Oregon-based Johnson Cowan Hanrahan in Portland, Oregon has created a Holiday-themed site for its knife client Gerber Blades. The site, like those Holiday calenders with a chocolate for each day in December, offers gift ideas which are a bit out of the norm. Gift ideas range from using a bushy-tailed woodrat as a tree ornament to creating a smoothie out of a Bison to killing a bear to make mittens out of its paws to stuffing a rabbit in a box to make a jackrabbit-in-a-box to using skunk meat to make French-fried skunk. Not unsurprisingly, making these gifts requires the use of a knife. It's sick. It's funny. We like it.
Doing some nice work for Honda UK, Wieden + Kennedy has created The Power of Dreams, a mini-movie set to the tune of "Dream the Impossible Dream," that takes the viewer through the history of Honda from its launch of the Super Cub motorbike in 1958 to its invention of the ATV in 1970 to a motorcycle with an airbag to roadsters, speedboats and the cars of today. The movie leads to The Power of Dreams site on which the history of Honda is detailed with each product receiving highlight through multiple microsites. There's also a an enter-to-win contest for a balloon ride over New Zealand. The site puts a nice wrapper on the package that is Honda.
With its Chrismahanukwanzakah holiday greeting, Virgin Mobile has attempted to cover all its politically correct, religious bases but really has just further segregated things with these videos. Humorously, of course. And you've gotta love the 1-888-ELF-POOP helpline.
Flipping the tell-me-what-to-do, Subservient Chicken style viral and turning the television into a sexual object, Philips UK has launched Ambilight, a site voiced by a woman cooing sexually laced phrases while images of a television and a lingerie-clad female are intertwined. The site asks visitors to answer four questions about themselves in a manner so non-threatening that before you know it, you've told Philips your age, income, email address and whether or not you live in the UK.
The site was developed to promote Philips' Cineo flat screen televisions and along with the engaging Q & A, the site enters you in a contest to win one of the new TVs. While some will toss this off as "been there done that," there's something about this site, even though it doesn't invent anything new, that keeps one's interest. Well, if you're a guy it does. Perhaps there's a version for women floating around somewhere too. Nice work.
Virgin has launched a game on Heavy called exercise your muscle which calls for players to, as they name indicates, exercise their brain and music muscles to identify the 74 bands represented in an image on the game's page. There's a magnifying glass that can be rolled over the images for greater detail. Game prizes include an Alienware computer and one free year of music from VirginDigital, MP3 players with one year subscriptions to VirginDigital and one year subscriptions to Paste Magazine. Only true music aficionados need play. This one is a challenge and will keep you delightfully engaged for hours.
Why we haven't seen this before we do not know - or perhaps we did and filed it aways with the other 300 ads we see every day - but in July Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig, working for Fallon, filmed 250,000 multi-colored balls being dropped from huge cranes and shot out of cannons creating an avalanche of color streaming down the streets of San Francisco to promote Sony's bravia LCD TV. It's exquisitely beautiful. Thanks to Emily over at Eatmail, there's a behind the scenes video of the shoot.
Maine Root Beer has launched a site called Free Range Root Beer which pits itself against the big guys whom Maine Root Beer portrays as large, tasteless entities which add all kinds of filler to their product. The site contains humorous videos including one in which a stealth Free Range Root Beer team attempts to free cans of root beer which have been taken from the wild and placed in a corporate jail cell. There's a history of root beer, an area for kids, a photo contest for people to send in photos of Maine Root Beer placed in strange locations and a section where root beer lovers can express themselves through art therapy. Funny stuff.
Little Red Riding Hood is nowhere to be found in this spot for Halls but some dudes dressed up like pigs are worried a dude dressed like a wolf is going to huff and puff and blow their house down. It's a fairly amusing spot, especially since the guy playing the wolf looks like he can't stop cracking up while acting his part.
Here's a fun little time-waster from McDonald's. Pick a character, listen to the beat, whack a few numbers keys on your keyboard and, homey, you're breakdancin'. After practicing, visitors can log in and compare their dance move scores with others. That's it. Simple. No overbearing marketing crap. Just plain fun.
Adrants reader "Campaign Critic" had such insightful things to say about the recent Capitol One ad campaigns that we figured we'd just extend him a Guest Contributor title for the day. Campaign Critic Writes:
Let's just get to the point: Capital One's credit card advertising is annoying, hard to follow and stupid. It quite frankly breaks a few of the most basic rules about advertising any product, let alone something as complicated or, these days, downright scary as handling a credit card.
One: don't go so afar afield from the point at hand that you lose the hook on what your product really is. Capital One's ads for their credit cards do just this: they somehow equate credit card service charges with barbarians (they have tried others in this series, but they take this one bad step further). "Credit card charges are like barbarians attacking you every time you use them." (Not barbarians-credit cards.) Sure.
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