April 2007

Here’s a new Snickers commercial featuring everyone’s favorite A-Team member, Mr. T. Conceptualized by AMV.BBDO(London) and Directed by Tom Kuntz from MJZ. The Mill was responsible for the VFX work with Wave Studios adding the music(giving the whole piece that good ‘ol A-Team feel).
In this spot we see a soccer player going down, melodramatically faking an injury to pull a foul, only to quickly find himself at the business end of a tank driven by the one and only, Mr.T (dressed as his famous character Sgt. Bosco “B.A.” Baracus from A-Team). He then throws a snickers at the poor guy and there is some severe pitying.. all in a days work.
I also like to add that any spot that references meeting any friend named “Pain” is a winner in my book.

Here’s a recent Coca-Cola spot from the folks over at Monkey Labs(Sydney). Singleton Ogilvy & Mather is the agency with Octavio de Lellis as Creative Director and Mark Jackson as Producer. I like it how Coke’s evolving in their usage of animation from the Christmas Polar Bear pieces to now using CGI. This 60sec spot reminds me of that Happiness Factory animation(Wieden + Kennedy/Psyop) that aired earlier this year.

Ok, there is nothing really that special about this ad, other than the fact that Edward Norton is doing the voice-over. Well, I’m a big Edward Norton fan so i couldn’t resist posting this. Created by Wieden and Kennedy(Amsterdam), this spot features Mr. Norton narrating a little piece about being addicted to running. Throughout the whole commercial you can hear the little voice that comes with the Nike+ running companion(you know, that little thing that you’re supposed to insert into your shoe + then into your Ipod Nano?)… kind of cool, if i had a Nano i’d probably use it(but I don’t so I can’t). The way in which it throws in the Nike+ computer voiceover makes it seem as if by using this you will be pushed to new heights(err.. distances?) during your runs…interesting indeed.

I do have to admit though, throughout this entire ad all I could think about was how similar this spot was to the ad that Helen Hunt and Mel Gibson pitched to the women’s division at Nike in the ending to the 2000 movie, “What Women Want.” Perhaps thats one of the reasons why Nike just moved their whole running line over to Miami based Crispin Porter + Bogusky… I guess we’ll never know.
Dante Ariola was the director and MJZ(London) was the production company. A-Bomb(London) did the music.