Floyd Hayes, the guy who brought us twipple, drew our gaze to "punkvertising," a description that immediately made us wince because we mistook it for Punk Marketing -- a dire book promo that consisted primarily of a woman named Cleo, slowly disrobing.
So-called punkvertising is tame in comparison. Punk-rockers were enlisted to trawl the streets of New York to spread word about some kind of Diesel promotion.
Apparently Floyd asked one of them if he liked the idea of being a sell-out, and the kid said something to the effect of, "$25 bucks an hour? Shit, I'd wear a dress for that - I don't care really!"
Guffaw.
Red Bull's partnered with Oakley to build a secret half-pipe behind Colorado's Silverton Mountain -- all so snowboarder Shaun White can have somewhere to train. (Okay, okay, it's not just for Shaun White.)
The space is closed off to the public and can only be accessed by snowmobile or hellie. Word has it the thing cost $500,000 to build.
Just goes to show -- brand love pays dividends as long as you stay away from other kinds of pipes.
It's called "Ken Block Gymkhana Practice." (But what is Gymkhana?, you ask.)
We didn't really get the big deal, but that was before we realized our fingers had burrowed into the glass tabletop. Then Ken Block did donuts around a guy on a Segway, and it was like, "Ohhh."
(It's racer porn. Plenty sexier than that one time you watched two Ford Fiestas tango in London. Even if you're not a speed junkie, the handling depicted in Gymkhana is fit to give you tingles.)
Mad Media put the video together in collaboration with Ken Block, DC Shoes and Subaru. Stats listed below.
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To promote its pension plan, AMF uses tact and a tongue-in-cheek tang to explore the actual merits of the good old days.
We were hooked from the first scene, where a kid with a dated haircut is stuck in the car with his chainsmoking parents. But the scenarios just kept getting better. Think life before Lisa! Think dinner pre-pizza.
The voiceover wraps with a niggling question: "Were the good old days really that good ... or do things get better and better all the time?" (We're really glad Forsman & Bodenfors resisted the temptation to license the Beatles.)
On-screen text: "Funds for the future. AMF Pension."
NICE!
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Adgabber's Elyse drew our attention to this fresh online ad for Audi, which features an extreme skier doing crazy shit all over San Francisco -- a city known for its treacherously steep hills, railed streets, and slow-moving, trolley-shaped obstacles. Oh -- and lack of snow.
The German ad is a promotion for Audi's quattro Gefuhl. We don't know how or why, but there you have it. Fun work by Kemper Trautmann.
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Okay. See the hands at left grasping greedily for the giant diamond? That's supposed to represent the mobile web ... and the faceless villains that will immediately try to exploit it.
This is the first of a three-part video series that explains the whole "4G=IP" thing to people that buy tech items, such as iPods, primarily because they like the pretty colours.
We're suckers for smooth animated magic -- and for Cisco in general -- so we kept our eyes on the piece, which was a comfortable length and not too stuffed with strange-sounding geek noises. It's possible we even learned things.
That squeaky Adventures in Odyssey-sounding narrator kinda pissed us off though.
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Here's "Samples xD," the latest spot from Scion's fresh-out "Samples" effort. The latter launched in January and features car customizations mashed-up to the din of mixed beats.
From ATTIK CD Simon Needham: "These newest ads energetically combine actual owners' xBs, xDs and tCs with stock models in ways that convey the distinct personalities of Scion's vehicles and their owners - while also showing how their individuality ties them together."
Metaphor for life if we ever heard one. Sound design -- a mere window-shopper to Aphex Twin's Window Licker -- by Face the Music.
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In this cockle-warming story about a hyperventilating geek who now wears onesies and gets his pick of trophies (both metal and collagen-enhanced), Tony Stewart reinforces the power of Swagger.* The Old Spice product previously de-geeked Brian Urlacher and LL Cool J.
Actually, LL Cool J's still pretty square. Sometimes getting all muscly to stop being square will only make you squarer.
But we digress. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, the Swagger campaign. It's starting to feel a little less highlariously kitsch-tacular and more like Axe/Lynx. Which sucks because once upon a time, both brands were uniquely neat, and now they're almost exactly alike, except Old Spice is too red and Axe/Lynx is too potent.
Work by Wieden + Kennedy/Portland -- which succeeded, as always, in stimulating provocative discussion on YouTube.
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Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco is out with another Sprint NASCAR commercial and, thankfully, there are no short shorts in the one. This one's called Speedway and it hypes the NASCAR Sprint Series and the ability to watch it on your Sprint phone.
Having just caught Tom Cruise's Days of Thunder on cable recenlty, we can identify with the on-track mania depicted in this commercial. Though we're not entirely clear why Goodby decided to get MassMarket to visual effectify the spot into something resembling a video game. Oh alright, we'll agree it's far more interesting that just watching "regular" cars crash into each other and it does capture the take-no-prisoners competitive aspect of the sport.
"Skaters," an ad for the Seat Ibiza, features a beautiful cover of Forever Young that made us tuck a chin in our collective hand and sigh, because we were thinking about Freaks and Geeks and childhood in general. Vintage footage of kids on skateboards only fueled the cozy flames of nostalgia.
Then there was this awkward cut to a car. Everything changed: the feel of the ad, the imagery, the sounds. And then our souls, which were floating up somewhere above our heads, collapsed onto concrete.
We get what agency Atletico International, and production company Agosto, wanted to do: tie the Ibiza into youth and freedom, personify that spirit in a vehicle that in some ways is decidedly less whimsical. (Not much wind in your hair, no risk of elbow-scrapes.)
But it could have been done better.
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