Agency Brown of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada throws together a little Spinal Tap tribute to demonstrate why it's just cooler to be "one louder" than the other cats out there. These are the same guys who did that "we're always on" lightswitch thing that we made fun of last year.
We'll cut them some slack this time because we like that weird skeleton shirt that Nigel Tufnel has on. It's funny the things that endear a campaign to you. We still, however, think Brown can be corny as all hell with this somewhat feeble "toot our own horns" shtick.
Doodles are coming back in a big way as suddenly everybody's under the impression they say a lot about you.
To perpetuate this strange idea Lunar BBDO creates a doodle campaign for UK-based Samaritans, which according to the website provides "emotional support for people who are experiencing feelings of distress or despair, including those which may lead to suicide."
Creative director Daryl Corps tells AdCritic, "If you stand close to the poster you'll see the detailed doodles -- but stand back and you'll see that these doodles make up the image of someone who should contact the Samaritans."
Suddenly we want desperately to hide the desk calendar we've been idly doodling on for the last year. Our little pinwheels, inky slashes and bug-eyed monsters make us feel very naked in the face of all this concerned scrutiny. Didn't Patrick Bateman of American Psycho do a lot of doodling too? Look at that. One day you're doodling; the next day you're trying to push a live cat into an ATM machine.
DRGM Las Vegas celebrates its agency femmes by creating a pin-up calendar of said women - except they're all being parodied by the agency men.
DRGM creative director Bernice Bamburak explains, "[T]hese guys make us look sexier than we are -- did you see the legs on Miss July?" She also notes that clients, who know both the men and women in the agency, love the idea. Last year the women parodied the agency men.
We need to create a compendium of all the ways this pin-up concept has been abused in the name of things like cheese, theatre, coffins and even fat as pets. What happened to the days when things were simple and we just took pictures of girls with pom-poms and team-coordinated bikinis?
For Smirnoff's Break the Ice campaign, Denmark-based Leo Burnett releases an online-only video of some douchey wallflower doing hackey sack-type tricks with a bottle of Smirnoff. We like the ending and don't want to spoil it for you. Let's just say there's a reason hackey sacks are soft and squishy.
Apparently Greenpeace attended Macworld for no better reason than to throw a wrench in Apple's game, projecting green backgrounds across large company logos as well as shots of Asian scrap yards.
Better still, they have a video of Steve Jobs crooning the sweet nothings they really want to hear in '07. There's even a website dedicated to getting Apple greener.
Hm. Greenpeace is a lot like that scary ex who insists you were wrong but keeps lurking around long after you've moved on in order to spread the word. We feel greener just thinking about it.
Oddcast, the guys responsible for this year's It's Red Again campaign, just launched U-DOO in tangent with MySpace.
U-DOO enables you to create unique user avatars and ringtones for your phone so instead of staring at an image of your buddy with his mouth hanging open every time he calls, you can look at an animated version of him while bobbing your head to his theme song. If there's anything better than that, we might just spontaneously combust, because that's a fate too sweet to miss.
Read more about U-DOO here. It ain't no iPhone but we're sure they'll get along just fine.
If you felt particularly jipped after falling for Apple's April Fools joke, rest assured you weren't a total ass and space is indeed the final frontier for marketing.
That's right: for $5000 a pop, which is less than some TV and radio ad spots, convey your logo 20 miles up. We don't know how demographically sound that would be but at the very least a handful of geeky people will think you are cool.
This service comes courtesy of JP Aerospace, whose dream it is to give everybody a taste of space travel.
For their snazzy new Halo videoconferencing tool, DreamWorks and HP commission Goodby, Silverstein and Partners (who, by the way, just won US Agency of the Year courtesy of Adweek) to help make magic.
To illustrate the medium's visual benefits and the idea that people can work together without actually being together, the agency called on The Ebeling Group to create a series of vignettes meant to be played on HDTV split-screens at events and such.
The spots, directed and conceptualized by Tennant, are esoteric but pretty, which is what they were shooting for so we suppose they succeed. They also get that complex "work together without being together" idea out nicely. We haven't added the Halo videoconferencing system to our nighttime prayers, though.
One of the spots can be seen on The Ebeling Group's website. They're fun both to watch and listen to, and we can only imagine what it must be like trying to watch the ads in entirety when they're playing 20 feet above you on either side of your face. They must blow the mind. At the very least we figure people will stop, stare and do that awkward back-and-forth foot pivot for a second or two. That weird reaction on its own is almost worth putting ads up high and splitting them apart.
For client Vitae, the largest homeless shelter in the EU, McCann Portugal runs a rather unsettling holiday campaign in which people find a hollow-eyed homeless man in their trash bins with the appeal, "Help. So that no one have to come here for food."
Coming from a country in which passing change to the homeless is discouraged, we're hard-pressed to work out the call-to-action here. Do you give them a potted plant? Drive them to Vitae? Bake them a pie?
An ad for the Mitsubishi Endeavor, in which a snowman melts when the hulking SUV drives by, was placed beside an article about whether climate change threatens polar bear habits on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website. This kind of awkward placement always makes us feel a little squeamish.
Larry Futers, Mitsubishi's national marketing director in Canada, defends the Mindblossom-produced ad: "It was the right campaign for us at the time," he explains. Though why a marketer has to practically apologize about the crappy placement of his ad on an affiliate's page is beyond us. Shouldn't CBC be firing an intern right now?
More about the dramatic developments on Radar Online.
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