If you like the Geico Caveman, you may be seeing a lot more of him in the not to distant future. And no, not because he'll keep popping up in commercials but because he'll be the star of a new ABC sitcom. That's right. Apparently someone over at ABC likes the caveman so much, they want three of them to humorously battle prejudice while living in Atlanta.
Joe Lawson, the Martin Agency copywriter behind the Geico campaign is on-board as a writer at least for the pilot which will even feature a Gieco spokesman. Now that's some serious brand integration.
Product placement is for losers. Getting your ad campaign turned into a TV show is the new new thing. Just think. Now, we can expect TV shows about a fast food worker who dreams he's a rapper married to a bald pop star. Or two closeted gays who go under cover as manly auto mechanics to hide their love for each other from their uptight, Southern Baptist families. Or even an emotional drama about the father of a family of robots who has just lost his job, contemplates suicide and fights to put his life back together for himself and his family. The possibilities are endless. Start submitting your campaigns to the nets right away! They're in a buying mood.
A new campaign for Australia Post takes a look at every day of the week, each of those day's traits and how Australia Post works for Australians every day. In fact, its tagline is "Part of Every Day." Of course, Monday is the worst but Australia Post says it's there to make the day easier. Who new the post office could be so helpful? View all seven spots here in one video.
New Belgium, the source of our beloved Fat Tire Ale, kicks off a campaign toting "the sustainable side of whimsical [read: alcohol-soaked] living."
Denver's Cultivator Advertising and Design create Follow Your Folly, guiding jovial beer lovers to an interactive Wonderland promoting sustainability with bare-assed but enviro-friendly efforts like Save Our Rivers. Tagged "Follow your folly. Ours is beer," a featured beer appears in each promotion.
It merits noting that even before Google got all extra-extra with their bike-riding culture and alternative energy hype, New Belgium was already laying the groundwork. They were also the first brewery to switch to wind-power in 1999, and employees ride bikes or walk to work. With careful recycling, reuse and composting methods, only 2% of their waste becomes landfill.
Follow Your Folly looks to us like great marketing in harmony with the socially responsible values of a good company. Even if some people don't care about environmentally responsible corporate conduct, we sorta do. After all, beer is nature's nectar.
With asymmetrical seams (sewn by hand ye old indentured way) and copper rivets, Levi's Copper jeans allegedly hark back to the first jeans ever. To promote this hat-tip to history, Ogilvy One, Singapore also takes a nod backward with a pure HTML-written site.
Using archaic inconvenience to promote user interactivity, oversized imagery elicits scrolling in all directions. Copper trivia pops out of the dirt in old-school info windows and facts on the jeans appear in drop-down menus starkly interspersed across the huge denim-and-dirt backdrop. The usability and aesthetic annoyances that come with vintage web design nipped more than once, but we dig the creative effort.
If you're so inspired that another day without Copper jeans will kill you, print out a life-sized PDF to try on. We've never worn PDF before and we can't wait to show all our friends.
Thanks to Richard Ho of AdCritic.com for the Levi's Copper info.
We're always open to a time-waster. TAMBA gets all competitive by hopping in on Comic Relief's Digital Challenge, where they launched a new game called Red Lead in honour of Red Nose Day 2007.
The idea is to get the Red Noses from one side of your monitor to the other without getting stabbed by a sharp pencil. Different sorts of noses, like the golden ones, are magical. In case you wondered, there is a cause attached to this.
Note image to the left. Then consider what we said here. The game is cool and all, but are we destined for one sensory violation after another today?
We like these stylized print ads that are part of a new campaign for Asics footwear. We like the photographic effect and the attention it commanded when found browsing thorough the sea of fashion ad sameness in the March issue of GQ. The campaign pits you against a running partner who's either your alter ego, a Harvard sculling team, a man you will never meet or your friendly dog who interupts your run with his morning business. See all four ads here.
Quitting alone is perilous, so say three ads that demonstrate how sporadic and undependable "cold turkey" really is. Catch spot one, spot two and spot three.
Created by Wongdoody for the Washington State Dept. of Health, Cold Turkey builds upon the previous No Stank You! campaign.
The whole pimply uncooked bird gimmick is weird. And what's wrong with cold turkey, anyway? Cold turkey's helped us quit hundreds of times. As any experienced smoker will tell you, quitting hundreds of times is way better than starting hundreds of times.
On Tuesday, we reported Jennifer Love Hewitt would be reprising her role as Hanes spokeswoman to promote the company's All-Over Comfort Bra. Hewitt will appear in :15 and :30 commercials as well as in print. The television commercials, breaking tonight on American Idol, feature Hewitt struggling with ill-fitting bras during a photo shoot until she she finds the perfect Hanes bra. The entire campaign will direct people to www.hanes.com/photoshoot for additional behind-the-scenes footage and commercial outtakes, an interactive "Bra Toss" game and sweepstakes for consumers, as well as a blog where consumers can vent about their biggest bra challenges.
You can see the new commercial, view the out takes, play the game, share bad bra stories and see more of Jennifer Love Hewitt in all her glory here.
Now if ad*itive and Reebok had chosen, oh, say, Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan instead of Scarlett Johansson for the company's new Scarlett Hearts apparel and footwear campaign which carries the headline, "I Am More Than A Cover Story," the ad might have carried more weight. While Scarlett is certainly cover story material, it's not like she captures the mind of America like some of the more famous starlets we have.
She's much better suited to the new Disney World campaign that just broke in GQ and other mags in which she appears as Cinderella along with Beyonce Knwles as Alice, Lyle Lovett as the March Hare, Oliver Platt as the Mad Hatter and David Beckham as Prince Philip.
While we're sure retail campaigns like Gap's (red) and Kenneth Cole's Are You Putting Us On? mean well, they don't always ring sincere to the adxhausted audience they aim for.
With fingers on the pulse of a social backlash, Words Pictures Ideas and Romantic Static marry up to bring us the cynical Buy Less Crap, a pithy-prints effort pushing for less, not more, purchase-oriented donation.
In contrast to Gap's campaign, where donations are tied to purchasing (red) clothing modeled in the ads, (less) ads feature naked models with headings like (red)icu(less), meaning(less) and point(less). The website lists multiple charities where people can donate without having to purchase a heart-warming hoodie.
This isn't the first spoof on Gap's (red) but we dig the way it makes the point. While we see the benefit of turning philanthropy into its own sort of brand in a consumer culture, we can't shake the feeling there's a conflict of interest in blurring the lines between purchase and social responsibility.
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