First Else – My Pick For Worst Campaign

A very stylish ad, but for what? A new Matrix-like sci-fi film? A political campaign? A web service? Oh. Maybe it’s a phone! As a small-time content creator that often works on my own with almost no budget, I’m often astonished by what gets produced by a team of creatives with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions in production and placement dollars available. The greater problem with this First Else spot is that (at least as of this writing) it is exactly the same thing you find at their web site. Except on the site it loads with a massive, browser-crashing Flash file that makes all their talk about “technology making our lives more difficult” uncomfortably ironic. Much more effective on several counts, in my opinion, is the Embrace Life spot below.

Embrace Life – My Pick For Best Campaign

Not only does it rather brilliantly convey its message, it does so very simply, and probably on a miniscule production budget. The associated web site isn’t terribly impressive, but it likewise does its job with minimal fuss.

What do you think? USA Today’s Ad Meter is dial-group generated roundup of the “best” Superbowl spots. Have a favorite of your own? Feel free to share. Here are the spots mentioned above:

Lamisil’s Digger the Dermatophyte Spot

Feeling of Fast High Speed Internet Commercial

Google’s Parisian Love Ad

With the annual hubbub about the Superbowl ad spots starting to simmer (here are last year’s top 10), I’m reminded of the only thing I miss about television since shutting off my cable service back in 2003: the commercials. It’s more than a little odd that I miss them; when I was exposed to them on a regular basis, I had two PTSD-like reflexes to their sudden appearance: 1.) Hit the mute button and pointedly avoid looking at them, or 2.) Play a game of “distill the message”, in which my friends and I would take a beer commercial for instance, and distill it down to the message it was conveying. An example being “although you’re male and act like an idiot, chicks will dig you if you drink our beer“. So in my pining for a commercial to watch, I figured that with the advent of YouTube and the fact that even grandma has a blog these days, it would be easy to find a roundup of the best commercials of the last few years. How wrong I was. Try searching yourself; this tends to be a heavily-targeted keyword, so you’ll keep encountering things like this old European condom commercial, and the title on the clip is almost always something like “FUNNIEST COMMERCIAL EV-AR”. There’s also the added weird “meta” effect of TV programs that are actually devoted to filling the spaces between the commercials with commercials. So although I found some interesting clips to share, I realized I’ll have to come back with a “Part II” after doing a more themed, focused search. Something like the offensive car ads we rounded up last year. Below is a quick roundup of some of the quirkier things I found; feel free to share any goodies of your own.

The Japanese always have a knack for putting an unusual spin on ads, whether with western celebs who Japander to their audience, or simply as a result of our pop culture differences.

This ten-year-old spot features a fresh-faced Britney Spears in a Japanese candy commercial that subtly dips into Japan’s “lolita” fascination. The spot itself isn’t that remarkable; it’s the context:

This spot for Lowfat Sealect Tuna possesses an amusing level of honesty about something many of us have done to look good:

Although American ads tend to remain almost puritan in their avoidance of stepping over certain lines, I was surprised to see that Crest had gotten as “edgy as they had with their “You Can Say Anything with a Smile” campaign, especially given Proctor and Gamble’s traditionally apple pie image:

Likewise with this LA County Fair ad that points out that every fashionable young LA woman knows very well that of course angora wool comes from boy cows:

Some of the most effective commercials I’ve ever seen were local commercials; the same is probably true in your area. I Love Local Commercials has cashed in on this, with spot like the Cullman Liquidation ad featured at the top, and this “Black and White People Furniture” clip:

Probably one of the best local spots ever was Suburban Auto’s “Trunk Monkey” series:

European ads have always been a little more comfortable exploring the connection between the phallus and the automobile, whether implied, as in this case….

…or literal, as in this case:

And from another era: who knew Batgirl worked for the equal rights movement? Holy act of congress, Batman!

The unpleasant treatment of children in Dickensian tales is almost understandable; the stories were written in times that were, well, Dickensian. But what is it about British culture that warrants morbid PSA’s with dead children, and inspires entire Pink Floyd double albums with songs like We Don’t Need No Education? Or more recently, the Tales of the Road children’s safety campaign  created by the Leo Burnett agency. If you’re a fan of Tim Burton you’ll love the ads; they seem to be based on a weird amalgam of the “Big Eye” art of Margaret Keane, the poetry of Hilaire Belloc, and the macabre tone of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies. My favorite is probably The Girl Who Didnt Dress Bright, perhaps more for the name than anything else. You can see the rest on the UK Department for Transport’s YouTube channel, and on their main web site you can even play brutal hit and run games like Make Me Cross. And remember: No pudding ’til you’ve eaten your meat.

A new Nissan commercial being broadcast in Israel is causing a little resentment in Arab Gulf nations. In the commercial (left) Saudi oil barons are shown leaving a hotel, and upon noticing the new fuel-efficient Nissan parked nearby, begin pounding on the car shouting “Hawks should peck at you day and night” in Arabic. The voiceover concludes with “It’s clear the oil companies won’t like you”. Offensive, or truthiness in advertising? You decide. For more offensive car commercials, see the booby-jiggling Nissan Pathfinder ad, Jeep’s Bouncy & Fun, Toyota’s nipple-stimulating air-conditioning, and the accidently leaked VW Polo ad, Small But Tough.