- BMW's holding a media review worth $155 million.
- Remember Memento? Imagine if it were an ad for Sony Ericsson.
- The Institute for America's Future hopes to derail the political bullshit train with an ad campaign about "major challenges facing the country." That's cool and all, but is this nearly as exciting as this? Don't answer, that's rhetorical.
- "Mom, what are those?" "Tadpoles, honey." "Oh. What do they have to do with being 'knocked up'?" Good luck with that.
- If PETA's ads were always this cute, I might have wanted a pig for a pet, not for breakfast. I like the point it made though. And look! They didn't even have to embarrass anybody.
- Here's a Wrigley Juicy Fruit ad in the style of that DoubleMint candy raver-looking thing. In this one, Julianne Hough invests the Juicy Fruit jingle with country music flair. It was so peppy and sweet, watching it gave me a cavity.
- In the unlikely event you need a laptop to match your Mandarin dress, Hewlett-Packard's got just the thing.
Think the Brits are stuffy? You don't know the half of it. See a bunch of disgruntled British housewives protest against a man accused of "polygameat" -- the practice of eating more than one meat in a burger.
By Crispin Porter + Bogusky for Burger King's Meat Beast Whopper. Sorta reminds me of that meatatarian thing Wendy's is promoting.
Ohmigosh. Is flesh-eating finally cool again? Because I could use some gazelle, garnished with pepperoni and a side of fried chicken strips. Dipped in lamb's blood.
I recently saw this cute rich media ad for Target's "Happy Together" campaign, targeted to college kids.
Its composed of harmonious extremes that appear one after the other, like flash cards: planner + dreamer, night owl + morning bird, extrovert +introvert. The accompanying illustrations remind me of the work of Liling Yu, who created Twitter's FailWhale.
Yu's art totally personifies the Web 2.0 aesthetic: bug-eyed animal friends, soothing pastels, and non-confrontational sans-serif typefaces, all culminating in brands that seem to want to play with us. That Target knows to tap into all this is part of what keeps it young, fresh and lively.
In the latest TV spots for its McCafe label, McDonalds surrenders the art house crowd to Starbucks -- and liberates the crusty, football-loving Joes that never quite fit in.
This ad starts with two guys in a typical cafe scene, reading books and sipping coffee out of wide cups. One haughtily asks, "Did you hear McDonald's has cappuccinos now?"
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In installment 2 of Microsoft's avant-garde repositioning extravaganza, Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld try the simple life.
Imagine it: two rich dudes, bunking in with a family straight out of Little Miss Sunshine. It's almost like when Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie lived on a farm, except more weird than entertaining.
But maybe I'm just reacting to the malicious geriatric.
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Wendy's joins the amateur video club with "Crazy Lettuce." By now you know the score: two guys are involved. One can never hold the camera straight. At the very last second some zany shit happens.
In this case, a bushy head of lettuce consumes a wee little Wendy's burger. Link to meatatariansunite, a nightmare of poor wallpaper that does nothing but hurt eyes and demand emails.
If this is the one trick to succeeding in so-called "viral marketing," the medium ought to die fast and painfully. Unfortunately for Wendy's, the eyes-deceive-thee! gimmick that served Levi's, Ray Ban and Nike so well is all used up. People finally get the joke: these amazing feats in online video? They never happened. Know what else? They're ADS.
"Crazy Lettuce" has drawn less than 1100 views on YouTube, a mediocre rating (2 stars) and mixed response (of which there are 12).
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Over at Gawker, Nike is taking a beating for a new slogan it's testing in a new campaign targeting women in Europe. The tagline, "Here I am" is humorously pointed out to have, well, and interesting relationship with the parent tagline,"Just Do It." The relationship? The actionable "do it" portion of the parent tagline is seen to be a bit, well, awkwardly demeaning when placed next to the more submissive "Here I Am."
So is Nike telling the bulk of its audience to just do it with submissive women in Europe who will just lay down and say "here I am?"
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As you likely know, we love to trash bad work here. We think it's our strong suit. We also have a short attention span and, thankfully to many, don't often go into lengthy detail in our trashings. But, we can appreciate and point to others who don't seem to have short attention spans and who take a keen interest in ripping apart every conceivable element of a piece of work.
Recently, new NBA franchise and former Seattle Supersonics the Oklahoma City Thunder unveiled a new logo and Denver Egotist commenter Bubba did us proud slamming every element of the work. Another commenter writes, "a team that steals basketball away from a deserving city because of an owner who wants to take his ball and go to his hometown (and much smaller city at that) deserves a shitty logo."
Need we say more?
...that whole "grammar" thing, though, you'll probably need to learn elsewhere.
The ad at left is part of a University of Phoenix campaign where consecutive ads finish the thought started by "University of...", probably with other gimpy platitudes:
University of seizing the day.
University of never giving up.
University of I CAN.
Ooh, just found a variant. University of my hopes. Didn't see that one coming.
In its latest TV campaign, Jimmy John's, America's Sandwich Delivery Experts, relieves tense situations with foot-longs and smiling delivery men. (Actually not a bad idea.)
The company is mostly midwest-based, and its ads are friendly and earnest -- deeply mid-western? -- even if not wildly original. The Bomb spot did make me laugh, but the effort overall only felt so-so.
While sandwich delivery may not really resolve hostage situations or smooth out an explosive case of nerves, I guess it could calm screaming schoolchildren. For half an hour.
Ads by The Ad Store.
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