While we had a tough time getting past the first page of this site on which the very beautiful Susan Jones stares out at us, we finally made it to a story written by Robert Cherry in which he lists and comments on the top ten advertising-related movies. On the list, of course, is, perhaps, the truest movie of them all: Dudley Moore's Crazy People. Also on the list are Lost in America, What Women Want, How to get Ahead in Advertising and several we've never heard of before. So head over to Netflix and give yourself something to do over the holidays.
Smirnoff Ice's Save the Mistletoe is an amusingly long-way-around attempt to say Smirnoff brings people together (just like mistletoe - so stop ravaging innocent bushes).
While we remain unmoved by the plight of the sprig, the execution wins us over. By some curious witch magic the campaign features celebrity supporters that we thought were long dead or had found joy in covert day jobs. Natalie from The Facts of Life, Lisa Turtle from Saved by the Bell, Tiffany who crooned "I Think We're Alone Now" and even the Soup Nazi band together to protect the kissing plant from further appropriation by brute force.
That's not all. Kevin at PR Blog divulges having seen a swamp-like creature that was actually supposed to be mistletoe, getting heckled by children at a nearby ice rink for love of the campaign. We wonder which sponsoring celebrity burn-out he happened to be. We put our money on The Incredible Hulk.
Oh it wouldn't be an agency Christmas party without pole dancing, would it? Of course not which is why several Arnold staffers, during the agency's Boston in-office Christmas party, headed into creative director Pete Favat's office, where, apparently, a pole is in place to hold up the ceiling and did a little pole grinding. The Boston Herald's Inside Track reports there's a video on the agencies Intranet of employee Lawson Clarke doing dance moves while dressed in a red Santa bikini. Those of you at Arnold reading this....please oh please provide us more dirt. You know you want us to scoop Inside Edition, don't you?
UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long. Here's the video of Clarke.
UPDATE II: Oops. It's gone now. Damn. Should have saved it.
Once upon a time we noted ad people would rather shoot movies than make boring ads. To illustrate this desperation we get tons of contrived holiday videos. But considering adland's love of video production in general, you'd think more artists would be thinking, "By gad. I'll get Ogilvy to position my bikini-clad models!"
Well, U2 did. Nix the bikini model part. For "Window in the Sky" they tapped Modernista, the only agency we know that self-promotes to an audience that perhaps prefers to remain unawares about agencies lurking behind brands. The resulting video is gorgeosity and includes multiple musical influences, icons and audiences.
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- Verizon's Giant's Stadium text message contest suffers from bad "can you hear me now?" reception.
- Looks like the pre-holiday layoffs are rolling in. Time Inc. just laid off 27 from its consumer marketing unit reports MediaWeek.
- If you just couldn't get enough of the fake Sony PSP blog, The Consumerist saved the entire site and reuploaded it to humiliate Sony even further.
- coBRANDit's Owen Mack attended the recent Word of Mouth Marketing Association conference in Washington DC last week and created several video interviews.
- IQ Interactive singing heads sing Christmas carols.
- Who knew? USA Today says the wise-ass Windex bird commercial was the most-liked ad in 2006.
- AdMashup, the site that collects submitted ad mashups was featured in the 2006 Advertising Age Book of Tens.
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.
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