Have you got a neglected, crusty jar of Marmite gathering dust at the back of your kitchen cupboard? It’s time to stamp out such neglect, says a new campaign created by Adam&eveDDB.
The amusing Marmite Neglect campaign follows a fictional Marmite Rescue Unit that sniffs out and rescues neglected Marmite jars from a variety of offenders’ homes, before re-housing them with loving families.
Shot in the style of real-life animal rescue programmes, with a voiceover from Michael Buerk, the campaign builds on the well-known Love/Hate strapline, urging users to “Love it. Hate it. Just don’t forget it.”
Beyond the TV commercial, the campaign includes a series of outdoor posters, of snapshots (shot by photographer David Sykes) of kitchen cupboards, with long-forgotten Marmite jars peeking out from behind their larder peers.
The spoof style and superior acting is what makes this campaign particularly endearing, as also in evidence in the behind-the-scenes interviews with the committed Marmite Rescue team, including rookie Callum Howe (see below).
Credits: Agency: adam&eveDDB Creative directors: Mike Crowe & Rob Messeter / Matt Lee & Pete Heyes Creatives: Nick Sheppard & Tom Webber Agency producer: Chris Styring Production company: Outsider Director: James Rouse Producer: Benji Howell Editor: Art Jones / Neil Smith @ Work Post Photographer: David Sykes
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Award-winning animation director Juan Pablo Zaramella and producer Alan Dewhurst have created a quirky animated TV ad for Tesco F&F’s back-to-school range of clothes.
The ad was put together through stop-motion animation and the team also decided to use pixilation (the technique of animating real people) to “combine the real image with the fantastic world of animation”, according to Zaramella.
“Pixilation offers an intriguing combination of reality and fantasy, spontaneity and control, so it has aspects of both live action and animation,” adds Dewhurst. “We worked hard to make the commercial as a tiny episodic film, in which each scene is driven by a character, and has an introduction, a central purpose, and a resolution – and to make the images, music and sound as expressive as possible.”
Commissioned through agency WARL, the campaign shows a series of everyday scenarios in a kid’s life (such as dancing, playing football and so on), filtered through their animated imagination. The team is also producing a 10-second sponsorship ident that uses imagery from the TV spot, also animated in a simple way.
The commercial was shot over one week, with background props of pencils, fabrics, paints and other stationery mocked up to larger scale. Performers were shot lying down, with the camera fixed seven metres above them.
One of the main challenges was keeping the kid actors entertained and switched on through the laborious animation process (see below for behind-the-scenes video). “It was fascinating to see some kids ‘get it’ and really enter into the spirit of this very unnatural process, while others fidgeted and had little interest in what they were doing,” says Dewhurst. “There’s a degree of alchemy in it, as with all animation – appearing spontaneous while working painstakingly, one frame at a time.”
The ad is a 30-second commercial, that like any other consists of 750 frames, as Dewhurst points out. “However each frame has been composited from multiple layers of imagery that were shot or post-produced one image at a time”, he adds, with more than 5,000 images used in the entire commercial. “All in all this was a considerable visual effects project, as well as an elaborate animation process.”
Credits: Agency: WARL Production company: HANraHAN Animation company: Can Can Club Director: Juan Pablo Zaramella Art director: Lena Blaschek Project manager: Elizabeth Gillingham Producer: Alan Dewhurst Animation producer: Anuk Torre Obeid Animation Director: Becho Lo Bianco Animation art directors: Diego Berakha, Maria Victoria Lamas Director of photography: Sergia Pineyro Making of: Tota Romero
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Oxelo a confié une nouvelle fois à Studio Ores la création d’une vidéo originale présentant son nouveau modèle de skate, le Big Yamba. Dans ce nouveau film qui reprend la baseline « A Beat of California » comme dans le premier opus, 4 skaters déambulent dans les rues et composent la musique du clip en ridant.
James Belkevitz a imaginé « Google Monopoly », un remake du jeu de société qui critique avec intelligence la politique de ce géant. Une idée bien réalisée, proposant aux joueurs de commencer avec la valeur économique de Google, c’est-à-dire 251 milliards de dollars. Plus d’images dans la suite.
A MINI office desk, MINI body art, a MINI cake and sandcastle – these are just some of the weird and wonderful creations by fans of the iconic brand paid tribute to in a new campaign. MINI UK has launched a campaign that celebrates its fans’ creative innovation and uses their own MINI creations as its central imagery.
Created by iris Worldwide, it brings the manufacturer’s ‘Not Normal’ tagline to the UK, celebrating the relationship British consumers have with their MINIs. It uses as its inspiration images created by fans, sourced by iris from various social media sites.
“We discovered that the web is full of images of people’s MINI creations – snow MINI’s, MINI chandeliers, knitted MINIs, prams, MINI lilos – you name it,” says iris executive creative director Shaun Mcilrath. “What better advertising could there be for a brand than the creative tributes people make themselves?”
All ideas were sourced online, with the agency tracking down 70 people that had produced particularly creative tributes. In some cases, the agency asked fans to recreate the images, or – as in the campaign visuals above – recreated or reshot them itself. The sand castle, for example, was re-built and shot on the same beach in Weston-Super-Mare.”The rule was, we wouldn’t create anything we hadn’t found online,” adds Mcilrath.
As part of the campaign, an online film asks the public to help it to track down further images and inventors, with consumers encouraged to join in by posting their images online, with the hashtag #MININOTNORMAL. It is also accompanied by a global TV advert.
With regards to the rise of user-generated campaign content, Mcilrath reckons “certain brands are more suited to it than others”. “These are iconic or inventive brands,” he explains. “Brands that inspire people. The MINI brand is all of these things. It makes a lot of sense for brands with passionate, creative fans to open up and involve them more.”
And if anyone knows the two blokes who made a life-sized paper red MINI Countryman, for what looks like a stag weekend in Amsterdam, adds Mcilrath, “we’d love to track them down”.
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Créée par DDB Sydney avec Cameron Hoelter à la création, voici la récente campagne publicitaire de « McDonald’s » pour le développement de produits destinés aux petites faims, abordable et achetable avec la monnaie trouvée dans le fond d’une poche. Une jolie campagne à découvrir en images dans la suite.
Do you know your Big Mac from your Double Whopper? A new campaign for McDonald’s by TBWA Paris relies on consumers being able to do just that, highlighting six of the chain’s ‘iconic’ products without a shred of branding.
The Big Mac, Cheeseburger, Sundae, French fries, Chicken McNuggets and Filet-O-Fish need no introduction, according to the agency, which goes on to explain the campaign’s concept thus: “Long speeches aren’t necessary: everyone knows what they taste like and stand for. A logo would be redundent, you instantly understand who’s talking to you.”
The campaign, which runs across France in print and outdoors, features close-up images of the items but eschewing logo or any other branded visuals (apart from maybe the grease-proof paper just visible in two of them). “The brand isn’t mentioned anywhere on these visuals, not a single indication would add to the impact of the communication,” states the agency. “Because when a product speaks for itself, what more could we possibly say? But moreover, why should we say anything else?”
It is accompanied by a similarly understated television campaign, directed by Xavier Mairesse, which shows people’s reactions to the mouth-watering imagery and its aftermath, again with no reference to the brand in the script (see Interview and Yoga below).
Want to learn a new skill? Hone your craft? Or just switch off that Mac and do something a little less boring instead for a while? Then our August issue is for you with details on workshops, short courses and a host of ideas to reinvigorate the creative mind. You can buy the August issue of Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money too. Details here.
X-Men: Days of Future Past isn’t scheduled for release until 2014 but the marketing activity has already begun with a series of anti-mutant posters and a fake ad for Trask Industries. But how effective are these campaigns?
It seems as though no release of a superhero or sci-fi themed film is complete these days without a huge marketing effort filling in the backstories of the key characters and organisations involved. For 20th Century Fox’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, LA-based agency Ignition Creative has built a detailed website for Trask Industries, the company supposedly responsible for building the Sentinels, a robot army bent on destroying all mutants.
The site presents Trask Industries as “the world’s leading full-spectrum genetic security and containment company, Trask Industries continues to uncover new ways to control the mounting X-gene threat. We are proud to bring decades of experience, along with 118,000 innovative minds as we continue to secure human freedoms in every nation on Earth. Our goal is to solve tomorrow’s problems, today.”
In the site’s ‘media’ section, two downloadable posters address the mutant ‘threat’ (see top and below).
In addition, Ignition and production company Logan have created a fake Trask Industries commercial
In a feature in our June 2012 issue, film writer Adam Lee Davies traced such complex, multifaceted movie launch campaigns back to 42 Entertainment’s work for Dark Knight Rises in 2008 (with a nod to 1999’s Blair Witch Project).
A particular early favourite here at CR was the email campaing supporting the 2000 fim of American Psycho whereby you could sign up to receive missives from Patrick Bateman on topics such as the marketing genius of Prada and the advantages of using a prvate airport as well as cc’d emails to his therapist. (Read the full list of emails here)
This one reads “I have long ago given up worrying about man’s ability to devise new ways in which to spend a disproportionately huge amount of money in order to show his fellow man that he has amassed huge piles of it. Forget cocaine. It’s place in the luxury goods market has been usurped triumphantly by Prada. I applaud the brilliance of those minds behind this phenomenon. Where else can merchandise made primarily of nylon and leather be fought over by patrons wearing Diamonds and Sable? Prada. More than a brand; A mantra. A greeting. “Prada?” Soon to be right up there with Shalom, Ciao, and Aloha. Virtually yours, Patrick Bateman”
Since then, we have seen increasingly elaborate campaigns for films such as District 9, Watchmen and, most notable of all perhaps, Prometheus, which included this fake TED Talk by character Peter Weyland.
But, as Lee Davies notes, impressive as these campaigns are, they may just be preaching to the converted. Marc Berry Reid, regional director of digital communications agency Way To Blue, concurs in the piece. “The big question for me is how can viral campaigns break out of just appealing to the core audience. They are typically adopted by the ‘fan boy’ audience who, it could be argued, are going to see the film anyway. Avengers Assemble is a good example of a movie that, even though it screamed for one, had no elaborate viral campaign. Did the lack of one impact the movie? The box office so far doesn’t seem to suggest so.”
Robert Marich, contributor to Variety and author of the book Marketing to Moviegoers has harder evidence. “It’s absolutely shown by interviewing American moviegoers that the most impactful marketing is the in-theatre screening of trailers and TV commercials. Online comes after. That’s unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.”
The immaculate, award winning campaign for Tron: Legacy failed to put bums on seats, while James Cameron’s Avatar had no viral campaign to speak of.
Want to learn a new skill? Hone your craft? Or just switch off that Mac and do something a little less boring instead for a while? Then our August issue is for you with details on workshops, short courses and a host of ideas to reinvigorate the creative mind. You can buy the August issue of Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money too. Details here.
L’agence de publicité Grey Tel Aviv a créé une campagne pour la plus grande chaine de librairies en Israël Steimatzky. Intitulée « On est jamais seul avec un bon livre », elle met en scène des lecteurs endormis à côté des personnages de fiction dont ils explorent les aventures. Des visuels très réussis à découvrir.
Hommage à d’Ayrton Senna durant le Grand Prix du Japon en 1989, le dernier spot publicitaire de Honda retrace les mouvements exacts de ce dernier à l’aide de centaines de haut-parleurs et de luminaires. L’absence de voiture sur le circuit Suzuka ajoute à la fois de l’étrangeté et de la solennité à cette réalisation.
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