This year marks our virgin foray into Cannes Lions territory: the biggest, swankiest and snottiest ad festival in all the land. (Dire economic reports suggest the event will be a little sparse this year, but we're stalwart in our optimism.)
We'll be there from the 20th-27th, writing ribald posts, interviewing people and probably taking really bad pictures. So if you want to hang out, get trashed and talk crap about ugly ads or their creators, by all means follow us on Twitter.
You can also check out the full Cannes Lions schedule or register here, late bloomer.
In the event that you can't make it or are too old to try crashing for free, there's always Wrath of Cannes on Coney Island. We may be stoked about the real Cannes, but in our hearts, few things beat a recycled statue with a head up its ass.
Seriously? We thought we'd never have to say this again. Really, we did. After Agency.com's Subway video debacle, we hoped an important lesson was learned by ad agencies in the business. Apparently not so we'll say it again:
"Attention ad agencies. Don't DON'T. DO NOT DO THIS. Do not create a video where you publicly masturbate, backslap and attempt to hipify yourself with viral goodness in front of the industry all in the name of cool factor and winning new business."
And do not ever compare your work (before it's even had a chance) to classics by telling us "It's right up there (in my opinion) with 'Truth in Advertising' and 'When I grow up I want to be in advertising.' Doing so just sets you up for failure.
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Except with a Sony Ericsson F305 phone and not an actual Wii.
The F305 is a phone equipped with game and motion sensor technology, much like the iPhone, which -- like the WiiMote -- lets users control the game based on how they move their handheld.
To promote it, SocialMedia8.com launched the Motion Mania contest, where users are asked to shoot a video on mobile gaming and upload it to this website. Popular video producers could win tickets to the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
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86itjunk.com is a Canadian service that checks out your junk, gives you a quote and hauls it away on the spot.
The service sounds both parts filthy and boring, but instead of confirming our collective yech by going down the cheap-homemade-ad route, the company actually invested in a pretty good -- wait, no, highlarious -- campaign.
Charmingly taglined "Taking crap. It's what we do," three spots feature two increasingly lovable junk guys, which stay sane amidst the trash by doing guy things: engaging in potentially fatal bets, sparring with blunt instruments, and just generally destroying each other's dignities.
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Today and tomorrow, Killed Ideas Volume I will arrive in the hot little hands of some of the industry's creative elite. Last week, it arrived in my hands so I guess I'm special. Actually, it has nothing to do with how special I am. Rather, it has everything to do with the fact I curated the book so of course I get to see it first!
What is Killed Ideas? Killed Ideas is a project put together by Ammo Marketing for online book publisher Blurb. Fifty ideas that were never approved/never appeared were selected to appear in the book Killed Ideas Volume I, a compendium of some great, though unseen, creative work.
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Michael Moore knows exactly how to hit the Inner Unhinged-Rage button. And however biased you feel he is, he addresses you with such a strong sense of complicity -- inflaming all the right wounds -- that the young and virile among us can't help but be swept up by the tide.
Promotional efforts for Save our CEOs, his latest documentary, are no exception. This is a caustic snapshot of how public funds were gleaned to save big fat slow-moving companies -- including the numerous financial institutions whose willful negligence in the loan acquisition process paved the way for your sweeping foreclosures and shortsales.
At theaters in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and DC, audiences got an unedited appeal from Moore himself, asking in a sarcastically compassionate drawl for viewers to donate still more cash to those coffers.
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Hopping right on the "we'll do anything to increase ad revenue" bus, Entertainment Weekly is out with Andy's Richter Scale, an advertorial on the magazine's Must List page pimping the Conan O'Brien show, Andy Richter himself and HBO's True Blood. Wait, what's this ad for again?
Whatever the ad may be for, we love the riff on vampires which ends with, "And have you ever noticed that their real-life fans are ust renaissance fair types with substance abuse problems?"
As advertorials go, it's a good one. So good, it took us three days to realize it wasn't just an editorial sidebar to the Must List. But one wonders. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
- Celebs discover, via social media, that they are hated. And then the whole world cried.
- The best Facebook vanity URL, and more on that land-grab in general.
- Yummy and functional absinthe packaging.
- An app to aid conspicuous shopping.
- Film yourself building the Google Chrome icon; get love from the Internet's favourite monopoly.
- Eclectic Method remixes, mashes up and edits before live audience.
- Zombies. Skittles. Advergaming.
In some sort of Mean Girls meets Teen Witch Meets Twenty-Something Ad Hotties, we have Chiat High. Yes, it's exactly what it sounds like; a bunch of primadonnas, a jock, a wimp, a collection of geeks and a love story with a happy ending. Yea, it's the high school cafeteria known as Chiat.
And you know what? This is the best representation of ad agency life we've seen in a long time. The primadonna's (account managers) prance with self-importance, the jocks (creatives) think they're better than everyone else, the tools (media) actually have heart but are afraid to express it and the nerds (traffic) get run over...over and over again.
Oh yes, some think this is yet another step down for a once great ad agency but we think someone's finally got agency life right.
And at Chiat, the lowly media planner scores with the hot AE. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that at all.
Well, at least it isn't a stupid sunglass toss. This new Cutwater-created work for Ray Ban borrows significantly from Sony Paint but, aside from that, we do like the colorific, Matrix-like style slomotasticness of it. Don't blink though or you'll miss the Never Hide tagline at the end.
But, really. Who cares about that anymore? After all, we can't make ads that looks like ads anymore, right? Only cool stuff that tries really hard not to be advertising and that pretends to be something else while at the same time making every effort to make sure everyone actually does realize it's advertising while hiding the fact it...oh we could go on forever explaining this tactic.
Just watch and enjoy.
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