February 2008

Here’s a cute addition to the Canadian Purina website that lets you learn how to “speak dog.” It reminds me of the subservient ___insert any of the chicken knock-offs here__ sites, but only this time using a well-trained dog as it’s victim. The site also gives you the ability to send a Valentines Day card to your loved one using the newly learned dog language (and yes there is a cat version of the site too, although at the time of this posting there isn’t a “learn to speak like a cat” nor a feline version of the Valentine’s Day card. I’m sure those will be up within the week though).

The site was designed by Lowe Roche, Toronto for Purina, and features the Dog Communication Tool as well as the Send a Valentine in Dog as part of the brand’s new Valentine’s day campaign push. The Valentine’s Day card portion is said to go down following this Friday (In case that somehow throws you off though, remember that Valentine’s Day is on Thursday this year….. and I don’t think this would serve as a proper “sorry honey that I missed Valentine’s Day” grovel) so if you have any interest in checking it out, i’d suggest you do it soon.

As for the speak dog section, type in “bad” or “sexy” and see what happens….

Link courtesy of Shannon from www.glossyinc.com

Interesting new guerilla campaign for European clothing line Throttleman coming out of Lisboa, Portugal (FYI: Lisboa is Portuguese for Lisbon). Done by guerilla agency torke, it used bluetooth enabled phones to spread the message about their recent clothing line.

From their agency blog:
In order to communicate Throttleman’s Autumn-Winter collection several people dressed with Throttleman’s clothes walked around the city of Oporto with giant tags outside their clothes . Wherever this group would pass, people around them with which had bluetooth turned on would receive an alert SMS of what was happening around them and to invite them to the nearest Throttleman shop.

This type of campaign falls in that grey area of invasive advertising. I don’t know what the cell phone setup is in Portugal, but here in the states, some people are on cell phone plans that charge them for every SMS they send OR receive…. so having to pay to read an advertisement for a new clothing line might not be the best way of attracting new customers. I will say this though, being a 16 year old and getting paid to wear the latest line for a clothing company and only having to spend the day walking the city isn’t too shabby of a gig. It definitely beats standing on a corner flipping a sign around announcing some weekend sale, that’s for sure!

You can view another photo of the campaign in action here.

Here’s the latest spot from Team One (Los Angeles) for Lexus where we’re shown a strange world where the letter “H” has gone missing…. from the classroom to the keyboard, even on billboards. In typical Lexus fashion we have the deep, yet still soft spoken narrator explain that the letter H didn’t feel “unappreciated” but rather had just found a better place to live. That place being on the hybrid tag found on the back of the new Lexus line of “eco-friendly” automobiles. Rather than taking a “green” route to tout the car, they simply end with, “The Power Of h. The Lexus Hybrids.”

Personally I like this spot, but then again, I like most Lexus commercials. Hopefully their goal wasn’t to show just how off-centered the world would be if we were to all of a sudden be missing a letter in the alphabet (and thus inferring that the power of the letter is symbolic to the power of the car)….. because in this case they’d be far off from their mark. That aside it makes for an interesting commercial indeed.

Agency Producer for this commercial was Erin Finch (with Jack Epsteen as the Executive AP) and features Gavin Lester and Jon Pearse as the GCDs.

Dante Ariola directed the spot for MJZ with Toby Irwin as the DP. Andrea MacArthur did the post-editing with Rock Paper Scissors using A52 for the visual effects. Last but not least, Chris Brady from HUM takes credit for composing the soundtrack.

Ogilvy Paris debut’s their first television commercial for luxury brand Louis Vuitton continuing with the theme of their recent print and interactive work for the brand. I’m not going to lie if I say I wasn’t hoping for a Scarlett Johansson cameo, who’s most recent appearance in LV’s print campaign can be viewed here, but instead we see a montage of journeys, asking us whether “the person create the journey, or does the journey create the person?” This is the same message from their now infamous Gorbachev print piece that resulted in a barrage of tin-foil-hat-wearing controversy surrounding the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Turned out that the photographer for the shoot in question, Annie Leibovitz, was the culprit to blame, having purchased a handful of random magazines in order to make the bag appear to be full. More on that can be read here.

As for this spot, Laure Bayle was Agency Producer with Christian Reuilly as acting CD. Bruno Aveillan directed this piece for Quad Productions (Martin Coulais was the producer, Philippe Lesourd the DP, and Bruno himself managed all the camera work).
Manual Beard from WIZZ Paris did the post production with editing done by Fred Olszak (Bruno Maillard was the Flame Artist with the music credits going to none other than famous movie composer Gustavo-Santaolalla).

Interesting piece for a brand’s first foray into the realm of television commercials. This piece will air in 13 different languages in select theaters/cable/satellite channels throughout 2008. If you notice, it’s not your typical :30 second spot either, this one clocks in at around 90 seconds. The reason for that?

The choice of the exceptional 90-second format enables Louis Vuitton to take the time to convey the true and enriching essence of travel as a process of both discovery and self-discovery,” said Antoine Arnault, head of communications at Louis Vuitton. “Time is the ultimate luxury.”[source]

Nicely put, especially with the cost of each second of media time these days…… “Time IS the ultimate luxury.”

Etsy.com, the online store that enables you to sell your homemade goods, just announced that they’ve accepted a $27 million dollar investment to further establish their online community.

taken from their site:
“What does this investment mean?
This means that we now have the resources to extend Etsy’s reach in this world, to enable so many more people to make a living making things. We want Etsy to exist for hundreds of years. Our goal is for Etsy to be an independent, publicly traded company, focused on all things handmade.”

They’ve seen a lot of growth since five friends started the site in 2005 to what they now claim to be a community with over 650,000 members, all purchasing wares from more than 120,000 registered vendors in 127 different countries. From their news post, they try to outline what the investment will be used for - multiple language translations of the site, a better checkout process (which is currently pretty low-fi for a site as large as etsy’s is), as well as being in a position to better service the vendors who rely on Etsy.com for their living. Ohh, and something else about wanting to give their employees dental benefits (pffffffffsh). 

Another venture they plan on trying is a cooperative advertising program where Etsy’s would take out print ads in various magazines/newspapers, and select vendors would be given the opportunity to showcase their “store” and one of their products. With enough vendors, Etsy’s promises to split the cost of the ad if the combined vendors come up with the rest. This idea is just being talked about now, but judging from the results, it looks like it is plausible in the very near future. 

To read more about their Marketing Plans for 2008, click here.