This ad, made by Watson & Lewis, makes you want to cancel all your appointments and book a trip to Italy instantly; beautiful people, beautiful scenery and an atmosphere you want to completely drown in. And although the Martini logo presence is a little dominant, it makes a very nice long form ad. The commercial is made for the Dutch market only. Why make such an international big budget commercial for such a tiny market? The reason is that they are using YouTube for the distribution and thus could allocate the whole media budget to production! Well allocated, we have to say.
‘Your vagina is vulnerable’ is a good way to grab everyone’s attention, right from the start! The commercial continues: “In your life you wear 4790 strings, use 69723 meters of toilet paper and 130 liters of shaving foam, you produce 1700 liters of sweat, have sex 3760 times and your period 2920 times”. En it ends with “Lactacyd helps to protect the natural balance of your vagina”. Although it only makes sense to use the ‘v’ word when you’re advertising ‘feminine intimate care’ products, there are not many FMCG manufacturers that would dare to do so. So our compliments go to GSK for being direct and speaking a language we understand. And even more compliments go to Grey Amsterdam for the stylish execution – it even makes the Lactacyd bottle look old fashioned. Interesting detail: beginning of this year Grey made a similar ad for Lactacyd with the ‘subtle’ difference that the commercial was filmed from within the vagina! GSK had it recalled, because some consumers complained about it at the Advertising Standards Authority.
Already in January we called this commercial about the Big Bank Theory by Dawn ‘state of the art storytelling’. Last weekend the beautiful animation, made by Postma Graphics and Motions, won a Dutch Design Award for best motion design. A good excuse to show it again.
Earlier we talked about FIFA 10, the new EA Sports game that was released beginning of October. Together with the game Wieden + Kennedy also created a new online platform, called FIFA Earth. This platform uses live data from the FIFA games that are being played around the world and translates these into a virtual globe. For example you can see how many games have been played (40 million when we took this screenshot!), which virtual clubs are hot and how they rank. The site also links to Twitter and shows football related tweets on the FIFA Buzz section – together with their geo location. We were told that there are plans already to enrich FIFA Earth with more data and functionalities that will blur the borders between the on and offline world of football even further. And it thus sounds like a very promising new Nike+like brand utility.
This beautiful commercial for Bavaria is created by Selmore, directed by Matthijs van Heijningen (the legendary Dutch film maker) and post produced by 8VFX. It should be no surprise that it immediately made us think of the legendary Noitulove campaign for Guinness by AMV/BBDO (Grand Prix, Cannes 2006) – “Good things come to those who wait”. And if you’re asking yourself why the drop, after its epic journey, is disrespectfully being swallowed by a bull dog, you need to know that Bavaria likes to position itself as a down to earth beer, also meant for the man in the street. So even though Bavaria likes to make big budget productions – especially since it has been working with Selmore – and is the “only beer brewed with pure mineral water”, it also comes to those who accidently catch it.
“There comes a moment when you’re ready for something new” is what this commercial is telling us in quite a complicated way. The reason for this is explained by the pay-off: ‘Royal Club, soft drink for the advanced’. It is made by Alfred. And although the concept of the traveling garden gnome is clearly copied from the movie ‘Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain’, we still appreciate the sympathetic little fellow and think the commercial is quite skillfully made.
Brilliant in its simplicity. This ad by Indie for Dominos doesn’t need much explanation. And that’s a smart thing when you’re talking to hungry builders about pizza. If it’s up to us, prize winning already.
It has probably been done before, but that doesn’t matter, because this online ad agency (‘Papercut’) simulator is very well executed by real life agency Qi. It was initiated by the VEA (Association of Advertisers) to give secondary school students a peek into the world of advertising. The site takes them by the hand in learning the ins and outs of the advertising process; there’s a difficult client – lingerie brand Guilty – a briefing, a timeline and a team of typical ad people. There are phone conversations, difficult questions, brainstorms, strategic positioning diagrams, sketches, traffic problems, deadlines and client presentations. Thoroughly done and very educational. It must have been a time consuming project! So either Qi got heavily underpaid or the VEA is very rich. In any case, a good way to persuade teenagers towards advertising at a relatively young age.
It is not always easy to sell snowboard related products. The advertising needs to have a well balanced campy-hip-casual undertone – otherwise the picky crowd doesn’t ‘buy’ it. With this guide to Rudeville – a guide that should draw attention to the well equipped snowboard chalets, called rudechalets™ – KK Outlet (KesselsKramer’s London annex) did quite a good job. First we took it for a hoax – which is a good sign – but the chalets actually do exist and are located around Chamonix, France. They are facilitated with “Xbox 360s in every room as standard, bubbling Jacuzzis and a Burton on-site test centre”. What else do you want? The guide is larded with well written bullshit. For example, it introduces a fictional character who runs the bar ‘Chez Roger’: “Some foolish types believe the bar is named after Roger, but he in fact changed his name to Roger when he bought the bar in 1989. (…) Rumour has it he has a tattoo of his face on his face and won his snowboarding-dog Paul in a bare-knuckle fight with Brian May”. We rest our case.
We saw the premiere of this beautiful trailer for the international Playgrounds Festival on Wednesday at Press Play, a special launch for the festival, held at hybrid studio PostPanic. We have to admit that we had never heard of the festival before – maybe because it’s held in Tilburg – but learned it shows the best of digital audiovisual art in the world – music videos, animations, commercials, character design, VFX and games. The event at PostPanic gave the Amsterdam creative community a taste of what’s to come next year when the festival relocates to the city. There were four artist talks on the night; UVA (London), Pleix (Paris), Dvein (Barcelona) and PostPanic’s Mischa Rozema. This trailer, combining live action with animation, was directed by Onesize and produced by Revolver Media. It conveys the essence of the festival; creating a 3D fantasy that looks so authentic that it becomes reality.
