Advertising

Volkswagen Phaeton Elevates Ads to Fine Art

When you consider standard car ads, you can pretty much imagine the scenario – beautiful young couple driving over curvy scenic roads or attracting envious stares from suburban neighbors as the car pulls into the driveway. So it is refreshing to see how Volkswagen Phaeton has elevated its ads to fine art in order to convey the handmade quality of the luxury sedan. In India, DDB Mudra Group in Mumbai suggested the artisan’s pride of craftsmanship and attention to intricate details through the use of a traditional Indian art form. The way the Phaeton is integrated into the art is both surprising and memorable. More importantly, this isn’t a “foreign” ad jarringly adapted to an Indian audience. It speaks directly to India’s rich aesthetic heritage.

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Photography

Making the Plunge

San Francisco-based photographer Ryan Heffernan took these dramatic shots for a Japan Rags ad campaign. What looks like a freeze-frame photograph captured with split-second timing is actually a composite of three different stills.

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Advertising

Iconic True Colors by Farber-Castell

Eggplant (aubergine) purple. Fire engine red. Shark-skin silver. Dachshund brown. Even if you aren’t shown the actual color, you can envision its exact shade in your mind. Some colors are inextricably linked to an object, plant or animal. This clever ad campaign for Farber-Castell, which has been producing fine art products, including colored pencils, for professional artists for the past 250 years, relies on the viewer to make that connection. It was created by the Serviceplan agency in Munich, Germany.

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Advertising

Nike Recycled for a Better World

Made by Wieden + Kennedy from 100% recycled ad footage, the Nike “Better World” campaign features giants like Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong and exhilarating sports feats. The two-minute video’s message is that sports inspires hope, fights prejudice, combats disease and just makes the world a better place. The recycled angle is getting a lot of media play, but that part seems misleading and irrelevant. The film clips are classics. They weren’t recycled out of necessity; they were just too good to remain stashed away, gathering dust in the archive.

Viral Marketing

Nokia N8 Mobile Phone Film Winner

Here’s a novel way to get consumers to test out your product. In March, Nokia announced a competition to shoot a short film entirely with a Nokia N8 mobile phone. It invited entrants to send in a story pitch and offered a $5,000 filming budget and two Nokia N8s to eight finalists.

“Splitscreen: A Love Story,” directed by UK-based JW Griffiths, won the first place award of $10,000.

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