Australia's ANZ Small Business tapped M&C Saatchi to develop an ad both funny and sympathetic to its target demo: small business owners.
That doesn't sound like tons of fun, so we didn't expect it to be, especially when we saw the length of the clip: 1:40? And in sepia? Why not force our eyes open with steel rods, too?
The spot itself starts out innocuously enough: a suited man is walking down the street, somebody calls his name: "Jack!" He starts to run. As the spot progresses, the variety of people -- butchers, mechanics, a Chinese restaurant owner -- that catch sight of him and give chase increases, adding to the dramatic tension and making way for a few semi-amusing stunt scenes. You lazily wonder what the punchline is.
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Speaking of MySpace, the hot mess at left was recently rejected by the social networking site for being too sexually explicit.
The ad is part of a campaign, "Hottest Body in the World," for Parfums de Coeur's new men's fragrance, Body Heat. It's a contest where users turn in photos, the hottest of which will be used on a Hollywood billboard. (The winner also gets $10,000.)
Featured prominently at center is a screenshot from a :30 commercial that will run across Fox TV stations and on Facebook. It depicts a shirtless man and some hot fawning ... fawns, one of which is edging down toward his waist.
Dot Box, which originated the idea, called the MySpace rejection an "odd development considering MySpace's less-than-prudish reputation."
But we're kinda with @RGA on this one:
Was this ad too hot for MySpace [dramatic pause, raised eyebrow]...or was it not trashy + poorly designed enough?
One ... two ... three ... Discuss.
How completely insane. Here is a series of videos that purport to teach you how various indie emo hipster-looking people achieve their MySpace profile pic angles.
Sounds innocuous enough. Even seems to promise a spirited joke or two: how does the Crooked Bathed-in-Light guy get his gooseneck lamp to cast just right?
Click on one to view the how-to. What you discover is that each person, or group, is actually a disfigured or terrifying zombie/witch/monster thing. Then you're walked pragmatically through the process of how they covered blemishes and used various cheats on their cameras to make themselves as MySpace-worthy (and, uh, human-looking) as possible.
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- Prior to the premier, Mad Men season 3 leaks on iTunes just long enough for a bunch of madcap bloggers to publish stuff like this.
- Social media cool-kid Jeremiah Owyang leaves Forrester, calls his time there "a grand adventure!"
- Defending the PR merits of the Flip camera. (Via.)
- Back to '69 with the Gap, on all your social media platforms (even iPhone!), courtesy of AKQA.
- ...and after Juno, Diablo Cody gives us an exorcist man-eating queen bee. With requisite dorky hot friend.
- Grey: wedding football and the Phantom. (Via.)
We dug the gimmick this time. And this time. And this time and this time. But this is one saunter-through-time too many.* And we're not standing for it!
Especially for a product like sexier incontinence underpants.
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Clearex acne treatment gel works a lot like Clearasil acne treatment cream (or your fluoride-rich toothpaste of choice): you rub it onto your pimples at night, then pray they're dry enough to pop or scratch off by morning.
Grasping for a clever way to market the stuff, which you either do or don't have in your cabinet, agency Shalmor Avnon Amichay/Tel Aviv dreamed up this print campaign.
Each piece is an uncomfortably close close-up of a blemished individual. The offending red dots are camouflaged, age-five-at-the-boardwalk!-style, with festive but decidedly unsexy face art. Okay, the Pacman one was kinda rawkin'.
Tagline: "Don't hide it, clear it." Inelegant but straightforward.
Hoping to profit from the unfortunate fact that liquor companies only focus on chic alcoholics or incurable ass-gawkers, Corby Distilleries launched a beverage for the other crowd.
Lamb's Black Sheep Spiced Rum greets life with a simple-enough print campaign featuring authoritative white wording at the foreground of a chalkboard -- where a black sheep first cuts his teeth, presumably while scrawling mediocre sentences across them as punishment.
The work's nothing special but we did cop a grin when we saw the piece that read "You think bacon comes from cows." That's not so much black-sheepy as ditzy. But that's cool, most of us are a little bit of both.
- People dig sharing stuff on Facebook, more than via email, or via MySpace, or via Twitter, or via anything else, really.
- "Life Guard" tees get Ralph Lauren sued. (Via.) Just for giggles, we ran a search for [ralph lauren lifeguard] on Google and clicked on "Lifeguard Cotton Tee - RalphLauren.com," which comes up first in search results. That link now leads to this beach patrol tee. But if you hit "Cached," you'll find it used to lead to that really boring sucker at left.
- Canadian model Liskula Cohen wins landmark case that will force Google to unmask an anonymous blogger who posted slutty pictures of her and, logically, called her a skank. Sigh.
- The least interesting man in the world probably won't sell any beers. He may, however, contribute to the sales of many geeky t-shirts. "Stand back. I'm going to try SCIENCE."
- MySpace swallows iLike.
- Talking Quizno's oven drives guys to therapy for what should be obvious reasons.
- Something that has nothing to do with advertising, but everything to do with "geometry, light and a wee bit of magic."
"Hey big nose. I think we're in a Quilmes spot."
Young & Rubicam make good in the comically self-aware "Spot," where two guys at a club look around and discover, by virtue of the gimmicks they recognize from beer ads, that they're living in an ad for Quilmes, a brand of Argentinian beer.
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We were thinking the other day about all the technological advances that happened with dolls when were kids: the kind with the hair you could cut that grows back, or the one whose hair changed colour when you ran a cold hairbrush through it, or -- our personal favourite -- the one that pissed into a changeable cloth diaper! after suckling real fluid from a bottle.
So maybe Spanish doll maker Berjuan is adding a logical cobblestone to what's already a long illustrious tradition. Still, this demonstration for Bebe Gloton, a doll little girls can pretend to breastfeed, left us suffering from WTF Face.
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