Everybody who's anybody needs to have an online presence if they have any hope of being recalled offline. The only question is how to make that online presence engaging without doing something everyone else did already.
To solve this riddle, Mini Cooper looks two decades backward and brings 3D back with Turbovision. We're still waiting for our 3D glasses to arrive in the mail, which is annoying, but it makes us feel like kids again. When was the last time you received something as awesome as 3D glasses in the mail? Plus, after receiving free stuff from somebody you're always more inclined to check them out on the internet, so maybe this one's a winner. It's too soon to tell.
In any event a pair of red and blue specs will serve us in more ways than just one. We have every intention of wearing them as we walk down the street. Collars up, of course. We just need to find our ghetto blaster.
There's something totally classy about blowing coke up your nose with a McD's coke spoon. It ties you to America somehow, and to cheeseburgers, and to childhood.
In the '70's, McD's strange-looking stirring spoon gets adopted by the white powder cult. Panicked about becoming accomplices in the empire of blow, family-friendly McDonald's discontinues the multi-faceted units.
But this kind of thing doesn't die quietly. Artists Tobias Wong and Ken Courtney bring the hot spoons back - plated in 18k gold, disco-fever style. Pissed at their insolence, McD's released a cease and desist.
Oh come on. It's every fledgling brand's wet dream to be appropriated by some enthusiastic subculture. And who doesn't want the designer drug users (possibly now enthusiastic - and wealthy - pop-art consumers)? They define trendy.
Plus, coke-heads are generally skinnier than the obese protesters long courting the golden arches. They make natural retaliatory press. Getting fat? Forego the baked apple pie for a spoon. It's free! (Magic dust sold separately.)
While we're used to Google garnering residual PR for retooling old media for new ways to advertise, we're pretty unused to seeing Google actually advertise outside of sanctioned Google space or some kind of cross-brand. It's a card the uberbrand rarely pulls.
Shortly after deciding to make Gmail public (really this time, except not) Google's decided to start marketing for it too. And who did they tap as the vehicle to do the job? Youtube.
Nodding to critiques about big names doing bad at guerilla, Google makes sure we can't accuse them of getting too slick. The video takes place in a cubicle farm, is narrated by a 20-something and demonstrates Gmail's unique features with hand puppets made of office tools.
Clever, Google. They have a cavalier way of hawking great services by demonstrating none too shyly how much fun they're having. And even as VC's shake their heads in disgust at the grinning Googlers sipping smoothies, you have to admit few companies are willing to let their minions put their deskside office art on air. Maybe one day we'll be getting credit for our low-key talent as origami bird makers.
Irv Blitz-directed spot Swing, by agency Momentum for Grolsch, involves the most synchronized dancing beer bottles we've ever seen. And that's saying a lot considering when our own beer bottles dance, they are never nearly this snappy.
We haven't tried Anheuser-Busch's Grolsch lager, but suddenly we're curious, in part because we think it will make us better dancers. And we know this for a fact because listening to jazz, or at least something jazz-like, makes you smarter. It's been proven by science.
Out since early February and in a nod to television's Starsky & Hutch and Knight Rider, Hammer & Coop is a six episode online miniseries that pits a dude named Jim Turtledove against a white-suited megalomaniac named Sven Hartjan. The star of the show, though, is the 2007 Mini Coop. This is not an ad. This is a show and it's hilarious. Though it's not technically an ad, the show does a great job of pointing out the car's feature without it seeming too gratuitous.
Two of the six episodes are out and have Turtledove getting sidetracked by a bikini car wash and Hartjan sharing his maniacal plans with us. There's a funny action hero name generator so you, too, can have your own Jim Turtledove-like name. There's also the usual wallpapers, screensavers and buddy icons. Very nice work.
Adrants reader Jeff Wasiluk writes to tell us, "For most of us, day to day creativity only pays off in our minds. Sure there is the occasional award, standard company raise, maybe you even got a pat on the back. Good for you. But me, I'd rather have those little sparks of brilliance put my ass on the beach and a mai tai in my hand." Point taken. Which brings us to Rather be in Hawaii, a site from Starwood Hotels and Hawaiian Airlines, on which you can upload an image of an unpleasant moment of your life and have it paired with another image of vacation perfection. If you win the contest, you get a 5 night stay in Hawaii at a Starwood Hotel with airfare courtesy of Hawaiian Airlines. Go ahead. Upload your misery and go to Hawaii.
 The Girl Scouts of America, that pristine organization of innocence and good values, at the end of January, stepped foot into the seedy world of MySpace with a site promoting this year's cookie drive. On the site you'll find pictures of the cookies and some of the cleanest, most fully-dressed pictures of people you'll ever find on MySpace. The MySpace presence, aside from our tasteless snark, makes perfect sense. Why not hang with the most concentrated collection of tweens and teens anywhere online to build awareness and to, perhaps, as a side benefit, encourage those tweens and teens to...put more clothes on while getting them to buy cookies and join the Girl Scouts...who don't let you wear low-cut, cleavage revealing belly shirts and low rider jeans to their den meetings. Wow. A Campaign With Benefits. Sell cookies and get American youth to fully dress themselves in the morning. Is this a new trend? If this campaign succeeds, will there be no more places online for teenage boys to drool over what they can't get in real life anyway?
Oh damn, our phone's ringing. It must be the Girls Scouts of America telling us to shut up and stop associating all this filth with their fine, upstanding organization. OK, fine. Besides, we have to take our daughter to a den meeting now.
With its classic Jerry Bruckheimer movie-sounding theme music (which draws us in every time for reasons we know not), Sony has released two new PlayStation sites created by Zugara. The two sites offer visitors mini Navy Seal Missions introduced by former real life Navy Seal Rob Roy. After viewing a brief explanation Roy about how a four-man team needs to work with a two-man team, visitors are asked to complete a reconnaissance mission on the FireTeam Bravo 2 site. Once the recon work is completed, a four-man assault mission on the Combined Assault site becomes unlocked, and players are automatically deep-linked back to that site's Crosstalk section so that you can lead the assault team.
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Because we work on the internet, we like to entertain the fantasy that we're down with hackers or could have been hackers if we wanted to. This surmise is probably untrue as we haven't yet mastered the art of face-to-face l337-sp33k.
The spiffy rogues at Hanft Raboy and Partners put forth Discover Hackistan, a hacker community that scoffs at tired bourgeois trimmings like intellectual property and valorizes everyday net annoyances as seeds of revolution. Hackistan's one enemy is Fortify Software, the status quo superheroes characterized by fringey promos of this type from Hanft. We dig it.
Kitschy hacker country aside, Fortify shows it doesn't mind laughing at itself as sworn saviours of web uniformity. An "open letter" running in magazines includes an invitation for Hackistan citizens to "Join the world community and enjoy the benefits of globalization: soaring divorce rates, mindless entertainment and obesity." And if that's not compelling enough, consider the consequences of contributing to the free-for-all programming universe. Ooh, it gives us the shudders.
Sinless points us to The Metallers, a pair of awkward fame-seekers who remind us why heavy metal was so good for the furniture industry. And maybe also the Ritalin industry.
We covered The Fame Game when it first came out and were intrigued back then at what kind of entries appeared. After the long "we-want-your-stuff!" marketing craze, and the small CGM gems that appeared in the Super Bowl, one forgets that for the most part pure consumer-gen will consist mainly of bedroom dancing and awkward pillow-tossing.
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