If you're a LinkedIn member, you might start seeing more ads from the professional social network. Continuing its push to get more revenue from advertising, LinkedIn is bringing Sponsored InMail, which lets advertisers email targeted messages straight to users' mobile devices.
Hey bros, you already get your razors and pomade through a monthly subscription service. Now you can get right to the point and buy your rubbers through one too. A new startup called The Cocksman Club will mail members condoms in discreet packages, sparing you the awkwardness of making a responsible purchase in public.
If you want to slide down a ski slope in your car, Porsche suggests the 911 Carrera 4S. This new video for the brand, filmed at the Sugarbush Resort in Vermont, melds car porn with snow porn. Filled with explanation from instructors at the Porsche Driving School, it mostly consists of luxury sports cars drifting around slaloms, spraying powder. It's gorgeously shot. It's also surprisingly entertaining, as informational videos go. "We're actually on the trail Cracker Jack, which has a lot of undulating terrain," says one teacher.
For the first time in six years, Saatchi & Saatchi has a worldwide creative director. Pablo Del Campo, cd for the agency's Latin American region since 2007, has assumed the global role that Bob Isherwood vacated in 2008. As such, the Buenos Aires-based Del Campo becomes the top creative executive at the Publicis Groupe agency, whose top accounts include Procter & Gamble, Toyota and General Mills.
Geico and M&M's, the peanut butter and chocolate of comic advertising, have teamed up for this tasty peanut-butter cup of a commercial, in which Ms. Brown seeks to get insurance—much to the dismay of Geico's gecko, who has clearly read the company handbook on providing coverage to candy. (The edible are not eligible.) There's a cameo by a third character, too, well timed for this midweek release. M&M's agency BBDO New York led the creative, with input from The Martin Agency, which handles Geico. A social-media campaign on Facebook and Twitter will tell the larger story of Ms.
Prankvertising shifts into high gear for this elaborate X-Files-esque stunt from Crispin Porter + Bogusky promoting Scania's 2014 competition for professional truck and bus drivers. Daniel Olsson, who has five years of experience behind the wheel, must come through in the clutch after he picks up a mysterious shipment and passenger at a warehouse.
Business cards already seem pretty retro in the world of modern networking, but here's one that manages to be both cutting-edge and vintage at the same time. Portland-based photographer Kevin Bates made a business card for himself that is also a playable Tetris game.
Fake product demos are getting harder to spot, what with reality-bending products like NeverWet and Oakley's hovercraft golf cart. Here is the latest video in that vein—a hypnotizing four-minute demo for a real-life hoverboard made by a company called HUVr. Unfortunately, despite the video's insistence that the mind-boggling demonstrations "are completely real," the hoverboard does appear to be a fake. But that doesn't stop Tony Hawk, Moby, Terrell Owens, Agnes Bruckner and other celebs from pitching it fervently.
Wisconsin is doubling down on its Airplane! advertising strategy. In recent years, the state has hired the classic comedy's directors, Badger state natives David and Jerry Zucker, to direct a handful of tourism ads, including one featuring Airplane! actor Robert Hays getting beat up by everything (including a large bass). Unveiled this week, Travel Wisconsin's latest spot from Milwaukee agency Laughlin Constable is the first to explicitly reference the 1980 film. Set in a cockpit, it reunites Hays with his Airplane!
There's something about roadside advertising, from Hasslehoff cutouts to giant headphones, that turns drunk morons into thieves. But every now and again, someone pulls off a heist that's so fantastic, it can only be a hoax. Thus was the case with the stolen giant mango at the center of Australia's "MangoGate." The 33-foot-tall mango was built 12 years ago at a cost of $90,000 to celebrate the city of Bowen's self-designation as the mango capital of Australia.
