Plaid made the holidays extra-special this year by sending a video to clients and friends -- including us -- that claims we were involved in an affair with Mrs. Claus, which has since gone public and may potentially destroy Christmas.
It is a completely insane premise.
You've probably seen this or something like it before, laughed once and never thought about it again. But at least two people out there are so distraught over it, they've had a lawyer send an official cease and desist letter to Plaid, demanding that the material be taken down and that proof of its removal be conveyed to them.
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No ad industry holiday is complete without a lovable mood-setting douchebag. This year Tom Fellow is ours.
The guy had us from "felice navidado" and now we can't stop listening to his Christmas standards and watching him open presents while growling.
Lavish in the Fellow aesthetic or watch with glee while Twitter catches on. Big THANKEE to @pjbfcp.
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With help from production firm Dictionary Films, Leo Burnett launched a TV spot for "Food Shouldn't Be a Luxury," an effort to encourage locals to donate supplies to the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
The ad's put together like a generic perfume ad, with occasional flashes of a boiling pot and some random pasta fondling. We seriously winced when the model sexily purred "Spaghetti" in her fake Kate Moss-for-Eternity voice, but it got the point across: Okay, okay! Food shouldn't be a luxury.
Make a donation or volunteer time at Every1Can.org. Unlike the prints (see first link), the spot doesn't invite users to text donations over. Not sure if that means the texting thing didn't pan out, or if Leo Burnett just doesn't think people keep phones nearby while watching TV.
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Last year JWT sent us a holiday card featuring Albert, an animated tool whose tongue's been attached to the same pole for a year, I guess.
Albert's back. Try to free him without overtaxing his pain threshold. Pulling him back and letting go has proven somewhat amusing. Also, JWT promises there's a way to detach him this time. (But why would you?)
- URLesque has compiled a list of the top ten spec ads of 2008. Our fave, the JCPenney Speed Dressing ad is on the list.
- Just once I'd like to be able to tell someone like her to put her laptop on vibrate and stick it where the sun don't shine."
- Fuel Industries' Sean McPhedran tells us, "Rather than the cute holiday mini-game I think everyone would expect, we gathered around the sound studio and put together an old fashioned radio play this year, complete with bad acting!"
- Zugara sends us all over YouTube with a Santa-themed annotation adventure.
- New York Festivals has announced it 2008 Global Awards.
Australian hip-hop artist Al Bino (um, right) is out with a video entitled It's A Beautiful Day for Cancer. It's sexy. It's weird. It's gross. It's funny.
Produced by Lyrics Born, the video, according to the Lyrics Born website, was created for an "Australian skin cancer benefit project."
It appears the video has been successfully seeded across sites such as YouTube, Break, AOL, Current, Dailymotion, Buzznet and several others. On YouTube, the video, which was posted December 11, has seen 22, 798 views. Views on other seeded sites don't add up to much.
Under the slogan "Your holiday spirit," Lamb's pushes a triage of billboards that speak directly to scruffy dudes exhausted by the spendy and energetic gyrations of others.
Each board appears to be wood-paneled and (festively?) duct-taped. Perched by a swig-worthy neck of Lamb's are the following messages:
o "Yeah, we're into free-range turkey. It's called hunting."
o "You can buy a $75 tree. Or a $10 axe." (At left.)
o "Holiday shopping should be a one-day event."
Amusing work, even if it speaks to the parts of men that have attempted to fix our cars, build us coffee tables and otherwise sprinkle havoc (and sawdust, and transmission fluid) on our tidy store-bought worlds. Given the lines we're all having to brave just to visit the bank or buy groceries, the ads'll probably draw more lips to the bottle than those of the target market. (Frankly, we're halfway there.)
The work builds on Lamb's "It beats fancy" campaign, orchestrated by John St.
This holiday, Brew Creative decided to forego that "we're donating to charity!" crap that other agencies are doing and cut right to the good stuff. Here's a mash-up of all the depressing political soundbytes we were all subjected to this year.
If nothing else, let this knowledge fill your heart: our government makes so many warped promises that our interests are bound to be met at least some of the time, so keep right on coasting along and eating bacon.
Probably the best thing about this effort is the ability to sift through a broad array of disconnected soundbytes and make your own "message of hope." Politico quotables are divided between "Phrases" and "Connecting words." Good times.
Mashup features provided with help from Sevnthsin.
- Top 10 virals of '08, courtesy of the guys that brought you this.
- Digitas Health donates to charity for the holidays, as does RAZ PR (which told us via paper card). Meanwhile, comScore pledges trees.
- "Unprecedented economic waters" (nice euphemism!) means no FedEx retardation during '09's Super Bowl. One less thing to look forward to. Honestly, anything involving Burt Reynolds makes us happier people.
- Remember that crazy/beautiful, semi-schizophrenic media orgy titled Game, Game, Game and Again Game? The sequel is called I Made This. You Play This. We Are Enemies. Creator Jason Nelson promises "More strange hand drawn creatures, with screen shot anchored levels and all the poetic bits known." And then we kissed him.
- Crowdsourcing horror.
- Beancasting Steve and Bill. Among other things, they talk online video marketing, Pepsi suicide ads and diversity (lack of?) in the industry.
- Learn to shred with CP+B. "But yeah, the biggest thing people will go after is Alex giving lessons on how to play Extreme's More Than Words." Sounds like a winner to me.
As many wait around for what' become an interminably long time for Twitter to come up with (or at least adopt one of the thousands of ideas suggested) a revenue model, Dell, and several others, have come up with their own method of extracting money from Tweets. AdPulp points to an article on internetnews.com which reports Dell, over the past year and a half, has seen $1 million in revenue directly from its presence on Twitter.
Dell has no less than thirty task-specific accounts on Twitter but the one that returned that million dollars was its Dell Outlet account which hypes discounts available at the company's Home Outlet Store.
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