Choosing a more current pop culture reference certainly wasn’t the strategy behind Amsterdam-based Selmore for its broadband client Chello when it chose to wink at the Brad Pitt movie Seven Years in Tibet with its Seven Seconds in Tibet spot. Humorous enough, the spot shows “Pitt” stepping off the plane, seeing the effects of local goat milk, thinking twice, and stepping right back on the plane. Perhaps the movie was just released in Amsterdam but for the rest of us, we say, “Huh? Seven Years Where? When? Who?” Other spots in this weeks’ Ad Age TV Spots of the Week include a lavish looking, black and white spot for William Lawson Scotch featuring Sharon Stone which pokes fun at her Basic Instinct days; a spot by Minneapolis-based Colle & McVoy for Minnesota Tourism which promotes the frigid state by illustrating how much fun a bear can have when it doesn’t hibernate; a weepy, somber spot set to cat Stevens’ Morning Has Broken by Sydney-based DDB for McDonald’s mourning the death of the late former CEO Charlie Bell – very well done; a spot by Modernista showing a family tobogganing from the top of a mountain to which their Hummer brought them causing Ad Age to , rightly, suggest the tagline for this ad could be “Hummer, The Vehicle of Idiots;” a Cliff/Freeman spot for Snapple which has Wendy getting a woman to say nice things about a mechanic who placed the woman’s car in a junkyard; a spot for Quiznos by LA-based Siltanen & Partners featuring the talking Baby Bob; and a spot from Leo Burnett for Allstate which places its insured on mountain vista roadways to illustrate its rapid addition of customers in the past year.
