When Apple introduced its wireless AirPod earphones at its media event last week, there was immediate suspicion that these cute little gizmos might pose a particular problem for consumers. Conan O’Brien latches on to that criticism in very amusing style with the parody ad below—spoofing Apple’s famous iPod “Silhouettes” ads from the early 2000s.
Excited to get an iPhone 7 but don’t want to wait until next week to embrace the future? Try the Apple Plug, which kills your headphone jack right now.
Brands don’t newsjack Apple events quite as often as they used to. But Jim Beam is ambushing today’s announcements from the tech marketer by introducing an April Fools’-esque gadget called the Jim Beam Apple Watch, which puts a 1.5-ounce shot glass right on your wrist.
It gets away with the Apple reference because Jim Beam Apple is a real line extension from the whiskey brand. “The watch’s streamlined interface opens and closes manually on demand. And while it doesn’t tell time, it does save time, eliminating the need for a last-minute shot glass search,” the brand says of the gag product.
Comic short films about the absurdity of the ad business have a proud history going back to Tim Hamilton’s brilliant Truth in Advertising. Here’s the latest one—director Tim Mason’s No Other Way to Say It, about an amusingly bleak voiceover recording session for an ice-cream commercial.
The U.S. presidency is fine and all, but would Donald J. Trump stop there? Surely he would realize there’s a whole yuuuge world out there waiting to be dominated.
Apple’s “Shot on iPhone 6” print and outdoor ads, featuring real photos taken by real iPhone 6 users, has been very popular since its launch in early 2015, even picking up a Grand Prix award at Cannes. But of course, not every photo taken with an iPhone, or any smartphone, looks quite as perfect as that campaign would suggest.
Lens & Shutter, a three-location photography store chain in Canada, specializing in DSLR cameras, reminds its target market of the limitations of smartphone cameras in a fun parody of the Apple campaign—featuring the line “Shot on a phone.”
“Just what Los Angeles needs. Fewer brains.”
Unfortunately, that’s not a tagline for Fear the Walking Dead, which premieres this Sunday on AMC as the second series in the cable-television-eating Walking Dead zombie franchise.
Rather, it’s a line from two freelance L.A. creative directors, Charlie Noback and Brian Engleman, who are launching an Instagam called Cheer the Walking Dead. The idea is simple: Celebrate the arrival of the undead in their fair city by zombifying classic L.A. images.
They’ve posted half a dozen so far, and are hoping to get submissions (via email) from other creatives. “There are so many overworked ad professionals right now, sometimes I think we’re the real zombies,” says Engleman.
But mocking up L.A. zombie scenes can be nourishing for the soul, and clean out those festering creative minds, can it not? Says Noback: “I hope by getting the word out, we’ll help turn some zombies back into ad professionals.”
Airbnb’s existential-crisis ad with the waddling baby didn’t lend itself to being taken all that seriously in the first place. Now, a parody is now helping it along the path to full ridicule.
A grown man replaces the infant in this clip from digital shop Portal A, which turns the moral musings of the original voiceover into a biting satire of its sales-pitch subtext—and drives home why maybe you shouldn’t blindly trust the vacation company’s assessment of human nature. No, he’s not technically wearing diapers, but he probably should be.
Portal A, makers of Pitch Perfect 2’s crowd-sourced fan montage and YouTube’s Rewind videos from the past couple of years, shot the new video two days after Airbnb launched its global campaign.
In fact, the shop has been building a channel dedicated to ad parody—other bits so far include a more down-to-earth version of Carnival Cruise’s JFK Super Bowl spot, and if you’re a sucker for punishment, that older, NSFW play on Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches.
Here’s the original Airbnb spot:
These days, if you can’t understand emojis, life is not worth living. But there is hope, thanks to an “Emoji Literacy” campaign from Domino’s and Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
As you might recall, CP+B won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes (honoring the most breakthrough idea of the year) for designing an emoji ordering system for Domino’s, which lets folks place orders on Twitter and via text message simply by typing a pizza emoji.
Now, in something of a follow-up, client and agency have created 52 flashcards designed to help the uninitiated “speak” emoji. The cards—a tongue-in-cheek promo which really should boost your emoji prowess—are available for free starting today at emojiliteracy.com.
There’s even a faux PSA explaining the initiative.
“I didn’t know what to say,” laments one befuddled middle-aged dad. “I just replied BRB and hoped they don’t text back.” A teary-eyed mom fears that if she can’t communicate with emojis, somebody might “take my kids away from me.”
So, smarten up and master emojis! (Sure, you could spend your time learning an actual language, like French or Spanish or Mandarin, but really, what for?)
So, the folks over at Printsome, a U.K. T-shirt printing service, were getting hammered one evening (by their own admission, “beers weren’t lacking”) and somehow the discussion turned to how Facebook would taste if it were a beer.
I think most people would say the flavor would change every few months at the whim of its advertising partners, but Printsome took things one step further and made a whole beer identity for Facebook. They did the same for Nike, Apple, the Arsenal football club and themselves, deciding flavor, label design, alcohol content and desired audience for each.
The label designs are pretty standard for projects like this, but the writeups are fun. They decided Nike beer would be low-cal and full of taurine, which sounds exactly like something Nike would do, and that Apple’s iBeer would be an organic cider/beer monstrosity of some kind. I would have made it an iPA, but then again, I’m a pun-loving colonial savage.
What is the future of smartphones? Well, for one thing, they will reside inside your skull, not in your hand. And when they malfunction, your whole body will hiccup and crash—and you’ll need to head to the doctor for an upgrade.
At least, that’s the reality in this parody iPhone 7 ad from Noka Films.
“Upgrade is a story of a young woman who is experiencing an embarrassing malfunction with her older model of the iPhone and is desperately seeking an upgrade,” the filmmakers say. “iPhones and similar smartphones are now an integral part of our modern life, and in a way, beginning to alter who we are. To ridicule our addiction to our smartphones, we played out a world where this technological evolution may one day take over us.”
The idea of an iPhone implanted directly in your mind is “not so far from the truth,” they add, considering the “underlying strangeness of today’s world of marketing, innovation, and increasingly virtual reality.”
Maybe you saw the billboard, or the documentary about Frank La Rant, or the lookbook. If so, you were probably disappointed to learn that Plastique, the high-end plastic pants supposedly designed by La Rant, aren’t real. And that the whole thing was a spoof by Fruit of the Loom.
The spoof by Crispin Porter + Bogusky originally came from the brand’s TV ad in which Fruit of the Loom purportedly tested its boxer briefs by having people wear transparent plastic pants. (If anything would make underwear ride up, it would presumably be that.)
From there, CP+B launched a full-scale high-fashion parody—poking fun at underwear brands like H&M that pretend to be all glamorous in selling the most basic attire out there. The campaign included fashion ads, outdoor, digital, a web experience, social media accounts, and even men in Plastique parading around SoHo and Rodeo Drive.
“Throughout the campaign, Fruit of the Loom held the position that they didn’t really get how you could call plastic pants fashion,” the agency says. “But it was very clear that they were behind (and underneath) this entire story, giving this long time underwear maker the innovation and style cred they deserved.”
See more from the campaign below.
If you’re not into Star Wars, you might as well sign off the Internet for the rest of the year. Not only are the filmmakers going to bombard you with content, everybody else is, too.
Case in point: A Craigslist user in California posted a “buyer beware” listing warning people not to purchase the Imperial II-Class Star Destroyer seen in the most recent Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer.
Fake Craigslist ads are a hallowed genre, and this one is pretty solid—as the user warns that the vehicle is “totally infested with roaches and womp rats” and “there’s no way this thing is ever going to pass emissions.”
Check out the full text below.
BUYER BEWARE: Imperial II-class Star Destroyer – $1 (Mad River)
I just wanted to make sure people are aware, this is a total scam. I drove all the way out there to look at this thing and the guy wanted a huge deposit before he’d even let me take it for a spin.
After looking around a bit I’d be surprised if this thing could even finish the Kessel run, let alone do it in a decent time. It’s totally infested with roaches and womp rats, so when you figure the cost of a 6.2 trillion cubic foot fumigation job, this thing is a total write-off for that reason alone.
I know it’s had Sand People in it, but all the tracks are single file so who knows how many have been in there or what parts they’ve ripped off.
You can’t even get this thing licensed in most states until you remove all 384 turbolasers and the ion cannons will have to be retrofitted with low-capacity magazines (thanks Obama), and there’s no way this thing is ever going to pass emissions.
The “carbon scoring” is conveniently makes the serial numbers unreadable, so I can’t even verify what model year this thing is, but I suspect that it’s the year that no one wants because there weren’t any handrails on the control deck. The whole “open bridge” thing was a terrible idea. It’s like the Pontiac Aztec of star destroyers.
So save yourself a trip. The guy just wants this crap off his farm but doesn’t want to pay the Jawas to haul it away.
Believe me, this isn’t the star destroyer you’re looking for.
Men, if you saw a door marked “Big Dick” and a door marked “Average Dick,” which would you walk through?
Two weeks ago, Dove released a new video in its long-running Real Beauty campaign where they put the words “Average” and “Beautiful” over doors and figured out which women lacked self-confidence and which were full of themselves. Just kidding, they tried to get women to see that they could choose to see themselves as beautiful.
The divisive video was greeted with booth cheers and jeers, caused a kerfuffle over at BuzzFeed, and like past Dove videos, was ripe for parody. And indeed, Funny or Die produced the little video below that suggests once again that men, at least compared to women, don’t have a lot of self-confidence problems.
Of course, in reality, men also suffer from self-esteem issues, but the parody brings up some excellent points that many detractors have leveled at the original video. Namely, what’s so bad about being average? And where in our culture do we draw the line between healthy self-esteem and being embarrassingly full of yourself?
The guys in this video run the gamut from full-of-yourself you’re delusional (“It’s a bit like Big Ben”) to depressingly desperate (“Have sex with me, please!”). When our society values both confidence and modesty, it’s hard for women or men to win the physical beauty game. The paradox is aptly put in the One Direction lyric: “You don’t know you’re beautiful, but that’s what makes you beautiful.” In other words, One Direction doesn’t think any of the ladies who walked through the beautiful door are actually beautiful.
Which brings about larger questions: Who’s the arbiter of beauty? Who gets to decide who’s beautiful or who’s dick is big? Are we talking length or width, inner beauty or outer? And of course, why does society prize physical beauty in women above so many other features—and big dicks for men above, say, the ability to actually please a woman?
But you don’t have to think about all that to enjoy the parody. All you need to know is: Ha ha, dicks!
GoPro has spared no expense in traveling the world to create pulse-pounding footage that reminds us we’re living hollow lives devoid of excitement. Now, an everyman office drone has decided to prove that corporate drudgery is just as exciting as being hugged by lions or eaten by a grizzly bear.
The resulting clip has rapidly become a hit on Reddit, where it has nearly 5,000 net upvotes in the Video subreddit. There, the creator explains that he works at a real estate firm and “waited till it got quiet to film the printer/bathroom/kitchen stuff.”
“My worst fear,” he wrote, “was walking into the bathroom with a GoPro on my chest and seeing someone at the urinal like WTF dude?”
“Dumb Ways to Die” could be the theme song of Game of Thrones. And now this parody, from Egor Zhgun, brings them together in celebration of the various gory, untimely deaths through the show’s first four seasons. Spoilers, obviously.
The HBO show’s fifth season premiered Sunday.
A five-minute 1990s-era Scientology sing-along video doesn’t need a parody to be funny. But that hasn’t stopped Saturday Night Live from making one anyways—and the results really don’t disappoint.
Everyone’s favorite crazy celebrity cult is enjoying (or not) a renewed place in the popular consciousness, thanks to the buzz around the HBO documentary Going Clear. So is everyone’s favorite kitschy decade, thanks to BuzzFeed. That means NBC’s live sketch comedy show was able to topically spoof the clip, which resurfaced online in 2011.
There’s ample opportunity for skewering. The lyrics include excellent couplets like “Religion and science intertwined/aliens live inside of our minds.” Pop-up annotations list the sinister fates of faces gleefully bobbing on the screen. Bobby Moynihan shines as L. Ron Hubbard.
Titled “Neurotology Music Video,” it’s packed with references that will tickle anyone who’s been following the scandal around the church—even if the reality is unsettling. (Anyone who hasn’t been keeping up can find an excellent, hefty primer in the 2011 article “The Apostate,” by Lawrence Wright, who went on to write the book Going Clear, on which the HBO documentary is based.)
It’s too bad SNL couldn’t also work in an extended parody of Tom Cruise raving about how great it is to be Tom Cruise, the Scientologist. Though in that case, it’s hard to imagine anything beating the real deal.
Advertising veterans George Logothetis and Graham Clifford are celebrating Easter in a bit of a blasphemous way this year by unveiling The Product Placement Bible—a tongue-in-cheek (or at least turn-the-other-cheek) website that imagines verses of scripture sponsored by some of the world’s top marketers.
Placing products into TV shows and movies is commonplace. This satirical project takes the concept to its logical extreme by inserting marketing messages, logos and products into the most popular and widely read publications ever written, not counting the Ikea catalog.
The results are amusing—and Logothetis, a copywriter, and Clifford, a designer, hope you aren’t offended.
“It’s a not-so-subtle reminder for us to preserve our most sacred institutions,” they said in a statement. “There’s a time and a place for marketing messages, and it shouldn’t be in our most revered work of scripture. We came up with this far-fetched idea, sensed its potential as a content platform, and simply followed it to its logical conclusion. We mean no harm to anyone and want people to know that this is nothing more than a parody intended to be laugh out loud entertainment. And, of course, serve as a cautionary tale.”
Check out more examples below.
The Internet didn’t tolerate Starbucks’ #RaceTogether promotion about racial awereness, and the coffee giant swiftly ditched the effort. But Saturday Night Live took notice, and brilliantly skewered the overly simplistic campaign this weekend.
SNL took it to a comically exaggerated level, imagining a group of Pep Boys employees trying to begin a dialogue about gender and sexual identity with folks just trying to get their oil changed. “If you got both parts down there, then be proud. If I had both, I’d be doin’ myself all day long,” says Aidy Bryant’s charmingly ignorant character, fully embracing the fake #genderflect crusade.
SNL has been hitting edgy topics with its fake ads lately, and this one really nails it.
By now, you’ve probably seen Fox and Getty’s wonderful promotion for the movie Unfinished Business, with Vince Vaughn, Dave Franco and Tom Wilkinson posing for boringly clever stock photos.
Well, it turns out the images were Photoshopped from real stock photos. We’ve done you a solid by pairing the originals with the spoofs and turning them into GIFs.
Sorry in advance if we’ve shattered the illusion of Vince Vaughn ever sitting in an office.
Credit for all the original photos: Global Stock/iStock by Getty Images
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