Fall semester is here, so now we've got uni-oriented campaigns to sift through. "Hail, Stanford, Hail" is an effort for that one school in California whose name we'll let you guess. This is the site. Note that it's down (or was when we looked). Hail, Stanford, Hail.
But when it's up, it hosts two clever little videos that include college antics dubbed with a professorial narrative. Here's some trivia: Stanford is the alma mater for the inventors of the microwave and the FM synthesizer.
Marshmallow bunny molesters and Guitar Hero fanboys everywhere thank you, Stanford. And at the very least, your campaign was way better than Temple's. (Although we still like Wilkes best.)
Hey, where are the ad campaigns for Berkeley? Oh yeah, everybody there is still on strike and lamenting the recent loss of Bob Marley.
What makes a website or an ad campaign EGGciting? Don't come here to find out. The music will appall you, the animation and imagery will bring you feverish memories of your attempts to build a site on GeoCities and AngelFire, and even the font makes us angry for some odd reason.
Shortly after asking in a manner most slow what makes a site or campaign EGGciting, a little mouth appears and screams in our faces to demonstrate, we don't know, the element of surprise. Thankfully we were already distracted by then so the full effect was lost on us.
Rob, whoever you are, leave the gurus to Axe and Tanqueray.
Virgin America has launched a campaign with a self-deprecating look and feel, slightly a la Perrier. By poking fun of its own neurotic clientele and unique flight experience (the vibrating chairs, the plugs, the as-you-order food), Virgin demonstrates it can laugh at itself while laughing ever-more-loudly at the competition, which just doesn't promote in the cool-as-shit way it does.
The animation used in the campaign was popularized by jaded kids floating shorts from Sick Animation or episodes of Adventure Time, which use the medium that first taught us about society to bitchslap it across the face.
Our favorite spot is "Plugs." The campaign was created by Anomaly, our new heroes for the next 10 minutes.
Have you ever felt your baby was just not bulletproof enough? (If you are 50 Cent's mother, probably - or not, depending on how you look at it).
Visit Bulletproof Baby for bulletproof cribs, strollers, vests, toddler tasers and disturbing product-test videos, all meant to ensure that you, the discerning customer, have a happy bundle of steel.
Actually it's a stunt for New Line Cinema's Shoot 'Em Up, which is linked pretty prominently on the homepage. Even so, a PR person still saw fit to shoot us at least three emails this morning about how it was dramatically unveiled as a promotional effort after a long and controversial internet run. (We have serious doubts about this.)
And while we have no idea what that movie has to do with babies, we know it has plenty to do with bullets. And Clive Owen.
We're a little confused about this new game, dubbed Hunger Strike, for KFC. At first we thought it was like Pac-Man, but there don't appear to be any enemies to either run from or eat. Then we thought maybe it might be more esoteric, like this game, but no; the graphics don't really do anything, and the music is frozen in a hellish loop.
We just know we keep losing, and we don't understand why, so now we feel resentful toward chicken.
There's just no end to the fuckery contextual advertising delivers. This time, we have Red Stripe beer advertising directly next to a story about two guys who got arrested while driving the same truck...together...while drunk. Even weirder, one of the guys was a paraplegic so he steered while his friend worked the pedals. You just can't make this shit up.
If you like farms with pigs, cows, fish, farting farmers, aliens and atomic bombs that launch out of grain silos, you're gonna love this new site for Butternuts Beer & Ale from Woods Witt Dealy & Sons. just click around and have fun. Don't forget to click on the tractor in the back.
Along with the website, the campaign also includes print ads, table tents, packaging, posters and a MySpace page, all of which can be seen here. In one of the print ads, the cans are celebrated with the write-itself headline, Nice Cans. The ad is also carries a blue ribbon honoring the breweries position as best brewery in Garrattsville, New York. Not that there's any other brewers there which , of course, is the entire point of the ribbon.
Dubbed "farmhouse ale" (whatever that is) the beer's got great names like Porkslap, Heinnieweisse and Moo Thunder. If a microbrewer has to set itself apart from the pack, aligning the brand with farm nomenclature is certainly one way to do it.
We were beginning to think there was no longer any such thing as sites that take two minutes to load and count to or from 100 the whole time.
But Manning's Mind, a new promotion for Sprint by Goodby, defeats that logic.
Post-load, the site is actually not bad. It just isn't anything special. Take Peyton Manning on in a trivia-style game where each point won brings you closer to a touchdown.
It appears Peyton Manning is one of the only sports celebrity sponsors who's actually used for what he has to say. We don't know what that means, but it's interesting.
70 Volvos are hidden in a bunch of beautiful but rugged places and according to this subsite it is your responsibility to find out where. (Despite the daunting sound of the task and the lameness of going Volvo-hunting, clues and a Yahoo! Maps integration help the process along.)
More interestingly, is it just us or is the music for the subsite a throwback to the score for Vanilla Sky? It's probably just us.
With the ubiquitous YouTube video, Leno appearance and online video site, famed (at least if you watch movies and TV) Fred Thompson has entered the 2008 presidential race. We're not much into politics finding ourselves oddly aligned to some things Democrat and some things Republican but not comfortable with Independent status and certainly not or right or left wing crazy...at least in real life. So it is with confusion, we are drawn to Fred Thompson who appears to be as Republican as they come but also pretty laid back about a lot of things.
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