Smirnoff Ice's Save the Mistletoe is an amusingly long-way-around attempt to say Smirnoff brings people together (just like mistletoe - so stop ravaging innocent bushes).
While we remain unmoved by the plight of the sprig, the execution wins us over. By some curious witch magic the campaign features celebrity supporters that we thought were long dead or had found joy in covert day jobs. Natalie from The Facts of Life, Lisa Turtle from Saved by the Bell, Tiffany who crooned "I Think We're Alone Now" and even the Soup Nazi band together to protect the kissing plant from further appropriation by brute force.
That's not all. Kevin at PR Blog divulges having seen a swamp-like creature that was actually supposed to be mistletoe, getting heckled by children at a nearby ice rink for love of the campaign. We wonder which sponsoring celebrity burn-out he happened to be. We put our money on The Incredible Hulk.
Here's an eye-catching campaign. Agency Republik creates Illuminator, a series of time-released puzzles and clues whose answers lie in the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.
The campaign will run twice in six months through newspapers, on the Illuminator site, on signs in the museum, and in a flip book at the museum store. Each clue corresponds to one piece of art; for example, this Missing poster speaks to Memories by Sheng Qi. And the image at left points to this guy.
The person who nails all 20 gets ... a free shirt. Okay, that kind of sucks. But the game is intriguing and possibly, yes, illuminating. If there's anything we learned about America post Da Vinci Code it's that you can only get people's asses into a museum if they have a ball of yarn to untangle - and possibly a cryptic murder case involving an albino, but you can't ask for everything.
A Madrid airport recently featured a wrapped Mini waiting for its loving master in baggage claim like any other snowboard or piece of luggage.
This was for "It comes with me," a campaign thrown together by Dommo which wanted to demonstrate obsessive love of the zippy little car by suggesting somebody brings it everywhere, even onto the plane.
We can only imagine how much imagined bullshit an airport would have to go through to accommodate a douche who insists on bringing his car everywhere. We can only imagine the "what the fuck?" thoughts going through the minds of the guys whose bosses asked them to plastic wrap a vehicle. So by suggestion the placement is kind of funny. Only kind of though. Like, almost just microscopically funny.
This stunt aims to promote the product Go-Ped by showing drivers they ought to opt for more enviro-friendly vehicles. Yes, with a beartrap that says KILL THE BEAST in the middle.
We thought for a minute about ranting over campaigns that hawk their wares by making people feel shitty, inadequate or irresponsible, and then we realized that plenty of advertising does that, and we can't very well trash all advertising. Oh well. More Go-Ped stunts here. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Vaseline releases a couple of ads lauding the magic of skin. There are a couple of versions; one esoteric and mystical, the other slightly more fast-paced with a beat made of babble. We'll let you guess which is which.
How or why is it that the USA versions of ads always seem crasser and dumber than UK ones or ads for Europe in general? - Contributed by Angela Natividad
If you thought the blogosphere was limited to hipsters, cool-hunting businesses and 12-year-olds, you were horribly wrong. Winter (yes! That most frigid of seasons) just started its very own blog, Winter is Cool. Guess we couldn't have named it better ourselves...
And to push its right to the 2.0 pie, it's got an agency too - AgencyNext out of Massachusetts. Read an interview with the strangely defensive season here. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Catch Up Lady fills us in on the mysterious force behind Men in Cramps: Procter & Gamble, differentiating themselves from other brands who try (hard) to get down with the viral crowd and ultimately fail.
"We simply didn't have enough women who knew about our menstrual product [ThermaCare], and had to find a new way to connect with them," says Tom O'Brien, associate marketing director for personal health care at P&G, Cincinnati. R&D reveals women lamenting "there was one group of consumers they would like to see understand more deeply what it meant to have menstrual pain -- men."
Well, they nailed it with "cyclical nonuterine dysmenorrhea." Big Pharma's been successful at inventing chronic ailments for so long it's only natural they'd hit a home run doing it as a spoof. Catch one of the ThermaCare ads with poster boy Dr. Fardel here. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
- Lost Planet thinks they've made a trailer for their Xbox 360 game that'll shatter cultural norms, change lives and trigger brain aneurisms on-sight. It's a fair trailer but it won't look that great six months from now when some other game has kicked its ass, as these things tend to go.
- Fledgling supermarket Bloom cozy up with agency BooneOakley to make a real-live gingerbread house in South Carolina (of all fucking places)! And yes, we will help them eat it.
- News from our incognito buddy FishNChimps: Coke steals from actual creative people. That always leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. And considering they've been riding the holiday polar bear thing and/or copying Pepsi's campaigns for the last two hundred years to the nth degree, that really came as no major shocker. To witness the fuckage of other creative companies, hit Urban Counterfeiters.
- Join NPR's first-ever holiday craft contest before it is gone. Forever. Perhaps you can beat the cleverly rendered Mel Gibson menorah. Yeah, you heard us. A Mel Gibson menorah. Craftwise, it could be unbeatable.
- SAB Miller's Columbia by Bavaria beer is raffling off the famed "Man Smoking" painting on February 28 as part of a promotion.
- Southwest Airlines...blah, blah, blah...CGM contest...blah, blah, blah...YouTube...blah, blah, blah...win a trip...blah, blah, blah and blah.
- AdJab is as pissed off as we are about people labeling things viral before they actually become viral.
- George Parker is all over Julie Roehm's ass crapping on her supposed avalanche or job offers, delivering the inside story on Draft/FCB's lack of promised analytics skills and poking holes in the Advertising Age Jonah Bloom "in-depth" Julie Roehm interview. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Catch Up Lady takes paranoid note of Starbucks' infiltration of Boston cab drivers, who seem to be in cahoots with It's Red Again, the pay-it-forward campaign that's got people doing all kinds of weird shit like buying baked goods for each other. And smiling! What's with the smiling?!
Catch Up Lady vows to bar herself indoors but to be honest we'd like to get in the way of the people giving out movie tickets and orgasmic pastries. Clearly another demonstration of how Starbucks intends to take over the world, to no positive end. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
The Department of Defense takes a shot at drinking with That Guy, another one of those characteristically we-speak-your-language government campaigns that, in a wildly uncool manner, attempts to demonstrate how uncool it is to be a drinker.
The site feels a bit dated and we agree with Bill at Make the Logo Bigger: there's not much of an attempt to reach out to swig-happy women, and you know we've seen a few. It's also a little stupid to put a "Fun Stuff" section on a site that hopes to lay it on thick about the mals of the bottle. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
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