"A Magical Amount," by Arnold and Crispin Porter + Bogusky, starts out like a typical Truth ad: cigarette traps, a bullhorn and a bamboozled-looking group of people. Then a unicorn showed up, and there was singing, and...
Wow, just ... wow. Seriously. Wow.
You really have to watch it. The premise is tobacco companies don't want to kill you, but don't want to prevent addiction either, so there's a "magical amount" of nicotine in cigarettes. But tune out the arsenic talk and the animated oxygen mask, and you'd swear it was a superb cereal ad.
We always new Jay Mohr was an actor. We never really knew he was a comedian (we gave up on SNL long ago and, more recently, never watched Last Comic Standing). Apparently, appreciates his comic abilities and hooked up with him for a video contest called TaxLaugh in which entrants vie for a $10,000 and a chance to open for Mohr prize by submitting three minute comedy vids.
Jay tells us, "Most people think doing your own taxes is hard and being funny is easy. We're out to prove them wrong. TaxLaugh will give comedians the chance to make a name for themselves by making people laugh about something no one likes - taxes."
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Match.com swears if in six months you don't live out a love story with someone from its site, you can have six more months of free service to make up for it.
Not all tell-worthy stories end happily though. Sometimes you get locked out or hosed -- which, now that we think about it, isn't nearly as bad a fate as this one.
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OK, here we go again. Tonight, you have a choice. You can tune in to President Bush's State of the Union address. Or you can blow it off and, instead, head over to PETA's 2008 State of the Union Undress during which a lovely lady envisions a PETA-powered nation while she slowly transforms herself into a "fur free" state of undress. It's NSFW but not until the end and there's a Safe for Work version too.
Maybe because Nationwide cashed in like mad on its K-Fed pre-Super Bowl ad hype last year, everybody's releasing their spots before the drop.
We don't like the idea of opening our presents before Christmas day (which is what watching a Super Bowl ad a week in advance is like), but in some cases an early debut is a good thing.
That's the case with Pepsi's Bob's House, a Super Bowl spot by BBDO for its Enable campaign that composes a deaf world we're invited to watch from the sidelines. A silent ad is jarring, but it's weirder still to be passive observers of a community whose jokes we don't get.
Neat switcharoo on the minority experience. Can't wait to see what kind of response this generates on Super Bowl Sunday.
See the making-of, which, thankfully, isn't the usual self-congratulating "how I made my baby" swill.
Making life easier for publishers struggling to keep up with the explosion of ad networks - now numbering over 300 - and the determination of which network will yield the best results, is the Rubicon Project. Launched eight months ago by Frank Addante, the company, today, announced series B finding of $15 million bringing its total to $21 million.
We've seen a demo of Rubicon and its really fascinating. For a publisher trying to best monetize inventory, Rubicon, in a nutshell, does exactly that. A publisher joins with Rubicon, enters relevant information of their site and, poof, relevant ads are selected from the 300 or so ad networks in the system.
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Consumer Reports, which for a long time has helped people buy products that aren't crap, is now expanding its analysis of the advertising that pushes both good and bad products with the launch of CR AdWatch videos.
In a somewhat comical approach, host Jamie Hirsh takes a detailed look at the long-running Abe Lincoln/Beaver ad campaign for the sleep aid Rozerem. The analysis is level headed and if ads were required to provide equal time, this is the kind of advertising we might see on a regular basis. We review ads along the lines of how pretty they are and how effective they might be. Consumer Reports goes further and lets us know the other side of the claim.
Check out the Electric Tiger Land shoe campaign by StrawberryFrog, Amsterdam (print variations 1 and 2).
Here's the accompanying spot.
The pressie tells us the shots are of a giant "city in a sneaker" sculpture for Asics' Ontisuka Tiger.
The sculpture was inspired by Tokyo and has Japanese market signs in the toe, Onitsuka Tiger vending machines in the heel and the Narita airport runway on the the tongue. Versions were also made for Germany, France, the UK, Korea, and Australia.
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For HBO's new series In Treatment, Deep Focus along with illustrator Bryan Christie have crafted a website, He's Listening, that, like the series, lets you get inside the minds of the five patients features in the show. Visitors can click into the brain of Gabriel Byrne's Paul, the therapist to the patents in the show and see how the five characters relate to each other.
If you want to know what sort of "footwear" football (soccer) players will be wearing in the year 2178, PUMA has the answer for you. Like some form of full lower body armor crafted after those freaky looking animals you see in horror and fantasy movies, these PUMA "shoes" turn the game into something you'd see in Greek mythology.
Created by Danish agency Robert/Boisen & Like-minded and directed by Nicolai Fuglsig (who did the Sony Balls ad), the commercial features football players Gianluigi Buffon, Samuel Eto'o, Nicolas Anelka, Frederik Ljungberg, Alex Frei, Mario Gomez and Peter Crouch. Post-produced by The Mill, the "filming" involved 8 months of work with much scanning, animation and rendering of 523,000 fans all pulled together in one "take."
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