The wireless wars have been getting notoriously dirty, and now Sprint has come up with the most deviously clever attack yet—signing up Paul Marcarelli, who worked for years as Verizon’s “Can you hear me now?” guy, as its own spokesman.
Canadian mobile carrier Koodo doesn’t needlessly complicate things in this new campaign from Toronto agency Camp Jefferson.
Portraying itself as a company that’s fair and honest, and makes lots of people happy, Koodo is using the line “Choosy Happy.” And the ads simply try to capture the idea of happiness in ways that are giddy, cute, surreal and fun.
The brand worked with a slew of illustrators, animators, designers, artists and directors to create bit-size images of happiness, from an animated loop of a robot slipping on a banana peel to images of smiling popsicles and dogs that turn into bunnies.
Check out some of the campaign materials below. It’s like the happy side of the Internet threw a party that lasted for a week.
CREDITS
Client: Koodo Mobile
VP, Marketing Communications: Dan Quick
Director, Marketing Communications: Lise Doucet
Manager, Marketing Communications: Dragana Simao
Manager Quebec, Marketing Communications: Jennifer Robertson
Agency: Camp Jefferson
Executive Creative Director: Paul Little
Associate Creative Director: Julie Nikolic, Chris Obergfell
Copywriter: Paul Little, Rich Cooper, Michelle Colistro, Stefan Wegner
Art Director: Julie Nikolic, Andrew Passas, Chris Obergfell, Caroline Friesen
Designer: Andrew Passas, Mo Bofill
Tech Lead: Thomas Schemmer
Director of Integrated Production, Producer: Jen Mete
Print Production Manager: Marietta Sterman
Integrated Production Coordinator: Lily Tran
SVP, Managing Partner: Peter Bolt
VP, Director of Planning: Andre Louis
VP, Director of Social and Innovation: Ian Barr
Social Content Strategist: Chris Campaner
VP, Director of Client Services: Edith Rosa
Account Supervisors: Lisa Taylor, Suyi Hua, Melanie Abbott
Account Coordinator: Sabrina Zavarise
French Agency: K72
Copywriter: Marc-Andre Savard
Art Director: Sebastien Boulanger
VP, Strategy: Michelle-Alex Lessard
Account Director: Rosalie Laflamme
Account Coordinator: Genevieve Turmel
Production Houses: Mike Perry Studios w/Suneeva, 1stAvenueMachine & MOM
Directors: Mike Perry, Karim Zariffa, Julien Vallée, Eve Duhamel
Executive Producers: Geoff Cornish, Sam Penfield, Richard Ostiguy
Artist Representative: Laura Beckwith
Head of Production: Lisanne McDonald
Line Producer: Annya Williams, Guillaume Vallée
Directors of Photography: Anna Wolf, Simon-Pierre Gingras
Photographer: Scottie Cameron
Set Designer: J Bell
Art Director: Louise Schabas
Animation Director: Mike Perry
Assistant Animation Director: Jim Stoten
Lead Animators: Isam Prado, Maya Eldelman
Animator: Lizzi Akana
Editorial House: 1stAvenueMachine
Editor: Marc-Antoine Croteau
Transfer: Ricart & Co.
Colourist: Seth Ricart
Online: 1stAvenueMachine
Online Artist: John Loughlin
Audio / Music House: Apollo Studios
Creative Director + Music Producer: Daenen Bramberger
Audio Engineer: Spencer Hall
Executive Producer: Tom Hutch
Development: Ransom Profit
Lead Developer: Heung Lee
Developer: Tony Valderrama
We came here from the Internet as fast as we could to tell you of a brand-new development in seafood technology: the fried shrimp gun. With flour, egg yolk, tempura flakes and a soupçon of billowing fire, you can blast your shellfish craving into oblivion, apparently.
The minute-long video appears to be an ad for Japanese cell phone company NTT DoCoMo, the biggest cell provider in the country. It has a few other shorts on its YouTube channel that are difficult for non-Japanese speakers to appreciate, but hooray for the shrimp gun.
This is a mother-daughter team of shrimp-projectile experts, I guess? What’s great about it is that the mom stops the daughter mid-fry to tell the daughter there’s obviously a better way to make shrimp tempura. And so begins the daughter’s nightmare journey into invertebrate firearm cookery, complete with an excellent shot of the younger woman flinching as her mother calmly launches the shrimp toward a target across the room.
Shrimp guns may be specific, but the experience is universal.
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
If you can dream it, someone can steal it.
That could be the moral of the story of Stun Fone, a fictitious attachment that turned your smartphone into a stun gun, devised a few years back by Los Angeles ad agency and production studio Stun Creative. A video demo of this 90,000-volt fake gadget went viral (the original clip was pulled off YouTube, but a copy is posted below), racked up millions of tweets and won an "experimental and weird" Webby honor. Sadistic folks all over the world clamored for one.
Well, the wait's over, and the real version, made by a company called Yellow Jacket, is significantly more muscular than the one cooked up by Stun Creative's Brad Roth and Mark Feldstein as a quirky promotion for their business. Yellow Jacket will sell you a detachable stun-gun case for the iPhone 5 that can shoot 650,000 volts of electricity into a would-be predator (or unfortunate butt-dialer?) for just $149. Bonus: It doubles as a battery charger and makes a noise that's "throaty and intimidating," according to CNET.
The device, launched at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will be available next month, complete with safety switches so you don't fry your ears off. No word on revenue splits or a licensing fee to the original "creators," although they don't seem overly bothered by the new product. In fact, it was Stun Creative's PR team that pointed us to it.
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Remember the "map wars" of 2009, when AT&T and Verizon spent a combined $4 billion on ads (and went to court) to claim coverage-area supremacy? Well, it looks like Verizon is firing another round of salvos.
For a new installment of its "Reality Check" campaign, Verizon and McCann New York created a modern art gallery featuring 4G coverage areas offered by competitors AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. Visitors are asked to describe what they see, with the point being that few can recognize the illustrations as maps of the United States.
It's a clever gag and not overly aggressive, but will it mark the start of another round of cartography conflict?
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Smartphones are lovely, but they're also wasteful—not worth repairing when they break, quickly obsolete in a hyper-competitive market. But what if there were a different model, one where a phone's pieces could be easily removed, repaired, customized and upgraded? That's the idea behind the Phoneblok. It is (or would be—it hasn't been made yet) a smartphone made of detachable "bloks" connected to a base that locks everything together into a solid phone. If a blok breaks, you can replace it; if a blok gets old, you upgrade it. At the "Blokstore"—a kind of app store for hardware—you buy bloks, sell bloks, buy a pre-assembled phone or assemble your own by selecting the bloks made by brands you want to support. The idea, from Dutch designer Dave Hakkens, is pretty fascinating—even if critics say it's impractical and/or technologically infeasible. Phoneblok has undertaken a Thunderclap campaign to raise awareness, and is promising big things for Oct. 29. Meantime, check out phonebloks.com for more, and watch the video below. There's a reason it's gotten more than 12 million views in a week.
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Looking for a tear-jerker today? Thai mobile company TrueMove has got you covered with this story of a noodle seller whose generous act toward a young boy with a sick mother brings unexpected rewards 30 years later.
With almost 6 million hits in just a few days, the ad is getting lots of press. The tagline is, "Giving is the best communication." It's not entirely clear (at least in the ad) how that relates to a mobile company, but frankly, it doesn't need to. The buzz (and the vague hope that it will encourage random acts of kindness among viewers) is all that really matters.
Oddly, instead of focusing on the story, a bunch of bloggers have latched onto the ad and are using it to start a flame war with American advertisers about why we can't come up with ads this moving and cinematic. Way to generalize, guys. I didn't see you talking about awesome Thai ads when they punked you last month with the hot chick who was a dude.
I guess that was a different kind of crying game.
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O recurso visual não é novidade, foi utilizado insistentemente pelo cinema e publicidade nos últimos anos. Ainda assim, o tracking com cena congelada se aplica bem nesse comercial da New Zealand Telecom, anunciando que a espera acabou com seus planos de banda larga.
A criação é da Saatchi & Saatchi, com produção da GoodOil.
Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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Sure, I've tried to cross a dog with a cat. Who hasn't? All I got for my trouble was a face full of claws and another year in therapy. Ad agency VCCP does a better job of it for U.K. mobile telecom O2 in this commercial, in which a ginger Tom starts chasing cars, fetching sticks and generally behaving like Rover. I'm not sure why Queen's bellicose, bombastic theme from the campy 1980 version of Flash Gordon is used on the soundtrack. Maybe the song doesn't really suck, but only dogs have sharp enough hearing to tell? Anyway, Tabby's willingness to "Be more dog" (the spot's tagline) is supposed to inspire viewers to get out of their ruts and try new things, like products and services from O2. That stretches the leash a bit in terms of brand message. Even so, any pet that catches frisbees and can be trained to use a litter box is OK by me.
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In an attempt to become relevant again, BlackBerry is jumping into the movie business—though shorter than feature length. Two days after wrapping Sin City 2, awe-inspiring film director Robert Rodriguez (also known for Spy Kids, Desperado and From Dusk Till Dawn) partnered with BlackBerry to direct the short film Two Scoops as a part of BlackBerry's "Keep Moving" project.
Two Scoops was written, produced and shot by Rodriguez, but three scenes were left incomplete. Fans of Rodriguez (and presumably of BlackBerry) could then help complete the story by tweeting ideas, submitting SFX ideas and conceptualizing weapons/props to be incorporated into the final film.
As it turns out, the completed film is just what one might expect from the eccentric Rodriguez—featuring a strange, futuristic, monster-filled world with massive toy-like weapons and scantily clad twins in search for their missing father. Oh, and a splash of that slightly awkward Spanish comedy. Like all Rodriguez films, things are not as they seem.
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Any Mother's Day commercial with Susie Essman is not going to be warm and fuzzy. The Curb Your Enthusiasm star appears in the new online video below for Virgin Mobile urging young adults to give their moms a great gift this Mother's Day—by getting off the family cellphone plan and getting on one of Virgin's no-contract deals (starting at $35 per month for unlimited text and data). According to a recent survey Virgin Mobile survey, 46 percent of Americans in their 20s still receive some sort of financial assistance from their parents. Half also said they know at least one friend who is still on their parents' mobile plan, and 38 percent said they would hide it from their friends even if they were. Today only, Virgin Mobile is giving online customers 30 percent off the purchase of a new Samsung Galaxy Victory 4G LTE to switch over to one of its no-contract plans.
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While TNT has set the bar pretty high for interactive stunts in public spaces (in Holland, at least), there's still something charming about this "Best Bus Stop Ever" video from mobile firm Qualcomm. When commuters responded via mobile to a Qualcomm URL advertised on a bus shelter, the site triggered a real-world experience, such as a woman offering a ride in a Lamborghini for those who responded to the ad labeled "In a hurry?" Another ad with the headline "Seen it all?" triggered a dog sled team to arrive, and a response to "Bored?" sent in a bus of circus performers to terrorize entertain the crowd. Hat tip to The Presurfer.
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Advertising Agency: JWT Kuwait Creative Director: Maher Awar Agency Producers: Gilbert Nahas, Edgard Jimbashian Production & Animation: ABL Executive Producer: Sandra Petsaridis Executive Director: Tony Srour Animation Director: Rappas Post Producer: Daniel Petsaridis Via [mediaME]
Production House: Kiwi Productions, Jordan Creative Concept: The Online Project (TOP) Via [mediaME]
Advertising Agency: Impact BBDO Kuwait Via [Ads2Blog]
Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett Cairo, Egypt
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
