:: adgruntie :: Newsy bits

+ Jay Schulberg, creator of ad campaigns for Milk (mustache campaign) and AMEX ("Don't leave home without it") died on Wednesday at 65. He was a creative head at Ogilvy & Mather in NY before he became chief creative officer at Bozell Worldwide.

+ Levi's do their own take on Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The campaign spend is reported at £21 million.

And it is hoping the £21m campaign centred on the bard's A Midsummer Night's Dream, will reverse a seven-year sales decline in the 501 brand.

The new campaign features a romantic encounter between Bottom and Titania, queen of the fairies, transferred from Shakespearian woodland to a gritty downtown Los Angeles setting.
[snip]
In the latest advert Bottom is played by model turned actor Joshua Alba, while the role of the waitress as Titania is played by Donna Summer's daughter, Amanda Sudano.

Sounds a bit like it was taken from the revamped version of Romeo and Juliet done a few years back. The ad will be dubed into Italian, German, Spanish, French and subtitles will be added in Scandinavian countries.

+ TBWA\London has developed the latest campaign for Lockets, in which the cough sweet brand promotes itself as the 'sponsor of Winter'.

The Masterfoods brand has moved away from typical marketing promotions, which generally focus on product benefits, instead nominating itself as the "Proud Sponsors of the British Winter".
The campaign consists of one full-length and three shorter TV commercials, featuring a series of people - and a robin - coping with the hazards of a typically harsh Winter and showing that by soothing coughs and colds, Lockets "allow you to get on with life".
In the longer version, the ad opens on a robin sneezing so hard that he is thrown off the branch that he is perched on. It continues by portraying a variety of familiar horrors that the British winter has to offer, such as people fighting against the elements with their umbrellas, a jogger falling over on his way down an icy street, swimmers jump into a freezing Serpentine and a girl stuck in a snow drift rescued by her friends.
The ad closes on a typical British bobby, who eats a Locket to alleviate his cough and cold and is then promptly hit with a snowball.

+ How the Oscar Mayer wiener jingle was created back in 1963 by Richard Trentlage for J. Walter Thompson in Chicago.

+ Creative Generalist pal posts on Pantone's Colorstrology Color of the Year for 2005 - Violet Tulip -- or Pantone 16-3823 aka HTML 9b90c8. That last bit is in the html color.

+ Over at Brand New there's a post about the latest VW/NBC Universal product placement deal for $200 million. Seems to me someone is afraid that advertising and the rest of their marketing strategies aren't going to be enough in this TiVo world we live in. What's somewhat amusing about that is the percentage of people who have TiVo-like devices are probably a very small percentage of the population and more importantly, of target markets. At least for now. I think there's a lot of worrying about this sort of thing before it's necessary.

+ Ernie Schenck points to this article from the NYTimes about the Super Bowl. There's a good list of advertisers there. Also there's an interesting quote from David Lubars:

"When you try to do something that stands out in a game full of advertisers trying to stand out, you have to walk a line," said David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO North America in New York. "And some people walked over it last year."

BBDO North America, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group, is creating campaigns for several sponsors of Super Bowl XXXIX next month, including FedEx and Visa. "I don't think anybody goes in saying, 'Let's do spots in bad taste that will offend everyone,' " Mr. Lubars said, adding: "Last year, people thought their spots would be funny like they were in past years. But they just didn't work out."

Yes to the first part. Bud did. Lay's did. And I'm sure there are others but they were forgettable. But that second part. Oh, the second part. I'm not sure that there is an intentional desire to offend people. More likely it's a lack of understanding the whole of the audience that is viewing the spots. Besides the testosterone oozing, frat boys, the Super Bowl attracts a more varied audience than just the target market for your product. Usually that's part of the allure of using the Super Bowl as a launching pad for branding campaigns. But at the same time, if you are going to be having a more diverse group watching the spots, you can't be so niched in the content/creative/etc as you would if you were airing a spot on ESPN or some other channel that was more male orientated.
This is the danger zone for Super Bowl advertisers. The other side of the coin though, is, do they really care if they offend some people, if they aren't the target they are trying to reach in the first place? Probably not. Like Lubars said, it's a fine line.