advertising commentary and analysis for ad students, ad pros and people into pop culture.
What We’re Loving Now
If it’s spot-on funny, painfully honest, poignant, or simply as close to art as this discipline gets, it goes in our galleria of communications we love.
Here’s a great live-event-to-social media promo by agency Vitro that turns constituents into ambassadors. Can’t say if they’re Newcastle beer lovers, beer lovers, or fun-loving Del Mar racing fans. But the plan, one of three of the brand’s summer art projects, was simple. Shoot them in a traditional Newcastle beer glass (Geordie Schooner); bribe them to post with a t-shirt:
Agency: Vitro
Executive Creative Director: John Vitro
Creative Director: KT Thayer
Art Director: Paul Lambert
Agency Producer: Mickey Strider
Found on Scary Ideas
Just as the promo below says, “no better place to promote an underwater camera”. We like it for two reasons: The placement is about as strategic as you can get; The sink environment will almost always capture your full attention. A nice bit of smart.
From Giovanni+Draft FCB, Sao Paulo, Brazil. For some reason, too many AD’s and CD’s are credited on this to list, so we’ll give a credit to photographer Leandro Texeira.
Credit goes to adsoftheworld for curating this one.
This campaign by Ignition K, Madrid for cheap Bic cell phones (marketed in Europe) is a simple poster-y reminder that things do happen and if they do, there’s Bic. Simple, fun illustrations against bright backgrounds create a distinct look for Bic that conditions you to identify the ‘Waldo’ with the character in the corner.
Creative Director: David Moure
Art Director: Manuel Martínez Soler
Copywriter: Victoria León García
Illustrator: Manuel Martínez Soler
We like this campaign for Lego by Serviceplan, Munich (yes, we’ve been featuring a lot of creative from Germany these days). ‘Builders of Tomorrow’ (curated by scaryideas) features kids innocently creating the technology of tomorrow under the noses of their naive parents.
The TV spot is a super 8 recreation which will seem more historical curiosity than nostalgia to many of you. Print ads are one each from the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s. If the campaign is focused on today’s young parents, it barely makes the “I remember when’ cut-off. But Lego has always been about its power to stimulate creative expression, which is why this works well, regardless of your age.
The TV spot is followed by the print campaign.
Credit: CD: Matthias Harbeck; AD: Sandra Loibl; Photographer & Director: Susanne Dittrich; Commercial shot by Embassy of Dreams
Adiocracy is cooked up for copywriters, art directors and advertising students everywhere.
As ugly as it is, domestic violence is too often a difficult thing to spot, even when it’s happening right before your eyes. This ad campaign created by DOJO, Berlin for Senat of Berlin’s (oddly named) Dept. for economics, technology, and woman, makes the point in ingenious ‘Where’s Waldo’ style.
(For another another unusal visual expression of this difficult aspect of domestic violence, see the video MakeUnder for Beauty Cares done by this author.)
These arresting poster ads for the Leica S2 ‘Sharpest Details’ campaign are placed on the actual surface of the element they’re magnifying. Created by Advico Y&R, Zurich, the vivid posters demonstrate the camera’s remarkable 37.5 million pixel capabilities.
What makes any story truly compelling — and great advertising is story-telling — is the detail of the narrative. This Leica campaign demonstrates how fascinating the details can be.
Here’s a fun vid produced by The Viral Factory (based on the MacKenzie Crook impersonator, we say out of the UK office) for Samsung to illustrate the endurance of its SD cards (doesn’t appear to be for any kind of new super duper durable card).
We dig this light-hearted ‘demo’ despite the griping on YouTube that it switches out different cards, which by the way, we don’t think it does. We just think the naysayers don’t understand what it takes to make a video like this, which is lots and lots of takes, and why there are a few necessary edit points. The obvious opportunity the producers missed was to use the ol’ magician’s trick of putting an identifying mark on the card — sign the guy’s initials or draw a little picture — that the viewer could follow.
BUT, this is hardly the point, because it doesn’t really matter whether it’s one card or five, what’s important is the net takeaway — Samsung SD cards are durable enough to protect your info under all kinds of crazy conditions.
We bought into the video as quasi proof that their cards stand up to more than an SD card would ever reasonably encounter.
One of us did have an SD card that was accidentally cleaned and pressed in a tux a few months back, and it faithfully kept its data. Which is actually the brilliance of this idea: most SD cards would probably pass the same test. And, at least in this video, Samsung isn’t trying to make any unique claims. They’re simply attempting to own durability, which we think is a pretty smart strategic idea (caveat: we’re not up on our SD card advertising).
As of today, this vid only has 304 views. And though we don’t claim to have a crystal ball for virality, we say it’ll get passed along. If you ask the Viral Factory, they’ll say they’ve got the formula. But that’s like saying Michael Bay knows the necessary alchemy to guarantee a summer blockbuster.
Here’s a simple campaign reminding adults jumping back into the pool (as in dating pool) that they’re just as susceptible to Sexually Transmitted Infections (Brit for STDs) like syphilis, genital warts and chlamydia as young people. Though the outfits in the ads feel like they’d put the audience a bit older than their stated 40′s and 50′s target, we won’t quibble over a decade.
And while the structural connection between remembering when you wore an outift and remembering to wear a condom is a bit blunt, it fits with the simple and direct message: You’re older, you’re supposedly more experienced now, so wear a condom. By advertising agency tea, London (though we couldn’t find their site). AD: Chris Bishop and CW: Stuart Fermor.
Talk about reaching your demo. The most brilliant about this idea for “The Last Exorcism” by The Visionaire Group LA is how incisive the media is. What more dead-on place to reach the young male demographic than ChatRoulette?! Get ‘em while their horny. They’ll def tell their friends!
Just saw this one for the first time on AdPulp. It’s the 3rd in a series (from what we remember) created for Malibu Rum by comedy writer/actor Eric Fensler. In our opinion, it’s the funniest of the three, because the mock-morning show setting captures so many info-idioms, including all that super-duper enthusiasm, the convoluted problem-solution logic, and amazed clown-sized smiles. It’s about as stealth a mention for a product as you can get, and truth is, it may work better as a spoof than as an ad. The Mike Morgan character (is that the actor’s real name?) is so damn good, we’d hire him to do the real thing.
