michigan tourism campaign will certainly turn its nose up at this stuff.) But at least the spot goes for broke. What it's actually trying to say is another matter. Come to Wisconsin, where awful things can happen to you?

Zucker and Hays are planning to film another spot in which Hays will return to the cockpit for a flyover of the state. "Wisconsin is home and having a chance to give back by helping support Wisconsin's tourism effort and reunite with old friends such as Bob [Hays] has been a blast," Zucker said."After 30 years, Bob's comic timing is still dead on, and he's even agreed to let me put him in a plane again. I just hope that he has overcome his fear of flying by now." Hays added: "The memories of the war still haunt me, but David has promised me a great co-pilot, so that should ease my fears."