Happy Slip

Christine is our first Fil-American Youtube star.

An addictingly hilarious take on life as a Fil-Am in the Web 2.0 era.

The Ultimate in Torture Tests

This has got to be the toughest of all torture tests.

Obviously created by a demented mind. Wonderful idea!

The Beauty of Complaints

Complaints are wonderful: If there were no complaints, we wouldn't know what to fix. We wouldn't know what people really wanted. We wouldn't know how to market to them. We woulddn't know what to make for them.

The problem though is a complaint by nature is a negative, destructive even. It points to something missing, something that ought to be there, something that we ought to have thought about but which we neglected. It points out our faults, our failings, our inability to be omniscient and all-powerful.

Complaints remind us of our humanity. (And it works both ways, be you complainer or complainee.)

Thanks to Cisco for this link.

Renault Celebrates F1 Victory

Not sure whether this is a made-for-Youtube video, but it is pretty cool.

Made me feel good about my rooting for Alonso (okay, I'm really a Kimi fan but when it comes down to an Alonso vs Schumi deathmatch, I'm all for Fernando).

I bet there's nary a dry eye in the Renault camp these days, now that Alonso's moved to McLaren.

Anyway, this is a great rah-rah video for all the Renault fans out there.

(Half a million pageviews already for all the variants of this video on Youtube, incidentally. Pretty good.)

Proof: Zero Media, Maximum Impact

Russel Davies writes that one day, media budgets will be zero.

Well, it's not that far off into the future. It's already beginning. Nowadays, you don't need media -- or at least traditional media -- to get your message out there.

As Jason in Fruits of Imagination writes, this great spot from Dove has been viewed 2 MILLION times. The buzz has made it the subject of segments / shows on major networks like CNN and has made it the subject of discussions on talk shows like "Ellen", not to mention blogs. Imagine how much money you'd need to make that happen in the traditional way.

These are exciting (as well as damn scary) times for ad agencies.

The challenges, in no particular order, are:

1 How to continue to make money for the time when media commissions do indeed reach zero -- we all need to put food on our respective tables, after all.

2 Mastery of the new media alternatives out in the wild -- and not just existing alternatives like Youtube, Friendster and what-have-you. We've got to open up and see what else we can use that's out there. Or will be there. Or is getting there.

3 Thinking in a media-neutral kind of way -- and this may be the biggest challenge. Most of us, having grown up in the 80's and 90's tend to see advertising in terms of TV, perhaps because the great agencies of those years were TV-driven. Everything CAN be advertising. Let the agency heads figure out how to make non-media executions translate to income. Let's just focus on making messages that stick, and which indeed do stick, wherever we can make them stick.


Rey

Popcorn Showdown

Hmmm

I Love Popcorn

What good popcorn drives you to do : )

Feel Unbreakable (trailer)

see the whole thing --- and the director's cut -- at www.rogin-e.com !

Just wanted to show you our nicely designed website : )

Wrangler 5 Door

A new species for Jeeps. Clever!

Tea Partay

Smirnoff did this spot. Am not sure if it was purely for online.

Am sure though that in its campiness, it manages to refresh the boring image of the brand.

hether this'll translate to sales might be another thing. It doesn't work for me.

Urban Spam

Piers Fawkes from PSFK shares this video on what he calls "Urban Spam."

SPAM, of course is unwanted and meaningless junk messages, a lot of it irrelevant to everyone it hits.

Looking at the stuff on the video though, I think he'd have been better off shooting the billboards in Manila. A lot of the stuff he shows is actually quite cool. Then again, maybe I find them cool because we don't really see a lot of those stunts over here.

SPAM is relative.

CocaCola + Mentos

The kind of thing I mentioned in Multiply. Destined to be a classic!

Sony Bravia Homage by Tango

This is what I referred to in the previous post.

Looked at another way, maybe Sony actually encouraged the spoof to get more mileage for their own ad.

bravia

Scott G writing for Advertising Industry Newswire.com has this to say about this TVC: “
We’re in a modern city. Colored balls bounce down the street and rain from the sky. (Dramatic pause) That’s it. It’s pretty. Beautiful, even. Hell, it’s so jarringly lovely that it borders on the surrealistic. But there’s no actual content. It’s just colored balls bounding everywhere. Oh yeah, there’s some droning, whiny, shoegazing alt-rock blather on the soundtrack.

At the end, there’s an image of a TV screen. And some titles: “Sony Brava. Colour like no other.”

Okay, what is a Sony Brava? The commercial doesn’t say. If it’s a new TV screen that offers improved color, it seems like a side-by-side comparison between Brava and an ordinary screen would be the way to go. Which you cannot do in a TV spot; you need to use magazines or direct mail and ultimately get people to go see a product demo.

I mean, think about it: what is the point of making a commercial for your new color screen if I’m going to be watching it on my current color screen?
---
My take: The man has a point. BUT then again, this TVC did a great job for me. I didn't know about the Bravia before and now I'm thinking I want one.

Unfortunately for the Bravia, Tango spoofed the ad -- and I actually thought Sony stole the idea from the soda company!

Jun Ji-hyun in KFC advertisement

I like Sassy. So there.

Honda Journey

Another great Honda commercial.