AVIVA | "Life's Little Drama" commercials

Client: AVIVA
Agency: AMV BBDO, London
Production Company: Outsider
Director(s): Henry Littlechild
Creatives: Simon Chaudoir (DoP)
Diane Leaver (Creatives)
Si Rice (Creative)
Adam Rudd (Editor)
Yvonne Chalkley (Agency Producer)
Country: United Kingdom

Johnnie Walker | The Walk (The Man Who Walked Around The World)

credits

Brand: Johnnie Walker whisky
Agency: BBH London
Agency Producer: Ruben Mercadel
Creative Director: Mick Mahoney
Creative: Justin Moore
Director: Jamie Rafn
Production: HLA
Producer: Stephen Plesniak
Director of Photography: George Richmond
Post Production: Glassworks London
Editor: Kate Owen

==========================

Johnnie Walker

-

-

-
-

-

-
-

-

Slogans
1976: Born 1820 - still going strong.
1996: Taste life. (Red Label)
2000: Keep Walking!
-

www.johnniewalker.com

RadioShack |Rebrand

John Butler, executive creative director and founding partner of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, said the TV ads, in conjunction with all the various elements of the campaign, are meant to offer bits of information that in total tell RadioShack's story. "We looked at it almost like snacking. We could have a lot of little snacks throughout our broadcast and it felt like it would allow us to do a lot of different messages quickly. They are almost like interstitials," said Butler. "It's very music and design centric and products are front and center."

Tomorrow, the company will kick off a three-day event in New York's Time Square and San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza. "The Shack Summer Netogether" will use two 11 x 17-foot "laptops" broadcasting live video to connect activities in both cities.

RadioShack plans to use digital media to connect consumers with its experiential program via a new Web site designed by BSSP and its new Facebook page.

"The idea was to use Facebook as a platform to break into social media," said David Blum, executive director of interactive services at BSSP. "It's the predominant place where social interaction happens on the Web nowadays."


Major media spending on the brand is approximately $120 million annually, excluding online spending. Aegis' Carat, Dallas, handles media dutie

The campaign includes new in-store signage, digital media, out-of-home, direct and a three-day bi-coastal event that will broadcast live video connecting New York and San Francisco. It aims to give the 88-year-old brand, which began in the 1920s as a provider of equipment for the then-budding field of amateur radio, a more modern image that speaks to its premium brand offerings in wireless and connectivity.

The ads are decidedly quirky and range in style and tone from the introductory spot described above to a commercial that tells consumers "The Shack sells more phones than the population of Scandinavia." In the latter, an animated ad is set in "Phonelandia" and features thumping European dance music and phones and PDAs dressed in wigs and hats, drinking beer and smoking pipes and generally chillin' in a grassy field with a mountain range backdrop.


Another spot stresses that the electronics retailer has more "expertise than a truck full of Einsteins" with imagery of a lorry crammed with just that.

This 15-second commercial is one of 12 new TV ads to begin running nationally tomorrow as part of the Fort Worth, Texas-based retailer's ambitious effort from Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners in Sausalito, Calif., to rebrand itself, at least informally in its marketing materials, with the shorter, presumably friendlier nickname.

"If you think about how you use nicknames, you generally use them with friends, people for whom you have an affinity and trust. Those are important attributes for any brand and certainly for us," said Lee Applbaum, CMO of RadioShack, who explained that consumers and the company have used brand name shorthand for years. "If you can latch onto a brand truth, it's a really wonderful thing."

----------------------UPDATE-------------------------------

Radio Shack launched yesterday a new marketing initiative to position itself as The Shack. “Our friends,” they claim “call us the Shack.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?

“Trust is a critical attribute of any successful retailer, and the reality is that most people trust friends, not corporations. When a brand becomes a friend, it often gets a nickname — take FedEx or Coke, for example. Our customers, associates and even the investor community have long referred to RadioShack as ‘The Shack,’ so we decided to embrace that fact and share it with the world,” said Lee Applbaum, RadioShack’s chief marketing officer.

— The Business Journal

As far as I understand, the Radio Shack name and logo will NOT be replaced with this new name or “logo.” It’s simply part of a campaign to help seed this new persona, created by Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners. Which is good news, because The Shack is extremely ridiculous — even more so than The Hut— and does nothing but dig Radio Shack into a bigger hole of un-coolness. The effort is in no way aided by the unimaginative graphics and “logo” that have accompanied the launch. The type is boringly simple, even annoying in its lackluster execution. And, seriously, giant laptops to create buzz in the two cities (New York and San Francisco) where there are more people with their head buried in an iPhone per capita than anywhere else? Oh, and yes, they are plain lame. Giant pumpkins on ice sound more appealing.

Radio Shack needs a major overhaul and it should take advantage of the idiosyncratic products they carry that you can hardly find anywhere else, a sort of geek thrift store. The Shack campaign is insipid at best and harmful to the brand at worst.

Giant laptop in the making. Image source.

Launch at Times Square in New York. Photos by Flickr user Brechtbug

Axe| Periodic table

Advertising Agency: Lowe/SSP3-Bogotá, Colombia
Executive Creative Director: Jose Miguel Sokoloff
Creative Directors: Margarita Olivar, Juan Carlos González
Art Director: Margarita Olivar
Copywriter: Juan Carlos González
Photographer: Esteban Sosnitsky, Zumo
Agency Producer: Sonia Llanos
Other Additional Credits: Juanita Delgado, Natalia Franco

Evian babies are not Original

Evian Roller Babies

Running Bear (JOHNNY PRESTON) Dancing Baby

Absolut| "Doing things differently leads to something exceptional"

TITLE:Anthem

BRAND:Absolut

AGENCY:TBWA\CHIAT\DAY NEW YORK

Catherine Zeta-Jones:::Horndogs in T-Mobile ads

New strategy by the carrier of showing horny guys drooling all over the actress...

T-Mobile Mobile Makeover "Invisible"

T-Mobile Mobile Makeover "Dinner"

Google These Billboards

When the online search provider Google wanted to push its Enterprise software to business leaders, the company chose outdoor advertising.

By buying billboards along well traveled routes in four cities (the Massachusetts Turnpike in Boston, MA; the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago, IL; the West Side Highway in New York City, NY; and U.S. 101 in San Francisco, CA), Google is making sure it reaches as many people in its target audience as possible.

As reported in Mediaweek, the campaign focuses on the internal monologue of a business professional who is frustrated with other, more expensive software offerings. Over the course of a month, commuters will see the fictitious businessperson come to an epiphany and switch to Enterprise.

The campaign is accomplished through daily vinyl copy changes. Workers change the copy between 6:30 and 7:30 am, guaranteeing the next installment is ready for that day’s commute.
It’s not the first time Google has gone outdoor. The company has used bus ads and poster size billboards in the past to raise awareness of new offerings. This is, however, most likely the highest impact campaign from the search giant yet.

The campaign generated massive media attention, with coverage in major newspapers (such as the Boston Globe) and in the trade press (in publications such as PC World).

It serves as an excellent example of outdoor advertising being the premiere way to reach busy commuters, and make a splash doing it.

One has often heard this in client conference rooms: ‘why can’t we build a brand without any advertising? Like Google?’. One can, if everyone had a Google-like product. Thanks to a heady mix of great product and PR, Google rarely had to use advertising to promote it’s search engine. With Microsoft offering some serious competition via Bing, Google has perhaps seen the need to get back at Microsoft. Google is now taking billboards across several US cities to promote Google Apps – a bundle of business applications that sells for $50 per worker annually, in a campaign labeled ‘Going Google’.

The cloud-based, free Google Apps have been around since 2007 but have not been a serious threat to Microsoft’s Office suite. Even though the paid version is ‘a fraction of what Microsoft Exchange costs’ it still hasn’t been able to break the big business’ preference for MS Office. With new ventures like Chrome OS, Google may have to rely on a lot more than word of mouth to promote it’s applications. The advantage it has is that Google being Google, it gets written about for anything it does. Even if it is a pretty average billboard put up in Boston.

Do yo think Google needs advertising to sell it’s wares?

Prius flower power

The hybrid Toyota Prius has long had a reputation for being a “greener” car and wanted to promote the fact that a sun roof is available in the 3rd generation Prius which is due to launch in 2010 as well as emphasise its latest marketing theme: "Harmony between man, nature and machine." The idea is that people still want to be able to have personal vehicle to travel - they don't want to give up their cars - but they are willing to find a more sustainable way of doing so.

Prius has formed a partnership with various North American cities to provide enormous flowers in public squares. The flower sculptures, which stand at up to 18 feet high, collect solar energy through panels on the back of their petals and

the base of their stems. Each flower also has seating for up to 10 people. They offer people the chance to charge their laptops or mobile phones while sitting outside in the sun. The flowers also provided solar-powered WiFi, enabling people to surf the web at the same time. The message on the flowers read: “it’s all powered by the sun like the optional Solar Roof in the 3rd generation Prius”.

Boston bus riders are also treated to solar ventilation bus shelters in the downtown area as part of the “Harmony Installation” campaign. The special shelters feature solar panels on the roof that run fans to circulate air within the shelter. The shelters aim to imitate the Prius’s Solar Ventilation System.

The flowers are touring cities including Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles between July and October. All of the activity will be documented on Twitter and Facebook.

BRAND:Toyota

BRAND OWNER:Toyota Motor Co

CATEGORY:Automotive

REGION:USA

DATE:Jul 2009 - Oct 2009

AGENCY:Saatchi & Saatchi

MEDIA CHANNEL

Fiat| Open source car

Turning conventional car-making wisdom on its head, which says keep your designs close to your chest, Fiat has launched a website encouraging the public to submit designs for its next model, the Fiat Mio.

This is not the first time Fiat has called on the public to collaborate. Back in 2006, the car manufacturer challenged Brazilians to come up with ideas for the next 30 years of Fiat vehicles, as a celebration of its three decades in the Latin American country. So impressed was Fiat with the ideas generated, it challenged the public again; this time to come up with ecologically friendly car designs. The Fiat Concept Car 2 was showcased at the International Automobile fair in 2008.

And now the call has gone out once more. A dedicated website (www.fiatmio.cc) has been set up that will act as a forum for automobile enthusiasts to put across and debate their various dreams of what the future of car industry should look like. All suggestions on the site will be trialed and facilitated by the Fiat team, along with its own engineers’ ideas. The resulting vehicle will be showcased at the International Automobile Fair 2010. The project falls under the Creative Commons License, allowing participants to own their contributions, but for the community to distribute, modify and share their ideas.

The campaign is part of Fiat’s push to embrace the digital age head-on. By creating an open forum, it acknowledges that all ideas generated might be used by other individuals, or by its rivals. A bold step that might spell the beginning of the end for closed-shop car design.

BRAND:Fiat

BRAND OWNER:Fiat

CATEGORY:Automotive

REGION:Brazil

DATE:Jul 2009 - Dec 2009

AGENCY:AgenciaClick

MEDIA CHANNEL

Chevrolet | Cruze control

Chevrolet has launched a campaign in China to promote the release of its new Cruze model. Consumers can personalise an online ‘Chevy’ and share their designs with friends.

Not a market known for ‘macho’ advertising campaigns, Chevy’s Chinese offering definitely bucks the trend. The idea is a direct take-off of popular western programmes such as MTV’s ‘Pimp My Ride’ and comes in conjunction with the car manufacturer using anti-authoritarian American TV star Wentworth Miller in its Asian campaign.

Users can go online, pick a model from the Chevrolet range and virtually ‘pimp it’. A wealth of innovative customisation tools mean users can let their mind run wild and go way beyond a basic paint job. Once finished, cars can be entered in online races, shared with friends or saved as wallpaper on computers and mobiles.

BRAND:Chevrolet

BRAND OWNER;General Motors

CATEGORY:Automotive

REGION:China

DATE:Jul 2009 - Sep 2009

AGENCY:McCann Erickson/ZenithOptimedia

MEDIA CHANNEL