coca-cola: encounter.

So I’ll admit that maybe this ad treads a little closely to sappy, but there’s something about it that totally got to me. In back-lash to economic-misery and the general doomsday feelings of the recession, I think advertising is going to keep shifting towards the abandonment of feel good and speak directly to a need to be positive. And, yeah, we’re not idiots, if it sells some Coke in the process then that obviously helps.

In this lovely Spanish Coca-Cola spot, “Encounter”, a 102 year-old man is brought to meet a new-born baby boy. They’re not related, and have no reason to meet other than the connection of both being human. The old man’s face when he first sees the boy brought me to the edge. He then gives the youngin’ some sage advice that would normally be a bit obsequious, but seems so genuinely heart-felt and honestly-meant that I let myself go and went for the emotional ride of it. And you should too. Sometimes, it just feels good to feel good.

(Agency: McCann Erickson Madrid. Director: Andy Fogwill.)

virgin mobile: screw you recession!

I don’t normally talk about my own work on here much, but Virgin Mobile’s new campaign (which I obviously helped worked on) is getting some big buzz. We started it off with a huge billboard installation at the corner of Yonge and Dundas in Toronto. Oddly enough, the balcony from my place looks across a park… right into the corner of Yonge and Dundas Square. So basically I fall asleep staring at my own copywriting on a gigantic billboard. There are worse things…

Last Friday the billboards and the impending campaign got profiled by Jennifer Wells in the Globe and Mail and the billboards got some talk time on Stimulant.  We’re working right now on a very cool website, Screw You Recession!, that’s launching very soon. So stay tuned…

shelter + radiohead: house of cards.

This spot just totally took my breath away. That, and it’s set to Radiohead, so that’s guaranteed win.

Radiohead donated the rights to use their track, In Rainbow’s “Videotape” to Leo Burnett London for this new spot, “House of Cards” (coincidentally or not, also the name of another track from Radiohead’s In Rainbows…) The House of Cards campaign is promoting Shelter, a UK housing charity working to bring attention to the desperate homelessness crisis in Britain. Everyone involved – Radiohead, Leo Burnett, Framestore, Outsider, Dom and Nic, and actress Samantha Morton – donated their time to create this worthwhile spot.

The final 20 seconds are absolutely stellar. So haunting I cant stop thinking about it…

(Director: Dom and Nic. Production: Outsider. Post-Production: Framestore.)

pandapanther + onitsuka tiger: zodiac race.

PandaPanther is one of my fave animation design shops in the entire world. Their contribution to Advanced Beauty was unbelievable. Time and again, their character work is unmatched, giving an inner-life and personality to each creation that connects you to the work in a deep, emotional way. It’s an amazing example of the power of animation and motion to feel intrinsically real even though the characters are created from imagination.

With the typical PandaPanther blend of sublime and whacky, their latest spot is part of Onitsuka Tiger’s 60th anniversary campaign.”The Zodiac Race” brings to life, with some hints of classic Animé style, the Japanese legend of a race that animals ran to win spots on the zodiac. It also ties into a hand-made diorama of an Onitsuka Tiger shoe that will be travelling the world as part of the campaign.

The spot is vibrant, quirky, and moves with an electric video game pace:

Watch the making of vid:

Via Motionographer

t-mobile: dance.

There are some things about this that interest me and some things that just piss me off. Satchi & Statchi created “Dance”, a spot for T-Mobile UK where 350 dancers spontaneously took over Liverpool Street Station in London to the joy and glee of all involved. The interesting part is that the spot, filmed entirely with hidden cameras, was shot on January 15th and aired on the 17th, giving it a bit of vitality and life in the spirit of the spot itself.

Here’s the full version that aired in the UK today. It’s being followed up by a 60 second version airing over the coming weeks.

The spot is totally fun and the idea is great. The problem is just that none of the ideas in it were Satchi & Satchi’s. Everything in this ad has been done before, with greater authenticity and in the spirit of actually creating joy in people’s lives – not commodifying a version of joy to try to try and sell a product. Flash mobbing isn’t anything new; Improv Everywhere has been doing this exact thing, on a fairly high-level on the publicity scale, for a while now. And they do it simply for the thrill of causing shit. The whole “joy of dance makes us all the same” bit has also been done before. Just ask “Where The Hell Is Matt?” hero Dancing Matt and his sponsors, Stride Gum, and their 12 million YouTube views.

Hot off the heels of last week’s appalling news that the GAP (the muthafucking GAP, ugh…) had opened pop-up store in NYC in collaboration with Pantone (read: the Pantone coolness trend is near an end when a dinosaur like GAP finally figures out it’s cool), “Dance”, while a good advertisement, is still just a hollow replication of other people’s ideas, appropriated by big companies and agencies to sell big products and not giving big credit to any of the people that were doing it before them.

universal everything: 6 billion people, 6 billion colours.

Universal Everything is heaven. Utopia. Shangri-La. A creative Eden. Any of those good places you want to go when you die.

To promote their new E71 phone, Universal Everything continued its collaboration with Nokia as one of four artists asked to produce videos for “Beautiful Connections”, a minisite exploring the beauty of connection. Also featuring work from Carl Burgess, field, and SHFT, each film is up for download, has an available wallpaper, and the site invites you to create and upload your own vids as well.

No big surprise, but Matt Pyke, Maxim Zhetskov, and Simon Pyke’s contribution for Universal Everything, “6 Billion People, 6 Billion Colours” was my fave. It resounds not just with the feeling of connection and human interaction given to these little shapes, but to the possibility of inspiration and change. How amongst even the largest masses an individual has the ability to impact all the others, and create a more beautiful, harmonious, connected existence. Plus the soundtrack, created by Simon Pyke’s Freefarm, is un-freaking-believable.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I read an interesting opinion from Martina, creator of Adverblog, that the site is “…made of four very beautiful videos and not much else… I have contrasting feelings about marketing initiatives that mix art and advertising. As usual I have a very pragmatic approach, and I appreciate and understand them only when the brand and the product fit the artwork.”

I humbly disagree. But, then again, I’m artsy. For me, a brand with enough balls to promote and patron the creation of art and ideas is worthy of my loyalty because it does so without tying it in so neatly to the product. Similar to Sony’s groundbreaking “Colour Like No Other” campaign, these companies are taking something fairly techno-boring (unless you’re a techie) and imbuing it with an emotion. An artistic feeling. And for me that demonstrates not just an evolved thinking but the trust that I’m smart and saavy enough to relate back without having technical specs and other traditional sales pitches thrown at me. These types of venutres create the ultimate brand connection – they make me feel something.

surfrider foundation: catch of the day.

This is smart. Super smart. It’s getting more and more rare to see an actual, honest to goodness guerilla campaign that involves both a surprise and an insight tied together with a purpose. Slapping decals on the hand-rests of escalators just isn’t enough anymore.

To bring some attention to ocean pollution and just how disgusting it really is,  Surfrider Foundation teamed up with Satchi & Satchi LA to create “Catch of the Day.” Simply and brilliantly, they collected actual trash from beaches around the U.S., packaged it like food, and left it on display at farmer’s markets. It’s site-specific, appropriate, impacting, meaningful, shocking, and an actual consumer insight into the very act they’re in the middle of. Someone about to buy fish from the same ocean as the trash in their hands can’t help but be at least a little more enlightened as to how pollution isn’t someone else’s problem.

Condom Strips – Newport Beach, CA

Butts-n-Bits – Venice Beach, CA

Plastic Surprise – Galveston Beach, TX

Styrofoam Bites – Long Beach, CA

Aerosol Valu-Pack – South Padre Beach, TX

Thanks to Jessica at Thoughts Punctuated for the tip.

humanitarian lion.

Writers, designers, and artists excel at creating ideas that can change the way people think. With the power of funding behind them, it makes complete sense that creatives could develop ideas that will literally change the world. 2009 is the year we need to begin to make the Humanitarian Lion a reality.

The Cannes Lions are the most coveted advertising award in the world: the Ad Oscars. If we could take some of the energy and cash that goes into winning an award and use it, as this video suggests, to do some good the possibilities are boundless.

No matter what industry you work in, you have the power to support a movement like this. Visit Humanitarion Lion , watch this video and support the power of the idea.

volkswagen + bitt: fishdog.

There are dog people. There are fish people. Now, thanks to Bitt Animation, there are fishdog people.

(Agency: Almap BBDO. Director: Armando Bo. Production: Rebolucion.)

burger king: whopper virgins.

Following in the much-buzzed about footsteps of “Whopper Freakout” (which was released around the same time last year, coincidentally) comes the latest Burger King web vid from mega-agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Welcome “Whopper Virgins.”

In it, BK’s globe-trotting burger flippers head to three places with cultures where burgers aren’t normally on the menu – the Hmong of Thailand, the part of Romania that used to be called Transylvania, and the Inuit in Greenland – and visit remote areas looking for people who’ve never eaten one before. Then they do a taste test between a Whopper and Big Mac and asked them to choose which one they preferred. That bit is simple; it’s classic advertising schtick.

After that, it gets messy. If you read marketing/ad blogs regularly you’ve no doubt already heard about “Whopper Virgins.” That’s because everyone’s been talking about it since it debuted last week. Fierce debate has ensued: people in uproar, offended beyond belief at how callous and corporate Burger King is. The vid has been covered in publications and newspapers around the world, like The Wall Street Journal, The Telegraph, and The Huffington Post, and caused a full-on controversy on the net. All over a hamburger.

Watch “Whopper Virgins” so you can decide what you think for yourself. Then I’ll tell you what I think:

So I think it’s pretty clear that the video is tasteful, well-done, and respectful to everyone involved. I think the most offensive complaint, and the one I’ve read the most often on the blogs, is people saying either that this vid promotes the heartless Westernization of other cultures (some comments I’ve read go so far compare it to Colonization or even Christian Missionary conversion tactics) and that we’re in some way taking advantage of the naïvte of the savage foreigners. The brand of pseudo-respect that some completely ignorant Westerners pretend to display through their condescending “offense” is degrading to these people and revolting to the rest of us. The thought that we’re somehow going to have such a dramatic impact on these people, by offering them a hamburger, is so sanctimonious it’s ludicrous.

First, I’d be interested to know how many of these offended-by-proxy commentators have actually even been to any of these three places? Second, when did we all pre-suppose that simply because these people live in villages on other continents that means they’re impoverished? Marilyn Borchardt, Development Director for Food First, called the campaign insensitive: “The ad’s not even acknowledging that there’s even hunger in any of these places.”

So I suppose there should be no food advertising anywhere in North America then, because there’s just as much, if not more, hunger and poverty here as there is in any of these countries. It’s not like they went to Darfur or something – it’s Greenland. The assumption that they’re all suffering from mass starvation simply because they live a more rural existence shows more arrogance and ethnocentricity than anyone involved in creating this ad has. You get the feeling from some of these comments that just because these people aren’t white and don’t speak English that they’re all living in shacks and digging for vegetables, innocently corrupted by the evil fast-food bearing conquerors.  It’s beyond insulting.

But it gets worse: Sharon Akabas of the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University, told the New York Daily News “It’s outrageous…What’s next? Are we going to start taking guns out to some of these remote places and ask them which one they like better?”

Are you fucking kidding me? Romania went through a blood-filled communist revolution less than 20 years ago. They publically shot their dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, to death in the  the street; you think these people have never seen a gun? The people of Thailand, nestled between Burma (a human rights-violating military dictatorship) and Cambodia (home of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, and the genocide of 1.5 million innocent Cambodians), might have seen a gun or two in their time as well. I don’t say this to be flippant; I say this because to assume they’ve never seen a gun is to completely disregard the violent history of their region as well as any of the human right battles that have been won there since. I guess it’s easy to assume, since they’re not running around polishing Glocks and shooting each other, like many people in certain Western countries do, that they’ve never seen a gun. Perhaps they’ve seen so many of them that they’re smart enough to know not to use them. If this is the type of person leading thought and debate, in any way, at a university as prestigious as Columbia, then I’m worried. Guns? It’s a hamburger!

In the same article that Ms. Akabas was quoted in, the New York Daily News went to a Burger King in Times Sqaure to get some opinions on the street. That’s when Irvin Gatone, 42, from the Bronx, said: “That’s a stupid commercial, because when you’re hungry, anything tastes good.” I think maybe, just maybe, that might be the epitome of Western ignorance right there folks. They like the burger… because they’re so stupid and hungry. Well said, Irvin.

These are vibrant, healthy, well-fed cultures. They’ve been quite successful at feeding themselves for a few thousand years. To assume that our introduction of the burger will completely westernize them and make them unhealthy and fat, (essentially, turning them into us, oddly enough) is both the height of arrogance and our part and greatly underestimates the strength, beauty, and vitality of these cultures.

At the end of the day, though, to anyone who would protest so loudly, it’s just a hamburger ad. It’s an interesting idea to bring them something not typically found in their culture – a harmless burger – and interact with them and watch a human connection unfold. But that’s me looking on the bright side of it. More cynical people might say it’s just an ad, all it’s doing is trying to sell hamburgers. Well, guess what? It’s an ad for hamburgers! And it’s doing its job really well.

The thing that’s most interesting to me about it, and this is where CP+B really gets their brilliance points, is that people simply won’t stop talking about this. Not only in the world’s biggest newspapers, but in blogs and all around the net. People literally ranting on and on about how terrible it is, driving conversation, sending it to friends, rallying opinions… which is exactly what Burger King wants!

Like your Mom told you about the bullies at school, ignore them and it will go away. People who really find this that offensive should realize that by contributing to the discussion they are propagating it, and through that inevitably promoting the King. Remember that age old adage “there is no such thing as bad press, just make sure you spell my name right.” It’s totally true. Burger King doesn’t give a shit about who hates this ad. But if you do, they want you to hate it enough that you’ll talk about it, which is precisely what people are doing.

That, from a marketing standpoint, is utter fucking genius.