Match.com's Make Love Happen campaign pushes the notion that there's a match for everybody, no matter how quirky or off-colour. The lively prints come courtesy of Serge Seidlitz. Well, we said we were all for the unsexy in a primarily sex-driven industry so this is what we get: sexless Lego pieces in an Erect-a-Set city.
Check out a pink variation of the ad here. It merits a close look as there are a lot of details. Whether it will draw attention to said details is a story only time will tell.
Mini Cooper marketers Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners get savvy with billboards that talk to cars. RFID technology in Mini Cooper keyfobs get picked up by billboards which then reflect that information in little messages like "Hey Bill" and "Nice convertible."
Check out the video here. We're impressed but creeped out, not least because if people still wonder whether Big Brother is watching, this would be an appropriate time to suspect that yes he is. And he approves of your taste in cars.
Mini users not in the RFID loop can sign up for it at the Mini website. You'll be asked a few questions about your private life. Try not to let slip the awkward BDSM fantasy about your boss unless you want it aired 200 feet above you.
Appropriating ads and turning them into fuck-the-man messages is not actually anti-advertising. It's turning an ad into another (granted, irony-rich and possibly more sophisticated) ad.
While like Mortarblog we have serious doubts about the Anti-Advertising Agency's claim that "city dwellers see 5,000 ads per day," we agree that the world out there is oversaturated ad-wise. But in an ideal world, that raises the bar for us - not to become more ostentatious with our messages, but to make them more slow-moving and subtle. In an ideal world, anyway.
We dig what the Anti-Ad Agency's trying to do. It's important to ask questions about the presence of ads in our daily lives. But isn't that what this whole consumer-gen thing is all about? It's our strong suspicion that, short of finding a society bent on ridding themselves of ads, what they truly want are ads on their terms and not The Man's. That's okay with us.
Agency BBDO Italy is to blame for this fiberglass life-sized Mini Cooper that actually does bob up and down like a yo-yo. We like Mini's forays into the whimsical to illustrate its compact size and playful personality, but the fact that it's slightly more wee than a regular car probably doesn't comfort those driving under the billboard.
More images here.
We're not sure whether to laugh at or be concerned for Boston which got quite angry with Turner Broadcasting's for its ten city publicity stunt which, over the past two weeks, placed circuit board-like devices throughout each city, including Boston, to promote the the company's Cartoon Network Adult Swim Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Wednesday, all hell broke loose in the city of Boston when a commuter noticed one of the devices under a highway overpass above Sullivan Sqaure Station in Charlestown.
Bomb squads were called. Subways were shut down. Traffic was diverted. Newly seated Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said, "It's a hoax and it's not funny." Boston Mayor Thomas Menino threatened legal action. All because a few promotional items were placed around the city.
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Mcrosoft is, of course, pulling out all the stops to launch its new operating system, Vista. As part of the launch today, New Yorkers were greeted with a gigantic billboard outside the Terminal Building. The billboard was not your standard static board but was alive with Cirque du Soleil-style acrobats hanging from ropes while unfurling large tarps in the shape of the Windows logo. TBWA used a similar approach for Adidas in Japan back in the summer of 2003.
If sex sells for humans, why can't it sell for animals as well? Well, it does, (sort of, considering it's the humans who are the ultimate buyers here for their pets) for the Kentucky Humane Society which launched a campaign to promote a new spaying and neutering clinic. The billboards and bus shelter posters, created by Creative Alliance, feature humorous copy such as "You're going to cut off my what?", "Safe Sex? That just means she's been declawed", "Because I simply refuse to wear a condom" and "Cause humping your leg doesn't do it for me anymore." You can view all the creative here.
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To celebrate its quirky Japanese roots Asics presents its Fabre74 Onitsuka model in the style of ad-idolatry: with a 1.5-meter sculpture of an Onitsuka Tiger sneaker made of warring elements of Japanese culture. This is part of Onitsuka's Made of Japan effort, which seeks to challenge ideas about the Japanese pop-world with, uh ... a hodgepodge of its icons.
The giant shoe is a collabo between StrawberryFrog, LA-based artist Gary Baseman, and Dutch photographer Marcel Christ, all of whom are about as Japanese as the little Russian toy who gets excluded from the fun and games at the end of the promo video. The sculpture will appear in print, online and at venues in London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and Zurich.
Not to sound silly (as if we ever do) but we continue to harbor quiet fears about our toys coming to life and tormenting us.
We once worked in an agency where one of the B2B clients was in the dermatology space and each month a magazine called Cutis would appear in the mail room. When the magazine arrived, several of us took great pleasure in horrifying the squeamish at the agency by placing copies of the magazine on their desks. The cover of the magazine always featured some disgustingly sick skin affliction, pussing orfice or freakishly huge zit-like thing no one would ever want to see on their own body. What? You thought ad agencies were intellectual institutions staffed by scholarly folk who would never stoop to such antics?
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Shedwa points out there's a green 50-ft idol floating around the Hudson River this morning. Much evolved from the days of the golden calf, idolators these days favour the Lady Liberty-styled M&M.
Come full circle in your worship at Become an M&M, where you can create an M&M avatar with vestiges of you. To really get in the mood, we recommend shoving a few of the peanut butter persuasion into your mouth before zipping off with that mouse.
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