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…

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.

pundo3000: advertising versus reality.

Deep down in our dark, carb-laden, fast-food munching hearts we all knew this to be true, but sometimes seeing the evidence laid out before us is a little bit hard to swallow. (That was punny, I realize, but I couldn’t stop myself…)

In pundo3000.com‘s “Werbung Gegen Realität” (Advertising Versus Reality), they’ve taken 100 (sometimes incredibly odd looking) German food products and given us a direct comparison of their packaging next to what was actually inside. I mean, sure, nobody really expects their Heringssalat to be as totally filled with juicy bits of fresh herring as is portrayed on the box, but shouldn’t it at least be approximately the same colour?

When you open your Heringssalat and it’s a bright shade of creamy mauve, it’s time to throw that shit away. Plus, you know that your Zwiebel-Hackbraten just won’t taste the same without those succulent grillmarks on whatever appears to have been intended to be a steak of some kind. If it had grillmarks, we’d know it was meant to be meat. C’mon people – where are the damn GRILLMARKS?!?!

I’m also a little suspicious of why my kohlwurst has sunk to the bottom of my Grünkohl. I like my wursts to be a little more buoyant…

You can check out the entire 100 products in all their glory here, but these are three of the more heinous ones. This Entenfleisch, Rinderroulade, and Schlemmergulasch ain’t how Grandma used to make it…

I also found a video hyping the project (complete with a culturally misunderstood quasi-old skool hip hop scratch soundtrack – I’d say the intention was some kind of irony, but I’m pretty sure Germany’s taste in music just blows…)

Via the kick ass The Denver Egotist via Funtasticus

matterbox.

I don’t really know what this is but I signed up for it anyway. The philosophy behind Matter is a solid one; in a world that gets more and more virtual, people will start to go old skool and find value in stuff they can hold in their hands.

Created by brand company Artomatic, you can register and then Matter will mail you your very own Matterbox. What’s inside it? You don’t know. It just gets sent to you, presumably filled with samples and other kinds of marketing goodies. I’ll keep you posted.

niedermeyer: osama camera.

Here’s a new print ad for Niedermeyer Cameras. Um, ok. So, not that I’m necessarily shocked by this, but I just find it really sort of mind-blowing that we’re using Osama Bin Laden to sell things (besides the War on Terror… he sold that really well). I’m not coming from any sort of neo-conservative “support our troops” standpoint. I don’t think anything should ever be off limits. I think I’m just surprised that the US manhunt for Osama is so engrained in the worldwide culture that it could be used to sell something as banal as a camera.

Besides that, the ad also makes total sense purely from it’s marketing pitch: hunt for Osama – can’t find him – got a camera – zooms really good – there’s Osama – great camera. Isn’t that, I dunno… just weird?

It’s also an odd statement on how the omnipresence of advertising has made it at least reasonable to market a product on this type of situation. I don’t care if people find it offensive or not (people are way too easily offended, in my opinion). I’m more interested that this was seen, by some camera company, as a viable idea. I’m pretty sure that up to this point we wouldn’t have used Hitler or Pol Pot or Stalin to sell electronics. Unless you’re in North Korea, of course. In which case you’re only using dictators to sell electronics. But that’s a whole other story…