"French squirrel goes nuts" -- one more reason to avoid bringing housewarming gifts to your vinyl-spinning French neighbour,* squirrel or not.
"Thank you, Larry, for picking these sad little acorns out of the dirt and putting them in this box. I feel so warm and tingly inside; now we will be friends forever."
Cold, man, cold.
Disseminated for Emerald Nuts, the brand of choice for nut elitists (and kryptonite to the mischievous Robert Goulet!), by Feed Company.
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- The Obama Administration's recovery.gov logo kinda reminds us of...
- MoMA shoots for socially-minded redesign. (It should probably start here, though.)
- Google's Eric Schmidt's a Twitter-hater. Well, maybe "hater" is too strong a word.
- For once, an instance where extreme prejudice may improve your online quality of life. (Via that one guy whose site's all covered in Skittles.)
- Hella happy over drillwork.
- Starbucks value meals? Seriously? Sell your stock. Now. Because a licensing partnership with Hello Kitty is just around the corner.
There's something about Japanese pop culture that compels us to watch and not look away. Japan is the seat of all fetishes, magnified for your viewing pleasure. (And we're not just talking* sexual ones.)
To ensure eyeballs for Nivea's line of shaving products, DraftFCB and Rubber Republic tapped into "glabermania" -- the addiction to shaving and being smooth. Inspired by our game show-crazed Japanese cohorts, here's what they came up with.
Come on, don't knock it. What else do you and your jaded creative homies have to do on Saturday night? Grab a camera and pool your shaving cream; think of it as a company morale-builder.
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- Devil heckles cyclists.
- 1% of the tweets you've seen were all about Skittles.
- 10 compelling, authentic brands.
- Google has announced winners from YouTube's crowdsourced symphony orchestra contest.
- Crispin's "Secretary of Taste" sounds a lot like...
- Little French vlogger becomes Edurelief/Mongolia advocate. Ohh, look at her telling the funny story! Look at her eating all the candy! Look at her tricking the tooth fairy!
- Hey, remember Candystand? It's got a sassy new game -- sponsored by The Harlem Globetrotters.
- Not ad-related, still perusal-crucial: "You don't win a race by huffing and puffing as hard as you can. You win it by going faster."
- Heh. The rumors are true about beer and "the goggles."
This is kinda interesting. For client CONSOL Energy, Brunner/Pittsburgh put together a microsite with a "coal flag." Designed like the Stars and Stripes, each seam represents a mining topic and features interviews of between :90 and 3:00 with people working within the industry.
Target market: residents of coal-producing and electricity-consuming communities, and their leaders. The site was done in Flash 8 and HTML to maximize its SEO juice; not sure how else it's being promoted.
Found this gilded treasure on a community dating site called Datingish.
The CTA alone was sufficient to leave our ears ringing with bad Bangkok jokes, but a quick visit to the website, Thaikisses.com, drives users to still other exotic destinations: Chinesekisses.com, Filipinokisses.com, Latinlove.org, and -- wait for it! -- Ladyboykisses.com.
There's somethin' in the grab bag for everyone!
To better represent the interest of its users, whose lives "[revolve] around social and user generated media," Skittles tore a sheet out of Modernista's playbook and relinquished control of its website.
Visits to Skittles.com drive users to the Wikipedia article about the company, with navs featured in a pop-up that explains what users are looking at (Modernista has one of these too):
"Don't sweat it, this is still Skittles.com. It just has a new twist. User this as your guide to find anything and everything Skittles that's online. Have fun."
Interesting. When Modernista surrendered itself to the Zeitgeist, we thought the move was brave and forward-moving, not least because it nods to pure transparency. (We saw that earlier this month, when Modernista's "n3wz" section, which points to either Google News or Google Blog Search, was deluged with articles about layoffs at the agency.)
It also opens the label up to just general meanness. Modernista hardly had its new "site" up 24 hours before Wikipedia yanked its page. Modernista.com now points to the Facebook Fan page.
Aaaanywho, the Skittles "site" model will work about the same way. The nav bar will drive you to places all over the "interwebs," including YouTube and flickr. We like that "CHATTER" points to a search for "skittles" on Summize, meaning you can read everything Twitter users are tweeting about Skittles in real-time.
Ballsy!
UPDATE, 9:45 AM EST on 2/28/09: Skittles.com now points directly to Summize results for "skittles." Looks like Wikipedia is an equal-opportunity antagonist -- although Wiki articles are still used in the "PRODUCTS" section.
Didn't You Hear pointed us in the direction of "Fast girls, Fast cars, One wild ride" -- two sponsors' attempt to penetrate the hype wormhole opened by the Ken Block Gymkhana practice video (which is also sponsored, just less obviously).
Sports Illustrated poster girls Melissa Haro, Jessica Hart and Damaris Lewis ease into respective Nissan 370Zs and demonstrate the car's uber-fun-and-fastness by grabbing onto things, throwing their arms up and shrieking like they're on Medusa.
The 370Z is cool and all, but this whole setup feels terrifically desperate. Then again, we usually react poorly to anyone who prefaces a pitch with "They're in for the ride of their lives!"
For you intellectual sadists, there are laughs to be had in the YouTube comment stream.
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- Somebody just sent us a link to KillaBanker.com, a little CafePress store where you can buy knee-jerk reactions to economic despair.
- Hanzi Smatter, a site "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture," is hilarious. See awkward interpretation of tattoo on a model featured in AussieBum's Commando ad.
- Kellogg's brand rep suffers following Phelps fallout.
- What ho, a Dairy Queen blog.
- More jibjab over Arnell/Tropicana.
Witness with a growing sense of unease as a couple on its first date quotes lines from Romeo & Juliet.
$5 says they met on eHarmony.
"How Romeo Pulls Juliet," which vibes like a middling tribute to Baz Luhrmann's '96 oeuvre, was put together by Madeinmilan Wine. The company wanted to "tell a story about having fun with wine, indulging in intense pleasure" while incidentally promoting a suite of wines named after iconic characters, like Romeo. (There's also a bottle marked Brutus. Hrm.)
For requisite engagement purposes, check out the "wine pairing" section, where you (apparently...?) pair wine to other things, like "travel" or "chill out." (We have NO idea.)
Click on "sex" for an exciting shot of a mad couple crawling around on all fours. We're not sure why it's there, but it struck us as one of the few things worth mentioning at all.
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