The Bottom Rung

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.

New ad from VW. The crazy kids at CreativeondemanD are at it again.

Not quite sure what to say about this one, other than we’re glad we are not his girlfriend…

Happy Weekend All.

This just in from Autoblog. The new PGR 4 (Project Gotham Racing 4) commercial from Microsoft has just been released. For months now, fans of the game have been hearing (and seeing) all sort of gossip about the new ad for the famous xbox game. Well now the wait is finally over as the new video has been released and it is pretty impressive, as far as microsoft commercials go. It’s no Gears of War but the production quality is high and the soundtrack isn’t bad either. Maybe I’m just a car guy because watching the ‘vette do a nice donut was enough for me. Anyway, check it out below.

Somebody uploaded one of the ads I recently worked on to the world wide interweb. It’s pretty cool when someone uploads your work to Youtube. Thanks whoever you are, you made my day!