For the record, we think Crumpler's* Paint By Numbers toilet paper rolls -- in a stall near you! -- are totally rad. (Read the colour key!)
With that said, the effort lit a spark in us that ignites every time we see yet another brand trying to do something with toilet paper. Like the occasional outbreak of insanity, every few months somebody pitches us with some TP-oriented thing that they're sure will bring ruminations of their genius to public stalls everywhere. See examples one and two.
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A while back when I was actually creating advertising rather than shamelessly trashing it, we held a video contest for a jeweler and asked people to send in videos of their marriage proposals. We picked the best, worst, strangest, funniest, etc. and give them a big discount at the jeweler. I know...giving a discount after the ring's been brought and the proposal's been made is, to say the least, illogical. Then again, this is advertising. More likely, I can't remember the details and the promotion was something completely different that how I remember it.
Anyway...here's yet another in the long line of marriage proposal gaffes that offer never ending hilarity. It's for Aviva Insurance (not even a jeweler!) and was created by Taxi Toronto.
- Marvel's soliciting the YouTube community for the best comic-inspired costumes. Get dressed, flip your camera on and keep your videos down to a minute. Beyond licensing an entire suite of heroes and villains to Hollywood, I guess that's one way to stay relevant.
- Got VD? The decent thing to do would be to tell everybody you slept with, so they can check if they have it too. But don't sweat it too much; this is the digital age! Send those hutches an e-card. (Thanks Adrants reader Candace.)
- Not quite The West Side Story, but it's Macs and PCs, so almost the same thing.
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To promote the Li Yue Long Men Young Creatives Competition, BBDO/Shanghai is using this :45 video to spread the weirdest rumour: that all its female staff members are D-cups.
Finding three young D-cups in all of Asia is a feat, which alone made the video worth watching. I also like the effect the cheesy music had on this slow exploration of the Shanghai office. It made all that leering look less ... leery.
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Somebody* just alerted me to a dentistry publication called Dear Doctor - Dentistry & Oral Health. Its president and publisher, Dr. Mario Vilardi, aims for the magazine to wax the common sense of Dear Abby, coupled with the vapid gawk-appeal of People.
Toward that end, each new issue sports the distinctive pearly-whites of a star.
It isn't immediately clear how deep we get to dive into the mouths of people we idolize on television. Deliciously sordid details, like the number of cavities they had as children, or shots of them in head gear, will probably not grace the pages of Dear Doctor. So I'm not sure what else to say about this, aside from, hey, I guess star power can serve any interest.
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Here's a series of ads for The Alberta Library which tells us just how powerful informative and motivational books can be. Aiming to show just how much influence a book can have on a person's life, both positively and negatively, four scenarios are played out to humorous effect.
Created by Rethink Vancouver and produced by Holiday Film, the commercial's directors commented on the work, saying, "We were both attracted to this job because neither of us can read, and we thought this would be a good excuse to go into a library for the first time. We loved Katie and Chad's scripts, they were simple and quite dark, and reminded us how libraries can lead you down the road to ruin, but then get you right back on track. It was our idea to use real actors in all four spots, instead of CGI characters used in most library commercials."
Um, right.
- Avenue A/Razorfish is changing its name to Razorfish.
- Considering an iPhone? Read this first.
- Wife killed by estranged hubby for changing her Facebook status to "single" too soon. Wow ... the world has changed.
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Like a Calvin & Hobbes decal come to life, "Slash" for MTV Switch depicts people pissing in public places. The moral of the story is to "Save water, flush less." (Niiiiice.)
By Ogilvy/London, which has an odd take on persuasion. Wizzing in a fountain is funny -- hell, incendiary -- while you're stoned and around age 15, but unless things have changed abroad, doing it in the Queen's England remains both unsavory and illegal.
There's no accounting for logic in advertising, however. Along with other "green" MTV Switch ads, "Slash" will likely run across 55 TV channels in 162 countries. The track in the ad is Miserere Mei, by Bouwe Dykstra.
MCM Net and Aardman partnered to produce Creature Discomforts, a campaign for the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity. Its purpose, I think, is to encourage outsiders to change the way they perceive disabilities.
I'm just confused about how. The campaign launched a game called Peanut Pickup, where you, a mouse, shoot peanuts into an elephant's trunk. That's it.
It isn't clear what lesson I was meant to glean (could it be a hand-eye coordination game for disabled children...?), but all I could gather was it isn't nearly as fun as Suicide Kittens -- which, for a minute or two, I mistook for another component of the Creature Discomforts campaign.
- Make magazine offers Twitter support. Hey, neato.
- Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska premiered on YouTube last Friday. Which brings up the usual "dawn of a new era?" questions.
- Ecast MixMaster helps decide how best to get you trashed.
- O noes, kids and search and porn.
- Little Big Planet alienates Muslims. I would never have guessed.
- The essence of blogging.
- Do you dare mess with someone else's Hummer -- even for love of advertising? Good luck and godspeed.
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