So what does an "aging" Disney star do when she gets too old for Mickey? She gets nude, takes pictures, puts them on her laptop, loses the laptop at JFK, reports it stolen and then attempts to twist the whole thing into a career-shifting media frenzy. But unlike her younger Disney brethren, Miley Cyrus and Vanessa Hudgens who accidentally (or so it is assumed) found themselves in compromising positions, 25-year-old Cheetah Girl Adrienne Bailon's "compromising position" was entirely planned by her publicist Jonathon Jaxon.
Yes, the girl might as well be a grandmother in Disney's eyes. After a successful run with three Cheetah Girls movies and musical tours, the Cheetah Girls movie franchise has come to a close and Bailon will seemingly be put out to pasture to fend for herself in the "grownup world."
And so it goes. The blunt transition from Disney to adulthood, never an easy one, plays out again. It will happen (is happening) with Miley Cyrus, the entire crew of High School Musical fame, Camp Rock's Demi Lovato and Wizards of Waverly Place star Selena Gomez.
We've seen plenty of evidence in the ad world of P. Diddy's self-deluded worldview: Ciroc Vodka, Burger King, Unforgivable.
Even so, I still choked a little upon catching sight of this two-page spread for I Am King, the direct and to-the-point moniker for his newest fragrance. Copy and packaging are flanked by The Man himself, tux-clad and perpetually defiant.
Diggin' how the spread lacks a sampler. Guess you're supposed to take it on faith that if Diddy shits it, it reeks of rosepetal.
It's funny about this subsite. For a few seconds I seriously thought it was for a phone called the Pomegranate NS08 -- which I had already begun to covet more than anything else I've ever wanted, ever.
Then I realized it's unlikely that a phone -- even one with email, internet, GPS, music and a camera -- will actually shave your face, brew coffee or double as a harmonica. (Though it's easy to picture scenarios where all those value-adds would be useful.) So, taking my cues from the site motif, I concluded this must be a campaign promoting the universal merits of the pomegranate fruit.
I hit "Release Date" and got a message that kind of seemed to corroborate my theory:
Someday you'll be able to get everything you want in one device. Today you can get everything you want in one place.
Followed by the product reveal, which did blow my mind because it struck me as so utterly improbable:
"Nova Scotia."
Wait, what?
HP's enlisted improv actors from the Upright Citizens Brigade and the People's Improv Theater to spice up its YouTube learning center, gleefully dubbed MasterPC Theatre.
The point of the campaign is to teach you about the different capabilities of HP products in a refreshing and irreverent way, which it succeeds in doing whenever it's not bringing comedy traffic school to mind.
Expect to see the spots in rich media banners if "the economy picks up," said Don Russell from Source. Produced by Streamline Content, edited by Fluid.
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Or it's spec for Tom Tykwer's Perfume Deux: Redhead's Revenge. Dude on the chocolate bit looks kinda like Grenouille -- but really he's Le Petit Ecolier, a wee schoolboy who's served as the face of this snack since 1850.
For Lu Biscuits, which is currently having a chic little identity crisis. Okay, not really, but I seriously LOL'ed when the website started blasting ambient music. Because come on, all this for a biscuit. A saucy biscuit, sure. Even with a turn-on of a tea to pair them with, biscuits are still like less sexy cookies (NSFW).
And that's pretty much all the PR people have going for it. The idea behind "Recess is on" is for Morgan Hotel Group to look like a bad-ass place to party amidst the crippling buzzkill of a recession.
See minimalist rebel prints:
o Don't Jump. Dance.
o Fuck the recession. Powerful in brevity.
o Fuck the recession -- reprise. This ad also includes a letter written by Morgan Hotel Group to a personified Recession, flippantly declaring its intention to raise hell and whatnot. "Fuck off" is written at bottom in surprisingly girly script. (I think a sharp, all-caps and slightly Nicholson-esque "FUCK OFFFFFFFFFfff" would have done the job better.)
The website, linked above, also includes an epilepsy-inducing :60 video that'll be projected upon some unfortunate building. Or not. Word has it the creative will be changed and repeated use of "fuck" will be scrubbed.
"Whatever happened to defiance?" the rep from Pronto Stockholm asked us. Well, fuck if we know.
It's not immediately clear what's going on in this spot for Microsoft's Zune, featuring Common and Afrika Bambaataa. In it, a girl puts Common's Universal Mind Control on the spin. She gives props for it, then Common and Afrika Bambaataa leap out of a cloud of images and start sparring over it.
At first the whole thing rang like a poorer rendition of HP's "Hands" campaign, which does a good job of connecting the essence of a celebrity to the machine he's using.
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- Yesterday's news: Pepsi shafts BBDO for TBWA. BBDO held the account for nearly 50 years.
- After a year and a half of fumbling at the throne of Yahoo, CEO Jerry Yang exits stage left.
- Wieden + Kennedy scores the Nokia Nseries account, worth about $150 million. Lowe London held it before.
- VeeV, an acai-based spirit with delusions of grandeur, brings you The End of Vodka, complete with vodka bots. The site's goal is to show users how much superficiality vodka's introduced into our lives over the course of the past decade. Yeah. If by superficiality you mean lasting friendships and insta-forgiveness.
- "Is this Miley's fault? Ugh, she wouldn't know a legendary jazz man even if he walked up to her and shot cocaine into her neck."
- Sprint's web 2.0 clusterfuck.
- Big Takeaways from the Motrin crisis. (How is it Motrin gets shut down but this goes on undeterred?)
To promote the fusion of Comcast DVR with TiVo, Biscuit Filmworks USA and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners give us "Separated at Birth."
It's a love story about a pair of TVs that part at the assembly line and serve two people in two different ways. In the end, the owners -- which start out as kids -- grow up and get together. Just like their favourite TV services.
Almost too cute to stand. The split ad format keeps eyes bouncing back and forth, and a simple narrative prevents captive audiences from snapping out of it. We'll even be willing to ignore the fact that TiVo hasn't been around long enough to have served any twenty-something from her budding days as a grade school control freak.
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That Coke Christmas commercial which was teased last week is out in full form. And, like the teaser, it captures all the magic and mystery of Christmas. Like we said before, not much else to say. Well, just that there's a nice cover of Elvis' Can't Help Falling In Love With You in the commercial. Watch and enjoy.
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