Creatives hitting the vending machines at RTCRM might be accosted with a smorgasbord of aluminum signs, each with a military-style message demanding, in some short shouty way, that they beat their own bodies into a pulp and do a great deal of sweating.
This is part of RTCRM's six-week "extreme exercise" boot camp. Creatives meet at 7am, twice a week, to groan and sweat with fellow languid-limbed chums.
Must be interesting for morale. You never quite look at someone the same way once you've seen where their sweat glands are most active. And an approach like this is infinitely kinder than firing people for smoking.
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America's going through a period of bottled water Puritanism. That is, it's officially out-of-vogue to hawk your (wastefully!) bottled H2O, unless you've got a green angle tied to it ... or you happen to be Evian.
But Mattoni doesn't just flaunt its water wares; it's downright decadent. See its refreshingly playful spot, where a despondent patron orders Mattoni water -- and gets a surprisingly lush response.
The English-speaking version is more brash and saucy, but I dig how the splashy dame steps right onto the table and caps the ad with her theatrically husky (read: dubbed-porn-ish) "Will that be with bubbles ... or without?"
Brava, Mattoni. By Black Mountain Studios VFX/Stuttgart and Velvet Mediendesign.
This infectious Wii Music ad depicts people in shelves, sorta like notes in sheet music, playing individual melodies with a Wiimote. As the spot progresses, they all tap into the original Super Mario Bros. theme song.
Very cool. It reminds me a bit of those iPod ads that featured silhouettes of people jamming out to whatever they were listening to.
Like iPod, Wii's become a lifestyle brand, except it's less self-conscious and more democratic. Everybody plays, even grandma.
In this commercial for the Volkswagen Routan mini-van, you can identify with the pain these hippies feel as if you lived your life right alongside theirs in the heady days of the sixties. Reminiscing by looking at old pictures and movies, they long for the days when things were simpler. Or at least more fun and there was a purpose to their lives. When they fought for causes. When they changed the world. And...when they drove the VS Bus.
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I can't help thinking Snow White's childhood would have been less tragic if her evil stepmother was fed marketing propaganda, and not beauty validation, from her enchanted mirror:
"Mirror mirror, who's the fairest?"
"You're very close! Here's a projection of what La Mer can do about those unsightly crow's feet."
If, like other emotionally unavailable moms, she spent all her free time working on herself, she would probably never have gotten hip to the "fact" Snow White was -- le gasp! -- prettier than she was.
I'm thinking these thoughts because Alpay Kasal and Interference Inc. created something called the Interactive Mirror, which lets people "draw" across reflective surfaces or interact with stuff that's already there (like ads!).
See a demo. I like it when the girl runs her finger down the mirror and flowers bloom along the trail. Oh, it's also neat when the guy customizes a shirt. The photo-viewing feature is cool too.
This is pretty nifty all around, actually. I can imagine it seeing it in "ambiance" stores like Virgin.
Appearing today in USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, Stihl offers confidence to wary consumers that, of late, hear nothing but bad news about the economy. With so many portfolios in shambles, Stihl promises to be a sharp investment in today's crazy market.
Say what? Is that a chainsaw in the ad? So, like, the solution is to take a chainsaw to your portfolio and dramatically carve it up because, given Wall Street, anything less would be wimpy?
Oh wait, Stihl isn't a financial management firm. It makes power tools. And not just any crappy power tools like the ones you can find cheaply priced at Home Depot or Lowe's. Nope. Stihl is an investment, not an expenditure because, unlike the cheap tools you have you buy over and over because they always break, Stihl is a life long investment. Or so the ad would have us believe.
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"Precious Biscuits" uses the loose, altered threads of fairy tales to imbue Bakers Biscuits with wispy wonder.
It begins with pretty schoolchildren walking through a forest. Behind them, biscuits leap out of a cobblestone pavement (vestiges of Hansel & Gretel), bringing the environment to animated life.
Naughty piglets race across a canvas populated by blind mice, an egg that only almost dies, a lone social advocate made of gingerbread, and a round Red Queen with a teeny china mouth. You remember them, don't you? At the end, Bakers draws a subtle comparison between itself and other confectioners of myth.
Produced by the divine hands of Shy the Sun & Blackginger for Ogilvy/Johannesburg and client Bakers.
Adrants reader Candace sent us Palin as President, a just-for-kicks interactive site "updated daily until November 4th!"
Palin sits behind the desk of the oval office, wearing a frozen doll-like grin. Click on the items around her and along the walls.
"Where'd Russia go?" she wonders when I brush by the window. For bonus points, take a shot every time you see or hear the word "Maverick."
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In highschool, the legendary food fight is always just that, a legend...until it happens and you find yourself in the middle of it, adrenalin rushing, throwing tray fulls of fries, chicken cutlet, American chop suey and soggy salad across the cafeteria at no particular target. After all the trays have been thrown and are on their way to their final, undetermined target, the "sky" above the cafeteria becomes a surreal event mentally captured for all time in Hollywood-style slow motion.
It's as if you were a camera filming The Matrix, slowly capturing every angle and every last detail as the food moved ever so slowly towards its destination. This imagery becomes so vivid, so real, so indelible it never leaves the mind and continues to replay itself at random moments throughout life.
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I saw this ad for Resistance 2 last night while watching Fringe. Maybe it was the context, or the very large screen, but I found it deliciously chilling.
Product footage and 'net research reveals it's just another shooter game with an old premise: mankind versus an alien race.
Meh. How very Stargate SG-1, circa '98.
Somehow I thought Resistance 2 would be richer, like Heroes before everybody had a power, or like Fringe, which has me stuck on genetic manipulation, corporate conspiracies and string theory.
Where's my MMOG?
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