There's nothing like the reality and freedom of series cancellation to get the creative juices flowing. For sure, FOX's The O.C. was heading for shit and deserved to be canceled but in the past few weeks the show has gone through a dynamic rejuvenation worthy of re-instatement. The show has been turned on its head with Ryan's transformation from brooding, tough guy loner to active participant in the human race, Taylor's morph from cartoonish high school caricature to smart girl with feelings, Seth and Summer's maturing relationship, Julie Cooper's shift from vapid bitch to love struck nice girl (even if she doesn't really love the Bull oops...Bullet...or stay with him...shouldn't write while drinking a martini), Kaitlin Cooper's change from stuck up, ego-centric mean girl to supportive daughter and Sandy and Kirsten Cohen's transition from perfect couple to even more perfect couple.
FOX, you ought to reconsider your cancellation. Or, at least threaten all shows with cancellation in order to achieve improved creativity. And yes, we admit we watch the show.
Isn't it beautiful what hands can do? That's the question VW asks at the end of this Phaeton ad by Grabarz & Partner Werbeagentur out of Hamburg. With a playful instrumental and impressive handplay, Volkswagen draws attention to the potential of hands to do more than grope, play games and spread the flu. This is meant to showcase the notion that the Phaeton is as elaborately handmade, though we're hard-pressed to imagine a set of European craftsmen sitting around adding final details to a VW.
We agree with Motionographer that it's probably not the most effective ad. It's a long, patient watch and these are not prized audience characteristics. But we like the thought, talent and attention to detail that went into putting it together. If ads are the art that will speak in years to come for society today, we'd rather it be Volkswagen's elegant handplay than, well, this.
Candies's love celebrities. From Hilary Duff to Jenny McCarthy to Kelly Clarkson to Ashlee Simpson Destiny's Child to the Dixie Chicks, it's all celeb, all the time. Now the fashion brand is hooking up with musical artist Fergie (Stacy Ann Ferguson) for its spring 2007 campaign which kicks off with a spot during the February ll broadcast of the Grammy's. Print ads will appear in Teen Vogue among others.
A source points us to a UK trend of snippy little domestica ads showcasing women acting out the spectrum of nasty human emotions for love of a product. The ads run along the same undercurrent: antagonists have a quality about them that's shared by kids who get in trouble long after 3rd-grade because they still haven't learned to share. (We know what happens to those kids. They grow up to be amazingly magnetic sex gods and goddesses who write ad news for a living.)
A couple of illustrative ads include this one for Toyota Yaris, where a woman passive-aggressively crashes her boyfriend's plane after he kicks the door shut on her car; and this creepy Quorn one where a girl with a fork acts out over health food.
If this is any indication of quietly growing womens' sentiments in the UK, we're disinclined to visit anytime soon, particularly if there are forks nearby. Feel free to send in more of the same or an explanation if you happen to have one.
Okay, there's more than just a one-handed man in the spot we're about to show you, but for us that's what stuck out, and we think that's what they wanted because they saved him for last.
Veteran group VoteVets is raising money to put this MoveOn-supported ad on air during the Super Bowl. It's meant to stop the escalation with the same (occasionally effective) psychological tactic 15-year-old boys use to get girls to put out in the backseat of cars: If you support escalation, you don't support the troops.
Click the above link to help them raise money, or just watch a series of vets try making you feel real real bad. Like we said, it's a fairly effective method.
We are big on the Bond reinvention characterized by Daniel Craig so maybe it's only natural that we'd be mildly iffy about this new campaign by Mazda, which takes the freshly-lit Bond torch out of Craig's hands and puts it in the claws of the usual two-dimensional leather-clad woman who skulks in the dark.
Building on the 12 Second Thriller campaign, which might as well have been a series of Viagra shorts, Mazda brings us Every Drive's a Thriller, boasting two :30 films directed by Luke Scott, Casino and Desert Treasure.
We'd say that we're turned on enough to buy an MX-5, and the whole power woman in black motif is always a bit exciting, but the Zoom-Zoom thing makes it feel a bit silly, a lot like the compressed and cartoony "Hello Moto."
Really. What can't you sell between two long leather-clad legs?
- P&G and Unilever has decided to sit out this year's Super Bowl advertising extravaganza and will, instead, allocate dollars to other efforts they feel will provide a better ROI.
- Rather than believing its new operating system is good enough to seel itself, Microsoft is serving up a $500 million worldwide waterfall of advertising.
- A "viral" print ad? Yawn. Snooze. Huh? WTF?
- George is right. The five finalists in the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl are quite good. Our money is one Duct Tape of Mouse Trap.
- George also thinks he has the perfect replacement for the Maytag Man. He thinks it's Elmo Blatch (real name: Bill Bolanfder), the guy who killed the Tim Robbin's character's wife.
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This past Sunday during Desperate Housewives Rembrandt Oral Care aired a commercial for its long-running and very pretty Brilliant Mouth campaign. It's available on YouTube so you can check it out here.
The use of romance to hawk hygiene isn't new; Listerine has been doing it as far back as the '50's, admonishing conscientious teenage boys to check their breath twice before that big date. And don't even get us started on Lysol, which used to be a douche (the feminine kind, not this kind).
So this is a contemporary take on a very old idea. The imagery is better than in the '50's though, and we like that Rembrandt takes a grown-up approach instead of trying to compete with all those overgrown Crest Kids. We are way over sparkly gum-flavoured toothpaste.
When we shake someone's hand, we often wonder where that hand has been before. A new commercial from the LA County Department of Health answers that question in an effort to prevent the spread of the flu. We're told washing one's hands is the number one method of curtailing the spread of germs. We are so with Howard Stern on this one. If we didn't feel like a jerk refusing to shake someone's hand, we never would again. The ad is the work of DDB and Curious Pictures.
- FMBQ reports Royce International Broadcasting alleges to the FCC that Entercom, which hopes to acquire 16 CBS radio stations, is "a highly-leveraged criminal enterprise that cannot be relied on to serve the public interest" an wants the sale stopped.
- It seems the idiocy that is the FM radio promotional stunt may come to an end. FMBW repoprts, "After radio contestant Jennifer Strange died from water intoxication - the result of KDND/Sacramento's water-drinking contest Hold Your Wee for a Wii - syndicated radio personality Erich 'Mancow' Muller has announced that he is creating the Foundation For Responsible Radio and calling for an end to 'voyeuristic FM radio stunts.'" Nah. Opie and Anthony are still out there.
- Cynopsis reports the President's State of the Union address was viewed by a combined station total of 45.5 million people, up from 41.7 million in 2006.
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