With help from Crispin Porter + Bogusky (featuring built-in tweetage from @bogusky hisself!), two intrepid messengers from Brammo are on a mission to present President Obama with the most energy-efficient electric vehicle in America: the Brammo Enertia powercycle.
The pair adds a dash of bloggable epic to the quest by road-trippin' it from Detroit to Washington, DC: the route automotive CEOs took when they made their pilgrimages to beg for bailout aid.
"But instead of seeking aid, were going to present President Obama with a homegrown solution to the transportation crisis," the pair writes gleefully.
To succeed in their quest, dubbed ShockingBarack, they're depending on little more than "the kindness of everyday Americans." Visit the ShockingBarack website to offer them a place to crash, a source that'll help them get in touch with the President or an outlet to fuel their motorbikes. (They promise to reimburse you the $0.30 it takes to charge them.)
If you lack the inclination or the geographic convenience to do either, follow the journey. The latest video -- where they visit the Mayor of Adrian bearing a peace offering of donuts -- appears below.
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FirstBank, Colorado demonstrates its commitment to small business by giving your card more traction than the corner cafe's bulletin board.
A series of rotating displays in high-traffic areas feature tons of business cards for their small business customers, flanked by the tagline "We care about small business."
"The cards get lengthy readership from airport travelers, who stand nearby for up to 90 seconds, or longer, while awaiting the next airport shuttle train," explained the pressfolk.
See a close-up. Don't you just wanna pass valuable time to the little one with the heart with the rainbow tail? We know we do!
Work by TDA Advertising & Design, Boulder.
Say hello to "My Home is Like Hell," a campaign that encourages the intrepid to move if their current residence feels anything like eternal damnation.
The effort is for Vlanimmo.be, a Belgian firm that specializes in helping users find new homes either to buy or rent. Agency Cherry and Cake plans to produce four videos that feature an actual home in hell, and the unhappy protagonist Matt Demon, whose Facebook and Twitter you can follow if you don't have enough fictional friends.
See Episode 1 in English below; Episode 2 follows but is only available in French.
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"Okay dancers, show me 'crazy with happiness'!"
You gotta love whatever comes after a statement like that.
"Kinderkreis," a universe constructed for Gushers video "Danse Gooshers," is a fictional TV show where occasionally uncomfortable-looking German kids are offered a product. Then they tell the host how they feel about it -- think "crazy with happiness!" -- and a series of spandex-ensconced interpretive dancers pump out that sentiment to the best of their abilities.
Watch orange man go ballistic. He's feeling it! But for a real thrill, wait until the dancers are greenscreened in with the faces of inexplicably delighted children.
We ask you -- what on the internet is better than this? Curious work by Publicis Modem.
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Nikon's COOLPIX S1000pj does this neat, if not evidently useful, thing where you can project your photos onto a wall. To promote this feature it came up with "Helicopter Boyz," an outdoor event at Yomiuri Land where two boys -- with cameras strapped to their bodies -- shake ass onstage while photos are projected behind them.
Lends a very cool effect. Watchy watchy. Note though that the music will be ricocheting from one end of your brain to the other for at least the next hour.
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If you're a fan of that Warren Beatty Bulworth-esque statement about everyone "co-mingling" until we're all the same color, you just might like this new effort from We Love People for fashion brand Blend. The agency worked with artists from baghdad, Tehran, Myanmar and Afghanistan to spread positive messages about "blending" the world.
So yes, it's the same old if we could al just get along" message that everyone always agrees to and aspires to but, sadly, never seems to work.
So yea, there's a video. It's typical. Give it a watch.
It's not as if the Diversity in Advertising drum hasn't been beaten to death but, maddeningly, it's still an issue. And, to be honest, maddeningly, we're sick of writing about it. So can we please deal with it and move on?
But in order to move on, more talk, maddeningly, is needed. And more talk is what we have in the debut episode of AdVerve, a podcast hosted by Live and Uncensored's Angela Natividad and Make the Logo Bigger's Bill Green. In the first episode, Angela and Bill interview Hadji Williams, copywriter and author of the book Knock the Hustle.
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"Not only am I a terrible copywriter but my client actually approved this shit." That's the apparent confession of a DeVito Verdi New York creative during a Copywriters Anonymous meeting earlier this week. The copywriter was referring to recent television commercial created for client Meijer, a Midwest-based retailer. You can view the disaster here.
But that's not what we're really talking about here. The retailer recently launched a Halloween promotion that, OMG, lets you make a video of yourself wearing a Halloween mask! It's really easy. Here's what you do.
1. Fire up your webcam (Oops, don't have one)
2. Go to http://meijerhalloween.com and oops. You have to give Adobe Flash Player permission to access your webcam and microphone which you don't have. No worries, we'll just check it out anyway.
3. Click Allow and oops. "Total Immersion D'Fusion Web Plug-in Installation Required." Say what? Never heard of that. (Why do we need yet another plug in when Flash would have worked just fine?)
4. Throw your hands up and download the plug in anyway.
5. Refresh.
6. View screen as it reload and, again, tells you, "Total Immersion D'Fusion Web Plug-in Installation Required." (Um, say what? We already did that.)
7. Oh wait. Note onscreen verbiage, "You have to manually launch it."
8. Proceed to waste more time digging around your hard drive to find out where exactly that weird ass plug in downloaded to.
9. Give up and move on with your day.
And if you're the one reviewing this less than wonderful Halloween promotion:
10. Feel sorry for the creator who sent you the work and link to what one of these video creations would look like.
11. View the video and, again, feel sorry for the person who sent you this work because you know them.
12. Don't publicly out them because your not a dick and don't want to hurt their feelings by telling them this is one of the lamest pieces of shit you've reviewed in a long time.
13. Have second thoughts about mentioning this at all.
14. Then click the Publish button. Because it's your job.
Wow. This goes way back. We thought the days of Million Dollar Homepage knock offs were over. After all, none of them actually made money. The latest is 365DaysAds, a "viral experiment where advertisers can catch the attention of the public by buying advertising days" on a Google calendar.
Our prediction? No one will care. No one will notice. No one will buy. We could be wrong. But we're pretty confident we're not.
Pardon the conference-related commercial interruption but we feel it's our duty as a respected advertising industry media outlet to make sure everyone knows where the wilds thing are during a conference. Oops, bad movie pun but there will be wild things and there will be parties. They'll be in Las Vegas and they'll be during BlogworldExpo occurring this week Thursday through Saturday.
Aside from the fact it's a great conference (you can read about last year's here), there will be many, many social events where conference goers can go to kick back and relax or, conversely, get so inebriated they find themselves in a hotel room bed the next morning with a person whose name ever so awkwardly escapes them.
You decide how you want your night to play out but the least we can do is tell you where you can get your night started. So, here's the list of parties to be held this week at Blogworld. No doubt there will be more added but here's a starting point.
So be good. Or be bad. It's Vegas. It's your choice.
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