BrandWeek

It's the little details that make this "Irish Eyes" spot (by Fitzgerald + Co.) for Atlanta's 2012 St. Patrick's Day Parade so effective. Not only is ginger Elvis here singing along with the mouths that form in his eye sockets, he's actually harmonizing with them. The result is unsettling and a bit punny, but in a good way. He's lucky it's not a Welsh parade coming up, though. The Mari Lwyd would require his nostrils and ears to join in, too. That would get complicated. It's probably also good that he's not a Misfits fan.

Virgin Mobile usually hits up the SXSW Music festival to scout up-and-coming bands for its Virgin Mobile FreeFest concert or Virgin Mobile Live Radio, "but now the new rock stars are these mobile app developers," Ron Faris, head of brand marketing at Virgin Mobile USA, told me this morning. As part of its larger "Higher Calling" initiative rolled out earlier this week, on Friday (Mar. 9) Virgin Mobile launched its What the App program to spotlight emerging Android app developers on Virginmobilelive.com and other brand outlets.

Anyone who witnessed how Apple's launch of its App Store accelerated iPhone adoption shouldn't be shocked at a cell company would align itself with the mobile app ecosystem, but the fact that Virgin Mobile announced the program at an early-adopter event like SXSWi instead of promoting it in a more consumer-facing fashion might be a little shock. Michael Lazerow, CEO and cofounder of Buddy Media, said there's definitely been a rise in brand marketers attending SXSWi. "Pretty much every one of our big brands [ex. Virgin Mobile] has people here, which didn't happen [before]," he said. "Usually you have social media managers, but now you have people running [brands' marketing departments like Faris in attendance]."

Also in attendance? All 32 NFL teams. Lazerow said he wouldn't have expected that confluence in years past, but the teams met in Austin this week with social marketing experts like the Buddy Media honcho to educate themselves on how to use technology and content to build their business. "They have the best content in the world. You'd think they'd figured it out, but everyone's still learning." One thing brands are learning is how to transform from marketers to media companies. "We think brands need to think in terms of how you build a distribution network to distribute content at scale," Lazerow said.

Facebook's recent changes to its ad offerings put the content-centric approach on blast, but the shift extends further than one social network." Where marketing is moving to is newsroom marketing, which is all about headlines just in time," said Virgin's Faris. "Brands have to stay relevant now, and to keep that conversation going, they have to publish daily." To that end Virgin Mobile is working with social-heavy news site Buzzfeed to help with content created for Virgin Mobile's social outlets. Faris said the decision to partner with Buzzfeed is a change from a "studio-based marketing culture" of one-way, brand-to-consumer messaging to a fast paced environment in which brands must keep up with the rapid pace of consumers' conversations. Faris' team meets every week to go over headlines and content to push to its 18-24-year-old target demo. "We're in like a hardcore training mode right now," he said.

Game developers have been to the edge of space, but Rovio has boldly gone where no ad has gone before—to the International Space Station. The video below, starring astronaut Don Pettit, promotes the upcoming version of Angry Birds that takes place in the depths of space, and has racked up more than a half-million views in its first 24 hours—bringing great exposure to both the game and NASA's continued work. In the clip, Pettit illustrates the pig-killing physics of deploying Angry Birds in a zero-gravity environment. Even if you're one of the 15 people who don't like Angry Birds, you'll still enjoy the silliness of watching an astronaut slingshot bird toys across a $35 billion research facility. NASA isn't the only group hoping to use the new game as a chance to teach young people about space exploration. National Geographic has created its own Angry Birds Space book about astronomy, helping to show "the furious fliers everything they'll need to know on their quest to explore the galaxy and rescue their precious eggs."

If Google+ looks like a ghost town to you, Vic Gundotra, Google’s svp of engineering, thinks the problem isn’t his social service, but you.

During a one on one conversation at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, blogger Guy Kawasaki asked Gundotra about recent criticism that Google+ isn’t getting much traction.

His response: “Make sure you’re using it correctly.” (Sounds a bit like Steve Jobs during antennagate, no?)

The majority of content is shared privately to circles, Gundotra said, adding that if you visit a page and it looks empty, “Maybe they’re just not into you yet.”

The industry may have the impression that Google+ is languishing, but Gundotra said it's the fastest-growing service Google has ever released and now gets 100 million active users over a 30-day period.

Gundotra also took a subtle dig at Facebook’s approach to advertising.

“We think we should not be injecting ads into your most intimate social experiences,” he said.

Instead of surfacing ads while people are looking at family photos or pics from a best friend’s party, he continued, Google’s approach “marries the best of social with the best of commercial intent.”

That means ads won’t appear on Google+ but when people are searching and, through Google’s social search features, see that a friend has +1’d a business or restaurant.

And, he added, early Google data now shows that socially-annotated ads (those that have been +1’d) get a 5 to 10 percent uplift in click-through rates.

“That allows us to not jam ads into photos of your daughter,” he said. “It’s serving the ads when they’re relevant.”
 

It's the rare commercial that tries to appeal to men by telling them how unmanly they are. Yet that's the basic approach of this 2011 Ogilvy spot for Volkswagen in South Africa, one of several new additions to VeryFunnyAds.com. A couple of buddies do their best Easy Rider impressions, riding off into the countryside on their motorcycles together. But almost immediately, things begin to go awry—beginning with one guy swallowing a bug. Things go downhill from there, and soon it becomes clear that it's just a whole lot easier to drive a car—a Jetta, for example. It's a fun idea, though it's not quite clear who will see themselves in these characters. Also newly posted this week: Tom Kuntz's great ad for Hahn Super Dry beer, Muller's extravagant "Wonderful Stuff" spot, and several more ads. See them all at VeryFunnyAds.com.

Mini Cooper has a final four.

The finalists in the brand’s U.S. review—which sources identified as Bartle Bogle Hegarty, The Via Agency, Fitzgerald + Co. and incumbent Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners—emerged from a group of six shops that Mini Cooper executives visited. The agencies that did not advance were Anomaly and McKinney.

Final presentations for the business, which includes national, regional and dealer advertising, media planning and most media buying, are expected to take place in May, after a round of work sessions in April. Account revenue is estimated at $5 million to $7 million.

The incumbent in any review typically faces long odds of keeping the business. In this case, however, Mini is coming off of a banner sales year (U.S. sales grew 26 percent to 57,511 units in 2011) and the search was mandated by the policies of Mini parent company BMW Group. As such, Butler, Shine is seen as the agency to beat.

Media spending on the brand exceeded $19 million in the first 11 months of last year, according to Nielsen. The total for all of 2010 was about $18 million. Those figures don’t include online spending.

Not in play are multicultural marketing, Web development and CRM, and broadcast media buying, which remain at Sanders Wingo, Beam Interactive and UM, respectively.

Hasan + Co., a Raleigh, N.C.-based consultancy, is managing the search. Hasan did not return calls and a Mini representative declined to comment on the review. 

A piquant assemblage of new releases may be sampled in a mere 60-second tasting above. And since there are so many of them this week, each trailer gets a single-sentence sentence, below. (Mashup by Max Becker.)

Modern New York love story The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jane appears to be a possibly moving biography of two outsider artists who made an art-and-life project of seeing their own reflections in each other—even having the same breast implants, leading their child to wonder if she had two mummies.



It is a rare trailer plagued by press so awful that prospects for the movie diminish with every click, but such is the case with John Carter, which at best appears to be a mashup of Conan the Barbarian and The Phantom Menace, and at worst, the most boring 17 hours you will spend in a cinema all year.



Teasing a remake of a low-budget Uruguayan flick that pretended to be a single take, the trailer for Silent House, starring Elizabeth Olson, presents a haunted house no more silent than any other haunted house, and, peaking with a resounding crash and gut rumble to accompany a ghostly girl in a nightdress, probably a noisier one.



Greece is not simply a national debt crisis, it is the cradle of Western civilization and the place where quirky sexual-behavior comedy Attenberg (a mispronunciation of Attenborough, as in the BBC's David, whose job is to watch quirky animal sex behavior) was produced to no small acclaim.



Dearly departed Dr. Who David Tennant is the chap due to marry self-obsessed celeb Alice Eve on a Local Hero-esque Scottish isle, but finds himself falling for Kelly MacDonald, The Decoy Bride, in what may be a lovely little comedy and may well have given Tenant a nice Hugh Grant-like rom-com boost, were he not already so famous a dearly departed Dr Who.



Jennifer Westfelder, the woman John Hamm abides with despite the wishes of every woman in your office, directs and stars in Friends with Kids, which appears to be a cheery comedy of manners about two people not in love who resolve to raise the kid they bring into the world—to the curious entertainment of friends played by Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Ed Burns, Maya Rudolph and the only good thing in Gulliver's Travels, Chris O'Dowd.



As when hipsters make coffee that takes four hours per cup and usually tastes like it was almost worth the effort, New Zealand-made Western Good for Nothing takes the old ingredients of a cowboy going on the run with a ladylike lady to produce what seemingly will be almost worth the effort of seeing in its entirety.



If you know true chefs, you know all they care about is the pursuit of perfection in their kitchens, and should you want to see that obsession embodied on film, and are excited by the idea that the world's greatest sushi restaurant is in a Tokyo subway station, then you will probably eat up the documentary of the week, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, with or without salad or miso soup.



Michael Fassbender must be taking a rest, so Ewan McGregor resumes his status as Pre-Eminent Celt in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a talent-packed palimpsest of the best-seller (Lasse Hallstrom directing a Simon Beaufoy script), and seemingly does a capable job of impersonating a charisma-free salmon farmer charged with helping anglophile Yemeni Prince Amr Waked fish salmon in the Yemen.



Following on the heels of Agnieszka Holland's WWII Holocaust drama In Darkness comes the two-year-old Saviours in the Night, in which super-Aryan-looking but Jewish nevertheless wife and mother Veronic Ferres is hidden on a farm by a group of nice Germans, even as Nazis stomp about shouting, "Schnell!"



The trailer for horror movie Playback receives an unimprovable review on YouTube from Petit Tabarnak: "I took 5 minutes to find the password of my youtube account so that I could be able to dislike this shit."



There's an agreeable sheen of misanthropy all over the trailer for Seeking Justice, and if you are going to make a seedy, '80s-ish movie about a Faustian pact with a vigilante group populated by law enforcers, then you can have no better Faust than Nicholas Cage, no better casus belli than January Jones and, on this evidence, no better Mephistopheles than Guy Pearce.



Yikes, it's another Eddie Murphy movie, only instead of surrounding himself in prosthetics and career-diminishing one-liners, he's picked up a Jim Carrey cast-off script about some mystical flibberty flob that results in having only A Thousand Words left to say before you die, and what happens is, of course, epic mugging, at least according to this trailer.


 

Google has no interest in half-measures. In its advertising, this means fully embracing the digital nature of its products—or going the other way completely by building old-timey, handcrafted props to illustrate how the products work. You see examples of the former approach in spots like "Parisian Love" (for the search engine) and "Dear Sophie" (for the Chrome browser)—ads that are 100 percent digital, stitched together entirely from dynamic computer screen shots. On the flip side, you have ads like the Chrome speed tests (which compared the browser's fleetness with that of real-world speed demons like lightning and flying potatoes, all filmed in 2700 fps slow motion), or more recently, the giant gyroscopic labyrinth cube for Google Maps. Google doesn't dilute these approaches by mixing them. It goes all in, one way or the other.

The introductory video for Google Play, posted below, from Studio G, falls squarely into the latter camp. It begins, funnily enough, with a hand crank—a device that couldn't seem more antiquated and un-Google-like. The crank sets in motion a series of now largely obsolete gadgets that are stand-ins for today's modern ones—a music box, a push-button telephone, paper books (alright, not entirely obsolete, but Google's working on it), a reel-to-reel film projector, a canvas projection screen, and a Rubik's Cube. Objects are pushed this way and that in this little world—representing the virtual movement of sharable media that Google Play facilitates. At the end, the camera pulls back to reveal that everything has taken place inside a suitcase—a metaphor for the virtual multimedia luggage we all carry around and share from device to device.

Producer Yovel Schwartz tells Creativity that Studio G built two suitcases, "one with the functioning guts and one slightly smaller one that we comped the mechanical innards into during post." The one with the guts "did in fact work," Schwartz says. "It required five or six people to puppeteer on set, all of whom were also involved in building it."

Building byzantine real-world contraptions to advertise products whose tiny, futuristic "guts" we never see, or even think about, is Google's way of connecting itself to a tradition of more mechanical human invention—a tradition that's easier to grasp, easier to see. It's also just about offering delightful entertainment, not another boring ad. And this new video is truly delightful, and well on its way to 1 million YouTube views after just a couple of days.

The criticism of these handmade spots is that operating in metaphor obscures the real product, and forces the viewer to parse two sets of information—first, what's going on in the handmade contraption, and then, how the handmade contraption relates to the product you can actually use. This was more of a problem with the Google Maps gyroscopic cube, which truly was an esoteric art piece. In this new spot, the voiceover goes a long way to resolving the issue, speaking in modern-ese and helping to bridge the gap between past and present. But in any case, Google won't mind if you're a bit confused. The point of these spots isn't to spit out product specs. It's to pull you in with a charming experience—and should you be intrigued, Google rightly assumes you're well equipped to find out more on your own.

One other notable thing about this spot is the tablet at the end, which appears simply as a clear glass replica of a tablet. There's no old-timey stand-in—because, of course, tablets are completely new and have no real antecedent. This is the present obliterating the past—and it will continue to happen. Google had better celebrate these antiquated devices while it can. Not long from now, people will no longer recognize them at all.



CREDITS
Client: Google
Agency: Studio G
Writer/Director: Jonathan Zames
Producer: Yovel Schwartz
Production Company: Studio G
Production Company: Camp Creative
Line Producer: David Dranitzke
Fabrication and Practical Effects: White Room Artifacts
Visual Effects: HOPR
Director of Photography: Adam Santelli
Art Director: Garret Lowe
Motion Control: Camera Control
Product Marketing Manager: Paola Veglio
Music Composition: Headquarters Music
Sound Design and Mix: Sound Lounge

Cracker Jack—a popular ballgame nibble mythologized alongside peanuts in the iconic baseball anthem—may soon need a few home runs to maintain its position as a preferred stadium snack. Fisher Nuts is looking at a kernel of a lead, thanks to a new sweepstakes and integrated campaign starting this afternoon at the Chicago Cubs vs. Chicago White Sox spring training game in Arizona.

Howard Brandeisky of Fisher Nuts' parent company, John B. Sanfilippo & Son, told Adweek while his company is "nuts about nuts" and "nuts about baseball," he sees no need for crunchy combat. "We're as much a part of the baseball tradition as Cracker Jacks are, but I think there's room for both of us on the shelf," said Brandeisky, vp of global marketing, innovation and customer solutions.

The sweepstakes' two grand prize winners will get a party for 20, game tickets and meet and greets with the teams’ respective managers.

First prizes are two sets of four tickets to a Cubs or Sox game, including the chance to watch the pregame batting practice, and tickets to a game and the chance for the winner's name to appear on the scoreboard during the game. Smaller prizes include gift cards and Fisher Nuts products.

Chicago's peanut and baseball fans will have chances to win the prizes throughout the season. When both ball clubs win games on the same day, Fisher Nuts will donate $500 to the teams’ charities.

John B. Sanfilippo & Son is partnering with supermarket chain Jewel-Osco and its agency, Blue Chip Marketing Worldwide, to manage the integrated campaign, which allows sweepstakes entry via advertisements with tear pads and shippers. Consumers who use a Jewel Preferred Customer Card to buy Fisher Nuts will be automatically entered in the contest. The campaign will also include in-game drop-in spots during Cubs TV and radio broadcasts and 60-second radio commercials. Fisher Nuts said it expects the campaign to yield more than 75 million in-store and out-of-home ad impressions.

Brandeisky wouldn't reveal the company's ad spend for this campaign, but said an ongoing sponsorship of the two ball clubs made it a natural fit. "We were looking for a more creative way to leverage these sponsorships," he said. "We were inspired that [both teams] are getting a fresh start with new managers."

Brandeisky said the goal of the campaign is to "have some fun, get consumers talking about the brand and build brand equity. I think integrated promotions like this help us break through the clutter."

Sluts are under siege, but condom maker Sir Richard's isn't going to stand idly by and watch it happen. Sir Richard's is fighting back with a new site, SlutsUnite.org, where you can take the "Sluts Unite" oath and grab any of 24 slutty avatars, free of charge, to show solidarity with the cause. "Sluts Unite is a sex-positive movement that brings people together who believe in tolerance, acceptance and personal freedom," the site says. "It is our goal to take what was intended to be a hateful, derogatory word and change it into something positive through the power of the collective." The campaign is by ad agency TDA_Boulder, which is also part owner of Sir Richard's. Use the "Married to a Slut" avatar with caution.

German home-improvement chain Hornbach and agency Heimat Berlin build a winning slow-mo fantasy in this new spot, as a middle-aged guy experiences DIY paradise in the split second it takes him to connect hammer and nail after several frustrating misses. The brief cinematic clip—with its laughing cherubs, cheering throng and awesomely amazed deer—is just as epic, in its way, as "The Infinite House," the client's lauded, dreamlike film from a few years back that's nine minutes long (probably more time than some DIYers invest in projects before quitting in disgust). Here, in 45 seconds, the advertiser nails the extrasensory euphoria that folks feel when they succeed, even briefly, at doing it themselves, driving home the message that Hornbach can help them attain such bliss. There's just one catch. To finish that deck, our hero will have to drive in a lot more nails. Heaven help him. Via Co.Create.