If you're not going to use hot women in bikinis when you create your beer commercial masterpiece, the only other option, really, is to blow stuff up with beer cans. Reminiscent of the famed OutPost.com Gerbil commercial, are several videos on YouTube of a few guys who were paid by Milwaukee's Best to make a beer cannon that projects beer cans into objects in front of a target such as a television, a watermelon, a plant, mayonnaise, beef stew, eggs and other assorted items. Collectively, the videos have been viewed almost a couple million times on YouTube.
If you want to see all the vdeos crammed into one, there's a montage version set the the tune of Robert Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries made popular in the movie Apocalypse Now. All the videos are on the Milwaukee's Best website too.
Advertising Week has to begin somewhere and why not with strange looking tiny "BobCars" that carry messaging. Sort of like a mobile billboard, BobCars, owned, we're told, by Snap Marketing, are being used to hand out postcards with questions on them which they can answer online to win two free weeks of advertising on a BobCar. It's an Adholes thingy.
Usually when something becomes self-referential, that something realizes it's become a parody of itself and it's time to make some big changes. The advertising industry seems to be incapable of that and Wunderman's Career-O-Matic 3,000 (which we think we've seen before) reminds us of that once again. The device helps people find life after advertising because, after all, the industry is going though a paradigm shifting toilet flush as the :30 morphs into a MySpace page, commercials are now called "virals" and agencies (dot com) take their pants off in public so all can see what passes for strategic thinking is just a bunch of people running down the hallway self-importantly shouting, "Corner office! Corner office!"
Like a scene out of Mallrats, four guys in this commercial for the Alltel Wireless My Circle plan plot a way to stop the "call ten friends for free no matter what plane they are on" feature because, after all, who could possibly have more than ten friends? Created by Campbell-Ewald, the spot is part of the wireless company's second campaign called "Sales Guys" which follows the initial "Icons" launch campaign. Beyond television, the campaign will include radio, print, event marketing, online advertising and webisodes. Be sure to check out the geeks on the Alltel website along with "Chad" who attempts to get in touch with competing wireless company CEO's to tell them about the My Circle plan.
Here's an interesting site created by Maclaren McCann Direct & Interactive for Pontiac Canada to promote the 2007 G5 on which visitors can fool around with their mouse and keyboard to create customized visual and audio representations of the vehicle. There's also a "build your own" section and a contest to win a new G5. One of the more engaging car sites out there.
It seems there may actually be some new ideas left in the ad business though we're sure someone will tell us this has been done before. Anyway, Michael Shostack tells us graphic designer Jeni Mattson created some very cool business cards for, apparently, another designer. The concept was to illustrate the designer's probing nature so Jeni designed a metal business card made up of actual lock picking tools. Hey, it's diferent. That's half the battle.
We saw this Zidane headbutt nod Nike did on TV (or maybe it was YouTube. Who can tell the difference these days?) a couple nights ago and, well, pardon our idiocy, we didn't even recognize it was Marco Materazzi, the recipient of Zinedine Zidane's head butt, in the ad. So bad on us for missing it but good on AdFreak for mentioning it here today. The ad is actually quite funny and, yes, a great wink-nod to the original head butting event.
As part of the Global Fund RED campaign to fight AIDS in Africa, The Independent has been redesigned today by Giorgio Armani and half the papers ad revenue will be donated to the Global Fund ro Fight AIDS. It's all part of the Maria Shriver/Bono-created campaign that aims to urge big business to contribute to the fund in an ongoing manner. The companies already involved are Gap, Converse, Emporio Armania, American Express and Motorola. All those companies have developed RED product lines and a portion of the revenue that comes from sales of those lines goes to the Fund.
Maria Shriver explains the effort telling The Independent, "How do you think Magic Johnson [who has HIV] is still around? He takes two pills a day, which he can get from any drugstore. But those drugstores don't exist in Africa, and millions can't get to the drugs Magic Johnson can get. That's where the RED money's going." So far, $10 million has been raised.
This really qualifies as old news but since it was overshadowed earlier by Motorola and we were prompted by our monthly GoDaddy email, we'll share with you that GoDaddy has, in addition to Motorola and many others, hooked up with Danica Patrick to sponsor her Andretti Green Racing car. In a video that includes the unveiling of the new #7 Team Motorola IndyCar, GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons interviews his new "GoDaddy Girl" in a most excruciatingly awkward manner that can only be likened to Joe Simpson obsessing about his daughter Jessica's 34DD's. While Bob reads from cue cards, Danica sits next to him and through her bored demeanor, you can just hear her say, "What the fuck am I doing here with this cheese ball?"
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Here's one of the better online ads we've seen in a while. Coming from Y&R Interactive Israel for Logitech, it capitalizes on the fact that when you see video online, you expect to hear sound. With this ad, you don't at first but with each increase of the volume slider in the ad, the guy peering into the webcam gets increasingly more active until he gets blown away and Logitech speakers come into the frame. The ad does a nice job involving the viewer, relating the ad to the product's purpose and showing the product.
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