Apparently Italy, Adrants and the dependable folk at Caffeine Marketing share a palate when it comes to coffee. Here's a coffee campaign that draws our attention in a way no Folger's ad ever could. Copy reads, "Italy's favorite coffee."
For Lavazza of Italy, ad photographer Eryk Fitkau marries the heady effects of raw, unadulterated coffee beans to equally intoxicating raw flesh. We're being sucked into the texture of the ad as we speak. We can almost smell it.
Oh ick. Coffee beans are oily. Romping around in them must be even worse than sand. And the smell! God the smell!
We've been focusing too long. Check out a variation of the ad right here.
Have you ever wondered what life must be like as a lonely pedestrian traffic light? No, neither have we but Snickers has in what appears to be a commercial for the oh-so-gooey, rich-and-chewy, homophobic but not homophobic Snickers bar. There's nothing like dueling colors livening up the hood with a little street fighting.
We like to think of street art as advertising that pushes back. After all, even graffiti's got its own idea to sell.
Wooster Collective points us to some paste-on street art by Mike Newton, who says, "I noticed how the police would move the homeless from street to street, doorway to doorway around the town. This gave me the inspiration for my latest piece 'removing me won't solve the problem,' a kind of twist on the removal of graffiti."
A similar campaign we once conducted also involved reintroducing absent social pariahs to their natural environments. But we don't think our parents were super thrilled when we wandered into the kitchen wearing Mom's "Like a Virgin" outfit during Pops' business dinner. We bet it left a lasting impression, though.
Continuing what we started in New York on Nov 8, yesterday Adrants and BDI held the second Ad Industry Diversity Job Fair and Leadership Conference in San Francisco, hosted by the Academy of Art in conjunction with BIG. Local and nationwide entities including Google, Modem Media, Draft FCB, Dieste and T3 (The Think Tank), showed up to trade paper with giddy be-suited candidates.
The set of pews and the wide church like set-up served as a good backdrop for what could be both parts keynote and sermon.
Larry Harris, EVP and Director of Integrated Marketing at DraftFCB, made a straightforward delivery on topics we expected to rise to the surface: the disparity of diversity in our industry, the changing face of marketing in the face of new media (iPods, internet, mobile phones, chip-reading billboards) and the importance of knowing what you want before leaping into the wild blue yonder. He also told an awesome story about how he infiltrated agency execs by pretending to be a message boy. "They let you right in!" he exclaimed.
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Rather than trying to get people to remember a company's URL which isn't always the easiest thing to remember, several companies in Japan have started using what have been referred to as "search me" ads. The ads offer the visual of a search bar with a search term already filled in. People are urged to perform the search, either immediately on their phone or later on their computer.
If the terms are chosen properly and th proper search engine marketing accompany the effort, the approach just may work. There's only so much a single ad can convey but an ad they points people to a place where endless information can be conveyed would appear to be an effective approach.
More often than not the big media cat-chase for the elusive hot viral comes up short. This could be for a ton of reasons - the ideas are too contrived or simply out of touch with the demo.
LA-based Feed Company put together Social Video 101: a Primer, an example-ridden tutorial on why some Youtube "virals" work and others don't. Will your video start a conversation? Is it funny? Is it sexy? Is it something you'd share with your friends?
"Viral is video that you're prepared to share with your friends," says CEO Josh Felser of Grouper. "If you're not prepared to share it with your friends, it's not viral video."
We'd like to say this sounds like mostly common sense. The unfortunate truth is if it were, major media entities would be more successful than they have been, and to be fair they're getting better.
That's not to say we don't still have a lot to learn from the unlikely geniuses of Smosh, whose Pokemon theme song generated a bewildering wildfire fanbase. And when you've figured out why, you'll probably be holding the key to the secret of life.
According to Molson Breweries, 36 percent of Candian hockey fans think players should be allowed to have more liberal curves on their stick. Maybe not for actually playing hockey but definitely for lazily reaching for a beer. Zig created. Untitled Produced.
In a new commercial for online retailer BlueFly, two co-workers who have been eying each other for a long time finally hook up, have dinner together and wake up in the same bed. Planning ahead, the woman makes sure she has the right attire so as to avoid suspecting glances at the office the next morning. The M2GL-created ad was directed by TonyGoldwyn. Here's the :30 and the extended :90.
Curiouser and curiouser. Australia-based graphic artist Jason Nelson throws together an odd piece of work called Hermeticon, which uses bits of '80's toy and candy ads to create sound and video collages that spark to life when you type things out into a grid. He calls the results "ad-driven spells."
It reminds us a lot of all the ad generators already flying around except less coherent than usual. That's okay though, we dig it.
It might just be because our childhood connection to Rainbow Brite sparked back to life when she appeared for a moment - just a moment! - on the grid. We can't help but admire the emotional range of a good nostalgic mash-up. That's why we sit on in the dark watching "I Love the 80's" reruns at 2 AM.
There's a bunch of big cocks (no, not that kind) in UK advertising and they're all highlighted in this BBC video clip presented by British comedian Charlie Brooker. Not much else to say. Just watch. Oh, and who would you nominate for biggest cocks in US advertising?
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