These are some super fantastic new Scrabble ads designed to liven up the game’s image a bit. Over the past 60′s years that it’s existed, Scrabble has sort taken on a reputation as a favorite of only English majors and elitist word geeks; so it looks like their trying to reach out to a wider audience. They get it, they’re “hip”. Also, is that Ween playing?

The concept of all the words on the board coming alive and interacting is great, but I’m not so sure everyone will “get it” at first. I mean, the people who already like Scrabble probably will, but the more mainstream people they’re trying to recruit, less likely. Still, I love this ad, and the other two in the series:

Ad Info:

Title: THE BEAUTIFUL WORD
Advertiser/Client: MATTEL
Product/Service: SCRABBLE
Agency: OGILVY & MATHER, Paris
Country: FRANCE

Credit Details:
Chris Garbutt Executive: Creative Director Ogilvy and Mather
Arnaud Vanhelle: Copy Writer Ogilvy and Mather
Benjamin Bregeault: Copy Writer Ogilvy and Mather
Mihnea Gheorghiu: Copy Writer
Antoaneta Metchanova: Art Director Ogilvy and Mather
Alex Daff: Art Director
Najin Ha: Art Director Ogilvy and Mather
Benoit de Fleurian: Managing Director Ogilvy and Mather
Marie-Charlotte Lafront: Group Director Ogilvy and Mather
Herve Parizot: President Mattel
Arnaud Roland Gosselin: Marketing Director Mattel

I only wish ads like these would play in the US.
My questions to you: Do people still buy board games in this digi-techno-online-quickness culture? And, seriously… is that Ween playing in the first video? It sounds just like them, and they’ve done commercials in the past. Remember the “Where’d the Cheese Go?” commercial for Pizza Hut? Ween did a version first, and was rejected. Check them out:
Where’d the Cheese Go?
and
Where’d the Cheese Go? (explicit)

Here’s a direct quote from Deaner about those two minisongs:
“Earlier in 2002 we were hired by the largest advertising firm in the country to write music for a Pizza Hut commercial. Pizza Hut had hired them to come up with a whole new image to promote their new Pizza, “The Insider” which had all the cheese inside the crust. In keeping in line with their new cutting edge image, the agency hired Ween to do the music, and we delivered in a big way. Unfortunately, they didn’t like a single piece of the 6 tunes we submitted and they had us rewriting the song every day for a couple of weeks before they hired someone else. In my opinion, it is one of the best tunes we wrote all last year.”

Update:
Here is a very cool (although completely unrelated) stop-motion animation commercial done for Scrabble’s 60th anniversary. This one is from a few months ago:

The free market works.

It’s been less than a week since chicken chain KFC offered to pay for the repair of potholes in some cities so long as they could advertise over the patch, and there’s already a bidding war for the job. PETA has offered to pay double what KFC has, so long as they can stencil in their own, anti-KFC, advertisement, pictured below.

It should say “KFC Tortures Delicious Animals”, amirite?

Now, I’ve talked about how completely batshit insane PETA is before, but their ideology doesn’t matter this time, my point remains the same. This is just a fantastic example of how the free market solves problems without government intervention. Not even a week after a private company offers to do something that most people think only government can do (namely: fix the streets), another corporate sponsor offers to pay double for the same thing. Both corporate sponsors have selfish reasons for doing what they’re doing, and both actions will have a positive outcome for society at large. It will fix city streets and cost taxpayers nothing.

The potential for this kind of thing is endless, and it’s because of the magic of advertising. Let’s hope it catches on.

I have somewhat of an obsession with colors and their names or designations. Whenever I can get my hands on color guides or paint sample booklets, I snatch them up. For instance, I have boxes full of those Pantone Guide strips; and having worked in the automotive industry, I have literally piles of automotive production color books with samples of all the exterior colors from various cars. I have samples from nearly every year of nearly every major make and model of car. There is something about the classification of color; I’m fascinated with the taxonomic designations and, more importantly, the aesthetic of all the sample colors lined up in neat rectangles with numbers beneath them.

Anyway… Mimosa. Mimosa is the color of the year, according to the “global authority on color”, Pantone. Read on about 2009′s color:

Pantone makes its money by selling color measurement devices and color guides. They provide standardized palettes mostly for design industries: graphics, fashion, textiles, interior design, etc. So their main customers are design folks, people who would be interested in things like the Color of the Year.

But the thing about Pantone’s selection is that it’s meaningless. They write a blurb about the color, like how we need a cheerful hue for these difficult economic times; but really, they could relate any color to anything else. The real reason for the whole spectacle is marketing. The color of the year selection gets the design folks all up in an interested frenzy, talking about Mimosa and mentioning Pantone every time. And with every mention, Pantone becomes more the universal authority on color. Genius marketing, well done.

During a time of controversy, the best way to win over public opinion is to convince the public that there is no controversy. Sometimes, when an issue is too complicated for the general public to make an informed decision on their own, they rely on the opinions of experts, and politicians stop debating the points of the issue, and start debating the consensus. That’s a consensus war. It’s happening with the global warming issue, and it’s happening with the economy. A reasoned, logical debate of the finer points of the fiscal policy won’t convince the average American. The only way to win the hearts and minds of the American people is to tell them the experts opinion.

Recently, Obama attempted to shut down the controversy surrounding his so-called “stimulus” package by saying “there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.” Then later saying “economists from across the political spectrum agree” on the need for this massive government spending package. Of course, that is not the case. In actuality, many, if not most, economists disagree with the stimulus package. So in response, the Cato Institute took out a full page ad in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times, and Roll Call disputing the president’s claim. Hundreds of top economists, including Nobel laureates and prominent scholars from major universities, signed the statement. There were more than 200 economists signatures on the original ad, and over 100 more have signed on since then. Read on to see the original ad:


the original, full-page Cato ad can be found here in pdf form

Text from the ad:
“There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”
— PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA, JANUARY 9 , 2009

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”

A few months ago I wrote some words about American Apparel’s style of advertising, and how I think they’ve really tapped in to our collective idea of what’s sexy in the internet-pron age. That porn chic style of advertising has been serving them well so far, and just recently, they turned it up a notch and released a few ads with actual nudity. Now, I’m the first to say that some of AA’s original ads were actually more sexually explicit than an image of a woman’s nipple, but it’s still a line, and they’ve crossed it. Whether this will be a positive or a negative for them is still in question.

However, they’re not the only ones flaunting bewbz these days. The skin is spreading. Urban Outfitters has much less clothing on the models than usual in it’s newest catalog. But they’re still shooting in that hazy, soft-focus sepia that we’re so used to, so they can’t say they’re all that cutting edge just yet. Read on to see some pictures of the naked bodies selling clothes:

Currently, two websites are running AA’s nude ads – Debauchette and Reverse Cowgirl.

But AA and UO aren’t the only flashers in the fashion industry right now. I don’t have many concrete examples, but I swear it’s getting a lot more naked around here. The fashion shows seem much more nippely than usual and the fancy artfreak fashionistas seem to be publishing more skin than I remember seeing before. One example: Gravure Magazine’s black-and-white, 28-page spread of naked hot bodies. I sense a trend.

some of the American Apparel ads:

pics from the Urban Outfitters catalog:

and a few of Gravure Magazine’s noodz:

Nikon has this new series of ads for their S60 model of digital camera. The tagline is “The Nikon S60. Detects up to 12 faces.” It’s really quality marketing: it’s simple and it gets the point across well. Well done.

Ad Info:
Agency: Euro RSCG, Singapore
Photographer: Jeremy Wong
Executive Creative Director: Charlie Blower
Creative Director: Victor Ng
Art Director: Lee Hsueh Ling
Copywriter: Victor Ng, Stephen Kyriakou

Check out full size images of all three ads: