Here's a clever little gimmick. Australia's Cascade Brewery recently made a limited-edition batch of beer with special "experimental" hops from a secret garden in Tasmania's Derwent Valley. There was only enough for 5,000 cases, and so the brewer—with help from Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne—made an ad for it that can only be watched 5,000 times. Check it out below. The special embed code (which can take some time to load) includes a ticker that's counting down to zero. "Whether you caught the film in time or not, make sure you don't miss the beer," the brewer says on its website. Come on, people, we can make this thing obsolete within the hour if we put our minds to it. Via The Denver Egotist.

UPDATE: Video has been having trouble loading—either that or it hit 5,000 and ran.

Some days it seems almost anybody can make an enjoyable video promoting a Kickstarter project, but these guys get bonus points for simultaneously giving the venture-capital system a big poke in the eye. "Nikola Tesla Pitching Silicon Valley VCs" is a biting look at what might have happened if one of history's greatest inventors had to rely on today's venture capitalists. It also happens to promote a Kickstarter effort to build a WiFi hot spot statue of Tesla in Silicon Valley. What's interesting is that the video isn't some sort of populist celebration of Kickstarter. Instead, it depicts crowdfunding as a stopgap solution to the lack of large-scale vision among venture capitalists, whose tech-industry kingmaking is increasingly being called into question. The team behind the video, a creative project firm called Northern Imagination, admits the clip was pulled together quickly, which probably explains the strange audio levels and Tesla's questionable "Serbian" accent. But it has clearly struck a chord, inspiring GigaOm to write a 1,000-word essay on what the video "says about the state of Silicon Valley." In the meantime, the Tesla statue-raisers could still use your help. As of Thursday morning, they were still nearly $100,000 short of their goal, with only 10 days left. Via Boing Boing.

The ubiquitous Twitter hashtag #FML (there have been 37,000 #FML-tagged tweets in the past seven days alone) is generally understood to be short for an obscene phrase uttered when things are at their bleakest. But now, Jell-O is here to help. The Kraft Foods brand and agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky are trying to hijack #FML and make it stand for "Fun My Life" (rather than doing something else to your life). Between now and June 14, everyone who tweets the #FML hashtag is entered into a pool, from which a certain number will win "Fun My Life" prize packs "specially created to get their life back on track." You can follow along at jelloFML.com, which also shows how the brand is tweeting at #FML-ers.

The Creative Circus, Atlanta's advertising school, has hired the most famous, perhaps infamous, stripper in town to pimp its do-goody-goody advertising contest known as A+, where all the winners receive a pimp cup. They're trying to make Atlanta a "more livable city" one stripper promotion at a time. Blondie is Atlanta legend. I heard about her before I even moved here. She strips at the Clermont Lounge, officially known as the place strippers go to die. Her great trick is crushing cans with her boobs. But she's not all flash and bling. She's a sensitive soul who is also well known for writing poems. (It is considered an honor to receive one.) Watching the promos, created with ad agency Iris, where Blondie is dressed like a ridiculous caricature of a southern belle, posed in front of a plantation and giving advice about how you have to dig deep down to your nasty self and bring it out like The Exorcist, one can only blink and repost. There simply are no words. More videos below.

Today in weird, leechy Justin Bieber news, we have this new billboard that just went up in Los Angeles speculating on the cause of the young pop star's dramatic descent into sadness, as seen in pretty much everything he does these days. The ad, from a group called the Employment Policies Institute, offers the least likely of explanations for the Biebs' malaise—suggesting it has something to do with the employment status of his millennial-age fans, as it relates to the level of the minimum wage. The irony, of course, is that the billboard will make Bieber even more sad, should he happen to spy it on his express elevator to hell.

Microsoft says a mouthful in this ad from Crispin Porter + Bogusky. And—surprise!—those words are spoken by Siri, Apple's voice assistant, from an iPad sitting next to a Windows 8 tablet. As the latter wordlessly flips through various features, Siri apologies for being unable to run those programs and perform the same functions. "I'm sorry, I don't update like that," she says. "I'm sorry, I can only do one thing at a time." I half expected a tax app to pop up on the tablet's screen and be greeted by an awkward silence from Siri. Maybe in the sequel. This is Microsoft's second spot in a week to deftly parody a rival's ad style (in this case, Apple's stylish minimalism), following its skewering of Google's Chrome browser. The tablet ad, which references the iPad mini's "Piano" spot from last October, is approaching 2 million views on YouTube in just a couple of days. There are some chatty personal assistants, like Indigo, available for Windows devices. But for my taste, the ultimate Microsoft PA voice would speak in measured, calm-yet-crazy cadences, providing sadly poignant commentary as the OS crashes into a sea of blue when its mind begins to go.

Lots of companies advertise their job openings to the ends of the earth, which we can't really fault in this economy. But rather than let HR weed out applicants arbitrarily, Flickr decided to hide a link to its job postings for coders somewhere only worthy coding applicants would ever find it—inside the source code of its website. Of course, the effect is kind of ruined by other websites posting about it with screenshots of the message, but such is the price of good ideas. Just ask the guys who did practically the same thing three years ago with ads for EA's Dante's Inferno. Via The Denver Egotist.

Seventh Generation tips a hat to its hippy heritage with this new streaking-themed spot for its chemical-free diapers. Lest you get uppity about naked babies, don't worry. The trick of the spot, by ad agency Made, is that this cute little streaking tot—who, despite the pink shoes, is impressively androgynous—is actually wearing a Seventh Generation diaper. They just pixelated the privates to vaguely shock you. (You see, wearing Seventh Generation diapers is, toxins-wise, apparently like wearing nothing at all.) Add in some booty-shaking to booty-shaking music, and you get an winning result. Of course, really dedicated hippy moms go with cloth diapers, ditching disposables altogether. But surely there's a market niche in between the two extremes, for when you want to do a little good for the Earth. Do a little more by tweeting your story with #toxinfreegen, and Seventh Generation will donate $1 in your name to Women's Voices for the Earth.

CREDITS
Client: Seventh Generation

Agency: Made Movement
Chief Creative Officer/Partner: Dave Schiff
Chief Design Officer/Partner: John Kieselhorst
Chief Digital Officer/Partner: Scott Prindle
Chief Strategy Officer: Graham Furlong
Art Director: Stephanie Sullivan
Writers: Dan Ligon, David Satterfield
Consulting Head of Integrated Production: Chris Kyriakos
Junior Integrated Producer: Isaac Karsen
Business Affairs: Jennifer DeCastro
Senior Account Producer: Rachael Donaldson

Production Company: The Academy
Director: Austin Wilson
Executive Producers: Harry Calbom, Nate Barr
Line Producer: Craig Stevens
Director of Photography: Christian Hansen
Editorial Company: NO6, Santa Monica, Calif.
Editor: Kyle Whitmore
Executive Producer (Editorial Co): Crissy DeSimone
Producer: Leslie Tabor

Visual Effects Company: NO6, Santa Monica, Calif.
Lead Flame: Verdi Sevenhuysen
Executive Producer: Crissy DeSimone
Visual Effects Producer: Leslie Tabor
Telecine: Verdi Sevenhuysen
Music Company & City: Beacon Street Studios, Venice, CA
Composer/Lyricist: Andrew Feltenstein, John Nau
Audio Finishing: Lime Studios
Audio Engineer: Sam Casas

A forensic artist drawing a picture of a baby Clydesdale shipping its pants? Now that would be a viral commercial supernova.

Dove, Budweiser and Kmart all rank near the top of Unruly Media's just-released list of the most viral commercials of 2013 so far. Those brands are joined by Pepsi MAX, Evian, Ram Trucks and more, as Unruly celebrates the commercials with the most pass-along value through the first five months of the year. And as the numbers show, it's been a very strong year for online video, as compared to 2012.

See the full list at this link:

The 10 Most-Viral Ads of 2013 (So Far)

Unruly counts shares of videos across social media—a metric that is often at odds with sheer view counts. For example, Microsoft's "Child of the '90s" video for Internet Explorer would place fourth on this list in terms of YouTube views (with more than 34 million), but its approximately 630,000 shares are good for only ninth place.

Conversely, Kmart's "Ship My Pants" and Budweiser's "Brotherhood" spots both have fewer YouTube views than Evian's "Baby & Me" or Pepsi MAX's "Test Drive"—but they rank higher on this list because of better share rates. (The top video on the list, however, leads in both views and shares.)

We left a couple of videos from Unruly's list off this one—including the Biting Elbows music video and the Miami Heat's Harlem Shake clip—to focus on brand advertising rather than more entertainment-based content.

Better call Saul? Actually, try Harry Kassabian first. The proprietor of People's Bail Bonds in Van Nuys, Calif., co-stars with some real-life criminals in this great commercial produced by local-ad heroes Rhett & Link. The cue-ball-headed Kassabian makes liberal use of air quotes in describing his clients' supposed innocence—but really, it's all the same to him. "The customer is always right, even if the customer is you and you've done something illegal," he says in one of the ad's better lines. Kassabian's personal tagline? He's "the guy that gets you out." "We decided there was a group out there that really needed their own commercial: criminals," Rhett & Link tell AdFreak. True enough. Rhett & Link also made their traditional cameo—look for them in the final seconds of the spot. Credits below.

CREDITS
Written and Directed by: Rhett & Link
Produced by: Stevie Wynne Levine
Editor: Benjamin Eck
Production Assistant/Behind the Scenes: Jason Inman
Production Coordinator: Kendall Hawley

Visiting the video arcade at my neighborhood mall in the '80s was both exhilarating and a bit scary. On the one hand, I feared that bigger kids would try to take all my change. (And I mean a physical shakedown, so quarters would spill from my pockets onto the pizza-smeared floor.) The adrenaline rush came from the games themselves. Asteroids, Space Invaders, Radar Scope ... I loved them all. As I played, I rarely paid attention to my score. I just grooved on the sights and sounds, thrilled to each synthesized pop! bleep! and ping!, riding waves of pixelated excitement for hours on end. I wanted to meld with those machines and live in that world. Magic machines everywhere! That's what I wanted the future to be like. That was a scary thought, too, but no less wonderful for that.

Fast forward to Google's latest Chrome Experiments—two games designed to show off the advanced capabilities of the company's browser. They took me back to those arcades of my youth in ways both good and bad. This is partly because the games, "Roll It" and "Racer," are self-consciously retro. (The latter's soundtrack is by Giorgio Moroder, still taking his passion and making it happen after all this time!) Despite the nods to yesteryear, both games are cutting edge and let users play across multiple screens—phones, tablets and computers. "Racer" lets you drive a car across as many as five mobile devices. Watch it speed from the phone you're holding to the tablet in your buddy's hand! With "Roll It," you control the trajectory of a virtual skeeball on a desktop or laptop screen by moving a smartphone handset this way and that.

"Racer" and "Roll It" are both fun and absorbing—impressive slices of techno-magic that fulfill the promise of those crude arcade screens from the mall. They're like yesterday's dreams come true, brimming with possibilities for our digital tomorrows when synced systems running Chrome will conquer space and time. Still, I can't help feeling ambivalent, even dispirited about the proposition. For one thing, the joviality feels forced and works a tad too hard to sell happiness on a microchip. "Grab your phone, some friends and get ready to roll," says the "Roll It" promo clip. "No apps. No downloads. All you need is Chrome."

Booyah, Google's got the fun! It's daffy doodles, rad robots, animated animal rock groups and games all day long. Just follow the bouncing Chrome ball across screens of every shape and size … because the company now demands our attention on multiple platforms, as if retargeting humanity one screen at a time wasn't enough fun.

Ah well, there's no point in bemoaning "Big Bad Google," because I can't imagine a world without its products and services. Sure, Google's scary—but it gives us wonderful stuff, and its output has become an indispensable part of our daily existence. Maybe that's my problem. We've melded with the machines more thoroughly than I'd ever imagined, and now there's no escape. Our cursor-driven workplace tasks are essentially problem-solving games, complete with somewhat more sophisticated pops! bleeps! and pings! There aren't any shakedowns per se—just data-driven commerce. We can all groove to that, right?

I got the future I dreamed of all those years ago. So, why can't I shake the feeling that I'm the one being played?

Poor JCPenney. The retailer, which lost gobs of money last year and could very well die this year, simply cannot catch a break. This time it put up a seemingly harmless billboard in California. But wouldn't you know it—people are already saying the tea kettle on the billboard looks like Hitler. That's a stretch (this is what a proper Hitler tea kettle looks like) but somehow not surprising, given how star-crossed this company seems to be these days. Perhaps Michael Graves, the designer of the kettle, should apologize—although JCPenney would probably beat him to it. Via Reddit and Gawker.

UPDATE: Kudos to Penney for the tweet response below. There's life in the old gal yet!

@telegraph Certainly unintended. If we'd designed the kettle to look like something, we would've gone w/a snowman: twitter.com/jcpenney/statu…

— jcpenney (@jcpenney) May 28, 2013

Cruzan Rum welcomes you to "The Don't Hurry," an island paradise where no one is busy, people enjoy zero-kilometer runs and sleep yoga, and every minute lasts 64 seconds. (The brand hails from the U.S. Virgin Islands and is now owned by Beam Inc.) Even the animals are slow, from a rum toting turtle to the national bird—a parrot that talks like Barry White. Well written, interestingly edited and expertly cast, the nearly two-minute anthem below is a lovely little gem. And Cruzan has clearly been watching other alcohol ads closely. The spokesman with the exotic, sometimes Spanish-sounding accent is a cross between Dos Equis's Most Interesting Man in the World and a drunken bum. You can also look to the left of the screen, where a man who looks suspiciously like Southern Comfort's comfortable guy saunters in his shoes and undies. It's backed up by some lovely print and digital work. (Sample headline: "Your only handheld device should be the one with ice cubes in it.") And it's clearly inspired by consumer insights. Well done, Cruzan. Hold my massage monkey, I'll be right there. See some shorter companion spots below.

Graphic designer/illustrator Jaime Calderón's "Super Likes" series dresses up the Facebook "Like" button in a variety of superhero costumes, including Spider-Man, Batman, The Thing, Wolverine and The Flash. The Flash icon is pretty clever—it's captured in motion and almost out of frame—but the rest of these could do with some accessorizing to make them look less generic. Only two or three of them are immediately recognizable as superheroes without the captions explaining who they are. That said, I'd like to see a Villains "Like" series if he wants to keep this going, if only because the Two-Facebook icon should also be flipping a coin. More after the jump, and many more at Calderón's Behance site, linked above. Via Design Taxi.

Taco Bell's Dollar Cravings Menu is a low-budget option, so naturally it needs low-budget advertising. Enter Deutsch/LA, which claims to have produced radio ads for a dollar promoting the menu. The agency decided not to hire a voiceover actor, choosing instead to have a low-quality text-to-speech voice—i.e., a bad robot voice—read the scripts. The result is pretty amusing. The robot pronounces radio as "rah-dio," but more shameful is that he can't say "tortilla" properly either. He makes up for it with some humorous musings on his personal life, and the refreshing sign-off "Live Más. Bell sound."

When longtime Richards Group copywriter Matt Bull finished his first highly visible solo gig in Dallas this week, it felt like a pretty big deal to him. And apparently Redditors agreed, giving his billboard for the local Chicken Scratch restaurant a massive boost in publicity by voting it to the site's front page on Wednesday. Part of the appeal was the creepy, counterintuitive tone of the board, which highlights Chicken Scratch's location "between some trailers and a condemned motel." But another key to Bull's success was his clear excitement at creating something on his own after a lengthy stint in agency life. "After 16 years, I quit my ad agency job to work for myself and spend more time with my family," he wrote in his Reddit post."Thought I'd share my first solo ad with you guys—for a great local restaurant. I've worked with much bigger budgets in every media imaginable, but I've never been more proud of the outcome than this." Created with illustrator Elliott Park, the R. Crumb-esque billboard has quickly launched Bull and his one-man shop, The Department of Persuasion, into the public eye. We caught up with him for a quick Q&A about the story behind this odd bit of outdoor.

How did you get connected with this gig?
Chicken Scratch is in Oak Cliff, which is a pretty tight-knit neighborhood in Dallas. The owners traded a party for an outdoor placement with CBS and needed something to put up. They wanted to work with someone locally, and another neighbor I'd done some work for recommended me. That was all there was to it.

How much direction did they give you?
The initial direction was only, "We're thinking we want something kind of Church of the SubGenius." Which I can honestly say I've never ever heard from a client. In retrospect that was probably them vetting me, to see if I was on the same wavelength. Then later the co-owner, Christopher, was talking about the challenging sell the restaurant has and said, "I mean, we're between a trailer park and a condemned motel!" And I thought, "That would make a pretty great ad, actually."

Were they (or you) concerned about the general creepiness of it?
Not in the slightest. In fact, the only feedback they made when looking at pencils was, "Can we make the guy creepier?"

How about the fact that you don't show the address?
Nah, no concerns. They didn't even ask for it. I've done a lot of outdoor and had given them the basic ad agency party line on what to expect from outdoor. This one was already on the crowded side, and everyone has a smartphone anyway.

What's your take on the Reddit response? Did you ever expect it would blow up the way it has?
I'm genuinely shocked. I only did it on a whim. I expected, like most of my posts there, that it would get swiftly downvoted into oblivion. How much time have you spent there? They hate ads more than they hate organized religion. I imagine there are entire nu-marketing shops packed with interns leading deeply frustrated lives chasing the front page of Reddit for global brands. That we did it for a fried chicken biscuit sandwich place is gratifying.

The best part of the comments is all the ad-strategy criticism. I think because everyone's grown up assaulted by ads from day one on the planet, they end up a) feeling like they're experts by virtue of passive experience and b) carrying a lot of low level resentment around over having no say in being forced into becoming an audience for thousands of pitches a day. Which they then work out on a billboard for a one-off chicken place. But overall, they really seemed to love it.

For more on Matt Bull and to see his previous work, visit DepartmentOfPersuasion.com.

As the NBA pivots from the conference semifinals to the league championship series, its ads naturally have shifted from memorable moments in the playoffs ("Big is now") to images from past NBA Finals ("Forever is big"). Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks and Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers star in the first two NBA Finals ads, which were created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. Each execution freezes on a key shot each star took en route to a team championship. The action then shifts to the same frozen image as it appears on a cake, in action figures, etc. The latest spot, from the NBA's production arm, NBA TV, celebrates past winning teams with a montage that dates back to the old Minneapolis Lakers of the 1950s. Lots of basketball icons here, from the Celtics' Bill Russell and the Knicks' Willis Reed to the Lakers' Magic Johnson, the Bulls' Michael Jordan and the Heat's LeBron James, who smiles broadly amid a sweet spray of champagne. Daniel Meiseles was executive producer on this celebratory ad, known as "Finally Forever."

A print ad that uses solar power to charge cell phones? At long last, mankind's prayers have been answered! Giovanni + Draftfcb in São Paulo, Brazil, developed the ad, which includes a wafer-think solar panel and phone plug, to promote the Nivea Sun line of skincare products. It ran in Brazilian magazine Veja Rio, and there's a sun-soaked beach video that shows the device in action. Of course, the ad is mainly a gimmick to generate publicity through media coverage, which we're pleased to provide, though the work also suggests that adding novel functionality to traditional campaigns could be a smart way to stir things up. What will they think of next—a billboard that generates drinking water out of thin air?

That hunky Bradley Cooper can do anything he wants, you understand, including strolling into an elegant cocktail party eating ice cream straight out of the container. Lapses in etiquette be damned—just look at those baby blues! And he even brought his own spoon. It helps that he's visiting The House of Häagen-Dazs, which isn't a real place but more of a sugar-fueled fever dream, in this new spot from Team One in El Segundo, Calif. There's a raven-haired supermodel (Jana Perez) who latches onto the smokin' hot Oscar nominee and onetime Sexiest Man Alive for canoodling purposes. Oh but wait, she just wants his dessert. Sure, she does. The General Mills brand, which shot this all-slow-mo, no-dialogue commercial in an 18th-century Baroque chateau in Prague, has never used a celebrity before. (European brand Magnum used a car-hopping Rachel Bilson in a campaign directed by Karl Lagerfeld for its decadent ice-cream bars a few years ago. Could this be a trend?). The Häagen-Dazs ad, meant to luxe up the brand, comes from director Allen Hughes of the famous filmmaking Hughes brothers. It fairly sizzles, and it's hot outside. Eat up!

Excited about the reality show Knitting Wars? If sew, too bad—it's fake. It's one of five bogus lowbrow programs dreamed up by CHI & Partners in New York for a poster campaign advertising New York PBS station Thirteen. The other shows: Bad Bad Bag Boys ("Cleanup on every aisle"), Bayou Eskimos ("Their life is headed south"), The Dillionarie ("Life's a pickle") and Married to a Mime ("She's got plenty to say"). They're all ludicrous, but you wouldn't bat an eye if they were on TLC."The fact that you thought this was a real show says a lot about the state of TV," says each ad, before asking you to support more "quality" programming on PBS. It is sort of sad that quality programming is so scarce today. It's like each new show is trying to out-stupid the last. So PBS makes a great point and delivers it with its trademark dry wit. That's just like them. They're such killjoys. More posters below.