No smoking
Who needs smoking when there are so many other fun ways to use your mouth?
A recent print ad for Montreal club Gogo Lounge depicts a few of those fun things, with attractive young urbanites engaging in various salacious activities in the club, with the tag: ‘Oh well, so much for smoking…’
Paulo Branco, the club’s owner, was in a panic about the anti-smoking bylaw set to take effect in the city at the end of May, as most of his chic clientele is prone to puff. Members of the bleublancrouge creative team, including CD Gaëtan Namouric, ran into Branco one evening while hanging out at the club. When they mentioned they work in advertising, Branco shared his concerns.
‘He said: ‘You know, guys, I have a big problem – what am I supposed to do? I’m going to lose all of my customers,” Namouric recalls. The team offered to help him, and the resulting print ad has helped Branco retain all of his customers post-bylaw. ‘We decided to go as far as we could.’
The racy ad ran in Montreal alt weeklies like Voir, and as a poster effort inside the club. Many of the posters have mysteriously disappeared.
client: Paulo Branco, owner, Gogo Lounge
strategic planning:
Benoît Chapellier
CD: Gaëtan Namouric
creative team: Sébastien Deland, Pierre Nolin
photographer: Alain Desjean
production co-ordinator:
Lisa Arduini
retouching: Claude Lafrance
Bick’s gets spacey
Oh, poor pickles. Held in captivity until they succumb to your selfish cravings.
The first in a series of three new 30-second spots for Bick’s depicts an ‘intercepted transmission’ of a fridge-based alien documentarian exposing the cruel way humans treat pickles. Quite the out-of-the-box concept for a mom-targeted condiment brand, yet nicely in line with Bick’s ‘fun’ brand identity.
‘The notion is so absurd,’ says Janet Kestin, co-CD at Ogilvy & Mather. ‘The clients loved it. They laughed from the first script through to the last edit tweak.’
Each spot features the animated alien and people eating pickles. ‘Bick’s’ briefs invariably involve the word ‘crunch.’
In this case, it was about crunch and craving,’ explains Kestin.
The campaign also includes two radio spots featuring the affable alien.
client: Danielle Rudra,
group marketing manager;
Leslie Gage, director of marketing, Smucker Foods of Canada
CDs: Janet Kestin, Nancy Vonk
copywriter: Miles Markovic
AD: Nick Burton
account director: Jody Low-A-Chee
agency producer: Brenda Surminski
prodco: Reginald Pike
director: Mark Gilbert
DOP: Andre Pienaar
executive producer: Josefina Nadurata
producer: Tuula Hopp
animation: Hatch Studios
director of animation: Rich Rosenman
executive producer, animation:
Randi Yaffa
editor: Brian Wells, School Editing
sound: Pirate
touchy subject
Go ahead, touch it. You know you want to.
Wild postings featuring a breast, stove element and face have been scattered around Vancouver, silently daring people to touch them. They aim to raise awareness about the June launch of the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale, an international art show that erects public art sculptures around the city.
‘This is a celebration of tactility,’ explains Michael Milardo, copywriter at Vancouver-based Rethink. ‘We were trying to figure out what was 3D and interactive, so it became a question of which medium to use.’ After determining that wild postings would best meet those needs, the creative team decided to up the interactivity ante by putting up empty shelves around the postings to create a community art project of sorts.
‘This was the public component…people put up pop bottles, origami,’ says Milardo, recalling that when he went to replace one of the stolen shelves two days after it was first put up, a family was there waiting for the new shelf so their little girl could display a clothespin bumblebee she made for it. ‘A couple of them got tagged, and it looked great.’
Rethink printed 1,000 vacuum-formed posters in total, which they’ll keep putting up until all have been stolen/removed. ‘We numbered each poster so that each one is unique,’ notes Milardo.
client: Barrie Mowatt, executive director, Vancouver Sculpture Biennale
CDs: Chris Staples, Ian Grais
copywriter: Michael Milardo
AD: Bart Batchelor
account services: Elizabeth Graham
print producer: Dale Vankoughnett
Nestea gets subliminal
Talk about integration. The latest TV spot for Nestea incorporates a ‘hidden URL,’ www.plungeandplay.com, where alert viewers can continue the commercial at home and control the main character’s underwater ‘plunge’ adventure, fighting to keep him hydrated with Nestea. Within the first few weeks, the site had already received 100,000 hits.
‘It ended up creating an enormous amount of buzz in the blogosphere and driving tons of traffic to the game,’ notes Wallace Leung, brand manager, Coca-Cola Canada/Nestea. ‘We had people going back and re-watching our commercial and then talking about it online. It went way beyond spending 30 seconds with the brand.’
The 30-second TV spot features a dude trying to stay cool by using a tennis-ball machine to shoot snowballs at him. He, of course, doesn’t achieve refreshment until he drinks a Nestea, at which point he ‘plunges’ into Nestea’s now familiar spontaneously materializing pool.
client: Wallace Leung, brand manager,
Coca-Cola Canada/Nestea
CDs: Christina Yu/Geoffrey Roche
copywriter: Rob Sturch
AD: Basil Cowieson
agency planner: Kristin Burnham
agency producer: Melanie Lambertsen
account team: Marla Reinstein, Sam Pollock
connections planner: Joy Sanguedolce
prodco: Untitled
director: Michael Downing
editor: Alison Gordon, Relish
interactive design agency: Indusblue, Toronto
interactive CD: Dayton Pereira
You are cordially invited to submit your new, dead clever and previously unrevealed campaigns to: editorial director Mary Maddever at mmaddever@brunico.com and CD Stephen Stanley at sstanley@brunico.com, co-curators of strategy’s Creative space.
