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Hoping to set the record straight and give credit where credit is due, branded entertainment agency Campfire would like us all to know they, working with McKinney, conceived and executed Audi's "Art of the Heist" campaign which Creativity magazine has just named 2005 campaign of the year.
Not that anyone's heard of Belarus nor is there any worry it will affect the world's modelling and advertising industry in any way, the country's president has introduced a law that prevents foreign models from appearing in any of the country's ad campaigns. Why do we even report this stuff?
As opinionites bicker over whether the holidays are about Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanuka or unadulterated commercialism, agency The Brooklyn Brothers bypasses all that buffoonery and offers recipients of its holiday card a different set of choices. Rather than bitch about which religion is more important, people can bitch about which platform through which they'd like to receive their card. Choices range from email to snail mail to fax to download to e-card to :30 to webcast. Make your selection and stop your bitchin'.
The folks over at cheeky Lynx have created a Christmas card that lets visitors write a message and have it spelled out by to models who contort themselves into the shape of the messages letters. T is a pretty good letter to try.
Taunting those who have a politically correct stick up their ass, NightAgency has offered the industry a Christmas card we, well at least Christmas lovers, can all take joy in as the card skewers every group out there calling attention to the notion Christmas isn't for everyone. Before the Comment section explodes, remember, it's called satire.
Sprite, along with the Jun Group, has launched Marcus Hates His Job, a series of three short films that follow the life of a guy starting an internship that doesn't go a smoothly as he would like. Firts, he gets hired by someone who, upon his first day of work, does not work at the company any longer. His interaction with the boss is not encouraging. His visit with the IT department to get an email address where he is met by a paranoid IT guy who demonstrates the usual office administration insanity we all have to go through from time to time. The whole thing, while supposedly promoting Sprite, just gave us a stomach ache reliving our own early days in advertising struggling to get a nut.
While we'd love to say it's all just another online video bandwagon jump emanating from a "Dude, we gotta do online video" creative jam session between iPod-carrying, file-sharing junkies, we can't. We actually like it.
Just when we were having fun celebrating the holidays with agency Christmas cards, gleefully reveling in their witty cuteisms, we had to receive this disaster from Wunderman. When receiving and viewing holiday wishes, it shouldn't be a chore, a job, an effort that requires anything more than a chuckle and a smirk. But that's exactly what Wunderman did with their holiday card. They created work and frustration. First, the Flashturbation took forever to load. Second...get this....you have to enter your email address just to view the thing! Come on. A holiday card should be a warm and friendly greeting, not a hard "we want your contact info" new business tactic. Not only do you have to enter your email, you have to eneter it every friggin time you visit the site! Has Wunderman never heard of a cookie?
We're not done yet. After getting through the card's unnecessary gateway, you'd think you'd be ready for a warm holiday welcome. No. It's friggin game. You have to choose a character, give it a nickname and then screw around with keys on your keyboard to make your character skate. And that's not all. There's a chat feature where, apparently, you can chat with...um...yourself. This card is so bad we have to invent a Worst Agency Holiday Card Award just for Wunderman. Congrats, Wunderman. Stick this on your trophy wall.
Benjamin Morgan, director of graffiti documentary Quality of Life, has entered a promotional and grass roots fund raising deal with Start Mobile, a company that provides downlaodable art from emerging and underground artists for use as cell phone wallpaper. The deal calls for StartMobile to offer and promote still images from Quality of Life.
Quality of Life Producer Brant Smith explains the choice of StartMobile as a promotional vehicle saying, "We can't afford billboards or TV spots. But if we can get our stills and promotional materials on thousands of cell phones across the country...we won't need to spend money on ads like Hollywood films do. Our audience doesn't care about print and TV ads. They're on-line and on their mobiles."
He's right. The mobile phone, now and when companies like Apple and Creative along with cell phone makers get beyond initially poor efforts at combining the mobile phone with the MP3 player, will become the single most important medium surpassing even television.
We're told Samsung Mobile has launched AnyFilms.net a site, created and implemented by Margeotes Fertitta Powell and The Barbarian Group, which features serial and interactive videos under the auspices of Ubiquitous Films and exec produced by Broken Flowers and Alexander producer Jon Kilik to highlight the cell phone as a rising video medium. The first serial film section of the site features two films. The first film Across the Hall has been directed by Alex Merkin, starring Entourage actor Adrian Grenier while another, "GiGi" was directed by Mark Dippe, the director of the feature film Spawn. Across the Hall was engaging enough to keep us watching until the end.
The second section of the site is really interesting and provides six icons that can be dragged into different sections of a grid which then reveals portions of previously shot footage, featuring ten characters and a mysterious suitcase, that make up a mystery. The mystery can be solved by sliding the six icons into enough different positions on the grid enough times producing enough different footage to offer clues. We spent a good amount of time with it but didn't want to go through all 11,000 permutations and combinations. Suffice to say, it kept us wanting more.
The site officially launches December, 24 but is live now. While the site purports to be all about dowloadable video, oddly, there seems to be no obvious means to download any of the content. No matter. We'd rather watch it comfortably at home rather than hunched over a cell phone fighting off angry commuters on the MTA. Oh wait. They're on strike.
The site is being seeded and promoted across weblogs by HyperHappen, an agency whose website, in a stamp of approval of the medium, is a weblog itself.
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