The Bottom Rung

It’s finally here! But this version doesn’t do it justice. Go to their website to check out the real deal (in high def).Not too shabby Sony! Much better than Paint for starters. And the whale in the street is just damn cool, wasn’t expecting that. Music…can’t argue with the stones right?!See what the other, more serious, blogs had to say about it:

PSFK

AdFreak

That’s it so far, I’m sure AdRants will chime in soon.

See my pre-release post here.

This ad comes to us from the Australian Anti-smoking organization Quit Victoria. I can’t get the image of this woman’s face out of my head. The visuals are quite plain and force you to focus on her mouth while she is trying to speak.Simple, to the point, memorable. Could you ever want more out of an ad? Other than not feeling nausious after…

It’s funny that just after I write a post on how Bravia’s sequel to Balls was less than impressive, I stumble upon Dove’s sequel to their Evolution spot. I have to say, “Sorry boys, no Gold Lion this year.” I don’t know what happens to these shops after they write an award winning ad but the next one out always leaves something to be desired.

Take a look for yourself and let me know what you think.

The easiest way to tell if an ad is good is to find out if anyone has tried to duplicate it. They always say, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Allow me to introduce Slob Evolution.

Source: Adverblog

I know everybody is well aware of the Sony “Balls” commercial as it blew the industry away with its inherent magic. But I wanted to post it just once more, because it is still great to watch even after all this time. I also know that everybody is familiar with the newer (and less inspired) Sony “Paint” commercial. I remember actually staying awake until 12:01 or whenever it was released just so I could be the first to see it. Fallon has definitely spent some time fine tuning their hype strategy for their latest iteration, “Playdoh”. You may or may not have seen it yet as it has been very much subdued for the most part compared to the hype before the paint commercial. I think Fallon has toned down their viral and pr stuff this time to keep everyone’s expectations a little lower. For the paint commercial, anything less than a Spielberg would have and did upset everyone. I remember thinking, is that it? Sure it was big and expensive and what not but the music was the low hanging fruit of choices compared to the piece from balls. That selection made the entire spot in my view.

For the upcoming Playdoh spot, I only know of their website and the teaser video on youtube (below). If you have seen anything else out there, please let me know. From what I have seen, the stop motion animation should be pretty cool and will hopefully live up to everyone’s expectations. I can only imagine how much it cost to buy that much plasticine and keep that many animators on retainer… but that is for Sony to worry about at this point. Final spot to be released on October 5th.

Halo 3 comes out in 2 days and the Halo commercial has been on and off for a couple of days now. It’s pretty sick in my view. The commercial reminds me of everyone’s favourite Gears of War commercial from Cannes in the way it has the cool tunes playing behind the sort of surreal looking video. The interesting part of this campaign is how they have integrated it with the rest of it. Everyone in advertising these days likes to toss around fancy terms like Integration or Engagement but Microsoft has taken Integration in a different direction.

For those of you not familiar with the campaign, the boys over at McCann-Erickson built a very intricate small scale model of a battle ground as the basis for their work. Both the TV and the Website use this model to great effect. Other than the model, there aren’t very many connections between the different mediums but they still seem connected; the proof of great integration.

The word on the street is that the gameplay is only 5 hours (ie. how long the single player part lasts if you were to play it straight through) which is a bit short. However, they also say that the multiplayer portion is mind boggling which will be enough to sell most fans on the idea of buying the game. And thanks to the leaked version of the game that dropped this past Friday and this video, we can assume that is an almost certainty.

But none the less the advertising will do its job and the game will sell out as soon as it is released. And since people buy Xboxes so they can play Halo, I don’t think they’ll mind its potential shortcomings.