Tees keep coming (2/2)

Check the main T-shirts page for more.

Add comment | July 14th, 2008

More tees (1/2)

Good news for everyone who wears clothes, we’ve got new tees out today! Check them out in the T-shirts section now.

Add comment | July 10th, 2008

The Puman Race

In response to Nike’s current Human Race campaign, Puma have come up with something truly original: sponsoring a top team of genetic experts to develop an entirely new species.

“We’d love to sponsor ordinary human athletes,” Puma marketing director, Eligible Sessions, told Campaign magazine, “but they’re just not fast enough to express our core brand value of puma-like speed. That’s how we hit on the idea of the Pumans.”

Puma’s plan is to cross the world’s fastest runners with big cats, breeding for speed, power and brand loyalty. Currently the project is in its early stages but the part-human, part-puma super-athletes are predicted to dominate the Olympics by 2050.

“We’ve done the legwork of coming up with the idea. Now the whitecoats just have to execute,” he said. “The best bit is going to be seeing Paula Radcliffe getting inseminated by a tiger.”

Eligible, himself a new breed of “celebrity client” because of the extreme ideas he is willing to embrace, believes the Pumans are going to shift a lot of shoes. But his ultimate aim is bolder still.

“Our vision is to see mankind enslaved to super-powerful Puman beings. Only when the last human has been incarcerated in a Puman jail will Puma have achieved total market dominance.”

“I didn’t come up with the idea of the Puman Race,” Eligible continues, “But I think I may be a genius for signing off on it.”

3 comments | July 7th, 2008

Join the debate!

We’re pleased to see more and more companies who “get” online communities these days, who are opening up their brands and welcoming consumer opinion. Advertisers like Volvo understand it’s not a one-sided conversation any more — they’ve got to engage with the customer and find out, for instance, whether they like art or crime!

But the latest online campaign from Primark has to be the boldest and best yet. They’ve been honest enough to admit to corporate behaviour that some will find sickening, but by being transparent about it they’ve turned it into a brand virtue. Even if they don’t persuade you that they’re in the right, you can’t help warming to this conversatonal approach to a difficult topic:

The campaign also features a microsite where consumers can discuss Primark’s unethical sourcing practices and even organise marches and direct action against the company, all in a fully Primark-branded environment.

Long may the debate continue!

1 comment | June 28th, 2008

Golden Liars?

Over on Scamp Blog, BBH creative director Simon Veksner is having a rant at the Cannes Outdoor winners, which were announced earlier today:

“Cannes is FULL of scam – especially in press and outdoor. It makes me so angry to walk round and look at all the ads for dog neutering, penis enlargements and Join the Priesthood … Happy to be proved wrong, but I don’t believe that 50% of the winners in the outdoor category ever ran at all.”

Scamp singles out Lion winners from Thailand and Singapore as particularly suspect. Commenters also suggest that Asian agencies are the main culprits when it comes to fakery, even resorting to photoshopped outdoor scenes.

But this Gold-winning Malaysian entry seems legit to us. The client is a Kuala-Lumpur-based anvil manufacturer and to create the award-winning installation, agency Pumani-18 flattened an existing billboard site and positioned a giant anvil on top of it, as if it had fallen from the sky.

If British agencies want Gold, this is what they’ve got to be aiming for.

3 comments | June 18th, 2008

From the Hay-on-Wye literary festival

A reading at the Hay festival

From nature to literature, branding opportunities are all around us

The world of literature has always been sniffy about advertising and product placement. But happily, attitudes may be changing. This week we’ve been at the Hay festival in Wales, where acclaimed novelist Haruki Murakami read from his latest novel, the first major literary work commissioned by a brand. (It comes hot on the heels of Shane Meadows’ feature-length collaboration with Eurostar.)

See if you can figure out the identity of Murakami’s sponsor, a popular British supermarket, from this excerpt:

So we were orphans. Haku said we had better get used to the idea. We should concentrate on our schoolwork and make something of ourselves. But as much as I wanted to do what my older brother said, I couldn’t help thinking that today would be the day mother would come back to us. She would appear as if she had just popped out to the shops, arms full of treats and freezer pleasers ranging from a 1.5kg family lasagne to a kids’ lolly selection. She had gone somewhere wonderful, I was sure of it, a magical land of ice and plenty where all the mothers go. She was probably having a brilliant time with Kerry Katona. And somehow – don’t ask me how – I knew that we would see her again.

- From “The Land of Ice”, Haruki Murakami

Add comment | June 1st, 2008

Nuevo Dementos

Here’s an entertaining Spanish ad for Domestos, which is called Dementos in mainland Europe.

Woman: Pedro! No!

An attractive housewife scolds her cat as it jumps up onto the kitchen work surface. Her mouth softens and then melts into a smile as the cat nuzzles her hand. She strokes him and then turns back to her aerobics. Close up on her pushing down the play button on a tape deck.

Woman: Pedro! NO!

We see her face turn to horror. Camera turns to her POV. Pedro calmly jumps down from the work surface and pads out of the kitchen. He has defecated on the work surface. The woman’s face melts for a second time. She gets out the Dementos and a cloth. She sprays it on and with one wipe the shit is gone. The surface sparkles (CGI).

Woman holds up the dirty brown cloth and the Dementos bottle and sighs happily. Just then, her young son comes running into the kitchen behind her. She catches him and playfully rubs the shitty cloth over his face. He squeals in delight.

Woman (turning to camera): Nuevo Dementos. Whoopsie…Whoopie!

Add comment | May 28th, 2008

New tees

New tees out today, including the limited-edition Horny Ghost (see below). Be sure to check the T-shirts page for the full range.

Add comment | May 20th, 2008

Cash Bashing

We love porn magazines – but strictly for the ads! Thumbing through one of our favourites the other day we found something that really got us excited: two bold new ‘adult’ executions in Maestro’s ‘The New Cash’ campaign.

Just to remind you what we’re talking about, here’s a couple of pics from the mainstream campaign:

Maestro has been relentlessly abusing cash for two years now, which makes the two ads we stumbled across in our dirty magazine seem like a very natural extension of the campaign. You definitely won’t find the following in the Economist, however!

Warning: coarse language.
Click here to view Maestro ad 1
Click here to view Maestro ad 2

2 comments | May 14th, 2008

The fifth Orange animal

The Orange animals – Racoon, Panther, Dolphin and Canary – are a great marketing concept. By posing the question, “Which animal are you?”, they get consumers to do the work of market segmentation by themselves.

But did you know Orange also offers a lesser-known fifth talk plan, ‘Brown Recluse’? Named after the secretive but lethal spider, Brown Recluse is designed for those who use their phones only very occasionally.

When we heard about Brown Recluse this week we assumed it was something new that had been introduced in response to demand. But a second look at the classic ad by Mother reveals it’s been there all along – you just have to know where to look.

Here’s a still from the ad:

And here’s an enlargement of the boxed area:

Brown Recluse comes with fifteen minutes of talk time and a free text message every five months.

2 comments | May 7th, 2008