Adrants reader Burning Max fills us in on the scope of the HSBC tat ad we looked at yesterday. It's part of a global campaign called Your Point of View, where opinions fly forth on everything from wrapping paper to gorillas to Blackberrys (14 percent per this entry say they're actually evil).
Burning Max notes, "the campaign is obviously meant to drive people to abandon prejudices, look behind their beliefs and don't be afraid of differences - the best way to approach global business... and life in general, I guess..."
We dig it more and more. It's a total Benetton throwback, before they got into all that trouble with the Death Row campaign and dumbed down with Barbie liaisons. Here's to hoping banks and Barbies never meet.
Check out more provocative print and send accompanying ecards.
If there's anything that wakes one up more than a grande, half-caf, no-whip, double latte with room, it's a thong staring you in the face as you make your way to the office. Yea, we feel you, baby but we'd rather not show up to work with that horny highschooler look emblazoned on our mug. Especially during that account service meeting where we have to at least pretend we know what we're talking about.
Here's an eye-catching campaign. Agency Republik creates Illuminator, a series of time-released puzzles and clues whose answers lie in the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
The campaign will run twice in six months through newspapers, on the Illuminator site, on signs in the museum, and in a flip book at the museum store. Each clue corresponds to one piece of art; for example, this Missing poster speaks to Memories by Sheng Qi. And the image at left points to this guy.
The person who nails all 20 gets ... a free shirt. Okay, that kind of sucks. But the game is intriguing and possibly, yes, illuminating. If there's anything we learned about America post Da Vinci Code it's that you can only get people's asses into a museum if they have a ball of yarn to untangle - and possibly a cryptic murder case involving an albino, but you can't ask for everything.
"Dude, have you heard about this wild new ad technology that matches the content of an article to the subject matter of your ad? Oh, it's so cool. You just choose a few keywords that describe the ad and computers serve it up when an article mentions those keywords. It's like brainless. So easy to set up."
Um, yea, dude. We've heard of it. It's great if you want to make your client look like an unfeeling idiot who thinks it's OK to offer killer supermarket values in articles about Amish killings or turpentine next to an article about a girl who used the stuff to abort a pregnancy or Target selling Anna Nicole Smith's dead son.
Now, it seems, it's OK for Toyota to urge you to run right out and buy a car while reading about a teacher hit by a car. You can't make this shit up but we wish someone would make it stop.
So somebody emails us and goes, "Holiday time is more than just stupid f'in holiday cards, isn't it?" and we sigh with relief and go, hell yeah it is. And then we realize this is actually a plug for what they think holiday time is all about.
The cause is KCA Rebels, a liaison between Keep a Child Alive and Blender and the usual college hipsters who all want to be in bands and get famous. The winning band gets a record contract and a feature in Blender, but mainly this is to "promote awareness" (we love that phrase) about ... hm. Something related to keeping children alive. We're almost sure of it.
And because we were asked to, we'll link to this FLiP article too. Upon closer inspection it occurred to us the article has little or nothing to do with KCA Rebels and more to do with giving for the holidays with a web 2.0 tie-in to Facebook. And since this is completely fucking all over the place anyway, guess what? We're listening to Madonna's "Lucky Star" right now. And to give this an appropriate philanthropic tie-in, we're thinking of donating something to the kids at St. Jude. And for the requisite hipster 2.0 tie-in, lookie lookie - we're blogging about it.
We really like these ads for Korbel Royal and Korbel Blue Hawaiian, which made Steve want to dive into his computer screen, pop the cork and down a bottle while I experienced a bizarre craving for champagne with essence of coconut.
Korbel tagged agency Carmichael Lynch and Gasket Studios, who with their animation wanted to turn the ads into an experience of "visual taste." Gasket founder Greg Shultz adds, "Fluidity, fun, Americana and nostalgia are mixed with a very current aesthetic - the very essence of the Korbel champagne cocktails." He appears to have some trouble committing to just a couple of good adjectives there. In any case the wine cooler - oops, champagne cocktail - ads leap off Time Square this month but expect to see them elsewhere.
We've all seen sterile ads for feminine products in which piss or menstrual fluid comes out blue. We all know that piss and menstrual fluid are not actually blue. Those crazy cats at Amalgamated, the very guys who brought us Ben & Jerry claymation, decide to stomp on the polite institution of blue bodily fluid for their client Clearblue Easy and its new digital pregnancy test.
We would have respected them for that. But they took things one step further and put the pregnancy test in space, a la Dark Star, and then let fall a stream of disembodied space piss! And then our brains exploded.
Check it out here. But be careful. It's a little crazy.
- The One Club has announced its Call for Entries for the One Show 2007, the premiere international awards show recognizing the year's best creative advertising. The deadline for entry is January 31, 2007.
- Here's some less-than-kind Christmas buttons from Lowe Roche in Toronto.
- The iTunes PC Guy has a book.
- Thirty Reasons Why A Beer Is Better Than A Woman. If we you read the thing, we'd share it with you.
- Conde Nast gets it MySpace on with Flip.
A Madrid airport recently featured a wrapped Mini waiting for its loving master in baggage claim like any other snowboard or piece of luggage.
This was for "It comes with me," a campaign thrown together by Dommo which wanted to demonstrate obsessive love of the zippy little car by suggesting somebody brings it everywhere, even onto the plane.
We can only imagine how much imagined bullshit an airport would have to go through to accommodate a douche who insists on bringing his car everywhere. We can only imagine the "what the fuck?" thoughts going through the minds of the guys whose bosses asked them to plastic wrap a vehicle. So by suggestion the placement is kind of funny. Only kind of though. Like, almost just microscopically funny.
For a long time, everyone's been wondering who's really behind that freakish looking Burger King mask. OK, so we're the only ones wondering but has anyone seen Jack Kevorkian lately? The euthanasia dude seems to have disappeared. Oh wait, is he in prison? Anyway, we think we've found him along with the true identity of the Burger King.
The Richards Group, endeavoring, as all agencies do, to be a bit different with their Christmas cards, has launched YuleTube on which a collection of holiday-themed videos can be found. There's reverse cookie eating, fighting claymation and a campaign smearing Santa. It's moderately amusing.
We think we've found one of the more amusing agency holiday cards with Sullivan Higdon & Sink's We Love Holiday Sweaters. But come on guys. Leave the political correctness at home. It is a Christmas sweater after all and not a "holiday" sweater. You don't want to encourage the horror of people wearing these fashion faux pauxs every holiday do you? Once a year is enough! Anyway. On the site, not only do you get to wallow in the absurdity of the Christmas sweater, you get to create your own! Yes, advertising people. Leave that boring client work behind for a moment and test your true, unapproval process-hindered creativity in the knitting section of the site. Let's see who can create the best (or is it worst?) sweater. Email your creation to sweater@adrants.com and we'll feature them here. Or, just leave the link in comments.
absurdity of the Christmas sweater
Pop quiz. What do you get when you combine an advertising agency Christmas card with the Second Life fad? An agency Christmas card video set in Second Life, of course. Leo Burnett Detroit, one of the early agency entries into the virtual world has forgone the typical, boring, so yesterday, "real world" holiday card and, instead, given us an avatar-filled, winter-themed, Second Life hip hop jam. Hmm. Different. Nicely produced (by Millions of Us). Though it doesn't look like the Second Life we know. No lag. No half-built sims. No clunky interface. Just a lot of happy, dancing agency avatars. What's not to like?
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