Wieden + Kennedy, Amsterdam put together these ads that continue to promote Old Spice's worldly wisdom with the Experienced Man Challenge, a series of domestic trials gone wild that gauge a real man's capability, suave and scent.
The spots are directed by Brian Lee Hughes. Here we see two dudes struggling to start an engine; here one gets a sturdy door open with a sexy knock; and here, perhaps most trying of all, one parallel-parks with a camel.
Manly indeed. Who doesn't get hot over a sexy knock? We're way out of bom chica wah wah territory now.
We don't know why, but lately we're paying a lot of attention to the ads that appear on MySpace. Taking advantage of the teens who sit around filling out blog questionnaires all day, T-Mobile recently launched a quiz campaign where you're asked all sorts of inane multiple-choice questions by people who still think other people say "posse."
A variation involving pets is here. We're reminded of a campaign Match.com is also running.
It's always wince-worthy to watch big brands work hard to catch the thought streams racing through a whole 'nother world. Then again, maybe there's something to these individual-toting ad messages. MySpace's Shawn Gold did recently mention the social networking giant wanted to release user psychographics.
In the race to stay salient in the We-Can-Be-Phones-AND-Radios! pissing contest, Sprint drives right to the point with its new "Sprint Ahead" campaign, which boasts psychedelic graphics to highlight the tagline, "Music so fast it's trippy."
We hate to get our metaphors mixed but trippy music brings the one-time hazard of CD-skipping to mind, something that, before iPod, drove us crazy. And anyway, do we really want to use the word "trippy" in any context shared with sprinting?
Sounds like an accident waiting to happen.
The campaign was orchestrated by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco.
Sounding very much like Morgan Freeman, the Tom Kane-intoned voice over in these new Shine Advertising-created spots (one, two) for the Madison Wisconsin Mallards baseball team (yes, we'd never heard of them either) conveys the purity of America's favorite passtime (at least the way it should be) to...opera and stamp collecting. Yes, we know. It sounds very strange but, on some odd level, it works.
To combat the belief most Americans think Philips makes only light bulbs, Tribal DDB and DDB have created a campaign which combats that belief by showing people using Philips lioght bulbs to so things other Philips products wold normally do. For example, a woman feeds her baby with a light bulb instead of Philips baby bottles. A man shaves with a light bulb instead of a Philips Norelco razor. Scenarios such as this are played out across a time line that covers the span of one day. Each segment of the day plays a video such as the ones just mentioned.
It may not be as exciting a shaveeverywhere.com but it certainly explains the breadth of the philips product line n a simple and straight forward manner.
AKQA London has launched a weird little YouTube campaign for Pot Noodle in the UK.
We like the campaign mainly because, in exchange for user-generated fare, they've opted not to dole out the usual $10K. Instead, winners get a FREE CASE OF POT NOODLE!!!, which is probably exactly what they're worth.
Oh yeah, you can also win a PS3.
We never get tired of a rip on boy bands, especially when the pith is as thinly-veiled as it is on Fruit Guy Fans, a site for a Fruit of the Loom-sponsored boy band whose costumes are just as fruity as its music.
The concept's actually pretty sound, resisting the urge to go over the top like so many other parodies (or not) tend to. Download MP3s for would-be one-hit wonders like "You Can't Overlove." Our favorite is "Dream."
Thanks Bill for the heads-up and the bad poetry.
We were screwing around on some foreign news site when we saw the banner at left and thought, "Hey, Smokey Bear! Can't believe that guy is still around."
Out of curiosity, we hit www.smokeybear.com and found a creepy video that involves a child singing some song about forest fires, coupled with imagery of a spark igniting stenciled animals and a forest.
Smokey's Vault is a feature that brings Smokey into 2007 with a bunch of hip little spigot-thingies. There we discovered that Smokey was an actual baby bear that in 1950 rolled charred (and orphaned) out of the forest after a (clearly unprevented) forest fire.
And that's way more about fire-shy Bear than we ever thought we'd know. Those spigots, or at least that Bambi-esque banner ad, are clearly very effective.
Usually, he's just slowly walking around his Battlestar mumbling prophetic statements about the importance of mankind in that gruff voice he perfected so well back on Miami Vice but now Edward James Olmos is appearing, again, in two new commercial for Farmer's Insurance. In the first, Olmos is thrown, hands tied, from a plane without a parachute but is "rescued" by a pair of parachutists who, oh, just happen to be free falling through the air to save him by untying his hands and affixing a parachute to him. Of course, on the ground it's revealed it's all just a scene from some movie.
A second spot, also part of a movie set, has Olmos in the future being chased by a flying motorcycle while being shot. Olmos and everything is undamaged. The message in the two spots is things in real life are not indestructible which is why one needs insurance, namely Farmer's
For L'Odeur, an edible perfume, Lululemon put together this ad that can't seem to decide whether it's Calvin Klein or SNL.
We weren't the only ones who cringed. The PR people didn't seem keen on it either. And we can see why. It's a little ... well, gross.
To be fair, the ending was kind of funny.
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