Molson Canadian scores Canada's favourite viral image of the moment #anythingforhockey

Via Molson

Go Canada!  #OurTeamCan

The most naked ad I've ever seen is refreshingly unperverted

According to the evolution of public lice, humans and our ancestors have been wearing some sort of clothing for up to 3.3 million years. But this mythological reimagining of the dawn of pants is a little less icky.

I didn't count them, but prepare yourself for a multitude of swinging penises. And twice as many bared breasts. (Although I suspect some of the women in the ad concealed their nether parts behind merkins.)



The short film, called "Studies On Hysteria", is sponsored content for Colorado Denim. It was a project by three German student directors, Matthias Bäuerle, Gabriel Borgetto, Bernd Faaß, from Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

It was shot at two open-air museums, which presented some logistical problems, according to this interview:

Since we were shooting with a naked cast, the managers of the museum didn’t want us to interfere with the school classes visiting on a daily basis. Hence, we could only shoot outside in the early morning and in the late afternoon when the museum was closed. However, due to a timing mistake, we were still shooting when the first grade school class passed by our set. I think they weren’t shocked too much, but the teachers wanted to call the cops… Fortunately they didn’t see us shooting the scene in the church.

The actors, apparently, are mostly real-life nudists who were recruited from online naturist communities. And I think that's why this thing ends up being entirely OK in my book. The nudity is equal, it's natural, and it's funny.

H/T Adrants

Cosmetics ad tries to objectify men, still makes women look shallow

On the surface, this campaign by Benefit Cosmetics seems to turn the tables on the sexual objectification of women by featuring men with "big packages":



In the end, however, it just goes back to the tired old stereotype of women being obsessive shoppers who derive more pleasure from products (in this case, mascara) than anything else. You've come a long way... baby?

Directed by Adam Patch. The music is  'Riding Low' From the album "Palatial" by Dirt Nasty. Tip via AdRants.

Radio Shack tries to sex-up its brand, fails

Radio Shack? Really?



The Wall Street Journal reports that the approach is moving product:

The ad, which has been out for about a week, has already gotten more than 600,000 hits on YouTube and the stores allegedly can’t keep the product in stock, according to a research note today from David Strasser, retail analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott.

“This shows a management team willing to take risk, and a desire to think outside the RadioShack box,” Mr. Strasser said of the new ad campaign. “It’s more like a beer commercial than a [consumer electronics] commercial, but that is what this company needs to attract certain target customer groups.”

Creatively, it's kind of sad. The ad is a direct lift from the original Robin Thicke (ft. T.I., Pharrell) video, "Blurred Lines":



This is borrowed interest taken to the extreme. The difference is, sexual objectification of women in music videos — ethics aside — is still a different thing than the same sexual exploitation perpetrated by a brand. One has a certain amount of artistic licence. The other is at the mercy of its customers, stockholders and partners. The lines between the music business and retail may be blurring, but there is still a difference when it comes to what they have to lose.

Radio Shack may be getting some renewed interest from this lazy marketing, but long-term they risk alienating customers. Including some who buy Beats by Dre.

AdFreak's David Gianatasio lays it out pretty succinctly:

Yes, the clip has quickly amassed 700,000 YouTube views. But RadioShack shouldn't get too excited about that, because I'm betting the numbers say more about the tune's smooth mojo and the sexy imagery on display than any renewed excitement about the retail brand. RadioShack comes off like an unhip, balding, middle-aged dude desperately trying to prove he's down with the kids—and failing badly. (Being unhip, balding and middle-aged myself, I should know!) The dying chain's desire for reinvention is understandable, but how tossing off quick-buzz pop-culture crap like this is supposed to help it survive over the long haul beats me.

Can this kind of teaser campaign still be effective? #smallenfreuden

It's like a combination of the fictional Gabbo! campaign from The Simpsons and early meme site Zombo.com.

As Marketing reports:

Several ominous orange billboards appeared in Toronto last week, posing a strange question: “Do you #smallenfreuden?” 

They feature no tagline, no brand logo and no call to action. Just a question with the term smallenfreuden (an English/German portmanteau meaning “the joy of small”) styled as a hashtag.

Doing some research, the Canadian ad blog found an obscure Twitter account and this video:



So what is it for? I'm not that curious, really. I'm more interested in seeing if such an old-school teaser campaign can still work, without either being prematurely outed or simply forgotten about before it reaches critical mass.

What do you think? Is this approach stuck in the 20th century, or will people pay attention long enough to be a captive audience?

UPDATE: It's Visa

American Eagle posts ad for spray-on skinny jeans

Tip/Photo via Buzzfeed

It's not April 1 yet, but the gags are starting early this year.

American Eagle has dedicated part of its site to the skinniest jeans possible: spray-on body paint.



Pretty funny stuff, but somehow I doubt the men would not be able to pull of the look as sleekly as the women.

"It's our skinniest fit yet and is so comfortable you'll feel like you're wearing nothing at all."

Points for being "cheeky" with a hint of PG sex, but being fairly tasteful and gender balanced about the shenanigans.

Dove advertises directly to Photoshoppers

Well, this is neat. Ogilvy One in Toronto anonymously created a fake Photoshop Action (a free add-on) for Dove, posted it on Reddit and on design forums, and presumed to trick Art Directors, designers and photo retouchers into downloading it. They called it "Beautify" and it was supposed to add a skin glow to models.

It did something entirely different:



Very clever PR stunt, but was anyone really duped? And if they were, what were their reactions? Nonetheless, the gag isn't really the ad that will meet Dove's objectives. The video is. It's on-brand, and extremely shareworthy. Well done!

Tip via Ads of The World

Is this unauthorized use of celebs to sell burgers a "hot mess"?

I've written before about how brands are using the viral lift of Buzzfeed to generate interest in new offers. But this may have crossed a line.

Jack In The Box has sponsored a Buzzfeed list, titled "14 Of The Most Notorious Celebrity Hot Messes," to promote its Hot Mess Burger.

"Hot Mess" itself is an evolving term, but is often applied to celebrities who are sloppily out-of-control and/or/were "hot". The Jack In The Box list includes Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson, Tara Reid, Katt Williams, Amanda Bynes, Courtney Love, Paz De La Huerta, Charlie Sheen, Kathy Lee and Hoda, Gary Busey, Victoria Jackson, Dustin Diamond, D'Angelo and Demi Moore, all with a description of well-known embarrassing behaviours and accompanied by unflattering pictures and animated gifs. At the end of the list is the sell:

Now, here's the tricky part. Scandal mags, celebrity blogs, and humour sites pretty much get a pass on exploiting celebrity trainwrecks to gain eyeballs. But this particular list looks like an ad. It's branded, and it is selling a product.

It's a well-known tactic to use world leaders or dead celebrities for attention. And PETA will make fun of live ones who screw up. But many of these cases are not-for-profits expressing their rights to political speech.

I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that using a celebrity's image and name without permission in a clearly commercial context (as opposed to the "fair use" in traditional media, blogs or activism) might violate those celebrities' Personality Rights.

In other words, showing a picture like this and naming names might be okay for Perez Hilton, but a corporation using it to sell hamburgers might be a bit of a... umm... hot mess?

The post has been up since February 1.

"Warm Wishes from Adland" shows the true Xmas spirit in the industry

Currently trending, "Warm Wishes from Adland" is an anonymous compilation of 21 bitter and cynical comments about other people's work, compiled from comments on Ads of The World, Agency Spy, or elsewhere. (But oddly, not Adland.)

Lovely.

Now who is going to take credit?

Via Twitter

UPDATE: Adfreak's David Gianatasio identified the culprits as "a bunch of staffers at BBH in New York":

Tim Nolan, the interactive group cd who heads up BBH Labs, tells AdFreak: "As we approach that time of year where we all wish each other the warmest, we thought we would look at how we, as an industry, extend our 'warm wishes' throughout the year and under the veil of anonymity. After carefully curating some of the worst 'semi-safe-for-work' comments from around Ad Land, we picked our favorites and gave them all a dip in holiday cheer." 

He adds: "Traffic has been pretty steady since launching [Tuesday] afternoon. Most of the original visits came in from Twitter and Facebook, since each 'Warm Wish' is individually sharable. I'd say we are more pleased with the 'trending-ness' of it all, rather than being surprised. I mean, everyone likes to share a bit of 'naughtiness' around the holidays."

Cigarette marketing to women, 1930s style

Retronaut unearthed a couple of weird 1930s ads for Virginia Rounds (grandmother brand to Virginia Slims), a cigarette by Benson & Hedges aimed at women.

The example above, with its sharable dark humour and user-generated content contest, isn't that different from "breakthrough" social media campaigns today. (Although the disregard for the baby's health would also create a massive social media PR meltdown in today's more sensitive media era.)

The campaign also used celebrity. Illustrator Russell Patterson was a legend, having helped define the flapper style in his 1920s cover and interior artwork for publications like The Saturday Evening Post, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Photoplay. He was also a successful syndicated cartoonist. 

The dated, but interesting, "girl power" approach in the ad above foreshadows Virginia Slims' 1960s pseudo-feminist marketing strategy of "You've come a long way baby". And like it, it commits the unforgivable crime of co-opting female empowerment to sell a deadly product.

I found one more ad from the series at tobaccodocuments.org:

If you know of any others, please share.

Durex China celebrates Obama with racist dick joke

"The difference between Obama and Romney is..."

Twitter is a-twitter with this Durex ad, apparently shared last night by Durex China. (Even though I can't find a Twitter feed for them.) It did, however, appear on beijingcream.com last month, where it can be tracked back to Durex China's Sina Weibo account.

"Weibo" means "microblog" and Sina Weibo is the most popular platform, with about 368 million registered users.

So the ad is apparently real. But it probably wasn't intended to be seen outside China. However, when it started being Tweeted this morning, it lost its provenance as it went viral. (I spotted it on a few friends' Facebook feeds.)

Nonetheless, can we get over obsessing about black men's penises now?

Fly safe with Durex

Adrants posted this funny stunt by Durex Poland. It's really quite simple, and a rather intuitive brand association with"safety instructions":



The only problem I have with it is that I don't believe the "guerrilla" aspect of it. I simply can't imagine getting that many camera angles on the reaction shots without very obviously making a video. It appears very staged to me.

Funny, though.

O Canada played on beer empties

It's Canada Day Weekend, hosers. And here's our national anthem performed on beer bottles, cans and kegs:



Have a good one, eh? (And thanks to Ryan for the tip - via HuffPo.)

Frog in Your Throat: Early 20th Century viral marketing

Retronaut just posted some wonderful old packaging for Frog in Your Throat, an early 20th Century patent medicine by Philadelphia's Hance Brothers & White.

What I really love is the included series of marketing postcards. 

I often indulge myself in a smug chuckle when I hear people bemoan the present day's media saturation as if it were something very recent. It was actually the Victorians who began the onslaught, and by 100 years ago, cities and towns were literally plastered with ads. You can still see the remnants of whole side of buildings painted with logos, and people on the street would have encountered endless posters, handbills, and even human ads in sandwich boards on every corner.

Their newspapers, of course, were full of ads. But so was their mailbox. 

You see, viral marketing is nothing new. From the late 1800s on, people went absolutely nuts over postcards. Cheap to mail, and decorated with interesting views, pithy sayings, or even a custom photograph, they made communicating with friends and family almost effortless. Like greeting cards, they allowed the sender to take ownership of someone else's creative idea and participate in popular memes.

"Memes"? Yes. They existed before Richard Dawkins coined the term. And with the mail being the social media of the day, is it any surprise that companies soon started virally marketing their brands through series of promotional post cards?

And so the Frog in Your Throat mascot became an early viral marketing star, interacting with the fashionable ladies of the day in a rakish manner:

Think of him as an ancestor of Looney Tunes' Michigan J. Frog and good old Kermit.

You can see more Frog in Your Throat marketing at Kosmic Dreams.

Ranch Dressing Vs. Ketchup: Battle of the lowbrow condiments

Earlier this year, Hidden Valley introduced a thickened version of its Ranch Dressing and positioned it as "the new Ketchup".

It's an obvious attempt at creating a new demand for an old product. Sometimes this works, like when Kleenex went from being a feminine hygiene product, to a makeup wipe, to a disposable hanky. Other times, it was just wrong.

In this case, however, Hidden Valley is riding a wave of gonzo food consumption, egged on by cheerleaders like This is Why You're Fat and Epic Meal Time. Why wouldn't Americans want to pour more fat and crap on their fried crap? Seems like a pretty good bet.

To help viralize the idea, they've been passing around this video of Ranch and Ketchup mascots duking it out in public. (Kind of like epic battle from Borat, but without the testicles.)



Meh. I'm just really disappointed that they didn't use the opportunity to have the Ketchup gush "blood" when he was getting whaled on at the end.

Seen on Buzzfeed (as a sponsored story)

How to sell bikes: a historical perspective

These pics are from a sponsored Buzzfeed post by Schwinn. It's a good strategy, really, and the ads are really interesting.

But a few jumped out at me:

Golden Age Hollywood Endorsement

"You know how to pedal, don't you Steve?"

And what a celebrity! There is no way anyone classier has ever sold bikes, like, ever. (and that includes Joan Crawford and Doris Day, who are on the complete list.)

Cowboy Endorsement

Complete with awesomely awkward headline!

The "Substitute for Parental Love" Angle

Years later, McDonald's would base its entire brand on this con.

...Great White Hunter Endorsement

As soon as the illustrator was done, he skinned the tiger to make a swell rug!

Sexual Innuendo

Does the seat vibrate or something?

Which leads us, naturally, to: 

Blatant Sexual Exploitation (of women)

Why does that always happen?

So there you have it: even in bicycle advertising, all roads lead to smut.

"Scumbag Steve" meme the latest victim of product placement

I miss the days when "meme" was a scientific term (coined by Richard Dawkins). But now it's so bastardized that most young 'uns thing it's what you call those captioned photos that are generated by morons and spread virally by their friends.

Scumbag Steve is one of the classics of the genre, based on a 6-year-old MySpace photo of a guy who calls himself Blake Boston. The whole idea behind it is to match his douchey expression with some dick move you'd expect from him.

According to fastcocreate.com's Joe Berkowitz, the version you see at the top of this post was actually seeded by Mekanism on popular image sharing site imgur in what must be the laziest "advertising" placement of all time.

From fastcocreate.com:

The ad is Imgur’s first step in a new Promoted Image ad unit. It will be featured in the site’s image gallery, alongside similar pieces of content. Users will be scrolling through images of the next Sad Keanu or Schrute Facts, and eventually encounter the Brisk version of the Scumbag Steve meme in an elevated profile. The next phase of the ads will require a more curatorial role for Mekanism, though.

I just have two questions:

• Why not just do this without paying, and use your own network to promote it?
• When does Blake Boston get paid?

Kotex wants women to write a breakup song to their old tampons

It's kind of a cool campaign. In addition to offering women the opportunity to write beak-up letters to their old pads and tampons, the Facebook page features a collaborative forum for writing a "breakup song".



This one actually seems to have struck a chord:

Being of the wrong gender, I unfortunately cannot participate. But that's probably for the best. I'd probably just end up making a joke involving the word "ragtime" and end up getting angrily flamed by hundreds of people with cramps.

What won't you put in your... you-know-what? #FdAdFriday

The normalization of the word "vagina" in public discourse continues with this fun campaign by Sir Richard's Condoms:



This is part of a viral campaign for their "chemical-free" condoms, which invites women to fill in this blank:

The company is encouraging sharing on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #VaginaRule.

They are also dabbling, once again, in sexual politics:

Good for them! Not only for a funny and empowering campaign, but for using the word "vagina" in an anatomically correct way.

Tip via AdFreak

"A Stretchy Hand" — new sticky viral from Coca-Cola

Go ahead. Do it! Go to astretchyhand.com and tell me you didn't waste a good five minutes (or more) on that sticky little thing.

(That's what she said.)