In case you missed it, one of the best — if not the best — TV commercial from the broadcast of last weekend’s 2018 Super Bowl was this ad for Tide laundry detergent. It’s already being talked about as one of the best ever and an “instant classic.” There are a few more companion ads for this Tide spot that aired throughout the Super Bowl. For example this Old Spice hijack by Tide and these too. All brilliantly conceived and executed.
AdWeek is reporting on a series of funny anti-Trump outdoor ads have been popping up on bus-stop billboards around New York City the past week. These cheeky, hilarious ads riff on well-known films and popular fiction such as Dr. Strangelove, Thelma and Louise, The Shining, Humpty Dumpy, and Dumb and Dumber. The campaign amounts to an unpaid exercise in creative guerrilla activist-marketing. The ads were created by three friends, each of whom work for different advertising agency. See more more images on Adweek.
We recently attended a small talk with the co-founder and editor of Apartamento magazine, Omar Sosa. The talk was at one of the creative marketing companies run by mega-global advertising agency TBWA in Los Angeles. Sosa (pictured at right in the photo above) with Emilien Crespo, the talk moderator at the agency, spoke at length about how he and his designer friends started Apartamento in Barcelona in 2008 and how the magazine has grown and developed a devoted, almost cult-like, global readership.
We’ve been picking up copies of Apartamento since the first time we spotted it on the rack at the McNally-Jackson Bookstore in New York City way back in 2009. Part of what sets the magazine apart is its documentation of what it calls “everyday interiors.” Rather than showing slick images of pristine, carefully-staged, aspirational living spaces in the tradition of many commercial “shelter” mags, Apartmento shows the spaces of various creators in their cluttered, lived-in, natural glory and in a more intimate photographic style.
Japan has a long-established, globally recognized and highly-developed sense of aesthetics, especially when it come to design and graphic communications like advertising. This large indoor billboard poster for Coca-Cola at Ark Hills Tokyo references the Japanese summer tradition of hanabi (massive fireworks displays) as beautiful flat, abstract graphics.
The second of two examples of recent ad placements in the Tokyo Metro. This one is part of a Tokyo tourism campaign. Clever stuff. In the “You & Tokyo” campaign ad pictured below, a random assortment of common non-Japanese — and mostly Western — names are lightly integrated into the background of design in the top half of the ad around the word “You,” while around the word Tokyo in the lower half are names of various neighborhoods and famous sights around the Japanese capital.
Photo by Mayumi Ihara. All rights reserved.
This recent indoor billboard ad (pictured below) in Tokyo subway stations is part of an integrated marketing campaign promoting the Tokyo Metro’s tourist information service. It ties in with a television commercial (see video below) that started airing in the Tokyo area earlier this year, and it coincides with a broader series of ad campaigns aimed at promoting Tokyo tourism in general.
Photo by Mayumi Ihara. All rights reserved.
So many uses of augmented reality (AR) in media and advertising have been too lame or to gimmicky or both, the novelty having worn off quickly and long ago. This Pesi Max bus stop billboard ad in London, however, is an example of the technology being used in a cool, fun, and effective way, as seen in this short video below. Maybe there’s hope for AR yet.
