The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is celebrating its 50th anniversary with its biggest in 25 years. Lucia Moses takes a look at how the one percenters spend their money.
Venables Bell & Partners has prevailed in Reebok's global creative review. As lead agency on the brand, the San Francisco-based shop succeeds DDB. Reebok spends an estimated $50-60 million in media globally each year.
Brands with real-world appeal have been faux-criticizing social media for years—often in social media—by suggesting that you get off the damn phone already and take stock of your actual surroundings and the actual people in it. Coca-Cola is the latest to do so with the amusing video below, advertising a (presumably fake) product called the Social Media Guard, which is basically a giant, human-sized, Coke-red dog collar. This gizmo will possibly stop you from checking your phone every eight seconds, though actually it seems like you could still take a selfie if you wanted to.
When you use Old Spice hair products, your hair is capable of anything. First, it leaps off your head—that's a given. Then, as we've seen, it either hits on women at work or skillfully operates claw machines on the boardwalk to retrieve lost children. Now, though, it reveals its most impressive talent to date—playing all the best-loved Huey Lewis and the News songs on the keyboard.
If 2014's battle cry for women is "Love who you are" (see all the "real women" campaigns out there), then weight-loss brands need to tread lightly in their marketing. Weight Watchers has done that in a body-positive way with its new spot featuring Jessica Simpson. The opening lines are a hit. "This body made two amazing little human beings. I love this body and what it's capable of, no matter what size," she says.
If you need to outrun giant monsters that want to eat you, drive a Subaru Forester. This Subaru ad from Japan draws its villains from Attack on Titan, the forthcoming live-action adaption of the anime by the same name. The movie's director worked on the commercial, which reportedly included some pretty nifty practical effects, including a puppet that required seven sets of hands to control.
We've seen this marketing stunt countless times: Big brand dips into its deep pockets to give some hardworking, deserving, photogenic youngsters a new playground or a concert or a trip to Toys R Us. But this well-worn tactic can still wield some power. This time, it's Gatorade, with a cameo from Dwyane Wade, giving an extreme makeover to a high school basketball team's locker room in New Orleans. The Riverdale Rebels, it seems, haven't had a very good run in the past few decades.
BuzzFeed's attempt at an inspiring, empowering video for women falls short, and the target audience is having no problem letting BuzzFeed know it. "Photoshopping Real Women Into Cover Models" opens with four women lamenting that they'd never look like models in a magazine spread.
Go Ninja Go! Who says Vanilla Ice never had any street cred? Everyone, I guess. And when it comes to hip hop, they're right. But … who cares? The rapper (term used loosely) is prop-ah as hell in this self-deprecating Kraft Macaroni & Cheese commercial from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, skewering his goofy persona and, against all odds, stretching his 15 minutes of fame into a fourth decade.
It takes a lot of imagination to make a trip to New York’s dark and cavernous Javits Center any fun. Fortunately, Toy Fair has just enough of it. The gargantuan trade show (now in its 111th year) isn’t just a peek at the goods that this $22 billion industry will soon be peddling to the youngsters—it's a snapshot of the cultural zeitgeist, too. There’s a good bet that anything popular on YouTube or in the movies will wind up here. Plus, a good portion of the “kids” that toy brands are marketing to just so happen to have kids of their own.
