Bogus Branding

Swiss paper publishes this bogus Gucci ad

In Switzerland, it doesn’t take much to be in a Gucci ad campaign. You photograph yourself naked, add a perfume bottle and the Gucci logo, send it to a weekly paper, and have them bill Gucci directly for the $50,000. They’ll fall for it every time. Naturally, this is now the top story at a rival newspaper.

Pirelli Goes To Hollywood [Flash Movie]

PIRELLI: UMA THURMAN DEBUTS ON THE WEB WITH “MISSION ZERO”
PIRELLI’S SECOND FILM

NEW SHORT FILM PRESENTED IN NEW YORK

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, with Uma Thurman as guest star, the film required ten days of filming and three months of post production in Los Angeles

New York, January 30, 2007 – After the successful first edition, the new Pirelli short film, Mission Zero, will star Uma Thurman and be directed by Kathryn Bigelow of Strange Days and Point Break fame.

Once again Pirelli has chosen film via Internet to promote its brand and business activities.

Due to her past roles and films, Kill Bill star Uma Thurman is an actress who best represents the concept of speed and power in the collective mind of the international public. But in this edition, Uma’s speed and power will be nothing without control. Driving a fiery Lamborghini Gallardo with PZero tires, she will speed through the streets of Los Angeles to escape mysterious assassins who suddenly appear and try to kill her for no apparent reason.

The film is based on hair-raising chase scenes, but only the final scene of the clever plot will reveal the solution to a series of unexplainable events that happen to the star. Director Kathryn Bigelow gave a realistic interpretation of the script and added great emotional and psychological tension to the action scenes.

The film was shot with internationally renowned talents directly in Los Angeles, taking advantage of all the potential that the city, the home of the movie industry, has to offer. Everyone, from Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski (Oscar winner for Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List) to the weapons master and post-production team, contributed to the successful outcome of this short film that has all the characteristics of the best action flicks. The result is a complete film that concentrates in just 10 minutes the best that Hollywood has to offer.

Last year choosing the Internet as the distribution channel turned out to be a great idea. Thanks to its widespread use, in just a few months the movie reached global dimensions and was accessed from 216 countries and independent territories.

There was a large number of hits from Europe and Latin America, but movie buffs and web surfers also connected from remote places like the Comore Islands and Fiji, and even from the icy Antarctica base, for more than 5,000,000 film views in less than a year (equal to a share of more than 1.1% of the entire Internet broadband population –
Source: Internet World Stats and Nielsen Net Ratings).

This year, too, the project has been the talk of the town and has encouraged people to present new scripts and ideas.

Supercool Ford Mustang billboards by Ian Hart

"Think Israel" @ Emirates Stadium, London

I love London. It is a melting pot of different creeds, nationalities, races and religion. It is a true global village in the format of a vibrant big city. Everybody knows this, of course, but what you probably don't know is the composition of sponsors for one of the city's most prestigous football teams, Arsenal.

They have a brand new, amazing stadium, named after one of their main sponsors, the arabic airline Emirates. Other sponsors include their jersey-supplier, Nike (USA), the Korean electronics giant, LG, and local british sponsors BT and Paddy Power (!). But when the advertising banners show commercials for THINKISREAL.COM on the EMIRATES STADIUM, your love for football enters an entirely new dimension.

And don't get me started on the international squad directed by the french coach, Arsene Wenger.

I love London. I love football. And I love they way sports can make the world a better place.

Grab one of Influx's free thought packs

In the past three years, Influx has written over 1,000 posts on various brand related topics. The site doesn't yet have the best search engine and even if we did, it would be tough to organize the articles into a structured readable format, so we've gone out and done the heavy lifting for you.

Thought Packs are basically a collection of our best articles around a specific topic that have been designed and built into a downloadable PDF.

To date, we've published four of them that are available for free, simply by registering for them. On the left of the web page, you will see a button marked FREE, click on that and fill out your details.

The 5 published Thought Packs are as follows;

Volume 1: Design

Volume 2: Innovation and Creativity

Volume 3: 30 Ideas for C21st Branding

Volume 4: Social Responsibility

Volume 5: Influx Interviews

Home-made logo including the ®-mark!

Remember to remove the sign when you move the shop

Otherwise the consumer may think that you are going out of business. Or worse: got thrown out of the building!

Very nice, extremely discreet, building-friendly, signing though.

(Former DIESEL store in the hip Marais area of Paris).

Super Bowl Ads of Cartoonish Violence, Perhaps Reflecting Toll of War

No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq, unlike a patriotic spot for Budweiser beer that ran during the game two years ago. But the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials.

More than a dozen spots celebrated violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous.

For instance, in a commercial for Bud Light beer, sold by Anheuser-Busch, one man beat the other at a game of rock, paper, scissors by throwing a rock at his opponent’s head.

In another Bud Light spot, face-slapping replaced fist-bumping as the cool way for people to show affection for one another. In a FedEx commercial, set on the moon, an astronaut was wiped out by a meteor. In a spot for Snickers candy, sold by Mars, two co-workers sought to prove their masculinity by tearing off patches of chest hair.

There was also a bank robbery (E*Trade Financial), fierce battles among office workers trapped in a jungle (CareerBuilder), menacing hitchhikers (Bud Light again) and a clash between a monster and a superhero reminiscent of a horror movie (Garmin).

It was as if Madison Avenue were channeling Doc in “West Side Story,” the gentle owner of the candy store in the neighborhood that the two street gangs, the Jets and Sharks, fight over. “Why do you kids live like there’s a war on?” Doc asks plaintively. (Well, Doc, this time, there is.)

During other wars, Madison Avenue has appealed to a yearning for peace. That was expressed in several Super Bowl spots evocative of “Hilltop,” the classic Coca-Cola commercial from 1971, when the Vietnam War divided a world that needed to be taught to sing in perfect harmony.

Coca-Cola borrowed pages from its own playbook with two whimsical spots for Coca-Cola Classic, “Happiness Factory” and “Video Game,” that were as sweet as they were upbeat. The commercials, by Wieden & Kennedy, provided a welcome counterpoint to the martial tone of the evening.

Those who wish the last four years of history had never happened could find solace in several commercials that used the device of ending an awful tale by revealing it was only a dream.

The best of the batch was a commercial for General Motors by Deutsch, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, in which a factory robot “obsessed about quality” imagined the dire outcome of making a mistake.

The same gag, turned inside out, accounted for one of the funniest spots, a Nationwide Financial commercial by TM Advertising, also owned by Interpublic. The spot began with the singer Kevin Federline as the prosperous star of an elaborate rap video clip. But viewers learned at the end it was only the dream of a forlorn fry cook at a fast-food joint.

Then, too, there was the unfortunate homonym at the heart of a commercial from Prudential Financial, titled “What Can a Rock Do?”

The problem with the spot, created internally at Prudential, was that whenever the announcer said, “a rock” — invoking the Prudential logo, the rock of Gibraltar — it sounded as if he were saying, yes, “Iraq.”

To be sure, sometimes “a rock” is just “a rock,” and someone who has watched the Super Bowl XIX years in a row only for the commercials may be inferring things that Madison Avenue never meant to imply.

Take for instance a spot by Grey Worldwide, part of the WPP Group, for Flomax, a drug sold by Boehringer Ingelheim to help men treat enlarged prostates.

“Here’s to men,” the announcer intoned, “to guys who want to spend more time having fun and less time in the men’s room.”

It was not difficult to imagine guests at noisy Super Bowl parties asking one another, “Did he just say, ‘guys who want to spend more time having fun in the men’s room?’ ”

Another off-putting moment was provided by a stereotyped character in a commercial by Endeavor for a hair dye, Revlon Colorist. He was described as the stylist for the singer Sheryl Crow, and he was clearly miffed about her using the product.

“Revlon? Color?” he asked, pouting and rolling his eyes. “I am the colorist.”

What follows is an assessment of some of the other high and low points among the commercials shown nationally during the game on CBS. The spots are among 36 provided to a reporter before the game, out of the total of about 56 that were scheduled to run.

ANHEUSER-BUSCH Each year, Anheuser-Busch manages to offset the typically coarse commercials for Bud Light with a charmer or two for its Budweiser brand. Last night, the brewer went two-for-two with a pair of spots about animals. One commercial tugged at the heartstrings with a bedraggled mutt whose wish to jump on the Bud band wagon — literally and figuratively — came true. The other, sillier spot presented a beachful of anthropomorphic crabs starting a Bud-centric version of a cargo cult. Agency: DDB Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group.

CADBURY SCHWEPPES A wry, low-key commercial showed an ardent fan of Snapple Green Tea, sold by Cadbury Schweppes, traveling all the way to China to learn the secret of its appeal. The punch line, that the answer was closer than he imagined, was not unexpected. Still, it was delivered deftly. Agency: Cliff Freeman & Partners, part of MDC Partners.

DIAMOND FOODS Mr. Federline was not the only celebrity to poke fun at his public persona. A wacky spot for the Emerald line of nuts sold by Diamond Foods presented the crooner Robert Goulet as a nefarious evil-doer. Perhaps he was auditioning for a role in the next Austin Powers movie — or to replace William Shatner in the Priceline campaign. Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, owned by Omnicom.

GODADDY Another Super Bowl, another cheesy commercial for GoDaddy, the Web site registrar operated by the GoDaddy Group. This time, there was a wild party in the office of the GoDaddy marketing department. “Everybody wants to work in marketing,” a character says with a smirk. Hey, GoDaddy, go get Mommy — maybe she knows how to make a halfway decent Super Bowl spot. Agency: created internally.

PEPSICO Two spots for Sierra Mist, sold by the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, were not as funny as those from the game last year. A third commercial, for Sierra Mist Free, hit the jackpot with a punch line that, well, came up short, as in the abbreviated shorts worn by the comedian Jim Gaffigan. Agency: BBDO Worldwide, part of Omnicom.

SPRINT NEXTEL By now, even the most spoof-loving consumer is probably tired of commercials that mock commercials for prescription drugs. But a spot from Sprint Nextel managed to elicit laughs. The parody was dead-on, down to the hushed-voice announcer promising that Sprint Mobile Broadband would help those who “can’t take care of business the way others do” by curing their “connectile dysfunction.” Agency: Publicis & Hal Riney, part of the Publicis Groupe.

Nike Trial Vans

Nike Trial Vans are currently touring the UK/Ireland, France, Italy and Spain, stocking 1,000 pairs of shoes. It’s a free trial, no strings attached. To deliver on the crucial element of TRYVERTISING, total relevance of placement, the vans will pop up in places where people actually run. From athletic events to well-known running spots.

Who really won during the Super Bowl?

And the other winner of the Super Bowl is...Coke.

Top-ranking ads
Coca-Cola: "Video Game"
Doritos: "Live the Flavor"
Bud Light: "Hitchhiker"

Worst-ranking ads
Emerald Nuts: "Robert Goulet"
Honda: "CRV Crave"
Sprint: "Connectile Dysfunction"

Super Bowl 2007: "GM: Robot" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Coca-Cola: Side Of Life" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Snickers Mechanics" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "FedEx: Moon Office" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Sierra Mist: Karate" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Budweiser: Mencia" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "GM" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Blockbuster" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "HP Computers" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Honda: CR-V" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Budweiser: King Crab" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Hannibal Rising" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Prudential" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Snapple Green Tea" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Godaddy.com: The Office" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "E*Trade (4th Quarter)" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Budweiser: Select" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Careerbuilder.com"

Super Bowl 2007: "IZOD" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Flomax" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Honda: Full Line" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Meet The Robinsons" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Budweiser: Movie" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Van Heusen" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Taco Bell" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Toyota Tundra: See Saw" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Career Builder" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "T-Mobile" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Revlon: Colorist" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Emerald Nuts" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Budweiser: Great Apes" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Fedex Shipping" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Nationwide Insurance" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "Coca-Cola: Happiness Factory" [WindowsMedia]

Super Bowl 2007: "E*Trade" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Sierra Mist Free: Hospital" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Sprint Broadband" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Garmin Navigation" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Wild Hogs" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Budweiser: Spot Wink" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Frito-Lay" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Coca-Cola: Time Line" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Heart Association" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Budweiser: Fist Bomb" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Chevy: Car Wash" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Doritos: Live The Flavor" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Budweiser: Reception" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Coca-Cola: Video Game" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Toyota Tundra: Ramp" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Godaddy.com" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Salesgenie.com" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Sierra Mist Combover" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Lions Gate: Our House" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Schick Quattro Titanium" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Budweiser, Rock, Paper, Scissors" [WindowsMedia]

Superbowl 2007: "Doritos" [WindowsMedia]