- Jezebel compiled a list of the top 10 female product advertising icons -- and the actresses that could replace them. That Mrs. Butterworth's/Queen Latifah one is hella funny. Now you: go forth and laugh.
- Driverside.com, which sends reminders for auto maintenance and calculates repair estimates in your area, is paying parking tickets off for 100 San Francisco inhabitants. Register at the above link and check back July 25th to see if you're among the scott-free parking violators.
- Gary Busey's objectively bananas, and here's proof. If you're planning to argue, I've got three words for you: stupid, misfortunate placenta.
- Neat water campaigns: submerged-society ones for Australian brand Insight, quiet dreamscape ones for Diesel.
- BooneOakley is behind State Farm's "Experience Peace of Drive" car wash campaign. (Apparently you also get a free massage.) More from the effort: bathing car, car and yoga, car and cucumber, car and candles, car and acupuncture. (Kinda cool. I had a fat friend whose mom made him visit an acupuncturist to induce weight loss. It didn't work, but he kept telling her it did because he found the needles soothing.)
The DHSMV and the Florida Rider Training Program are looking for cool ways to get bikers to dress more visibly. So they launched Ride Proud Dress Loud.
The associated print ad campaign -- put together by Kidd Group -- features bikers in various shades of yikes! and oh my!. There's also some wince-worthy flaming-leather action. Great balls indeed.
More ads here.
Our source at Kidd says a lot of hardcore bikers are pissed about the campaign. Well hell, sour grapes, it could always be worse. Good stuff from Kidd though. I like a little colour on my burly man.
If you were a fan of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer or its slightly traumatizing spin-off Angel, you might get teary with glee over Acts I and II of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, an effort by creator Joss Whedon to raise crowdsourced funding for a web-only show. (See trailer!)
Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is a singing supervillain. He uses the blog to share his dreams of dominating the world and joining an elite frat, the Evil League of Evil, whose membership he'll probably never earn unless he defects for a series that takes itself more seriously, like True Blood.
"If you're gonna get into the Evil League of Evil you have to have a memorable laugh," insists Dr. Horrible, who looks like a cross between Doogie Howser, MD and Butters masquerading as Professor Chaos.
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Idle insanity mashes up with everyday banality, colorful media and schizophrenic graphics in Stunningly Harmful Artlikes, six audio-visual vignettes that may in fact cause you harm.
The series brings Being John Malkovich to mind: media artist Jason Nelson is pretty much letting us glimpse a mundane world through his compulsively musical mind. Along the way you'll see or hear appropriated snatches of songs, games and imagery seen elsewhere but out-of-context.
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I went to Toronto last weekend and attended a dinner party hosted by Shannon Stephaniuk of Glossy Inc. If you're a blogger, a production company or one of her agency clients, you probably know her well. She's the PR person who actually presents advertising in a format journalists like (and cover lavishly):
(subject line.)
PICTURES!
LINK TO (DOWNLOADABLE) CREATIVE!
LINK TO CREDITS!
To other PR people: Why is this formula so hard to grasp? Just today I got a fucking one-page essay from Peroni's PR folk, pitching me on its new "Calendario" campaign, and then NOTHING. What, I have to email back to see the creative? Oh wait, there's a tiny link to the site right at the bottom near the fine(-as-hell!) print. Once I give my birthdate and location, I can hunt "Calendario" down myself -- if Peroni was smart enough to post it there at all. (What ho, it wasn't.)
But I digress.
The dinner party took place Friday night at Nyoob and featured a handful of Toronto-based media and ad people. The guestlist is posted here and so are the photos, if you want to see what havoc ensued.
Quotable highlights from the party are below.
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Yea! Mad Men is returning but if you simply can't wait to wallow in the 1960's ad world, you get do so virtually in a New York city subway car, some of which have been designed on the interior to look like the television show. Too bad you'll never get the full effect what with the hundreds of people filling the cars obscuring the view...which could lead to another problem.
If you knew a vampire didn't need to feed on human blood to survive, would you let him sit next to you on the bus? That's the question behind this cheesy (but compelling) online campaign for True Blood, a new HBO series from Six Feet Under's Alan Ball.
Put together by Campfire -- the same zany folks that convinced you a sadistic witch lived in Maryland -- the effort tries drumming up controversy for a synthetic blood beverage called Tru Blood, which will liberate vampires from their need to feed on people and finally enable them to demand equal treatment among the living.
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So you've got a line of HDTVs. Yeah, well, so do all your rivals, and LG stole the promotional bacon with its campy-as-shit Scarlet campaign. How do you compete with the TV that compared itself to a red dress?
If you're Sharp, you'll promote the box.
Check out the Life Changing Box by Lowe Worldwide. Give each icon a poke to get something new out of the square brown wonder. The site loads slow as hell, but the results are, I don't know, educational. (Click on the beaker for a cartoon about the birth of LCD. Niftaaay.)
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Uh oh. The cause group for...speedwalkers is going to get their jockstraps in a twist over this new AMV BBDO-created Get Some Nuts commercial (higher quality Quicktime here) for Snickers in which Mr. T, atop a Mad Max-style pick up truck, shoots Snicker bars at a speedwalker using a Gatling gun. While hurling bars at the walker, Mr. T lets lose his usual "I pity the fool" tirade telling the walker he's a "disgrace to the man race" and that it's time to "run like a real man."
While most would prefer to rid the streets of these goofy walkers for fear they will unduly influence their children into adopting the goofiness that is speedwalking, it won't be surprising if some speedwalking fanatics make their way to Mars headquarters and slingshot, en mass, their jockstraps at the building pummeling executives into submission.
As an apparent follow up to their salad billboard, Leo Burnett Chicago has created a giant egg in front of a McDonald's which opens between 6:30AM and 10:30AM, the hours breakfast is served at the restaurant. It's not your average billboard and it. once again, proves the worth of a medium that, while old, still has a lot of flexibility for creative use. See time-lapse photography of the egg opening here.
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