Hasta La Ideas

Some fun bits of funny from our sister blog Agency Spy who found this series of very humorous reactions to the Cannes Grand Prix-winning campaign for Wrangler by the agency Fred & Farid and photographer Ryan McGinley. The campaign itself features half-naked attractive people in nighttime, woodsy locations, looking like they were captured by a Nature camera crew, with a small tag running on both the print ads and their commercials, “We Are Animals.” It’s certainly not the worst pieces of advertising we’ve ever seen, and some of the photographs are stellar, but we have to agree with the Grand Prix-winning-reaction images Agency Spy posted, which features one heading on Flickr to cover all of the subtly altered photos: “Seriously?” To make things worse, we found this quote by one of the jurors:

David Lubars, the president of the Cannes Lions press jury, said the campaign had won because the idea could work globally to change the US-centric view of the Wrangler brand.

“It is a very emotional campaign, you can see how it can go into all kinds of areas,” added Lubars. “The theme is we are animals, a very primal, sexual approach. Before the brand was about middle-aged cowboy jeans from America. Now it takes a whole different look overnight.”

Thanks for explaining the theme for us. Otherwise we would have had to read the explanatory tag line and the main thrust of the whole campaign to understand it. Did the jury of this “best of the best in advertising” award also like that the pictures were in color? And maybe we’re stepping out of bounds here, but no matter how many slithery, sexy teens you throw at it, how does a company like Wrangler move away from its “middle-aged cowboy” roots while closing their spots and tagging their print ads with a very “middle-aged cowboy” logo?