If you work in agency production, you likely hate the endless sales calls from vendors who waste your time selling you a service you don't want or need at the time. They are kind of the scum of the earth sometimes, right? Oh but wait. When you really, really need to get a quote for that super niche'y idea that freaky creative down the hall came up with, you want every vendor at your beck and call immediately regardless of whether you treated them all like shit yesterday.
A new service called AgencyVendors has just launched to make sure all those vendors are at your beck and call when all those whack job ideas require you to come up with a quote for the meeting that was set up without any regard for how long it would take you to create said quote. Unfortunately, the service is so new there are no actual vendors listed on the site yet so you might want to change your voice mail message to something like "Quit bugging me, freak. Go to AgencyVendors.com and make your pitch there. Don't call me. I'll call you."
Hmm. It seems Agency.com might have been better off using this Super Pitch game created by Hadrian's Wall for their client Magnecote. The game takes all the work out of creating a super-hip YouTube video and boils the whole thing down to a few clicks. The object of the game is to win the advertising account of one of three fictional clients; rafts magazine CozyNook, cardboard box manufacturer Blumsfeld Floomer or "nihilist, anti-fashion" brand Überboff. Witty commentary and industry insiderism accompany the game.
Players choose a team from eight agency types, including planner "The Brit," creative director "40 Going On 16," and president "Linda From New York." The team builds their presentation using tools organized into six categories. Then the player conducts the pitch. Nodding or frowning clients offer a progress report. A final score either wins the new business, or doesn't. We say give this one a whirl and see if you all can come up with a better pitch than Agency.com did.
This is either really, really bad or really, really good although we're inclined to go with the former rather than the latter. A commercial sent to us by FishNChimps and created by Lowe Shanghai shows the power of Electrolux vacuums by using one to save a guy from a suicide attempt. The effect are a bit cheesy but, hey, this isn't the kind of commercial you see everyday which, that alone, gives it a leg up.
If you don't mind the sound of guys grunting and groaning then by all means leave your sound turned on. If, on the other hand, you don't want your co-workers to think you've got an orgy going on in your cube, we advise you to turn your sound off before viewing this promotional clip for the Quebec Aids Organization in association with the Montreal Outgames. Sex isn't the only sport that gets people...uh...vocalizing their urgency.
The only true ketchup, Heinz, is, again, extending its talking label campaign. This time, in celebration of the company's 130th anniversary, by offering people the chance to create their own custom printed labels by visiting MyHeinz. At the site, people can choose from three bottle types, select or custom-create a message, pay for it and have it shipped to their home. We're guessing there'll be some pretty stiff editorial policing to keep the kooks from messing up the offering with dreck.
Attention ad agencies. Don't DON'T. DO NOT DO THIS. Do not create a video where you publicly masturbate, backslap and attempt to hipify yourself with viral goodness in front of the industry all in the name of cool factor and winning new business. Watch this video so you'll never do this to yourselves. Agency.com created a video of themselves pitching the Subway business as the pitch itself and uploaded it to YouTube. Everyone in the industry needs to watch this. Not because it's good but because it makes ad agency people look dumb and sound really stupid. It's filled with mindless business blather, self-important ad speak, fist bumps, fashionably un-tucked shirts and way too many utterances of the word "dude." It's painful to watch.
UPDATE: This work is for a sanctioned agency pitch. Agency.com Communications Manager Dan Cordella tells us, "SUBWAY Restaurants SFAFT Group is currently conducting a search for a new interactive agency. They gave all participants, including Agency.com, the option to submit a short video of the team/company, which is a fairly standard procedure in an agency review process. Agency.com wanted to show how viral could work instead of just telling them about it in a video or written response."
UPDATE II: And the blog.
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Hey, the guys over in Dolce $ Gabbana land must have thought enough time passed since the famed PUMA blowjob ad to reprise it for themselves. Although, this time, its sans bodily fluids and it's gay-themed. We've all got to get it somehow and there's noting wrong with getting it while your D&G's are down around your ankles and some random guy it kneeling in front of you.
We never thought we'd say it and it's probably because it looks nothing like one but this MySpace page, sent to us by Adrants reader Ariel Waldman, from Sunsilk which features three Queer Eye For the Straight Guy-like guys promoting hair care products and dispensing "hairapy" is actually good. The site has a few "tutorial" videos, one of which, "Haunted by a Booty Call" is kinda funny. The page also points to a Hairapy page on which you can talk to the Hairapy guys, read them dish about celebrity hair styles and. get product info. Each of the three guys have their own MySpace pages as well.
While certainly creative in one sense, the brains behind this German spot for TCOM - like T-Mobile here in the U.S. - certainly spent a ton of money to deliver a simple message: TCOM offers both home and mobile phone service. In the spot, the city of Frankfurt is transformed into a living room to illustrate TCOM's phone service is available where ever you go. With all kinds of live action photography and CG work, Zoic Studios brought the living room to the mobile populace. Or the mobile populace to the living room. Or, something like that.
Now that one newspaper has done it, they're all going to do it. Just like an agency account director who tells her AE, "Ah, fuck it. Just add another $20K to that quote. They'll never know the difference," the LA Times is getting greedy (or needy) and will now accept ads on the front pages of many of the paper's sections. The paper hasn't completely bent over to advertiser's wishes though - which is the reason Publisher Jeff Johnson is giving to the paper's employees versus the truth: the paper needs more money - and will not yet accept ads on the front page of the paper as some other papers have. That move will take some serious lubrication.
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