Third World sweatshop scandal, what Third World sweatshop scandal? Nike joins in the fight against HIV//AIDs in Africa with his new commercial, featuring Didier Drogba, Andrei Arshavin, Clint Dempsey, Denilson, Marco Materazzi, Javier Mascherano, Fabio Cannavaro along with Maria Sharapova and Kobe Bryant. Well done!
Archive for the 'Videos' Category
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Quite aside from all of the tasteless, sophomoric Super Bowl ads that make it to broadcast, there are now spots created intentionally to be “banned” in the hope they might go viral via social media. Below, one reputed such currently “under review” by CBS. It’s lame, of course, but not nearly so tasteless as the notorious Snickers commercial a few years back, the one in which two car mechanics inadvertently kiss, then rip out their chest hair.
Maybe that’s going a bit far , but anthropologist Grant McCracken (interviewed in Shoptimism) pays high tribute to this Nike spot produced seven years ago. Culturally, right on the button, he argues in his new book, Chief Culture Officer. The commercial’s well done, no doubt, but the fact that it was shot in Toronto may have ignited Canadian McCracken’s joyful enthusiasm for it.
The spot here, an initiative from the Metropolitan Police (London), just won an award in the U.K. for advertising in the service of social and non-profit advertising:
For a snapshot of how dismal the state of today’s advertising creative efforts, consider the spot following. It was selected as the “Ad of the Day” by the trade pub Adweek. Why? “Pop Secret’s new campaign from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners features the inhabitants of a Pop Secret street where animated kernels enjoy movie night together. The character development and animation are great, and the kernels have just the right texture to give them their hard dense forms.”
Fascinating how Domino’s Pizza is aggressively advertising how rotten its product was, via TV spots that feature presumably accurate focus group testimony and management’s commitment to a “pizza turnaround.” I’m wondering if a Detroit automaker might have found redemption in a similar strategy. Domino’s is going so far as to post a lot of online footage that fuels the campaign:
Barbara Lippert, a former neighbor, has been covering advertising for Ad Age for years and years. The other day she posted her favorite Super Bowl commercial of all time, a Monster.com spot that ran in 1999, Said Lippert: “Created at the peak of the dot-com bubble, it…shows that while the Internet taketh away, it also giveth….And the lines the kids say are still rueful….”:
Then how about splurging on something semi-unnecessary such as the world’s first fully transparent toaster, brought to market by Maginix, the French-Belgian appliance maker. I’m not sure the see-through browner is yet available in the U.S., though it’s coming soon. There is, however, this promotional video, complete with what sounds likes a musical score lifted from a smoldering soft-core porn flick from the Fifties.
If you’re a Sell Side marketer, Social media can cut both ways. It can make a product or freak out your customers. The commercial below is for a line (Apoliva) of personal-care products, though it was perceived to be so spooky that over 100,000 viewers joined a Facebook group called “I am scared of the girl in the Apoliva commercial.”
Jeep, languishing as a four-wheel-drive vehicle, may have a future as a four-wheel-drive musical instrument:
