Remember those Little Thickburger commercials from last year? Riffing off that, Hardee's launched an ad generator app so fans could create their own Thickburger comparisons.
The company expected maybe one or two to shine, but it turns out about 16 spots turned out to be broadcast-quality. (Though when you think about it, it's a pretty tough formula to screw up: [Big thing. Little thing.] Extra points for wordplay.) See them here.
"And we didn't even offer them a million dollars. Or anything for that matter," Hardee's added, puffing its chest out for extra effect.
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For Dante's Inferno, an Electronic Arts video game, G-Net Los Angeles got into bed with Psyop. The natural result is an ad we suspect might be more lush than the game itself.
We could be wrong, though. Any English major will tell you Dante had a helluva good time describing Hell, and the work he did merits equal dedication from agencies, production firms and game developers alike. Still, this is just one more reason why future generations will be reading fewer books: you think CGI's had its way with women? It's bringing literature to its knees.*
Going back to the ad: like we said, it's gorgeous, but probably could've done without the toothy worm things. It's just too dental-visit-gone-wrong. And while we understand every good Hell scenario needs a bad-ass horned demon master, the one here looks too much like a Balrog.
Once something invites a comparison to LotR, even accidentally, it's gonna have trouble standing up on its own. Even if it is the bloody Inferno.
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Belin Crazy Rings/Tubes/Starfish are essentially drinking snacks. We'd call them beer nuts but the branding material reads "l'apero cingle" -- aperitif snacks. Classy.
Anyway, to best target its market of casual at-home cocktailers, the French company is broadcasting this ad from its website and in banners on sites like MySpace. Our best guess is that they thought, "Drunk people engage in slightly malevolent, poorly thought-out hijinks all the time, so what if our snacks did too?!", and went zealously from there.
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We have it on good authority that Nabisco's started circulating a new slogan, "Why Snackrifice?", to promote Triscuits -- and, to a lesser degree, Kraft cheese (its perfect mate).
Annoyingly, video searches for "triscuit snackrifice" or "snackrifice" yielded little more than videos produced by people that should not own cameras and a ton of Neopets-related stuff, respectively.
However, we did find a Why Snackrifice? page on NabiscoWorld, which promotes Triscuit (and Kraft!)'s health merits and pocketbook-friendliness. Also, there's a really rad shot of two women snacking responsibly while sitting in ecstatic postures normally reserved for yogurt eating. Scandale!
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The Partnership for a Drug-Free America enlisted Avenue A/Razorfish to help it talk to parents about talking to their kids about drugs, I guess because the Patsy angle didn't go over so well. (Actually, this probably didn't either.)
Don't Sound Like Your Parents is the fruit of this partnership. It plays with out-of-touch parental camp ("You don't need drugs for excitement -- you can help me dust!") but it's also really candid. (Video reels depict Boomer parents that generally meant well, but for the most part failed to adequately deliver the drug talk. But hey, like the sex talk, it's a tough topic to scale.)
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- zOMG: grainy shots of Ashton and Demi! This cinches it: following celebrities on Twitter is almost as rad as following them around in real life. (Diggin' how the NYT actually quotes Kutcher's tweets, as if to prove THIS IS ALL REAL.)
- Gmail went down early this morning, and it's like the universe exploded.
- We actually ate this.
- BrightKit, a management/metrics dashboard for multiple Twitter accounts, changed its name to HootSuite and went pro-bono. (That is, it's no longer trying to charge a fee for services.) To compensate, it's selling display ad space above webpages whose links are shortened via ow.ly (HootSuite's version of tinyURL) -- meaning you could, in theory, make money (or build brand awareness...?) by spreading Twittersphere link-love.
- Fake Steve Jobs makes "wah" noises over monetizing blogging.
- Coca-Cola's Urge looks suspiciously like Coca-Cola's Surge. Remember the aftertaste on that stuff?
- Wedding the Sex and the City model to kitschy "Cathy": just one more lovechild the universe didn't need. Especially in the name of Baked Lay's.
- "True statements can be libelous if published maliciously." Wait ... what?!
If you've seen one Sony Bravia ad, you've got the blueprint for all of them: seize upon the easiest way to illustrate a product's raison d'etre, then magnify, until the crowd whose attention you so wistfully coveted has been submerged by your idea.
"Zoetrope" is no different -- and just as compelling as its predecessors. (See "Bunnies," see "Thread," see "Bubbles.")
For Sony's Motionflow Bravia TV, Fallon/London built the world's largest zoetrope: a rotating montage of static images viewed through small slits. (See? More fodder for Guinness.)
We got teaser material for the work last December. It was filmed a month prior in Venaria, near Italy's Turin. View the spit-shined final product below.
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And it's exactly as boring as the title of the post suggests. The sad part is, this video is the most popular of World Almanac's two (and counting!) attempts to go viral.
We'd rather watch the Sonic Hearing infomercial 42 times. And on that same note, we'd rather peruse the infinitely-less-useful Guinness Book of World Records than pick up the World Almanac.
It's hardly the same value proposition, but both are relative time-wasters and have about the same chance of falling to the wayside. The difference is, pop culture is loaded with people and advertisers that are still going out of their way to get into Guinness.
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Remember Boost Mobile, the Nextel spin-off that spent the last three years molesting street culture under the tagline "Where You At?"
Hip-hop's run out of milkable teats so Boost's taken shelter in the ironic, determinedly awkward humor of suburbia. And Skittles commercials.
"Coroner" and "Bicycle" explain how Boost Mobile rawks, not because the value proposition is good (would you rather have "no hidden fees" or play iPhone Ocarina?), but because some things out there are worse. The problem is, you're left with little more than nausea over the still-lingering memories of unkempt armpit hair and breakfast burritos a la Poe. You will have absolutely no memory of Boost's merits.
Which I guess is how it should be.
180LA's responsible for the ads, which fall under a campaign called UNwrong'D. AdFreak's right. That apostrophe -- the whole concept, really -- is like cyanide.
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YouTube's given rise to more than its fare share of pro-bono talking heads, so it's not often we watch any one "thought leader" video in full. But "The Command Economy," an ad manifesto from Carlos Mandelbaum's Carnival of Ideas, gave us pause. (He's got these expressions that grab you! And we love that musical text-reader gimmick.)
Listen with audiovisual fixation as he explains how the '80s ruined everything (which we already knew), and how advertisers' bad-ass commanding attitude have something major in common with the Berlin Wall.
It's tasty bait, and we wanna find out where he's taking us.
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