William and Kate's baby is just a day old, and he's already out carousing with other overprivileged infants. Grey London whipped up the "Future Rulers" ad above for The Sun, showing the royal baby alongside "some other pretty high-profile ankle biters" (the agency's words)—Harper Beckham, North West, Elijah Furnish-John and Blue Ivy Carter. They will all be trouble in 18 years, if not sooner.
Showing its flexibility, the agency produced the classier image below for The Times and The Sunday Times of London—replacing the traditional stork with the most royal of birds, the swan, in an ad featuring an image from award-winning still-life photographer Jenny Van Sommers. Credits for both below.
CREDITS Client: The Sun Agency: Grey, London Executive Creative Director: Nils Leonard Creative Director: Dave Monk Creative Team: Dominic Butler, Jasper Cho Retouching: Act2|UM
Client: The Times and The Sunday Times Executive Creative Director: Nils Leonard Creative Director: Dave Monk Creative Team: Jonathan Rands, Alex Tizard Photography: Jenny Van Sommers
The congratulatory ads continue to roll in following the birth of William and Kate's royal baby on Monday. Here's Carling's entry from ad agency Creature—an amusing tale of a palace nursery decorator who's working off faulty information.
Most of the tactical marketing around the royal baby's birth has been a bit undercooked, but this headline from British bakery Warburtons is pretty decent. By WCRS in London.
CREDITS Client: Warburtons Agency: WCRS, London Copywriter: Steve Hawthorne Art Director: Katy Hopkins Creative Director: Billy Faithfull Photographer: George Logan Client Services: Anna Covell Media Buying: Mindshare
When copywriter Matt Bull was given free use of a Dallas billboard for a month, he did what many of us would do: He devoted it to sloth-related violence. Since the billboard was a reward from Clear Channel for Bull's quirky creativity, he chose to advertise SlothPunchClub.com, a URL he offered to hand over to whomever could come up with the best proposal for how it should be used. This week, Bull announced the winner: artist Timmy Hamm, aka "Sloth," who plans to create a series of sloth-related custom shoes and give them away to lucky monthly winners.
"Timmy plans to keep the community-driven/freeware/contest spirit of this enterprise alive, which is cool," Bull writes on his startup agency's website, DepartmentOfPersuasion.com."His idea for Sloth Punch Club is to create one pair of shoes every month featuring a sloth punching something, and give them away. Each winner gets to be a member of the very exclusive Sloth Punch Club, and also gets to choose what exactly the target of the sloth's fists will be on the next pair of shoes Timmy gives away. It's simple and stupid and I love it."
As for Bull, who rapidly rose to Internet prominence when his first solo client work went viral, he reports his major source of life stress has shifted from finding paying work to simply getting all his new work done. So congrats to Matt, and to Timmy, and to the future members of the highly exclusive and well-shod Sloth Punch Club.
Apparently unable to think up a new idea vapid enough for its liking, Abercrombie & Fitch—the self-proclaimed brand for the cool kids!—revisits its "Stars on the Rise" campaign from the early 2000s, now with new faces. Jacob Artist of Glee, Alexander Ludwig of The Hunger Games and Lily Rabe of American Horror Story are among those featured. Ludwig is shirtless. It looks like he works out. "For many of our consumers today, they might not know what we did in 2005, so it seemed relevant to discuss this concept we've done in the past," Abercrombie director of marketing Michael Scheiner tells BuzzFeed. Strange, he used the word "relevant." Without irony. I think. The monochrome print campaign, shot by Bruce Weber, also features famous dogs, like the Jack Russell terrier from The Artist, for no particular reason. Now, you might say it's just too easy to criticize soulless fashion and fragrance advertising, that there's no sport to it, and that doing so shows a certain intellectual laziness on my part. Well d'uh! The original version of the campaign thrust Taylor Swift and Ashton Kutcher into the limelight. Haven't we suffered enough already?
Bucharest is many things. But one thing it is certainly not is Budapest. That's because Bucharest is the capital of Romania, and Budapest is the capital of neighboring Hungary. You could easily confuse them, of course, which is why Romanian candy bar ROM is out to end the confusion once and for all—with a new ad campaign from McCann Bucharest and MRM Romania.
As illustrated in the video below, it was all Michael Jackson's fault. In 1990, he started the trend by shouting "Hello, Budapest!" at his concert in Bucharest. In 1995, Iron Maiden did the same thing. They were followed by Morcheeba, Lenny Kravitz, Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne, Whitesnake and others. The problem reached comic proportions in 2012, when when 400 Athletic Bilbao fans missed the Europa League final after mistakenly flying to Budapest instead of Bucharest.
Bucharest didn't get mad, but now it wants to get even. Billboards have gone up in both cities, reminding everyone of which is which. A browser add-on adds the words "Not Budapest" next to every instance of "Bucharest." And fans on the ROM website are encouraged to share their Bucharest/Budapest stories and tag them #BucharestNotBudapest.
"It's a confusion that upsets us all, and if there is a brand that can take legitimate action towards this error, that brand is definitely ROM, because it's Romanian, authentic, daring and because it has BUCHAREST written on it," says client marketing manager Gabriela Munteanu. (You may remember ROM from the 2011 Cannes Lions festival, when it won two Grand Prix for a campaign that pretended to Americanize the candy bar, much to the horror of its fans.)
We will have an early indication of whether the Bucharest/Budapest campaign is working, as Iron Maiden returns to Bucharest on Wednesday as part of their current world tour.
Disgusting employee antics at fast-food restaurants are getting out of hand. The latest horror story comes from Columbus, Ohio, where two "sandwich artists" have been fired from Subway for behaving in particularly unartistic ways around the food. One reportedly urinated in a bottle and froze it in the company freezer. The other rubbed his genitals on some bread. (Insert $5 footlong joke here.) The Huffington Post's Weird News blog has more, in case you haven't already heard enough. Subway has issued this statement: "This isolated incident is not representative of Subway Sandwich Artists. These actions are not tolerated and the franchisee took immediate action to terminate the two employees involved." Your move, Arby's employee with no sense of boundaries.
This hilarious promo for the final season of CBS's How I Met Your Mother takes the show's weird framing device to its logical and deeply unsavory conclusion. The premise of the show is that our narrator, Ted, years from now, is actually telling his kids the extremely long-winded story of how he met their mother. Thing is, the show's been on for eight years. So, if you think about it, Ted has spent all that time recounting an endless series of women he slept with while his kids were trapped on the living-room couch. In this bleep-laden promo, Ted's adorable children, now surly teenagers, point out that in the past eight years they've gone through puberty, survived by crapping in a bucket, drinking rainwater and eating spiders, and are starting to have disturbing feelings of sibling lust—and he still hasn't gotten to how he met Mom. As the series finally ends, all of us, but especially Ted's kids, are excited to hear the motherf**king ending. The final season premieres Sept. 23.
I both love and hate the fact that "bad/offensive car dealership ad" is an accepted genre of TV marketing now. I mean, nothing sells me on a car faster than terrible acting, crappy sound and cartoonish ethnic stereotypes, and Charlie Clark Nissan employs all of those in a series of ads that are basically Hearst newsrag political cartoons from the 1930s. Also, the bald guy in the Tonto ad—which has been pulled from YouTube—looks like The Creeper from The Suffering: The Ties That Bind, which leaves me even further disinclined from ever buying a car at this place. Free marketing tip for these guys: I know you think any publicity is good publicity because you're raising awareness/generating buzz, but that only works when your target audience doesn't think you're all racist halfwits. Via Deadspin.
Emily Hodgson and Emilie Riis, staffers at London ad agency 18 Feet & Rising, have harnessed the awesome global power of the Internet for its ultimate purpose—pestering Nike. They've created Purple Unicorn Planet, a site that at first glance seems to sell various Nike training shoes. In fact, clicking on sneakers yields a message informing you that Nike doesn't make those shoes in women's sizes. The Emilies urge you to share a letter of protest with Nike (it begins, "Somewhere in Swoosh Central, there's been an oversight"). There's also a Twitter feed, @PunicornP, and hashtag, #PleaseJustDoIt, because everything has to have a Twitter feed and hashtag these days. Why not simply buy some other company's shoes? Or, if they're dead-set on wearing Nike Air Safaris, just saw off the toes? "The open-toe look isn't in this season," Hodgson tells AdFreak. Riis adds: "We saw a gap in the market and we want cooler trainers in girls' sizes. We are both huge Nike fans and love their men's designs, so that's why we are focusing on Nike." They swear the campaign isn't intended to generate buzz for themselves or their agency, but that's what's happened, so I guess it's all good. "We haven't heard from Nike. Yet," says Riis. The company might respond eventually, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that shoe to drop.
Mini is making the most of the summer season by introducing three incredible concept cars specially designed for campers—though you can't buy any of them (yet). And if they seem hard to believe, no wonder. At least one of them was previously unveiled as an April Fools' joke in 2012, but all three are now official Mini concept vehicles.
The most amazing is probably the Mini Cowley Caravan, an adorable trailer that comfortably sleeps two and comes with a twin-burner gas stove; a water tank with pump and sink; and a solar panel that charges the on-board battery, with a 230-volt connection that powers a fridge, TV and audio equipment.
The two other concepts are cool as well. The Countryman ALL4 Camp has a roof rack that cranks up into a tent.
The Clubvan Camper is almost a home on wheels—it has a spacious sleeping area for one; an extendable kitchenette with propane stove and chest fridge; a hand-held shower with water tank; a glass panel that can be opened for ventilation or stargazing; a kayak-looking storage rack on top; and a television and auxiliary heater.
Now, they just need to sell these things for real.
With crowdfunding product videos all the rage, mockvertising has reached a new apex with fictional Kickstarter ads. Behold the one below, imploring you to help fund the development of Tiny Diapers for the Tip of Your Penis™. This parody by comedy-writer group Above Average (and writers The Bilderbergers and director Ben Weinstein) is the best example I've seen of American chindogu. Chindogu is the Japanese word for an everyday gadget that seems to be an ideal solution for an annoying problem but would cause so much embarrassment to use that it's essentially useless. Given that these tiny diapers have tiny leg holes, they are exceedingly useless. But mostly, this is a send-up of the Kickstarter video format—the moronic questions the inventors answer, the absurd reward hierarchy, and the fantasy that some random people on the Internet are just a tiny amount of funding away from actually solving a serious problem. Because, really, Kickstarter videos are nothing more than the 3 a.m. infomercial of the Internet.
They say celebrity endorsements are a questionable investment, but as you can see below, they can be staggeringly successful—if the celebrity is Dikembe Mutombo and the target market is this particular baby. The Martin Agency will enjoy this. Wonder what the kid thinks of the "Hump Day" spot.
Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign doesn't have many vocal critics, but here's one: Kelly Cutrone, founder of fashion PR firm People's Revolution and star of The Hills, The City and Kell on Earth. Here's what she has to say about thinness in fashion, and Dove's ads:
"Society has a hyper emphasis on thin, and that trend comes from the consumers—it does not come from the fashion industry. The fashion industry needs to make money. That's what we do. If people said, 'We want a 300-pound purple person,' the first industry to do it would be fashion. You look at the Dove campaign in Times Square—it sticks out like a sore thumb. Those girls in the white T-shirts and underwear, next to Calvin Klein [and all the other fashion ads]. As a consumer, it doesn't make me want to buy Dove. I'm all for the real look, but as a consumer it doesn't make me want to buy clothes."
Vending machines have been developing unique personalities for some time. We've had generous ones, sadistic ones, patriotic ones. Now, we've got an exceedingly empathetic one. Check out the video below from a South African airport, where coffee roaster Douwe Egberts rigged up its vending machine with facial-recognition software to dispense free cups of coffee to anyone who yawned. It's a nice stunt that turned those yawns to smiles. The fittingly named agency behind it: Joe Public. Via Foodbeast.
It might have gone down as one of the least interesting Twitter hacks of all time, except it was fake. Which makes it … interesting?
Chipotle has admitted to Mashable that the brand was behind a series of what looked like rogue tweets last weekend. On Sunday, @ChipotleTweets began posting odd messages like "Find avocado store in Arvada, Colorado" and, "Hi sweetie, can you please pick up some lime, salt, and onions? twitter." Shortly after, "Joe" from the Chipotle team posted a message that seemed to confirm a hack: "Sorry all. We had a little problem with our account. But everything is back on track now!"
While brand hacks seem to be a dime a dozen these days, this one was apparently invented for publicity. The tweets were meant to obliquely tie into Chipotle's "Adventurito" promotion, a series of 20 puzzles in 20 days celebrating its 20th anniversary. Sunday's puzzle was about the ingredients that go into guacamole. "We thought that people would pay attention, that it would cut through people's attention and make them talk, and it did that," company spokesman Chris Arnold told Mashable on Wednesday.
Earlier this year, MTV and BET (both owned by Viacom) did something similar when they pretended to be victims of hacks similar to those befalling brands like Burger King and Jeep. Some social media and PR pundits are already bemoaning the loss of reliability that a brand can suffer by lying to its fans. But come on. If you're disappointed by the ethical integrity of a burrito-hustling Twitter feed, you have no one but yourself to blame.
If I ever want to drive up Pikes Peak in Colorado fairly fast, I guess I'll buy a Range Rover.
That's my takeaway from this five-minute video showing the 2014 Range Rover Sport setting records for both production-standard SUVs and standard vehicles of any kind on the 12.42-mile Pikes Peak International Hill Climb course. In June, performance and stunt driver Paul Dallenbach, who has won several events on Pikes Peak, took 12 minutes and 35.61 seconds to climb the hill, traveling at an average speed of about 60 miles per hour.
It's a twisty track with dense forest below. This is Dallenbach's first time back since he crashed there last year during a race while driving a different type of vehicle. Footage of that accident is re-run, and race officials, a safety crew member and a Pikes Peak Ranger are on hand to discuss how perilous the course can be.
The clip—the first in the automaker's "The Driven Challenges" series—makes every effort to play up the drama and danger. And while it's a solid piece of work, I still felt dissatisfied.
I mean, they'd never post the video if Dallenbach drove off a cliff and smashed the SUV in a flaming heap on the rocks below, now would they? We know that he and the SUV are going to be just fine, which makes the whole approach feel strained.
The film uses cinematic tools to build suspense where none really exists in the first place. Misty mountain tops and fast-moving cars are intercut with lingering shots of worried or thoughtful faces. Moody musical cues suggest danger in every note. The intensity peaks, so to speak, around the 2:15 mark, with the scene cutting from the starter to Paul … from the starter to Paul … from the starter to … just drive the damn truck already!
Contrast this with "Desire," Jaguar's 13-minute branded film from a few months back. (Jaguar and Range Rover are part of the same company.) "Desire" stars Damian Lewis as a mysterious "delivery man" searching for the new owner of a red F-Type sports car. There's action, gunplay and a twist at the end. Of course, it's complete fantasy, a schlocky story and utterly derivative at that. Yet on first viewing I found myself riveted by the tricky plot. I really did want to see how it all worked out, and those 13 minutes raced by.
Dallenbach probably was a bit on edge in that Range Rover on Pikes Peak. He'd crashed there recently. The potential for disaster was real. Still, in the video, a happy denouement is assured. Subtract any true tension, and what remains is a film about a guy driving a truck up a hill. The fact that it's a most impressive hill, and that he set some obscure speed records, didn't particularly pique my interest.
Pereira & O'Dell's social film "The Beauty Inside" for Intel and Toshiba was a major success—an engaging episodic tale with a delightful premise that propelled the small San Francisco agency onto the world stage when it won a Daytime Emmy and three Grand Prix at Cannes last month. So, what do they do for a sequel? They have Harvey Keitel battle zombie alien mustaches, of course.
"The Power Inside" stars Harvey Keitel, Craig Roberts, Analeigh Tipton, Reid Ewing and Zack Pearlman in the apparently somewhat campy story of aliens who disguise themselves as mustaches or unibrows and attach themselves to unsuspecting humans, turning them into unthinking drones. With the help of his friends and technology—and you—the main character, Neil, discovers he’s the only guy who can stop the invasion. (Intel-inspired Ultrabook devices by Toshiba play an important role, we're told.)
Check out the trailer below, and visit thepowerinside.com to audition to be in the film—as a Urick (bad guy) or Guardian (good guy). The six-episode series premieres Aug. 15 at facebook.com/insidefilms.
Remember that time you thought babysitting for a few extra bucks was a great idea? What could be so hard about putting an 8-year-old to bed, right? Fast-forward a few hours, and Mikey's got his head caught in the stairs. Sarah's got a wad of gum in her hair. You're fashioning a makeshift diaper out of duck tape for the one whose name you forgot. Or worse, the house catches fire. Seriously, anything can happen. Have you seen The Sitter?
Lucky for you, the Red Cross has developed "Babysitting Basics Course," an online tutorial that teaches you how to handle—or better yet, avoid—babysitting blunders. Oh, and they teamed up with BBDO Atlanta and director Daniel Strange to produce the PSA below. The spot is a charming and adorable one-minute piece about the potential hazards of babysitting. And those cute little tykes are clearly more aware of them than their absent-mind teenage babysitter. So, to you would-be sitters out there: Before you decide to conquer you neighbor's living room, hear the warning of unlucky kids, go online and take the course.
A jokey-yet-serious campaign called Bribe the Senate, intended to get the U.S. Senate to at least discuss the idea of mandatory background checks on gun purchases, has hit a legal snag and its organizers are rethinking their approach—lest they end up in prison.
Four creatives at Goodby, Silverstein & Partners came up with the project (a personal one, not an agency endeavor), which was designed to raise money to offset donations from the gun lobby to six senators who could provide the swing votes to consider legislation on the topic. At midnight Thursday—100 days after the Senate voted to keep background checks from even being discussed—the campaign's website will count down to zero, at which point it was supposed to start collecting donations. Now, that won't happen.
"Honestly, we started this whole thing with the intent to fundraise for the bribes," says Simon Bruyn, one of the creatives. "But the lawyers were very adamant that this was go-to-jail illegal. Not just for us, but for anybody who donated. So we had to change our approach late in the game."
Instead, the site will simply direct tweets to the six senators and ask them to revisit their stance on the issue. Not so much as a bitcoin will change hands.
"We get it. Bribes are bad. You can't pay a politician to change their vote," says Emil Tiismann, another of the site's creators. "Next time we will form a proper political lobbying organization so that we can collect unlimited cash in order to have a meaningful political conversation with our elected officials where we strongly express our opinions."
Tiismann adds: "Please don't send us to jail for this. We'd hate to have to share a cell with a mentally ill killer who bought his murder weapon at a gun show without a background check."
Jacob Sempler and Andrew Livingston were the other two creatives who built the campaign. Check out its appeal video below.
