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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25lMEQeeGKQ
Maisie Williams, better known as Arya Stark from Game of Thrones, parodies make up ads in this hilarious campaign for Three. Via TIME:
Maisie Williams is taking on the beauty industry in a new commercial for Three, an internet service provider in the U.K.
During the nearly two-minute long spot, the 19-year-old actress, who plays Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, promotes the company’s new 4G Super-Voice technology by revealing how she gets rid of black spots — a name for both areas without wireless signal and skin blemishes.
She parodies all the clichés of a stereotypical skincare ad, contrasting her newfound confidence with the dread she used to feel at the thought of leaving her room. “I wake up in the morning and can’t wait to check how many Hollywood job offers I’ve had,” she says during one hilarious moment.
The ad is by agency Gravity Road, and was made for social media, promoting Three’s 4G Super Voice Technology. Maisie Williams is no stranger to prank videos, having pranked fans before in various incidents, including the time when she pretended to be a cashier at an American hobby store:
Here’s to hoping that Arya survives the next season of Game of Thrones… and maybe becomes Queen of Westeros.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnR9ah0v1o4
Geico is on a roll, with another hilarious commercial starring a bunch of cute neighborhood kids and Ice T by the Martin Agency. Funny, if not as near the level of genius as Geico’s previous “Unskippable” ads. Via CampaignLive:
Rapper and actor Ice-T helps kids run a lemonade stand in the latest punny spot in Geico’s “It’s Not Surprising” campaign. The 30-second spot features starstruck pedestrians and an irascible Ice-T, as well as a behind-the-scenes video and a longer film for social in which the rapper explains the fundamentals of selling. It made its TV debut on Thursday night football during the rematch between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos.
And behind the scenes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTvrp441ZbY
Credits
Agency: The Martin Agency
Chief Creative Officer: Joe Alexander
Group Creative Director: Steve Bassett
Group Creative Director: Wade Alger
Creative Director: Sean Riley
Art Director: Jesse Mitchell
Senior Copywriter: Ken Marcus
Copywriter: Ryan Durr
Executive Producer: Brett Alexander
Broadcast Producer: Brian Camp
Associate Broadcast Producer: Coleman Sweeney
Junior Broadcast Producer: Sara Montgomery
Account Director: Ben Creasey
Account Supervisor: Allison Hensley
Account Executive: Jon Glomb
Account Coordinator: Allie Waller
Business Affairs Supervisor: Suzanne Wieringo
Financial Account Supervisor: Monica Cox
Senior Production Business Manager: Amy Trenz
Project Manager: Karen McEwen
Production Company: RadicalMedia
Director: Steve Miller
Executive Producer: Gregg Carlesimo
Head of Production: Frank Dituri
Editorial Company: Running With Scissors
Editor: Drew Neuhart
Executive Producer: Brian Creech
Producer: Katherine Brackman
Color: Drew Neuhart
Stock Music: Lulatone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWxyRG_tckY
TGIF! What are you guys up to this weekend? We’re planning to catch up on Netflix’s Stranger Things. In case you haven’t heard about it, it’s the latest Netflix hit starring Winona Ryder, a love letter to 80s supernatural films, right down to the typefaces. Via Vox:
Stranger Things is a knowing genre pastiche, an attempt to recreate the feeling of 1980s movies by assembling famous motifs and moments from them as if making a collage. Even the story is largely a riff on Stephen King’s novels of the period. Why does Stranger Things get to be “original” when a more direct remake doesn’t?
The answer is simple: We don’t really want original stories. We want to hear stories we’ve already heard, retold in slightly different ways.
And for more about its great title sequence:
To give the show its retro opening look, Imaginary Forces, the production studio behind the sequence, actually went back to an old-fashioned credits-making process. The team printed out the main logo on film and set up camera tests to see what it looked like when light passed through the film sheet. Using those camera shots as references, they then animated the sequence digitally.
The main logo was based off novel covers that Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer collected. The final result — riffing somewhere between Stephen King’s The Dead Zone and Nick Sharman’s The Cats — uses ITC Benguiat, a vaguely art nouveau font that has appeared on everything from Choose Your Own Adventure books to a 1987 album by the Smiths.
This hilarious new ad for Virgin Atlantic warns against taking a vacation in the office. The ad tries to promote taking an (actual) vacation by highlighting the drudgery of office drone life. Via Adweek:
The ad does a nice job of inciting the kind of desperation that makes you want to tear off your necktie and run, reinforcing Virgin Atlantic’s recently launched “One Day” campaign, a celebration of fantasy and spontaneity. However you feel about your job, we can probably all agree there’s a benefit to clocking out in favor of different experiences, people and thoughts (especially in advertising).
Expect to see outdoor, press, digital and social campaigns related to #GetOutOfOffice, whose very title is a play on the out-of-office messages we post when we’ve thrown our cover sheets into the air and zipped out the door. Virgin Atlantic is concurrently also promoting a limited selection of discounted flights to a variety of destinations.
If you hurry, you might still catch the sun setting over a beach.
Credits
Client: Virgin Atlantic
VP of Marketing: Hamish Rickman
Creative Agency: adam&eveDDB
Account Manager: Georgie Carroll
Copywriter: Simon Pearse
Art Director: Emmanuel Saint M Leux
Media Planner: Jessica Treasure
Planner: Martin Beverley
Business Director: Sam Lecoeur
Account Director: Mike Beer
Media Strategy: PHD
Post Production House: The Mill
Directors: The Bobbsey Twins From Homicide
Production Company: Blink
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foL9gfbfweY
This tv ad full of famous, fake TV doctors encourages people to get a checkup (with a real doctor). Ahh. All the medical drama nostalgia. Via AdAge:
In addition to the fact that up to 100,000 lives a year can be saved if people receive preventative care, according to the CDC, Mr. Cassell said there’s “an economic reason” to focus on annual checkups and health numbers around blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and Body Mass Index (BMI). People who know their four health numbers can save up to $1,400 a year in out-of-pocket costs, according to the 2014 Cigna Affordability Study. Also, the CDC reports that 86% of healthcare costs in the U.S. come from treating people with chronic diseases.
“And most people don’t even know that annual checkups are free,” said Mr. Cassell, who added that preventative care is better than reactive care because it allows a better chance for treatment and it can save people money.
In addition to its marquee TV spot, Cigna will bring the campaign to life on digital and social, such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, said Mr. Cassell. The brand is also looking at doing sponsored content on Facebook, and Mr. Cassell said the TV doctors are “all actively involved” and will do some interviews and social media pushes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9Ka3a7cdYw
The Meat & Livestock Australia’s new Spring Lamb campaign is its most diverse ad yet. Via the MLA’s website:
The 2016 Spring Lamb campaign continues the ‘You never Lamb alone’ platform and highlights lamb’s role in a modern and diverse Australia. It proves that there is no other meat that brings people together quite like lamb.
A traditional 30 Second TVC and 90 second online content piece cuts to the chase and addresses the fact that we are a welcoming and inclusive society that loves lamb, by featuring a cast of Aussies from all walks of life, coming together over a lamb barbecue. This content will be supported by a comprehensive media plan to reach Australians in all communities.
The plan uses 2011 Census data to gain an insight into the social fabric of our neighbourhoods and key ethnic groups, and used this data to inform a multi-language News Limited Community Press partnership and high-impact outdoor advertising activity. Focusing on areas with diverse backgrounds, it will spread unique messages linking lamb to diversity e.g. language, sexuality, culture and physical ability. Further embracing unity the lamb message will also be spread across ethnic print press and in language social media (WeChat and Weibo).
Taking the message to the table is a partnership with start-up platform called Feed Up (the Airbnb of food). A month of ‘Lamb get-togethers’ on this pop-up dining community will literally bring people together over lamb. Chef George Calombaris and a series of influencers will host their events and spread the message across their channels, as they encourage people to get involved.
Check out a century’s worth of stop motion animation, following the release of the critically acclaimed Kubo and the Two Strings. Via Nerdist:
From Clash of the Titans to Terminator to Nightmare Before Christmas, stop-motion animation has been popular since the beginning of cinema. In honor of the latest offering in the genre, Kubo and the Two Strings, Vugar Efendi has posted a video on Vimeo showing the history of stop-motion animation, combining 119 years of work into three minutes. To refresh your memory on the technique, it’s a physical object moved or replaced in increments and filmed to suggest movement, and Laika Studios (who did Kubo and the Two Strings) has been doing some pretty crazy work in the field, from Coraline to The Boxtrolls. A couple years ago, I got to travel to the studios for the later film and check out the absolutely insane amount of work that goes into one of those films, demonstrating that modern stop-motion animation often takes as much work as it did back in the early days, if not more. For instance, one character may have to have 50 facial expressions sculpted before the film starts, and you’re often taking fabric movement into consideration, like they did in the party scene, where dozens of ladies were dancing in flowing dresses.
The video is a gorgeous reminder of exactly how long this has been done, showing early examples of a baker seeing a stop-motion rat running out of his bakery in 1902, and a giant King Kong on top of the Empire State Building in the 1933 film. Remember letting the Wookie win in the Dejarik game in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope? And again in The Force Awakens? A certain lovable creeper’s weird head movements and monsters in Beetlejuice? All of these were examples of stop-motion animation.
The Know No campaign aims to teach young people about consent. Via Adweek:
Two women at Marc USA, Snake Roth and Stephanie Franke, came up with the idea for the campaign following news the Brock Turner, the man convicted of raping an unconscious Stanford University student, would serve a very short sentence for his crime. After seeing the overflow of outrage from friends and family, the two women got to thinking about how they could make an impact and help stop incidents like these from happening in the future.
What the women learned was that there is still a very large grey area around what consent is. People didn’t seem to understand that consent is only given when a woman or man says “yes.” “No” is not consent. Silence is not consent. “That made us step back and say we really want to do something about this and maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s clearing up the grey area so that kids make better decisions. We want to give them a tool and try to start to make a difference,” Franke said.
On the Know No website, the team created a series of questions designed to teach young men and women when consent is given and when it is not. “If someone consents to sex on one occasion, is that consent for any later occasions?” or “If someone is overtly flirty, is that consent?” are some of the questions. After answering any number of questions the user can share the quiz with friends on Facebook or Twitter.
ICYMI – this Kenzo perfume ad by Spike Jonze is bizarre and oddly entertaining. Definitely like no perfume ad you’ve seen before. Via Adweek:
The short film was directed by Spike Jonze and stars Margaret Qualley, actress and dancer (and Andie MacDowell offspring), who shoots laser beams out of her fingers in service of the product from Kenzo, the French luxury fashion house. […]
“When we think about perfume campaigns, we think about a pretty girl with a bottle,” Qualley said in a statement. “This clip is exactly the opposite. It’s very multi-faceted and different; it takes the spectator by surprise.”
The ad serves as the coming-out party for not just the fragrance but also the original soundtrack, “Mutant Brain,” from Jonze’s brother Sam Spiegel and Ape Drums. It has shades of Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” video, another quirky and delightfully wacky Jonze project.
“My Mutant Brain” sprang from the vision of Kenzo’s artistic directors, Carol Lim and Humberto Leon. “The Kenzo girl inhabits the present, like right now,” they said in a statement. “She’s not nostalgic at all. “She likes movement and speed and the way things shift and slide and collide in real time. She’s never blasé, always enthusiastic. She stands out from the crowd.”
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Wikiverse is a project by data engineer Owen Cornec, an upgraded version of an old Chrome experiment called Wikigalaxy. It reimagines how Wikipedia could look – and how fun it can be to interact with interconnected articles. Via the Verge:
These sessions are illuminating, but I find myself snapping back to reality after an hour with no idea how I got to my last entry. Wikiverse could help solve that problem. The site casts Wikipedia’s pages as floating points of light in a 3D universe, clustering “stars” on the same topic — technology, society, music, etcetera — together. Click on a star and you can read its entry, as well as see the pages it links to, stretching across the universe as colored lines.
It’s an abstract reinvention of Wikipedia’s knowledge banks, but it’s surprisingly useful to couch the site’s billions of articles in a more visual form, showing the links between art, science, history, and other major topics. As well as being visually pretty, Wikiverse also shows just how much information Wikipedia holds — even when loading just 5 percent of the site’s contents, zooming in on a cluster gives me the same head rush I get when I think about just how many stars are in our real galaxy.