This Spanish ad for the latest Got Milk? campaign brings us to an island where everyone giggles all day. The laughs and smiles get attributed to milk, toted as a magic salve for strong white teeth.
We were told this ad is funny but mostly we were confused, due no doubt in part to the fact that nobody at Adrants speaks Spanish. We watched it seven times and it didn't get any funnier. In fact, by now we're feeling a little bummed.
We considered getting some milk in order to feel less bummed, because, you know, there's tannin in it, but then we thought, doesn't vodka do almost the same thing?
The Army/Ad Council Boost Up effort skyrockets in our ratings of deserved abuse with this awkwardly-phrased, melodramatic, grammatically awful and typo-ridden explanation for Boost Up's mission.
We're sure they're sincere in suggesting that inside every one of us is a graduate. But clearly a high school graduate does not a good editor make. Well, guess that's what the military - er, college - is for.
In a world where...on wait, that movie trailer dude says that all the time. But, for once, the phrase can be put to good use: In a world where teens are subjected to an onslaught of "don't" ads (drive drunk, do drugs, eat too much, have unprotected sex, make racial slurs), the frequency of which only a creative reviewing a Cannes reel would subject oneself too, it's refreshing to see a different approach. We're thinking the teens are appreciating it too.
Rather than use scare tactics of meaningless pontifications, this Ad Council campaign called UR the Spokesperson uses humor and pokes fun at the overused and now meaningless scare and pontification tactics that teens are now desensitized to. In the ads, the usual teen foolery is going on inside a moving vehicle but rather than the ads ending in a crash or cutting to a stern lecture, a game show-style announcer hops in the car and asks, "How would you like to save your life from an ugly, reckless driving death?" It then goes on infomercial-style with the kids getting all agreeably 50's-style. It's different. It's refreshing. Whether it works, though, is an entirely different subject.
Everybody likes a virgin-turned-vamp and a chick who undresses while talking. Mitchum takes these patently American communication strategies to colour the Mitchum Man Man-o-Meter, where Nina the "no-sweat" girl gets sillier and sexier as rankings climb.
So you know, Adrants nailed a 95. (Given the choice, don't compare your manliness to Shaq. Nina knows about the genie movie.)
Mitchum also does the usual strip-tease one better with viral outtakes which you can check out here and here. Speaking from the less testosterone-enriched sex, we confess we like Nina 10 times better knowing she laughs at her own lame come-hither jokes and gets snarky with the back-end guys. Nina rocks well, and not just because she strips without giving us that don't-eat-meat insanity.
Just as we thought, the finished product is always better than the boring B-roll. That's quite evident when you compare the original B-roll of this Dale Earnhardt Jr. Budweiser to a short clip of the finished product. Budweiser is working with MWW Group and the two have released short clips of the ads they plan to run in this year's Super Bowl. There's eight in all and you can view them after the jump. Most seem to have promise.
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You know when you watch a friend do something so stupid you wish you were never born so you could never have seen it? That's the feeling that flooded us when we saw Pizza Hut's latest social networking snafu: the uncool-but-cool pizza delivery guy.
Even if you forgive the use of Incubus' Drive, the pretentious article-preceding-name ("The Ted" - why not go all the way and call him The Tedster?) and the awkward "Who I'd like to meat?" joke, you have yet to account for gratuitous use of words like "babe-licious" and "par-tay."
Let's not forget the use of seedy come-ons like "In a court of girls, I'm the prisoner, not the judge ... and I've been very, very bad." The page in general is so wince-worthy that the very thought of pizza afterward made us throw up in our mouths. Way to go, imc2!
What exactly is this ad saying? I have breasts so I'm not smart enough to read The Economist? I show a lot of cleavage so I don't have to be smart to get what I want? I wear a Wonderbra so every man is at my beck and call? I'm a stupid female that thinks my breasts are more powerful than my brain? OK, maybe that last one's kinda true for some but still. Perhaps Linda Foster is just so cool for wearing a Wonderbra that intelligence like The Economist are just beneath her. Maybe the Wonderbra is so effective it makes her breasts so huge see can't see over them to read the magazine. Please. Explain this ad to us.
For a marketing trend to be legit, Nike jumps on board and makes it legit, letting everybody else make mistakes before it swoops in with its gigantor marketing team and victorious hear-me-roar worldview.
To illustrate, they improved on Dove's decent but docile Real Beauty campaign, not just representing imperfections but embracing them with manic ferocity, even writing little manifestos about the merits of thunder thighs - which would be crazy-lame if done by anybody else but Nike.
So it's apt that they call their take on consumer-generated ads The Second Coming. And instead of begging for whatever you can pull out of your ass (a method yielding only ironic or lackluster results), they've wrapped an iron fist around the potential outcomes.
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Either Kevin Bacon has a great sense of humor or he finally got sick of the whole "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" and decided to cash in. Adland received a promotional email from "Kevin Bacon" promoting a program called Six Degrees which "makes it easy for you to raise awareness and support for a charity that's important to you." The email urges recipients to make their own Six Degrees AIM page to highlight charity an individual is interested in and promises to help the individual raise money for that charity. It's a social networking play that's a nod to the "six degrees of separation" thing that was, itself, social networking before it was called social networking.
As Adland properly states, the choice of Kevin Bacon is the "best choice of celebrity spokesperson for 2007." We'd have to agree.
Copyranter points us to Joel Spolsky, a self-professed geek, who was miffed by a recent Traveler's Insurance ad that was headlined, "To catch a geek, you have to think like a geek" and went on to say, "Fashion sense aside, today's high-tech criminals are evolving constantly... Give your independent agent a call, and spend your time taking your business to the next level. Instead of worrying about a crook in ill-fitting pants."
Joel argues it's wrong for Traveler's to view geeks as some sort of security-related insurance risk and the whole geek versus non-geek thing is so high school. He continues by questioning whether insurance agents are really any more capable than geeks to protect a company's security and that the ad attacks the very people whose job it is to implement sais protection.
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