div|whisperer

Thanks Mike for the heads up that the Jonzed movie came out earlier this month. I hadn’t noticed. For those of you who remember my first post on the topic, please remember to drop by the site and see the entertaining film that Revolve 360 and Egg Films put together.

There was some funny appearances from a few of the peeps from Picnicface (who seem to be in every web video coming out of Halifax shops these days) and a cameo from Landlord Lou, who plays a jerk.

In the end though, in my opinion, it doesn’t change the fact that 96% of the people who signed up for the Jonzed facebook group probably think it’s an iPhone contest and that for the 4% of those people who actually watched the video he likely had absolutely no impact on their binge drinking behavior.

Here’s my theory why:

Continue reading Needs a Penis Joke

A few weeks ago I mentioned the Landlord Lou campaign on this site as an example of a fantastic idea that, personally, I don’t think was executed to its fullest potential.

Over the past few weeks I have been inundated with friend invitations on Facebook to join the Jonzed group. The facebook fan page tells you to invite all of your friends because for every friend you get to add the fan page you get another ballot to win a MacBook or an iPhone.

How can they award an iPhone as a prize? Well the legalese says:

The required air time contract is the sole responsibility of the winner.

So what you’re really winning is the opportunity to spend $2,000 on a Rogers Wireless voice and data plan over the next three years. Awesome.

Continue reading Drinking Bad? Prizes Good?

Landlord Lou is real - and so is his mustache. A former co-worker of mine had Lou as his landlord while living in Halifax. The LandlordLou.ca campaign (which is almost a year old now) is, in my opinion, some of the best copy writing aimed at my demographic to come out of Canada. The original three videos (one, two, three) are absolutely hilarious.

Since those videos were released they’ve removed those videos and replaced them with new videos which aren’t as good. I had to hunt the original three down on YouTube from some random person’s uploads. The new videos are still funny but they aren’t as effective or clever as the originals.

They’ve started going for quirky dialogue that becomes more about character humour then about actually getting across the client (Killam Properties) message. Another sore spot has been the missed opportunity for distributing the campaign.

The web site allows you to join a facebook “group”, which is actually a “page” and add Lou as a friend. There is no ability to embed the videos in a blog or one click way to share them via Facebook, del.icio.us, etc. Stuff that’s considered the bare minimum of a digital campaign. And it shows. Four of the five videos on YouTube have under 1,000 views each.

If I hadn’t of been working for a web site that Colour paid to advertise this site on, I never would have heard of it. None of my apartment dwelling friends have heard of it.

For me this is an example of a fantastic idea, exceptional copy writing and fairly good production without much support. Here’s hoping they smarten up and realize the true potential of this campaign before it’s first birthday.

Client: Killam Properties
Agency: Colour

Some fantastic pro bono work for Vancouver-based Looking Glass Foundation by DDB Canada. There’s two others in the campaign as well.

The web site for the campaign is also well done and there are some print components as well that I hear were well done as well.

If I manage to find the print pieces online somewhere I’ll update this post to include them. If anyone has seen them, please add the link to this post in a comment - I’m lazy.

Thanks for the tip AdFreak.

Client: Looking Glass Foundation
Agency: DDB Canada

This is a great ad parody of the Coal industries recent efforts on U.S. network television. The group behind it, Wisconsin/New York based comedy group freeloveforum, are probably best known for their very funny MS Paint parody.

For the past year or so I’ve been using desktop wallpapers from 2Advanced - they’re awesome but after a year you start to want something a little different.

I came across Desktopography today, great wallpapers for all screen sizes. Making great wallpapers is difficult. It’s a big canvas and you have to take into consideration that people will be actually interacting with their iconography on top of it. The Desktopography tend to be more artistic than functional but they showcase some fantastic photoshop work.

What a great idea. A company that makes the raw goodness needed for a kickass party decides to parody a social network to remind you how much fun it is actually hanging out with your friends. Sounds like a fantastic idea. Mott’s tried to pull it off with the aptly named Lamato.net.

I don’t know whether they intended to be lame in a funny way or if some creative with a conscious tacked the name on at the last minute to save his reputation. You can pull off a “purposely lame” stunt and still maintain credit if your acting is awesome and the fake web site you build doesn’t look like it’s a domain parking page.

As of now the short video clips are just bad. I expected more from Tribal DDB.

Awkward.

A cool viral video funded by Stride Gum in a very authentic way. Apparently they just gave Matt money and told him to do his thing. No product placements. Great idea. I never would have had a reason to think twice about stride gum until hearing about their rather hands off approach to this.