Category — Cult Branding

Burger King has finally kicked off it’s slighted twisted take on the classic taste test this weekend. If you haven’t yet seen the set of 15-second teaser ads leading up to the launch, the campaign is a taste test with participants who’ve basically never heard of a hamburger. It features various isolated peoples from around the world, hence “Whopper Virgins”, to participate in the “world’s purest taste test”. They asked Thai Hmong tribesmen, Transylvanian farmers, and some Inuit from Greenland to choose either the Whopper or the McDonald’s Big Mac.

This is the latest bit of marketing from BK’s agency, Crispin Porter & Bogusky. CP+B is also responsible for previous ads like the motivational spoof Dr. Angus, the Whopper Freakout day where customers were told Burger King no longer sold Whoppers, and all the ads featuring the exceedingly bizarre King. This ad seems like the most ambitious to date though. “We wanted to see how the Whopper would perform in a world that didn’t have ad or marketing awareness or any sentimental attachments” says Russ Klein, president of BK’s global marketing. Of course, even before the main ads came out, tons of people were offended, as people often are. Read on:
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Best Animation & Best Direction & Best Model Making & Best Use of Recorded Music (Joint Winner)

Title: Play Doh
Product: Sony Bravia
Client: Sony
Nominee: Darren Walsh
Animation Production Company: Passion Pictures
Agency: Fallon

And the rest:
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Ok AdSavvyites, it’s time for some audience participation.

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, David Friedman’s Ideas, and he had an interesting topic: Ways to promote your political ideology. Let’s say you’re a moderately wealthy and talented individual with a strong desire to promote a certain political viewpoint. How do you go about doing it? What’s the most effective, efficient way to get it done? You want the most amount of change for the least amount of money and effort. I want to hear your ideas.

First, let’s consider some of the more common methods:
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Freak out videos are big. People love to laugh at the misfortune of others, plus we can all relate with the one guy who just has too much one day and finally snaps. It could be one of us, if we were mentally unbalanced. Fortunately for society, most of us are at least partially balanced, so we keep that terrible rage bottled up deep inside, buried in our special place, where it can do no harm except for the gradual eating away of our soul and joy of living.

Yes, well, the videos: This unfortunate nutcase in the hotel lobby is a fictional character as you may have guessed from the website displayed at the end. That website, www.donthaveameltdown.com, is actually a front for Cisco’s Unified Communications Create Adaptive Workspaces service. You sold me, Cisco, hook it up in my living room. Wait, it costs how much?

Moving on, check out these past freak out viral video ads:
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Toyota’s new Australian ad campaign for their 2009 Corolla hatchback is freaking solid gold. It’s just this kind of bizarre stuff that gets people interested and talking about the product, especially in their target audience, youth. “We just really wanted to make something a younger audience could be intrigued by, and sell a different side of Corolla, other than how practical it is,” says Micah Walker, Creative Director, Mojo Sydney.

The kitten headed hero’s story doesn’t end with the commercial though, his story is fleshed-out in an animated graphic novel online called The Getaway. We learn his name is Max and he has a sidekick named Misty; and he gets into a series of adventures: 9 Lives and Counting, Landing on all Fours, and The Sound and the Furry… clever, right?
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Agent Provocateur is known for it’s very sexy ad campaigns. In the past they’ve had Kate Moss, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peaches Geldof, and recently, Daisy Lowe; all ultra-hotties in their own right. But supermodel Helena Christensen is the newest freshbody in the AP ads.

Agent Provocateur’s ads are always interesting and usually have some sort of story line or theme. This time is pirates; mind-bogglingly sexy pirates. The Danish model stars as a female pirate who’s seducing the captain of the ship she’s attempting to plunder. Their website also has an insanely sexy video starring Christensen and Alice Dellal with cryptic clues and a choose-your-own-adventure feel.

Check out the hotness:
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The Economist is one of my top five favorite magazines, I read it regularly. I also live in the Philadelphia area and eat pizza quite often. So I’m excited about The Economist’s new advertising plan: they connected with over 20 pizzerias in the Greater Philadelphia area, most of them near college campuses or dorms, and supplied them with Economist-branded pizza boxes. Each box has a pie chart that connects pizza consumption with global economics and politics. They encourage people to “Get A World View”.

This kind of ambient advertising is always interesting. Publipizz, a maker of advertising pizza boxes, estimates that a box of pizza is looked at by 3 people for at least 8 minutes and results in an 80% memory retention rate. Plus, boxes with advertising on them are less expensive for pizzerias, which makes them more likely to join in.
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This is a great talk by Philip Zimbardo about what evil is. Evil, he says, is not a individual condition, it’s the result of circumstances. He cites the Stanley Milgram’s experiment on human behavior, and the Stanford prison experiment and the problems at Abu Ghraib, all leading up to the conclusion that all humans are equally capable of evil.

What does this have to do with advertising? Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works. This is a wonderful video on that subject. Check it out.

Adam Pacitti started the website TheGirlOfMyDreams after he supposedly had a dream of a girl of such amazing beauty, that he felt he had to find her in real life. So he drew her, and he posted the drawing online along with a video. Fortunately for us and everyone who loves hilarious things, Adam draws like a 5 year old. Yes, you saw it correctly in the video. Here is the girl of his dreams:

I’m still torn over whether Mr. Pacitti is a genius or slow-witted goon. If this is fake, he’s a genius, and he’s found a way to bring hundreds of thousands of people to his website and get exposure in the national media. But his website doesn’t have any ads, so it looks like he’s not making any money from whole thing. That means it may not be fake, and that’s a disturbing concept for me.
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Barack Obama has become the first presidential candidate to advertise in a video game. The Obama campaign purchased ad space in the Xbox live versions of 18 different video games. The ads will run up until Nov. 3, and only be displayed in 10 major swing states.

The ads show that Obama is willing to embrace new technology, and that may be the most important aspect of this whole video game campaign.

Obama’s face and name will be on billboards and signs in “NBA Live ’08″, “Burnout Paradise”, “Nascar 09″, “Need For Speed Carbon”, “Need For Speed Pro Street”, “NFL on Tour”, “NHL ’09″, “Skate”, and “Guitar Hero”, among some others. And the 10 states that are targeted include some major battleground states: Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, and Colorado.
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