We really dig method, a company that took it upon itself to develop cleaning products that are non-toxic, easy on the eyes and gentle on the senses.
But probably the biggest reason why we like them is they can push that manifesto in a trendy, almost sexy way.
We recently got an email blast from method under the subject line, "(still) cleans like a mother." Ha-ha, right? We are over this hipster crap. Then we opened it up and saw this.
And we're like, that picture is cute. That copy is clever. Wait, our kids lick tile? (Indeed, they do.) But wow, a method cleaning product does look really good with any decor.
Because Microsoft can't drive users to its search engine by merit (recall the Ms. Dewey effort), it's been dangling bait over internet users with various mind games and search-oriented word puzzles.
One such game is Chicktionary, where you try to build as many words as you can with a given set of scrambled letters. Once you engage an ad banner, you're driven to Live Search Club, where your engagement with the game is counted as ongoing use of Live Search.
This is how: each time you use the scrambled letters to make a word, successful words are counted as queries in the search engine, which then brings you its definition.
This and similar games have brought inordinately good tidings to the Microsoft search camp.
Clever.
The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways. It's not often, you have religion so intertwined with a mundane secular activity such as advertising but Triumph Boats has gone all out one this one to show just how tough its boats are and how a simple wish can elicit divine intervention.
We're not sure, though, who's being taught the lesson here. The boy who learns the power of pseudo prayer or the priest who realizes spiritual gifts don't always have to come in the form of hard to interpret intangibles. No matter. The bot gets his boat. The priest realizes materialistic desire might not be wrong. And Triumph gets to show just how tough their boats really are.
The Republik in Durham, NC created the ad.
The LA County Fair Bimbos are back again to celebrate this year's event. As we wrote last year; normally reserved for upstate New York or any flyover state, county fairs are full of cotton candy, barf-inducing tea cup rides, tractor pulls, all form of pig - both cooked and live, trucker hats, beer guts, "git r done" accents no one can understand and lots of girls who think they look hot with their gut bulging between their belly shirt and their way-too-tight low rider jeans.
This year the sisters are back with their equally bimbo-esque mom to tell all about how much fun riding bumper cars and eating pie can be. Enjoy.
We like Stanfield's. We like Stanfield's because it knows it's a corny underwear brand (as opposed to the other extreme), worn by a bunch of mama's boys. Or at least agency John St. does. (It probably doesn't help that the company is Canadian.)
Stanfield's latest campaign, "Separating the Men from the Boys," takes a handful of "unmanly"-men and adds embarrassingly "manly" characteristics to them. One such man brings inordinate heft to an exercise ball. Another turns down guy's night for book club. And another sports the power of polar-therm by conducting a conversation in a cold freezer.
The audio is slightly disconnected from the video, so try not to let that drive you crazy.
Virgin America has launched a campaign with a self-deprecating look and feel, slightly a la Perrier. By poking fun of its own neurotic clientele and unique flight experience (the vibrating chairs, the plugs, the as-you-order food), Virgin demonstrates it can laugh at itself while laughing ever-more-loudly at the competition, which just doesn't promote in the cool-as-shit way it does.
The animation used in the campaign was popularized by jaded kids floating shorts from Sick Animation or episodes of Adventure Time, which use the medium that first taught us about society to bitchslap it across the face.
Our favorite spot is "Plugs." The campaign was created by Anomaly, our new heroes for the next 10 minutes.
Steve Portigal from Portigal Consulting notes this ad for UK health club Cannons with the headline, "Because a new girl has started at work and she's hot," wouldn't play so well in America or Canada because we're a bit more politically correct than our forefather nation. While the ad is harmless enough, we agree. No doubt, an army of cause groups would be all over this one as soon as it hit the streets.
If you like farms with pigs, cows, fish, farting farmers, aliens and atomic bombs that launch out of grain silos, you're gonna love this new site for Butternuts Beer & Ale from Woods Witt Dealy & Sons. just click around and have fun. Don't forget to click on the tractor in the back.
Along with the website, the campaign also includes print ads, table tents, packaging, posters and a MySpace page, all of which can be seen here. In one of the print ads, the cans are celebrated with the write-itself headline, Nice Cans. The ad is also carries a blue ribbon honoring the breweries position as best brewery in Garrattsville, New York. Not that there's any other brewers there which , of course, is the entire point of the ribbon.
Dubbed "farmhouse ale" (whatever that is) the beer's got great names like Porkslap, Heinnieweisse and Moo Thunder. If a microbrewer has to set itself apart from the pack, aligning the brand with farm nomenclature is certainly one way to do it.
It's not often we're surprised by an ad. This one by Campbell-Ewald for Farmer's Insurance scared the crap out of us. And the guy in it kind of looks like Kevin Spacey.
Other spots from the taglined "Sanity makes a comeback" effort were equally interesting. There's this wind insurance one where a woman's papers keep blowing around (wait for the part where she slams into the wall and breaks it - that's pretty funny), a confusing one where a woman leaps on a garbage truck and hitches a ride with a cop on a horse (it was fun guessing what that was for), and a pretty good one about transient suburbanites getting by after a house fire.
We like this campaign a lot - it does a neat job of crawling into the minds of people actually dealing with hazards in real-time.
We need another award show like we need another email newsletter from MediaPost. Oh wait. Sorry. We used that one already. But wait. Read further. Maybe we do need another award show because the really good stuff...the stuff that should win awards but always gets killed by the client...needs its own platform on which to seek praise.
Enter The Speckies. Yup. An award show for great work that got killed, canceled, spat on, trashed and otherwise suffered the indignity of pompous, know-it-all clients who crapped on it just to feed their ego-driven power trip. So here's your chance to slap down those pontificating morons and show the industry your true, unfiltered talent. Or something like that.
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