Fresh out of Singapore, and under the catchy slogan "Safe no matter what you make," Play-Doh's launched a series of magazine ads that depict weapons of suburban destruction made out of the claylike substance.
We like it, but only because we've relinquished all ties to the Kingdom of Heaven. On the serious though, the ads are running in at least one alt weekly rag that caters to free-thinking cafe-goers that are okay with this kind of humor without necessarily being god-awful parents.
See variants below the drop.
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Milk's seen a fine trajectory: from nondescript white cereal enhancer to mustache marks on famous faces.
Ladies and gents, we have come a long way from the Dixie Chick days. In partnership with X-Men Origins, Wolverine's whipping out his indestructible talons for the Body By Milk campaign.
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HBO follows up on the ridiculously-lauded Voyeur campaign with Imagine.
Visually, it's a storytelling mashup of the social cloud and the Mac Cube: a series of stories are told from different perspectives, and you'll need to see all four sides of each to get a complete picture of what's going on.
Production quality is, as always, Home Box Office-caliber. The first one we saw was Art Heist, and it sucked us into its drama-ridden tentacles with a quickness -- once we got the damn site to load. (Small price to pay for good ol'-fashioned passive entertainment.)
Also, doesn't seem to work on Firefox. Fix, somebody, fix!
OK so for all you hipsters...no wait...emo...no wait...hmm...losers with nothing to do but screw around in the trashy side of town, these new Holland and Belgium-based Levi's commercials are for you. Can't you see yourself in them? trying really, really hard to be ever so hip and cool while jumping in mud puddles and throwing chairs buildings and otherwise kicking the shit out of everything around you like a bored eight year old?
Are we supposed to feel sorry for your lame-ass life? Actually care you think what you're doing somehow makes you today's version of James Dean? That you somehow don't think you look like a slob and should really be reading GQ rather than moping around like a self-absorbed little brat?
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Yawn. Sorry. We just can't help it. Viral. Viral Viral. It just makes us wish the word never existed. Well, at least for describing advertising efforts otherwise known as videos. Yes, people, videos. They are, after all, just videos. THEY AREN"T VIRAL UNTIL A SHIT TON OF PEOPLE VIEW THEM!
OK, sorry, we tend to off on that one.
Anyway, Audi's out with a collection of new VIDEOS (oops, sorry) that depict freakty electrical happenings like a lawnmower gone crazy, static electricity that sends a kid across the room and a lightning storm that attack Frankfurt.
All to promote a new car. Yea. A new car. Makes one long for those boring winding mountain road commercials that just, well, show the car. Which is, after all, what everyone wants to see in the first place.
We love a mildly wise-ass, witty repartee between two animated characters. Especially when they're selling us delicious drinks from Caribou Coffee. Created by Colle+McVoy, these five commercials star a "wisecracking pumpkin and a dimwitted gourd" named jack and Gourdo respectively.
You can view them all in their wisecracking glory right here.
My last ad:tech Chicago session was the Social Media Industry Forum, presented by Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer.
The sesh had a festive air for many reasons, not least that it was Ramsey's birthday. ad:tech's Warren Pickett burst in near the end to furnish him with candle-lit cupcakes.
But the company was also lively: we had a frothy, sometimes cynical and perennially candid band that included Digital Marketing Manager Katie O'Brien of Ben & Jerry's, President Rick Murray of Edelman Digital (which does interactive stuff for B&J's), PR/Social Media Manager Susan Wassel of Sanford Brands (here to rep Sharpie), and Digital Strategist Akash Pathak of DraftFCB, which worked with Wassel to bring life to Sharpie's label.
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A happy ending to an ad nauseam kinda week? Ad Age reports that the One Club has decided to ban any agency that submits scam art from its One Show competition for five years. In doing so, the intent is to cut down on work produced exclusively for award shows. Face it, having just one single award show do this is not enough. Other shows need to join with them here, and One Club leadership has apparently reached out to the other major shows. Regardless of comments that say this is too little, too late, it's a big step considering what's been done to this point. Credit to the One Club for addressing the problem.
Is it the same thing as enforcing existing rules only with harsher penalties the way pro sports do when it comes to steroids? Maybe. But change comes with small moves, right? Whether this seems like it was in response to one blogger's calls for such a ban I can only guess, but it's a big start in the right direction.
Actually, Dirt 2. My week now over, I leave a little present for Steve. Courtesy of Fuel and the logo creator they did for Dirt 2 and Codemasters. I believe the kids call this awesome.
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ad:tech Chicago's "Love for Sale -- How Great Creative Seduces Its Target" session was broken into two discernably useful parts: statistics on online dating, and seduction as a metaphor for marketing.
We'll begin at the beginning.
The Online Dating Crowd
Accompanied by Liz Ross of Digitas US, Fusion Idea Lab's Matt Brennock regaled us with both statistics and close-to-home anecdotes -- the kind that's fueled many a romantic comedy.
I heard one guy say the pair had great chemistry, and he commended them for "[opening] the kimono" the way they did. Given the topic matter, and Brennock's zeal for reminding us (first once, then twice, then...) that men really do just wanna get laid, the geisha metaphor was oddly appropriate.
Some stats:
- The average online dater is 42 years old.
- Match.com remains tops, with 3.4 million uniques/month, but people increasingly drift away from these big-box dating sites and into more niche fare: j-date, veggiedate, Christian singles. (AdAge blogger Kelly Eidson seized this opportunity to send me a link to STD Match, a dating site targeted to people living with sexually transmitted diseases. There are also -- as if you didn't know -- ethnicity-specific sites.)
If the world wasn't our oyster before, the marvelous advances of the internet, coupled with mankind's enterprising creative spirit, have ensured it certainly is now. There's a match worth blogging.
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