It is a sad day indeed when quirky Emerald Nuts announces it won't advertise in the Super Bowl this year. While the company say the October 30 death of pitchman Robert Goulet had nothing to do with the decision, one can't help acknowledge his last ceiling crawler/office pest commercial was a nice cap to the brand's three year run in the game.
In lieu of a commercial, Emerald Nuts will focus on events and sponsorships surrounding the game, one of which will be to team with Anheuser-Busch.
In a less threatening take on the "--or die!" manifesto marketers have become so fond of, Piers Fawkes suggests that if you're not going to go out there and change the world, you ought to just go home.
At the IIR Future Triends '07 conference on Monday, Fawkes gave this presentation -- pointing to Kashi, and that Omnivore's Dilemma guy, as well as other examples -- to illustrate what trendy forms our social assumptions about "going green" take.
"Green is not a trend, it's an issue," he stressed, adding that ours is the best job in the world because we can inspire companies to do good.
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What do you do if you're a celebrity with a pretty good past but not quite tops on the the A list...or even close to it? Well, if you're Burt Reynolds, Ice T, Vivica Fox, Estelle Harris or Brooke Burke, you hook up with Dell for its holiday ad campaign. On a website called Yours is Here, people can choose which celebrity video they'd like to send to their friends. The videos urge the friend to contribute to a fund which the person can then use to buy their Dell product of choice. Hmm. Nothing like using celebrities to do your holiday begging. Back in the day, you just bugged your mom or your dad. Or Santa until you started to get weirded out sitting on some old dude's lap.
Now there's websites. Paypal. Out of work celebrities. The Jumbotron. Social marketing. Isn't life so much grander now that in those dark days when there were just three TV channels and everyone walked to school...which was five miles away....in the snow...up hill...with no iPod to pass the time?
To reinvigorate love of starchy spud fare, McCain, makers of "the best damn chips in England" according to our in-house British consultant, tapped the expertise of Glue London, which developed the campaign; Aardman Animations; and Rubber Republic, which did the seeding.
The result was Potato Parade. For a friend, you could get a dancing line of spuds to spout praise and glory with little wooden signs.
Last year Benetton taught us that potatoes come from seeds, so madd props to Rubber Republic for "seeding" an all-singing, all-dancing parade.
Okay, that joke was just lame.
As if there weren't already enough Starbucks on every corner of every city and town in the nation, the chain plans to open 1,600 more in the next year. Partially in support of that and partially to stave off a minor (one percent) decline in transactions per store, Strabucks, in a conference call yesterday announced it would launch a new (it's first) national TV campaign (three spots now, two later in November) as well as an online initiative where visitors can share holiday cheer. Wieden + Kennedy is behind the campaign.
Hmm. Does America really run on Dunkin' or is Starbucks out to change that once and for all?
Pedaling to save the world -- or at least fuel advertising -- has endless appeal because we'll probably never run out of human energy or youthful tenacity.
The idea of driving people to oblivion for not doing the right thing (Vote or die!, Funny or die!, Assimilate with Android or die!) is also insanely appealing.
So Google and Specialized give us Innovate or Die(!), a rewards-driven invitation for young engineers to invent eco-friendly, zero-emission machines that operate on human pedal power.
If you're crazy enough to do it, or need to kill time until FlugTag, make a film about it and post it on YouTube by December 15.
Prize for the most innovative submission includes $5K and a Specialized Globe bike. Five runners-up will also get Specialized Globe bikes. We don't actually know what those are.
Wow. We knew Orangina had pulp, but we didn't know they meant pulp like Pulp Fiction means pulp. (Or maybe we should be thinking Flashdance.)
Actually, there are a few other movie references worth noting in this commercial, which will change the way you look at forest animals. Seriously. Inter-bestial relationships were beyond our realm of Orangina-oriented thinking, plus we've never seen a flamingo pole dance before.
Says CD Todd Mueller of Psyop, "I guess it goes without saying that when you get the opportunity to spray Orangina all over the chest of a sexy bunny girl, you go for it." In terms of sheer logic, that's not really helpful, but it puts the spot in context.
(Dude, our dad gives us this stuff when we go home for the holidays!)
Catch more info on the creators, and Steve's take on the spot, here.
Boston's Barbarian Group had a hand in the creation of the2husbands, an online reality entertainment site on which women can pine for Zach or Tanner by submitting video pleas from which the general public will choose as wives for Zach and Tanner. Hey, finding a wife is hard work. A guy can use all the help he can get.
Complete with heart wrenching emo-vids (on the MySpace page) from Zach and Tanner, a kick off party and a MySpace page, the campaign promises to find the pair true love and $50,000 for each of the winning brides. Hey, who said marrying for money was a bad thing?
Oh, and let's not forget the little added twist. Tanner is gay but he still wants to marry a woman. Hmm. Stay tuned for the real reason behind all this.
We just found out about an online music label called RCRD LBL, which lets users download MP3 tracks from new and seasoned artists for free.
This is a decent contender to what's already out there for the following three reasons:
- It's legitimately sponsored, and sponsors don't mess with the tracks
- It's not all ad-heavy and slow like OHHLA.com
- It's gritty and cool without feeling seedy as hell like AllofMP3.com before it got pwned by The Man
On iTunes, just below the album art and above the artist name, you get a little line of text that says, "Get free music at RCRDLBL.com." That's something we can live with.
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Here's a fun little game. E.ON Energy Champions is a simple effort by TAMBA in which you have to pick up the trash of careless employees and recycle them in the proper bins.
What makes it tricky is the speed and the stacking of trash when you get too slow, and the wildcard trash bags that could contain anything.
We tried a few times, improved our scores by mere pennies on the dollar, and ultimately decided we like it.
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