Appreciate the Cheese calls attention to an image on a promotional website for the Washington Performing Arts Society which includes a picture of cellist Yo Yo Ma and an Indian dancer with her hands in a pose, called the Hanover High Shocker, that mirrors a common sexual hand motion a guy performs on a girl. While every possible hand configuration can't really be vetted for every ad created, this one, perhaps, should have caught someone's attention.
Pretty soon some marketer is going to find a way to hover a block-sized, holographic mega-ad in the middle of Times Square but, until then, we'll have to settle for a three story perfume bottle in which, for two days, models and celebrities will live, party and kanoodle in front of onlookers. It's all to promote Calvin Klein's CK One fragrance. The display will be unveiled next Tuesday, July 19.
The work is the brainchild of buzz marketing firm Mixed Marketing head honcho Luanne Calvert and Calvin Klein;s in-house agency, CRK Advertising.
Writing on an Adrants forum, Kevin Glennon brings a contrarian but common sense point of view to the practice of viral advertising. Glennon claims viral is not intended. He says it can't be planned and is a response, not an intent, to a piece of work that happens to be worthy of passing along. He claims there's no difference between a viral campaign and a successful campaign, writing, "You do not create viral campaigns or efforts. You try to create them. Just like you do not create successful ones. You try to. You can launch something funny that gets 20 hits, and it's not viral. Launch something that explodes into 200,000 hits overnight, and yes, it's viral. It's not viral until it's successful. Anybody who tells you otherwise is robbing you blind."
While Glennon's point of view is certainly true in many respects, the notion of viral marketers as enablers of viral activity - those that implement tactics to increase the likelihood an execution will spread - can't be completely dismissed. It's true that the best viral activity is organic but many creative pieces do find their way around simply due to a little "push" from these enabling companies. They may not go far after the initial push unless they are well received, thus successful in Glennon's words, but they wouldn't go anywhere at all without the push in the first place. It's an intriguing catch-22.
Adrants readers Steven Hirst points us to this new commercial, billed as unreleased and called "Ouch!", for Xbox which pits an ex-girlfriend and an ex-boyfriend against each other in increasingly ridiculous stunts to make the other jealous. Thankfully, Xbox Live is there to offer a healthier form of combat. The ad is served from a site that asks a few questions about the spot, asks viewers what's the most painful thing they've done and collects contact info for entry into a drawing for prizes that include an Xbox consoles with video camera and games, a Samsung TV and a Samsung MP3 player.
It's a nice tie in between the notion of X's fighting and Xbox's ability to provide a platform for the fight. Clearly, someone at LAVA Communications, the agency that created the piece, wrote a creative brief that plainly illustrated the product benefit.
