There are few things more lame than a competitive staring match between two non-blinking pros, unless those pros are also inanimate objects.
Watch helplessly as the portraits of Coldwell Banker's founding fathers, Colbert Coldwell and Arthur Banker, try to out-stare each other. Well, sort of. They're side by side, so they can't really stare.
It could be worse. (Imagine the moving-mouth and eyeball-hockey effects that challenged advertisers usually impose on stills.)
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To celebrate 100 years in footwear, Converse is welding new icons to old ones in a campaign called "Connectivity."
According to Complex, "cultural heroes" like James Dean, Hunter S. Thompson and Sid Viscious will fuse feet (neat touch!) with Common, Dwyane Wade and Billie Joe Armstrong. Sort of like paper dolls.
See more here.
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Possibly because he proved such a smashing success in San Diego, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums has brought a man dressed like GEICO's Gecko to the Houston Zoo along with a live gecko exhibit.
Houston Zoo director Rick Barongi called GEICO "a great partner for zoos and aquariums." What?! GEICO on best behaviour amongst wee kiddies and disgruntled animals? We believe it. If we were the most visible insurance option at a zoo, we would be too.
To promote its hot new Ariake running shoe, K-Swiss enlisted the face of Sebastien Foucan, the founder of free running. ("Free running" is when you go jogging and, instead of hauling ass around an obstacle, you do an impressive Ranma-style aerial flip over it. Seriously.)
The print ads are very Zen. There's no copy, just images of Foucan being Foucan and a small K-Swiss logo at bottom. They were put together by Perfect Fools which is based in Sweden and the US. The ads will be accompanied by a wannabe-viral (which we haven't yet seen) and a website.
See Foucan variant. We're not really sure whether people will put two and two together and go, "Okay, Ariake = running! Got it." Because we were all, "Acrobatic skater gear?"
Here's another weird Coke Zero spot that elaborates on Coke's newfound fixation with body parts. (If you're all "huh?", see the Brazilian tongue spot we covered yesterday.) Just so you know -- if Coke Zero collaborates in ANY WAY with The Vagina Monologues, we're going on strike.
It's in English this time, so hurrah. The characters: a statuesque Coke Zero (sort of like a golden calf), an ornery French eyeball, a bull-headed British tongue and a pothead Californian finger.
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Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the cats that gave us our two most recurring nightmare monsters (him and him), just won the privilege of promoting Windows products to consumers.
The budget was undisclosed, but Advertising Age pegs it at upwards of $300 million. In '06, Microsoft spent $1 billion in measured and unmeasured US marketing, so it's obviously got cash to burn like mad.
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Coke Zero's throwing weight behind tongue-piercing parlors in Brazil. Seriously.
Shops in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Salvador are giving free piercings to people that agree to take a picture with a fresh new Coke Zero stud. Coke's calling the concept advertasting. (Not to be confused with this.)
See TV spot with talking tongues that for some reason are bitching out a bewildered-looking eyeball with legs. It (hopefully) helps if you speak Portuguese. The shop responsible: Espalhe Marketing de Guerrilha.
You know method: people against dirty? We love how their ad copy is always a little provocative, but not so saucy that you can point fingers and go, "HEY, that's DIRTY!"
We opened our emails this morning and found ourselves face-to-face with this promotion for method's latest "Bathroom Buddies": le scrub + little bowl blu. (You know, like your favourite song!)
Suddenly tag-team toilet cleaning time seems ... sexy. And strangely mod.
Sprintcuts, a handy-dandy Sprint campaign, gives tips on how to quick-peel a banana and dry nail polish in a blink.
The campaign leads people to Waitless.org, which shares other somewhat-productive tips on "time rebates" that are supposed to leave you with the sense that Sprint = time savings.
We've actually seen this spot, Instant Baby Soothe, a few times on either Hulu or ABC.com. We thought it was cool, but until this very moment we had no idea whose ad it was. Which would actually be helpful, because then we'd know who to blame when our relatives "WTF?" us as we carry their spawn to a nearby sink.
Big-ups to Candace for sharing.
Here's an ad for Gmail by Saatchi, Moscow (thanks for sharing, Armando). Like these Stateside spots (1, 2) it's got that "collaboration makes us whole!" feel -- except in Russia, Google had to pay an agency to contrive it.
Guess it's tougher to find free evangelists and moon-eyed employees outside the motherland.
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