While most of us are celebrating the fact it's Friday, DraftFCB CFO Bob Oates may not be so happy. We're told he's been fired by Howard Draft today and rumors indicate it's because he didn't think very highly of top management's spending habits. It's another chapter in the agency's bloodbath following the loss of the Verizon account which resulted in anywhere between 50 and 150 layoffs depending upon who you talk to. Not to mention the ongoing post-merger after effects.
This is your brain on drugs. No, wait. This is your brain on student loans. No, there's no brain frying in a fry pan but this new commercial for Think Financial gets cute with a talking brain that explains how easy it is to get financial aid for college. Adrants reader Lisa, who was kind enough to send us this oddity remarked, "The brain itself looked like a squishy Nerf football or worse yet a female body part." Eew. But she's kinda right.
What's a poor TV personality to do when her TV gigs - soap star, TRL host, ET reporter - dry up? An ad campaign, of course. Last spring Vanessa Minnello signed a deal with fashion brand Bongo to front their ad campaign which continues this fall with new ads.
If you want all the goods on Minnello, check out her Wikipedia page on which such tidbits as her number 15 placement on Maxim's Hot 100 issue and Lindsay Lohan knife images can be had.
Anyway, here's the other two images from the new campaign.
See those ultra-luxe Camel No. 9's at left? Pretty, right? Well, Democrat Lois Capps of California wants you to know they're dressed to kill. And not in the sexy way.
The CA representative is the leader of a group that wants to get ladymag publishers to stop pushing these and other smoking ads. But editors have expressed apathy toward the campaign, with only 3 out of 11 responding to Capps' demand:
Vogue editor Florio says screw you, pass restrictions through Congress. Glamour states simply that while smoking is discouraged in its articles, smoking ads remain legal. And W, the Switzerland in all this, says it wouldn't mind engaging in a 'constructive dialogue' about the issue. (Maybe they just don't want to hurt her feelings.)
Capps screams "hypocrisy!" and marches on.
Anything to get people to care about Current TV. Al Gore has hooked up with Cameron Diaz to introduce its ":60 Seconds to Save the Earth" contest which calls for people to submit :15, :30 or :60 PSAs urging people to care about the climate. The winning spots will air on Current TV and on MySpace's Impact channel. So if you're feeling green and have the CGM itch, this is your chance to get something on the air as opposed to having it trashed by the client.
A little bit Happiness Factory and a little bit OutPost Gerbil Cannon, this new commercial for Guinness created by BBDO in Ireland and edited by Cut + Run celebrates what's inside its beer by shooting futuristic-looking Speed Racer-like guys out of what looks like musical instruments onto a set of drums. The result is an orchestral masterpiece of sorts
And, yes, we get it. The guys are beer. Though we are a bit irked by that first shot which is supposed to be the reflection of beer in one of the guy's helmets but, rather, looks a bit like a melting brain. But that's just us. Similar as it might, in theory, be to the aforementioned spots, it does get points for a certain originality we find hard to describe.
The four day shoot used real stunt men shot out of real air cannons onto real, eight-foot drums specially made for the shoot. Now that's a shoot we wouldn't mind attending.
For some odd reason MySpace has gone all super-pink on our asses. This bamboozled us so we dug deep to work out what was going on.
Oh right, it's all part of that Cherry Coke contest, for which they've found a winner - a cat (yeah, you read right) named Pouncer.
To honor said winner, for all of today (and hopefully not tomorrow), it's not just MySpace.com; it's Pouncer's MySpace.com. Courtesy of Cherry Coke.
Options to molest your MySpace page in equal cherry-soaked fashion are available here.
We don't know why we're surprised or even confused, considering MySpace has always been open about its willingness to sacrifice a consistent aesthetic scheme to the highest bidder.
As the last pair of Beatles and the Saatchi guys will tell you, music and advertising make a passionate, but occasionally fatal, mix.
Bassist Brian Ritchie of the Violent Femmes is suing vocalist Gordon Gano for lack of attribution on some songs and inaccurate earnings distribution.
The lawsuit also alleges Gano "[trashed] the band's reputation" by licensing the use of "Blister in the Sun" in a Wendy's ad.
Ooh, pulling out the big guns. The ad doesn't strike us as super-controversial, but fans feel differently. One blogged, "My ears perked up. Then my jaw dropped. Then my heart sank."
Awww. There, there. Maybe it's the ad's white-collar aspect. Hey, an '80s folk-punk band can't stay young forever, and at some point even fans must exchange the bong for the mousepad. We'd cry in sympathy but, oh, we don't know how.
Thanks Brian for the tip.
What's awesome about puppets is that they never age. We think that's probably why Sesame Street continues to survive.
There's also the underlying mythology. Why was Oscar the Grouch so grouchy? How did the cookies become crumbles in Cookie Monster's toothless, wide-open mouth? Why did Bert and Ernie live together?
Answer these questions and more with any jaded adult who, having never worked it all out in childhood, was forced to use deductive logic to fill in the blanks. (Oscar does drugs; Bert and Ernie are quite obviously gay; and while the cookies-to-crumbles mystery remains thus, Cookie Monster now diets for today's impressionable youth).
But we digress. Season 38 of the show will open with a segment called "The Word on the Street," put together by agency mono (gotta love those agencies that do the mod "we don't need capital letters" thing - go literacy!).
In each segment a zealous orange puppet named Murray wanders the streets looking for news on "the word."
Watch the segment on "disappear," or see Murray get all "frustrated."
The first time we saw this video of Filipino inmates dancing to Thriller, we remember thinking, "... Dude, how were 1500 inmates at a Cebu prison coaxed into a coordinated syncopated jamboree?"
We didn't have long to wonder. Security consultant Byron Garcia, the force behind it, isn't exactly shy. With a near-comical audacity, Garcia uploaded the video onto YouTube himself, along with a shit-ton of other coordinated nightmares, including I Will Follow Him from Sister Act.
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