Major League Minor Detail Explained

Like baseball. Like really create animation? Then you'll like this commercial for the 2K Sports video game Major League Baseball 2K9.

"He should put a towel on."

UPDATE: If you'd like a witter version of this piece, click here.

Need a Scarf? Go to Seattle. They're Everywhere!

Adrants reader Andre Malvensen was impressed with a Wexley School For Girls campaign for the Seattle Sounders and wrote, "The Seattle Sounders have hit one out of the park with their Scarf Seattle campaign. (www.ScarfSeattle.com) The premise is simple, either buy or print a Seattle Sounders Scarf, place it somewhere in Seattle, take a picture of it and submit it.  It's brilliant.  Not only do the fans get a sense of involvement, but it's also free advertising and marketing as the scarves pop up all over the place.  As the fans try and one up each other and the thing goes viral you even start to get news stories and publicity on it."

And for those who might complain about all those Sounders scarfs laying around Seattle, just think of them as a nice give for the homeless who live out in the cold.

Anti-Suicide Folk Bring Sudden End to Songs, TV Shows

Suicide Action Montreal needed to get its message of suicide prevention out to a jaded province. Faced with the challenge, the clever cats at Touche! phd, Sid Lee and Astral Media concluded there's no better way to illustrate suicide than to bring an abrupt end to things people like.

The campaign rolled out in two ways. To start, popular programs randomly went black to make way for the following (roughly translated) message: "Does this premature ending surprise you? Imagine if it happened to the life of someone close."

After a few seconds of darkness, the episodes started rolling again. Same thing happened with popular songs on the radio.

Refreshingly out-of-box. Check out examples of both the TV and radio executions (bad pun!) on the Touche! phd blog.

'Loewe Sound' Adds Recreational Aspect to the Volume Adjust

Here's a clever way to highlight the "extremely realistic sound" touted by Loewe.

You've got a choir performing a piece. When an invisible remote zapper toggles between sound options, the orchestra changes in order to provide the desired audio texture. As "bass" increases on a dial, some bassists run in; a woman raises her voice -- then lowers it -- as treble changes; and higher volume results in a last-minute dash to the stage by previously-unseen performers.

The conductor's "WTF?" face ties it all together nicely, and the ad wraps up by panning away from the choir to reveal a television frame. Nice work by Scholz & Friends/Berlin, and production firm Element E.

We can also envision an online engagement opportunity on the website -- letting users toggle sounds from their keyboards in various settings. No such luck yet though.

more »

It's Barbie's 50th Anni!

To celebrate Barbie's 50-year anniversary, Chanel's own Karl Lagerfeld designed a Barbie/Ken exhibit for Colette in Paris. The exhibit will be visible in Colette store windows from March 9-15th, including a "high security exhibition" of the first-ever Barbie and Ken dolls on the 12th.

See all the pretty pretties.

If you're less interested in the aesthetics of Barbie than in her history, you definitely wanna check out The Big Money's awesome timeline of Barbie's social progression over the past half-century. It made us glad she shafted Ken in the early '00s -- dude was never that hawt.

more »

Hey, Burnout Frat Kid. Axe is Your Soap.

Mekanism put together this sensory mindfuck of a week in the life of a single twenty-something. Impressive how he manages to get into all those shenanigans and still stay Axe fresh.

The slogan follows pat: "Axe will fix you up" (no matter how messy everything else around you gets). More interestingly though, the ad's stuffed with links to thefixers.com -- which we only managed to catch once, maybe because we weren't looking hard enough.

The Fixers is a fake talk show about questionable hook-ups and pranking friends. It's funny, but then again, Axe never had a problem being funny. Nice effort overall.

more »

A Stirring Encounter of Coke Kind.

McCann Erickson/Madrid's "Encounter" is an increasingly emotional progression toward the meeting of a centenerian and a just-born child. The music, timely words and that final culmination -- wedding the tail-end of a life to the naissance of new -- brought us near tears.

And then we saw the Coca-Cola silhouette. And it was like, "Jesus Christ, this came from the same people that brought us Happiness Factory."

Nothing against Coke, whose ads are consistently good, but there has to've been a more graceful way to incorporate the brand into this message.

more »

OMG! No Parties at Cannes This Year?

Everyone knows the real reason ad people go to conferences and awards festivals is for the networking and the parties, right? Oh, and other un-printable things too. So what would happen if, suddenly, there were no parties at say, for example, Cannes?

Oh wait, there are no parties at Cannes this year. BBD? No. Publicis? No. Havas? No. Leo Burnett? Unlikely. Oh sure, there will be smaller get togethers but this year's Cannes, no thanks to the economy, may end up being as much fun as a life insurance conference.

more »

The New Samsung Hard Drive...Yawn...ZZZ...Oh Wait, This is Good!

So we get this link to a video that's supposed to illustrate how great the new Samsung SSD hard drive is...

Yawn...

ZZZ...

Oh wait! This is pretty good.

more »

What Happened to the Beer Babes?

Rising (falling?) YouTube starlet Jill Hanner wonders what ever happened to those beer ads where the beer was decided on how hot the girl was? It's a good question. Where have the Coors Twins gone? The Miller Lite Catfight girls? The St. Pauli Girl? Oh wait, she's still around.

But, seriously, it's like brewers pulled out and took a vow of abstinence or something. When was the last time beers and babes were in the same frame? Maybe it's a good thing since studies keep saying sex doesn't sell. And damn, a troll through the Adrants archives reveals we've trashed the tactic as well.

Or maybe it's just the normal course of things. After all, everyone needs a bit of a break between bouts.