Friday is upon us and some of us will be enjoying so much needed down time from our desks. Others of us however will be back at home tidying up loose ends or making headway into a big job. That said, you might also be going back into your office to create a remote controlled rally around your office like these guys.
A fantastic video, well worth sticking around until the very end of to see F1 world champion Lewis Hamilton embrace his Blackberry.
Do I love this ad campaign more because it’s French? Probably. It’d be super cool from anywhere though. Intermarché – a big supermarket chain in France – decided it was time to save an endangered species from the rubbish bin; ugly duckling fruit and veg. In the UK a whopping 40% of greens don’t reach our shelves simply for being a bit unfortunate looking and globally we waste $750 billion worth of food each year. Ouch.
If you watched any of this year’s World Cup you’ll most likely have noticed all the players strutting about in pairs of weightless neon boots. If, like me, you don’t really pay attention to that kind of thing, then you may not have known what they were. Luckily this stunning spot from ManvsMachine grabbed my attention for long enough to inform me that they were Nike’s latest Mercurial Superfly boot, capable of eviscerating a giant marble army of footballing warriors with their superhuman speed. But more important than my education in high-performance footwear was my appreciation of the phenomenal skill of Mike Alderson and his team at ManvsMachine whose ability to turn pure fiction into a believable, 3D-rendered reality is nothing short of breathtaking.
Remember the Speedo-clad old dude strolling casually through beach-bronzed beautiful people in Wieden + Kennedy’s hugely popular Southern Comfort spot a few years back? Course you do (and it’s still worth a watch in case you were wondering). Anyway Young Gun is the latest spot in the campaign and we think it’s another winner. If you’ve ever stood incandescent with rage as a barman holds up the entire queue showing off their “moves,” then you’ll enjoy this.
You and I dear reader look at a beret and see what? A GCSE textbook staple; an affectation, an effortless shorthand stereotype (often teamed up with a stripey Breton top and a string of onions)? But directorial team Tenis looked at a beret and realised it could be repurposed into a perfect record player. This charming short spot has been released to promote the new collaboration between peSeta and Marc Jacobs, although the espadrilles themselves don’t make an appearance until quite late in the day.
According to the new Stella Artois campaign, “There are no rules,” and “Continuity is clearly overrated.” These mysterious instructions actually come from the great Wim Wenders, who stars in the new Stella promotional short titled Wim Wenders’ Rules of Cinema Perfection.
This advertising world descended on Cannes last week for the annual sun-kissed celebration of some of the best work created during the past 12 months. With multiple winners across the 16 categories you’d be forgiven for struggling to keep up with who won what, but the excellent official winners’ website is the best place to get acquainted with the big picture. Here we’ve picked out a few examples of winners that caught our eye; some bits we’d championed on the site before and some we came across for the first time via the Lions.
Whenever Tom Darracott and Carl Burgess join forces the results are spectacular. The two directors and digital specialists are experts at creating polished 3D-generated worlds that feel part computer game, part hyper-real dream – every element a slightly altered version of a recognisable, real-world object. Even when they’re advertising clothes the pair produce unconventional results that delight and disorientate your eyes with their effortless surrealism. Their latest campaign for Loft is no exception, showing the brand’s brightly coloured collection folding itself into a state of geometric order.
Parties thrown to celebrate getting your first period aren’t really a thing, but if they were then uterus piñatas, “pin the pad on the period”, bobbing for ovaries and vagicians should be 100% obligatory. Created by the same absolute geniuses who dreamed up Camp Gyno last time around, Jamie T. McCelland and Pete Marquis, this brilliant advert for monthly sanitary care packages by Hello Flo is just as hilarious as the last one, but with more one-liners – see “your Grandpa is bobbing for ovaries like a champ!” – than you can shake a big, unadvertisable sanitary towel at. I’ll stop now for fear of ruining the fun, but this might be the best advert we’ve seen this year.
I heard recently about something called the arc of expectation which writers and comedians use to build up their ideas. For its latest campaign, Volkswagen UK is disrupting this arc in sumptuous cinematic style. Launched to promote the car giant’s longstanding support of independent UK cinemas, Made for Real Life by adam&eveDBB takes iconic blockbuster movie moments and shows what would actually happen if the high tech VW safety systems came into play. This Speed homage is the first of three films to be released over the coming months [N.B. The second in the series, Explosion is now available below!] and its slick production values ensures the neat central idea is played to maximum effect. Great work all round.
Last week I saw the photographer Jess Bonham give an excellent talk about her work, during which she showed this project for Kenzo which I had never come across before. Collaborating with long-term partner in creative crime Anna Lomax, she created this series of GIFs to mark the launch of the brand’s Resort 2014 edition in association with New Era. Playful and visually arresting, it’s rare to see the GIF used so neatly in a commercial context and is proof positive of why you should trust creatives of Jess’ and Anna’s calibre to deliver the goods.
In my humble but heartfelt opinion everyone even remotely connected to the creative industries should watch this amazing promo for next month’s Creative Fuel conference in Sydney. The strapline for the conference is “Cut the bullshit and focus on creativity” but we get there the hard way via this funny but at times excruciatingly close to the bone spoof. It follows a group of creative industry types and their plans for The World’s First Crowd Sourced 3D Printed QR Code, Live Streamed Via GoPro To A Mobile Or Tablet Device, Drone Delivery Ticket System Project, which we are constantly ensured will be a “gamechanger.”
It’s so packed with quotable lines that I don’t really want to spoil it, but a special mention must go to: “It’s very hard to find an idea so sometimes we just…don’t.” Clients don’t escape censure either (“I don’t understand it but I love it!”) and the little details are to die for; pay attention to the captions and look out for the fridge full of awards.
If you don’t give a toffee about typography, then the fixation on any font probably seems a touch tedious. But this fantastic new film from Steven Qua for The Times newspapers is an engaging and accessible exploration of this famous typeface, which takes in both its history and its current incarnations at the newspaper for whom it was designed. There’s insights from the likes of Andy Altmann, Marina Willer, Neville Brody and Monotype’s Dan Rhatigan so there’s more than enough here for both the initiated and the as-yet-to-be-converted to enjoy.
My Mum emailed this to me yesterday with the subject title of “try and guess what this is advertising.” Wrongly thinking I’d outwit her, I watched it the whole way through and was still stumped until about three seconds from the end. What a triumphant piece of advertising from none other than some graduates of the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. The ad’s three years old, so we can assume the men behind it, creative Andre Price and direct Andreas Roth, are both powerful filmmakers or ad-men nowadays. You don’t get much better than this fantastic, thrilling advert for what is promoting, in all honesty, a very dull product indeed. It’s dramatic, it’s spine-tingling and it’s genuinely funny enough to make you squeak a little giggle out at the end – and you can’t say that for many ads these days.
