We're never quite sure whether we like Truth's tongue-in-cheek, sometimes confrontational way of driving its anti-smoking points home, but they generally get our attention. Knowing nobody can fully reject a singing cowboy, and nobody can ever turn away from an exhibitionist with a hole in his neck, Truth brings us the laryngect-o-gram.
Show somebody you love them by sending one over. Friends will be amused. Lovers will be stunned. Family members will give you that sick look and shake their heads. It's a total win-win.
Any campaign with the tagline "it's always big" generally finds us paying a bit more attention to it than others and this new Colle+McVoy-created Minnesota State Lottery television campaign has us very interested. But, not for the sick reasons dancing around in your head right now. No. We like this campaign because it's a game. And it's game, called What's the Difference, that starts on the tube and ends online. In the ads, the viewer is asked to find the six differences between two images in the ad that represent a $20 million jackpot winner and a $200 million winner. Winners of the game are entered into a drawing to win cash and prizes.
With everyone in the industry latching onto the latest and greatest ad babble term of the day, engagement, it's nice to see something real come out of board room blather. We're giving props to Colle+McVoy on this one. See the ads here, here and here.
We reported Auntie Anne's V-day viral blast once already but we just noticed She's So Twisted for the first time and thought, how awesome would it be to hang out with someone who was bent out of shape all the time?
Not very. But this chick seems good-natured enough and we like how her little friend drags her around on a little rollie-board. Having a pretzel friend must be way funner than having a puppy or a ferret. We'd try being pretzels for a day but our drunker companions might eat us.
We all sort of wondered what happened to would-be rap star Chunky Pam, and as if to satisfy our wildest dreams she mysteriously reappears just in time for the heart-shaped holiday.
In a new MTV-produced video celebrating the merits of griddles and grills, Pam says she wants to be pampered in a way only a blinged-out pizza epicure can. Our favourite line involves Swedish fish and Swedish massage.
Unlike other sultry blondes who slinked into skinnier skins, Pam embraces decadent consumption wholeheartedly and makes it her forte. What talent. What art. What size. If only everyone were so easy to please on the 14th of February.
While artful design is always up for interpretation, some think Google, with its Valentine's Day logo redesign, left the L out of their name christening the site Googe. Likely, as some have mentioned, the stem of the strawberry is intended to be the L but that strawberry chocolate mess looks like one letter to us.
In our humble quest to find a Valentine's Day campaign that didn't leave us feeling sick or pressured, we came across Don Hertzfeldt's 1995 classic Ah l'Amour.
The video illustrates one small stick figure's attempt to find romance. Thankfully, he has a lot of lives to spare. In the end, there's only one realistic way to win a little stick woman's heart - and no, it's not sex. Weird, right? Because, like, sex gets us every time.
- Wieden + Kennedy London is seeking four people from outside the ad world to partake in its WKSide3 program which offers three month work at the agency.
- PSFK is organizing a future of marketing conference at which the likes of George Parker (now that's funny), Peter Rojas, Elizabeth Spiers, Cunning's Floyd Hayes, Anomaly's Mike Byrne and others will chat about where the industry is going.
- JC Penny Says "Every Day Matters."
- XM Radio does the Valentine's Day card generator thing.
- Suzuki does the webisode thing. Calls it The Briefcase.
This skin-crawling ad for Embarq so thoroughly grated the nerves on Bill that it gave us an uncourted sense of schadenfreude. In general, something about the ad embarrasses us in the same way your immortalization in the yearbook embarrasses you.
It merits adding that Embarq, who consider themselves trailblazers in the direction of common sense, will probably make good on a spot this annoying. It sort of clings, like toilet paper or static.
We're thankful that the song hasn't lodged itself in our heads yet but that's mainly because we're afraid of watching the spot a second time. We might catch '80's hair. And nobody wants that.
There's something inherently funny trying to get somebody to laugh who can't on pain of death, or at least hurt pride.
This is the inspiration for Royal Guard Cheese, a game where you try to induce a guard to laugh with well-placed props that include a feather, a rubber ducky and a teddy bear. Getting him to laugh like this could win you a free trip to London.
STA, are you paying attention? Just kidding. You know we love you.
Symantec's RockDotRock has added a Valentine's Day Serenade feature that allows you to send a customized message to your loved one (as long as they are o the list of 200 names) sung by the heavy metal rockers who grace the site. It's a nice continuation of the decidedly very different software campaign.
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