A clever campaign from Russia adds new utility to the dead-tree branding tool of the business card, by turning it into a blood alcohol test that can let bar patrons know whether they’re sober enough to drive safely—or should arrange for a ride to come pick them up.
During the project ‘pUp syndrome’ 5 participants were visiting the Dog Training Centre and the hotel for dogs – a place where animals are in need of special attention and care because they are away from their owners. Young people learned how to work, to be independent and responsible caring for the animals. Dogs helped them to become more self-reliant and executive. It became the First Professional Adaptation Programme for people with Down syndrome in Russia.
Mars, Pedigree’s parent company, is taking it one step further. They have committed to hiring five people with down syndrome to work in a new dog center in the Ulyanovsk region, of Russia, which will open in 2017.
Very moving piece.
From the experience of “Family Matters” psychological aid center, domestic violence victims are rarely capable of solving their problems by themselves. As a rule, they justify their tormenters or prefer to keep it secret. Thus, it is extremely important to change public opinion and tell people how to behave having spotted signs of domestic violence.
BBDO Russia Group and the “Family Matters” psychological aid center created a video warning people not to turn their back on a woman being beaten in a family. It’s a 360 experience on youtube.
“Our video is purposely lacking action”, says Kirill Tsytkin, BBDO copywriter. “The first second you see a woman turning her eyes from the camera and a text going out of the eyesight. You can stay with the woman or follow the text. However, whatever you choose, you’ll have to watch the video again to see the story from all sides”.
BBDO Russia Group and MTS bought the shortest available duration for the spots on the radio and “tailed” such adverts with its own speeded message: “4G Internet by MTS – super-fast Internet. You can’t tell people about it faster.” Mocking how the disclaimers already sound, and using that to make a point. Very funny, and very smart use of advertising creativity tailored to the media where it resides. In other news, Moscow looks like Stockholm on Steroids, right down to the old-school subway trains and the bombastic subway stations. Remind me to visit.
Lots of ads have used 360° video lately, but here’s one where the VR technology really suits the message—and delivers a powerful coda for those who absorb it.
Back in April, Nike Women launched its popular “Better for It” motivational campaign in the U.S. Now, the sportswear giant is expanding the tagline in Russia.
A half-dozen new spots from Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam feature the same playful attitude and general message—that the benefits of exercise outweigh the challenge—but take a slightly different tone, as you might expect from ads that feature professional athletes instead of the average exercisers represented in the U.S. work.
The camera work, from director Carlos Serrao, is a little more dramatic in its attention to detail, with scenes like yogi Olga Markes holding a particularly brutal pose while dripping sweat and boxer Kate Izotova getting punched in the face while sparring (a moment featured, naturally, in slow motion).
The copy, meanwhile, comes across as less overtly vulnerable than in the U.S. ads, where women explicitly tolerated their own misery (largely manifest as insecurity) for the promise of self-improvement in the end. Instead, the Russian athletes seem to be a bit more defiant in their vanity—embracing pain in pursuit of perfection or glory.
“What are you doing here?” says Izotova’s voiceover. “You could have stayed at home, been someone’s trophy…. Screw that. I’ll earn my own trophy.”
In other words, the ads hew more closely to traditional endorser-driven sports marketing (even if they’re not celebrities with wide global name recognition)—a strategy that speaks more of a “Be like this” inspirational strategy than a “We know it’s hard but we’re with you” motivational one.
In addition to the pro athlete ads, Nike also turned Instagram posts of real girls working out into street posters around Moscow. Indeed, the campaign’s title is “Real Girls of Moscow,” and it aims to capture the spirit of what Nike describes as a growing sports movement in Russia, featuring women who are “free-thinking and free-spirited,” and “are more comfortable in sneakers than heels, preferring exercise to fad diets.”
Whether drawing that kind of line—or calling a bunch of accomplished women, at least four of whom are in their 20s and 30s, “girls”—is a smart or deliberately provocative move isn’t clear. But it is at least understandable, given the brand sells selling running shoes that also tend to double as fashion statements—and not stilettos.
Regardless, Nike is also touting a 25,000-person turnout for a 10-day sporting event at Gorky Park in Moscow. And the new campaign features top athletes in a broad range of disciplines (ballet, choreography, long-jumping, skateboarding and sprinting) showing up variously on giant outdoor murals, and in nifty GIFs for online distribution—probably because if you really want to do that sweet kickflip, you’re going to have to get used to doing it over and over again, stuck on infinite loop, for the rest of time.
CREDITS
Client: Nike
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam
Executive Creative Director: Mark Bernath, Eric Quennoy
Creative Director: David Smith, Alvaro Sotomayor, Craig Williams
Art Director: Ignasi Tudela
Copywriter: Zoe Hawkins
Head of Content : Joe Togneri
Planner: Danny Feeney, Michelle Arrazcaeta
Communications Planner: Josh Chang
Group Account Director: Kirk Johnsen
Account Director: Kathryn Addo
Senior Account Manager: Jorge Fesser
Broadcast production / Head of Art Buying : Maud Klarenbeek
Art buying / broadcast production: Javier Perroud
Head of Studio: Jackie Barbour
Retoucher: Dario Fusnecher
Project Manager: Janna Harrington
Business Affairs: Michael Graves
Production Company: Terrie Tanaka Management
Director/Photographer: Carlos Serrao
Director of Photography: Monica May
Producer: Amy Lynne
Executive Producer: Terrie Tanaka
Vogue Shoot Make-up: Mark Williamson at artist-management using Mac
Vogue Shoot hair: Hanjee at Jed Root for Hanjee Hair Gallery
Editing Company: Whitehouse Post
Editor: Sam Gunn
Audio Post: Wave Amsterdam
Sound Designer/Mixer: Alex Nicholls-Lee
Music: Glintshake / MassiveMusic
Katya Izotova: Glintshake
Olga Markes: Glintshake
Adelina Sotnikova: MassiveMusic
Diana Vishneva: MassiveMusic
Darya Klishina: MassiveMusic
Postproduction: Glassworks
Flame: Morten Vinther
Telecine: Scott Harris
Producer: Jane Bakx
Media Buy: Mindshare Russia
Digital Production + Social Activation: Instinct BBDO Moscow
“It is your last night in Cannes. Make it more comfortable.”
That’s the message, printed on the pillows, that awaited Cannes Lions attendees who discovered a mattress on the event’s red carpet during the festival’s final hours.
The stunt was a well-played callback to this year’s much-buzzed-about moment when two unidentified people had sex on the red carpet of the Palais des Festivals around 4:30 a.m. last Tuesday.
Mad respect for this couple having blatant sex on the #CannesLions red carpet just now. pic.twitter.com/JVgVYIsC8z
— David Griner (@griner) June 23, 2015
While re-enacting the public sex became a frequent gag in photos from the event, one creative team decided to take it a step further.
Valery Volchetsky, group creative director for Moscow-based agency Hungry Boys, said he brainstormed the idea while talking about the sex photo with Romanian creatives Razvan Ghilencea, Anca Wirdy, Robert Capraru and Bianca Dumitra?cu. A gathering at the Gutter Bar turned into a brainstorming session as they tried to think of a way to play off the growing conversation around the sex act.
Initially thinking they’d make a spec bit of guerrilla branding for a brand like Ikea (“We even thought about PornHub, but they definitely do not need any comfort for sex”), the team instead decided to simply turn the whole thing into an attention-grabbing joke.
They created pillow cases printed with the message about making your last night in Cannes more comfortable, then brought their mattress and pillow setup to the entryway of the Palais. About 60 people gathered to photograph the stunt, Volchetsky said.
Here’s a brief video clip they created from the prank:
brightcove.createExperiences();
A rather funny poke at the gaudy rich, while making sure people remember “taste above all” is this sausage.
Retargeted banner ads are the sledgehammer of the web, bashing you again and again with the same random product you looked at once, whether you like it or not.
But 3M figured it could use the retargeted banner’s weakness as a strength. If the same banner comes up again and again, the company figured, why not make it a Post-it note where you could jot down info that might be useful later—when the ad pops up again?
Proximity Russia did just that in a recent campaign. Check out the case study below. It seems like ad-blocking software, but it’s not. 3M simply used retargeting technology and gave it an interactive spin.
The agency collaborated with several banner networks to get the Post-its on top websites in Russia. Clicking on the banners led you to a Post-it page, where you could create more stickers, edit or delete them all.
CREDITS
Client: 3M
Marketing Supervisor: Sergey Smolentsev
Marketing Coordinator: Yulia Smirnova
Agency: Proximity Russia
Creative Director: Andrew Kontra
Senior Copywriters: Polina Zabrodskaya, Anna Migaleva
Senior Art Director: Fernando Muto
Business Development Director: Mikhail Vdovin
Digital Director: Alexander Makarovsky
Senior Account Manager: Polina Zvereva
Digital Production House: INDEE Interactive
Producer: Alexey Zinchenko
UI designer: Egor Bernikov
Coders: Arina Vernidub, Andrey Zakurdaev, Oleg Nikanorov
Last summer, Russia imposed a full embargo on food imports from the European Union (as well as the U.S.) in retaliation for sanctions over Ukraine. This left authentic European food merchants in Moscow in a bit of a bind.
But one Italian grocery store there, Don Giulio Salumeria, kept selling its real Italian food—and came up with a bizarre out-of-home stunt to advertise to consumers without tipping off the police.
With help from agency The 23, the store developed a unique outdoor ad that could recognize police uniforms. Whenever the cops would appear, the ad would cycle out of its rotating display—in essence, physically hiding from the authorities.
The agency insists this was a real stunt. And if so, it is clever and amusingly weird. After emailing the case study all over the world, though, I’d think twice about answering the door when the Moscow police come knocking.
CREDITS
Client: Don Giulio Salumeria, Moscow
Owner: Giulio Zompi
Marketing Director: Anna Ipatova
Agency: The 23, Krasnogorsk
Creative director: Evgeniy Shinyaev
Creative director: Mikhail Tkachenko
Technology Director: Alexander Selifonov
Account Supervisor: Vera Kriulets
Director Of Photography: Nikolay Shinkarenko
Technical Assistant: Valeriy Oreshnikov
Proximity Russia lets us know that right now it’s available on Russian websites only, but if the initial response is positive, they’ll try to convince Post-it® to make it work all over the world. LETS TELL POST-IT THIS IS BRILLIANT Y’ALL!
It’s best to go slow, even on YouTube.
BBDO Russia uses the YouTube interface brilliantly for the video below, which purports to show dash-cam footage of a fatal accident. (Such videos are popular on YouTube in Russia.) But in fact, the 10-minute film shows nothing of the kind—just one car passing another.
However, if you fast-forward through the video by moving your cursor along the timeline (as viewers of this kind of material often do, searching for the accident), the preview thumbnails do depict a head-on collision with a truck. Thus, those who “speed” through the film experience an accident, while those who don’t speed do not. (The thumbnails also lead to the message “Don’t Rush” from the advertiser, insurance company Intouch.)
Clever as hell. Try it for yourself below.
If you saw a man drowning on social media, would you save him? That’s the metaphor at the heart of this bizarre ad for Mainpeople, a new Russian app designed to make charity more central to social media.
In the spot, half a dozen people stand on a dock watching and yammering while some poor guy flails around and swallows half the lake.
The cast of characters nicely skewers a range of clichés—there’s the paranoid conspiracy theorist, the smart-ass teenage boy, the cutesy teenage girl, the grown nerd spouting advice and statistics, the smarmy professor praising other countries, the indignant rich woman who blames the government.
Eventually, a sleazy contextual advertiser shows up and elbows his way into the conversation—flanked by two models in bikinis and rubber ducky life preservers (which are pretty awesome, I wouldn’t mind having one).
Nobody, though, can be bothered to actually lift a finger to help. And at the end of the parable, it’s clear, if not explicitly shown, that the victim actually drowns. (Though, in a clever bit of editing, an alternate reality shows the app quite literally saving him—someone pushes a button on it, and another man pulls him out onto the dock.)
The clip is, in a vacuum, amusing, playing on the perhaps too-obvious truth that there’s a lot of self-indulgent noise on networks like Facebook (and presumably VK), not to mention in a lot of the conversations anyone’s ever had about anything.
As for the apparent point—that people should be talking less and doing more to end suffering, broadly defined—it’s hard to argue the merits, but the mechanics are pretty fuzzy. There’s already no shortage of opportunities to donate to various causes via Facebook, for those who want them. Mainpeople’s website seems to suggest the app will streamline the process, making it easy to donate even when posting about unrelated subjects, and increasing the visibility of posts that come with a contribution (because it’s always smart to appeal to everyone’s vanity).
The brand’s name itself refers to people who are actually doing the heavy lifting of the charity work, and the app is supposed to let lazier types help simply by putting their money where their mouth is.
But even downloading another app seems like a lot of work.
CREDITS
Production: Stereotactic Moscow
Script: Pavel Karykhalin, Michael Lockshin
Director: Michael Lockshin
DOP: Ivan Lebedev
Executive producer: Pavel Karykhalin
Produced by Natalie Yurchenko, Lev Maslov
Composer: Oleg Karpachev
The worst thing about going to the movies is having to sit upright for a few hours to watch the film. Everyone knows lying down is the ideal viewing position for anything on a screen—or anything at all, for that matter.
No stranger to putting dream-like imagery in its advertising, Ikea moves even more directly into the bedroom with its latest stunt.
Moviegoers in the Russian town of Khimki are being treated to quite a surprise this month. After purchasing their tickets, patrons are led to a theater that’s been completely gutted and transformed into a giant bedroom, entirely outfitted with Ikea furniture.
Take a look-see at the video, which has some time-lapse shots of the construction and lots of shots of glee on people’s faces. The stunt runs through Dec. 14.
This is cool and all, but does Ikea make toilets too?
There’s nothing worse than waiting for something to download on your phone, especially if you are a 14-year-old boy waiting for sexy models to appear in your Instagram feed.
BBDO Moscow and Russian telecom MTS collaborated to baffle the crap out of followers of popular Instagram bloggers Victoria Bonya, Alena Vodonaeva and Anna Sedokova. In one of the troll-iest social media plays ever, these attractive Insta-celebrities posted photos captioned with the following hashtags: #sexy #oiled #myself #six #hot #naked #pumpedup #guys #red #latex #ass #withanimals #cat #bear #horse #experimenting #crazy #positions #wow #amazing #ohmygod.
Except the photos never loaded. In fact, they were just images of the loading screen.
Comments and engagement went through the roof as horny teens, animal lovers and basement dwellers freaked out upon realizing the images weren’t going to load at all. The models followed up by posting ads promoting MTS’s new 4G service and apologizing for the false expectations.
What is unclear is how the users reacted to having their dreams shattered.
CREDITS
Agency: BBDO Russia
Nikolay Megvelidze, creative director
Alexey Starodubov, creative group head / director / editor
Vladlena Obukhova, group account director
Luiza Vasyutina, account manager
Boris Anisonyan, head of tv production
Valery Gorokhov, producer
Kristina Malberg, celebrities producer (TMA)
Ekaterina Komolova, managing director (TMA)
Alexander Lubavin, art-director / composer
Elina Yaroslavskaya, digital account director
“Mobile Telesystems” (Client)
Natalia Glagoleva, director of marketing communications department
Maria Yakovleva, head of marketing communications department
Yaroslav Smirnov, head of marketing communications group
Anastasia Terekhova, marketing communications manager
Valery Kopytin, marketing communications manager
FreeParking (Production)
Alexander Polishuk, DOP
Maria Yakushina, producer
Andrey Rubtsov, head of production group
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