SunSilk Wingman Dispenses Advice

To relaunch SunSilk to women aged 18-35, Australian agency Amnesia has created a mini-portal style website with personalized information on career, movies, music, travel and dating. The site site introduces The Wingman, an avatar that stands in as a personal adviser and collector of all things relevant. We suppose they're cute and all but we're not into all that girly stuff anyway so someone else will have to tell you if it's good or not.

Elephant And Martial Artist Glamorize Bombay Saphire Gin

Here's some visual beauty for all you creative types. For the first time in the U.S., Bombay Saphire gin is advertising itself as a gin and tonic ingredient on television. The campaign includes two spots. One features a martial artist carving a glass out of a block of ice to hold the gin and a second spot has an elephant gingerly stepping over and around martini glasses until she sniffs out the glass holding the Bombay. Oh sure, both are an art director's visual orgasm but they fit the brand perfectly in our humble, gin-drinking opinion. We'd buy the stuff even though recent entrants to the gin club, Hendricks and Q, are a bit more exciting to the pallet.

Oh, and just so we all understand it's not just spoiled celebs that cause "issues" on the set, Maya, the elephant in the spot, needed to have her sidekick, Methusalem, an aging camel with her at all times, .

America Does Run On Dunkin

Each morning after my three mile excuse for a workout, I head over to the local Dunkin Donuts to pick up an iced latte. Hey, I know it doesn't sound very manly but it just seems to taste a lot better than regular coffee. Anyway, each day I look at my Dunkin Donuts cup, branded with the new tagline "America Runs on Dunkin," and think, finally, an agency and a company that hit on a message which actually means something. Recently, there's been loser taglines like "Bold Moves" and "Leap Ahead" so it's refreshing to see Hill Holiday, Dunkin Donuts' agency, come up with a winner in "America Runs on Dunkin."

I love the tagline because it speaks directly to the "fuel" that many Americans depend on to get going in the morning. Just like re-fueling a car, that morning stop at the local Dunkin Donuts fills the tank with energy to keep one running all day long. While a 2003 research study found taglines not very effective, "America Runs on Dunkin" just feels right as well as actually says something, an admirable accomplishment in comparison to most meaningless taglines littering the current advertising landscape.

TJ From Sonic Wants You to Make His Favorite Drink

For you Sonic lovers, here's a website you can spend hours with trying to guess the favorite drink of TJ, one of the guys from the Two Guys campaign.. The site let's you mix various flavors with a possible 168,894 combinations. If you guess which on is the favorite, prizes abound. Well, at least a coupon to use at Sonic. We whipped up a few but TJ didn't like. Kansas city based Barkley Evergreen & Partners did the work.

Strumpette Stirs Catfight, CFO Embezzles And Kills Himself

- This just isn't worth mentioning but it involves a catfight and breasts, two things this publication can't seem to ignore. Our apologies in advance.

- Some train stations to to great lengths to keep their stations clean and they want everyone to know about it.

- We swore we'd never again mention a million dollar homepage but this one is a bit different. It;s selling space on the side of a building. Oh wait. Not an actual building. Just pixels on an image of a building. OK. Sorry. It's just the same old crap with new clothes on.

- It's a pretty good bet Nike wishes this guy was wearing a different shirt.

- From time to time, we all hear those stories about upper management embezzling funds. Mack Simpson has recrafted a story he told us back in 2003 about a CFO at the company who worked for who shot himself after stealing $6.5 million dollars. It's an unfortunate story worth revisiting.

- Sometimes ads are so incredibly bad, there's actually good. This may or may not be one of those times.

- CoBRANDiT has summed up the recent Word of Mouth Marketing conference with a collection of video interviews which include Robert Scoble, Pete Blackshaw and other agency honchos.

Some Advertising Can Be Clear And Messy At The Same Time

In Slovakia, they have a unique way of informing people they should clean up after themselves when in public. It's gross. It's funny. It aired. It, albeit oddly, gets the message across. We'd love to have seen the dog trainer in action on this one.

Barber Brigade Says Get Sharp

Those oddballs over at Wexley School for Girl (an agency, not a private school with plaid pleated mini-skirt wearing girls roaming around, silly) have created another weird site, this time for Sharps, a line of mens grooming products. The agency created Barber Brigade, a cheeky site designed old school barber shop style with lots of 'tude and wit. Honestly, we never new personal hygiene was such an involved process. Perhaps that's why we work at home.

Oh but wait. Lest we forget the most important aspects of this and seemingly every other recent campaign, the Barber Brigage have MySpace pages. (1, 2, 3, 4) Hmm. How original.

Virtual Tomato Toss Somehow Sells Telecom

We're told this is a viral campaign but we'll have to take the sender's word for it because the whole thing is in French. Along with a bunch of videos, there's a game which let's you hurl tomatoes at fellow office workers and that appears to be amusing enough at least for a few minutes. Apparently, it's all for French telecom company SFR. Oh, we get it now. It's tomato telecom. Oh wait, that only works in English, right?

Nestea Provides New Kind of Tennis Training

Toronto agency Lowe Roche has created a new commercial and online game for Nestea. In the commercial, a guy finds out it's a lot easier to simply take the Nestea plunge than it is to cool off by launching a bunch of snowballs from a tennis ball machine. For some reason, this makes us think of that dot com gerbil that was shot from a cannon. Anyway, in the game, players try to plunge as deep as they can without hitting various objects. It's an acceptable time waster.

Gazelle, Lion Help Us 'Rethink Everything' For Hyundai

OK. It's fully understood that this new spot from Hyundai intends to make people Rethink Everything but this little showdown between a lion and a gazelle should never have been made as a :60. A :30 would have been just fine to make the point. Of course, this nit pick is irrelevant because, as we all know, :60's run about once and are then followed by a gazillion GRPs worth of the :30 so we'll just shut up now. Sorry, we can't help ourselves. Of course the :60 had to be made to justify the trip to some far off exotic looking locale buoyed by a bloated production budget to support the film crew and all those agency folks who love to be heard on their cell phones saying "I'm on location now. Have my assistant deal with that." Anyway, someone will probably correct us now and explain the whole thing was done using CGI and the exotic locale was some production geeks cubicle.