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Fred is a creative at the ad agency Leo Burnett Madrid. Fred had been wanting a tattoo for a long time, but could never decide on one. Until one day he finally chose a QR code... and he programmed it to show all the different contents he wanted. Videos, photos, texts ... whatever. He talked to more than 20 tattoo artists until he found the one who was willing to accept the job. It was a difficult tattoo... in fact, it took him more than 4 hours to finish it. When the agency saw Fred’s new tattoo they saw a great opportunity as well: a new media space was born. It's a media space with many advantages: innovative, it has access to a wide variety of targets, with huge impact in all kinds of media... So now it’s time for any brand who dares to take a chance to go down in history and become the first company in the world to advertise on Fred’s arm. Are you interested? All you need is to bid on eBay. The highest bidder will win a month on Fred’s arm to advertise whatever he wants. The bid starts with €1 and you have until April 26th to participate. Surf www.leoburnett.es/fredsarm and get informed. It’s that simple!

Advertising for People Who Don’t Like Advertising by KesselsKramer is a new book published by Laurence King. It is partly a creative handbook and partly a hunt to find new ways to think about communications. Together with creative people it admires, KesselsKramer goes in search of ideas that might help people like ads, instead of zapping them into oblivion. On the way, they consider a potted history of the business, ways of working that KesselsKramer aspires to embody, and the future of an ever-fragmenting industry.

The book is intended for anyone who’s ever questioned the business of communications. Its aim is to reach beyond the advertising and marketing sectors and engage with a non-specialist audience, and at students considering communications.

KesselsKramer hopes to create advertising that’s both truthful and ironic. Starting in 1996, the agency has busied itself with creative projects including fashion collections, music videos, films, exhibitions and book publishing.

The agency's thoughts on commercial creativity are the subject of this book and the accompanying blog dontlikeadvertising.com. As well as KesselsKramer’s observations, the book includes interviews with Alex Bogusky, Stefan Sagmeister, Erik Kessels, Steve Henry, Anthony Burrill, Hans Aarsman and Mark Fenske.

You can preorder it on Amazon

SoDA, along with Adobe and Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals®, have teamed up to launch an HTML5-Off that will benefit the more than 170 Children’s Miracle Network member hospitals seeking to raise funds and awareness for local community children in need.

The challenge focuses on creating an HTML5 solution for portions of two of the nonprofit organization’s primary digital properties – The Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals website and the Miss America for Kids website.

“The contest for the Children’s Miracle Network is a great example of how the agency world and students can contribute to great causes, using web standards to express their creativity. Adobe is a proud sponsor of SoDA and of this contest. We look forward to the great HTML-based animation and interactive content that will be created using Adobe Edge,” stated Arno Gourdol, Senior Director, Web Platform & Authoring for Adobe.

The HTML5-Off is broken down into two submission categories, Professionals and Students. Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals hopes to receive a creative solution from the Professionals group to redesign the homepage for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and the donation pages, using Adobe Edge. The objective for this project is to increase awareness for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and to increase the click-through rate on their donation pages, ultimately increasing overall donations through the website.

McCann NY has added Lynn Teo, formerly the Head of User Experience at digital shop AKQA, to its leadership team to serve in the new post of Chief Experience Officer (CXO).

Teo will build and lead the agency’s first Experience Design department, whose core focus is to shape products, services, systems, and communications that create positive, rewarding, and integrated customer experiences. She will oversee McCann’s client portfolio to ensure that an understanding of human needs and interactions sits at the core of all brand innovations. Her thought leadership and expertise in multi-platform interactive design will complement McCann’s leadership in integrated marketing communications and generate new perspectives in how brands engage with consumers.

Leo Burnett New York recently created a unique piece of artwork using 6325 recycled computer keys from around the agency network. The classic Leo Burnett logo was constructed from keys and the pieces symbolize the agency’s focus on combining ideas and craft, with ever evolving technology.

Los Angeles-based Recommended Media director Vic Huber teams up with TeamOne to pay a full-throttle homage to the launch of the 2012 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition in the new 3:40 web film “Lexus & Sports Illustrated Present the ‘Tori 500’”. The “making of” web film features a seductive swimwear shot of Paver augmented and placed onto a racetrack. The skills of professional racecar driver Scott Pruett and stunt driver Greg Tracy are put to the test as they compete to see if they can literally drive around the curves of this Sports Illustrated swimsuit model in the all-new 2013 Lexus GS. The co-branded campaign also includes a four-page centerfold in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, on stands today, two new iPhone and iPad apps, available for download online, that allow users to super-impose themselv es into a photo with Paver.

Writer / Illustrator / Creator: Chris Corley
Art Director / Colorist: Paul Prato

With Jerry Seinfeld's Super Bowl spot burning up YouTube with 12m views, Acura had decided to release five extended cuts, three of which just went live today. I thought you might be interested in these clips for a quick and easy roundup post leading up to the big game.

A group of creatives unpleased with the policies and their "damaging" effects on the advertising industry of Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity created a protest campaign: Fuck Cannes Lions. The campaign consists of a series of posters you can see below that drive the visitors to the site which explains what's wrong with Cannes Lions:

1- Let copycat shit win like it’s no problem!
2- Created a whole new space of advertisements which lack strategy and has nothing to do with people living on planet earth.
3- Their name, logo and communication SUCK! yet they want us to think they have the right to judge our creativity.
4- Are about money and won’t consider the creativity of real talents who can’t buy into their shit.
5- And yeah, let us not forget how they want us to believe that 30 year-old shitholes are and can be considered “young”.

The spot you can see below is such a cliche I would not post it on the front page, but the parody you can watch next is funny. Enjoy!

Wait for the movies to load and move the cursor over it. This is how you look like vs what you feel like when you're drunk.

One of Europe’s hottest creative hotshops, mortierbrigade, opens the mortierbrigade hotel for international trainees.

Jens Mortier, partner and creative director at mortierbrigade: “We just moved into our new offices. Next to our building there is a big house, not being used. So we decided to turn it into a hotel.”

“We’re based in Brussels, the capital of Europe. A lot of talent from all over the world wants to do an internship at our agency. But often the paperwork is a lot of hassle and they can’t afford a place to stay.”

“With our own hotel, we can get great international input from the new creative generation, which is great for us, and our clients. And the trainees have a nice place to stay, night and day.”

Facebook is going to be a Super Bowl marketer's best friend this year as the social network is set to edge out YouTube for ad searching and sharing, VB&P found in results from our third annual Super Bowl survey.

“Facebook has been critical to game day and post game marketing for a couple of years now, but for the first time in our study we are seeing the site bypass YouTube and brand sites as the first place Americans search online for ads pre-game,” said Lucy Farey-Jones, partner and head of strategy, VB&P.

Almost one in five (19%) Americans searched for ads before the game in 2011, about double (11%) who did in 2010. Of that group, 48% searched for ads on Facebook, putting the site just ahead of popular video sharing site YouTube, brand sites, and media sources as the lead destination to find ads. As Audi of America’s agency of record and creator of five years’ worth of Super Bowl spots, VB&P is taking advantage of this trend in this year’s game. To learn more, visit Audi’s Facebook page on January 25th.
Facebook will also be the place where Americans share ads. More than a third (36%) of Americans plan to share their favorite ad via social media. Of that group, 87% will share via Facebook, which is more than emailing with a YouTube link (6%) and Twitter (4%). Facebook will also be the place where Americans share ads. More than a third (36%) of Americans plan to share their favorite ad via social media. Of that group, 87% will share via Facebook, which is more than emailing with a YouTube link (6%) and Twitter (4%). Theoretically, this means that if 111 million people watched this year’s game, there could be 35 million posts on Facebook about Super Bowl advertising and with the average Facebook user having 130 friends, those collective posts could result in over 4.5 billion incremental impressions.

Overall, digital engagement during the Super Bowl has experienced double-digit increases from 2010—2012, proving Americans are increasingly multitasking during the big event. More than half (52%) plan to be engaged with some type of communications tool(s) while watching the game, a percentage that drastically increases for young adults (85%). 30% of Americans will be texting and roughly a quarter will be on Facebook, followed by e-mail, telephone, search, Twitter, IM and blogging.

Ads are more likely to be the subject of conversation the day after the game than the halftime show and party they attended, with 27% saying that’s what they’ll discuss at Monday’s water cooler. Also good news for brands who advertise --Americans are almost as likely to “like” a brand on Facebook that advertises during the Super Bowl (20%) as they are to “like” a team (29%), with 23% of young adults likely to “like” a brand.

In line with NBC’s decision to stream the Super Bowl live over the Internet to computers, phones and tablets, VB&P’s survey also found 40% of respondents use alternatives to cable as their primary source to watch television and movies. 18-29 year-olds are leading this digital movement with 1 out of 2 saying that cable is not their primary source. Compared to the 60+ segment, they are four times more likely to use Netflix, seven times more likely to use Hulu and 10 times more likely to use YouTube to watch shows and movies.

With AdPages, publications can advertise themselves in a way that combines the emotion of reading with the interactivity of the web. For publishers, it means a new, do-it-yourself way to gain exposure and get engaged readers. For advertisers, it creates a new outlet to a monthly audience of 50m users where they can offer readers highly targeted information.

As Issuu's Mik Strøyberg explained AdPages is the essence of content marketing and advertising. Today, when users click on display ads they are almost always teared away from one that site to the advertiser’s webpage. Users must then navigate back to what they were originally looking at, jarring them out of context. AdPages solves this problem for everyone from subscription-based magazines to product-based catalogs by displaying full-screen publications and interactive readable content without ever leaving Issuu, and giving users the freedom to return to their original publication at anytime. For publishers, AdPages is easy to set up, because ads are essentially made when you upload a document to Issuu. Your magazine, catalog, e-book, or portfolio can be easily repurposed as a sidebar ad targeted to select audiences. Issuu will sell and serve the ads, based on a user-determined cost per reader.

London-based Fiasco Magazine turned their traffic up by 400% through their AdPages campaign, which they admit were greater rewards than their time and efforts spent at Facebook and Twitter. Here's the ad they ran:

Fiasco also told Issuu that the AdPages-generated traffic would help them attract advertisers to their own publication.

50 years of inspiring design and advertising creative.

We are truly grateful for all your attention given us here on the website and in social media. We just launched our Ads of the World Google+ page, so if you like you can follow us there too. We're on Facebook and Twitter too.

An ancient Mayan prophecy, indicates the 21st december 2012 as the possible "end of the world" day. To exorcize this fateful event, Campari realized a calendar on this theme. In the shots the actress Milla Jovovich wears 12 surreal dresses representing some of the possible disasters that will end the world. Needless to say, the calendar ends the 21st of december.

January: Wave

Creativity takes time. If clients don't give enough time to agencies they will only come up with first ideas. To prove this hypothesis to clients agency produced a film and sent it to clients. Watch the Café Creative Golden Drum 2011 shortlist video.

A recruitment poster that takes digital job applicants to our website via a new kind of QR code. Unlike most QR codes, this one can be read from any angle, and will take them straight to a digital recruitment page on our website where they are given an email address to send their CV to. The right candidates will download the latest QR reader at www.i-nigma.mobi on their mobiles to view. See details below.

Barcelona-based and Blacklist-repped Dvein were invited by the Spanish film director Kike Maíllo to take part of his first feature film, Eva, by making the main titles as well as a machine called the Hand Up.

Eva is a retro futuristic sci-fi thriller in which Alex, a young scientist, returns to the town where he grew up to complete an unfinished project and create a boy robot. For more infos about the film visit evalapelicula.com.

Direction / Animation: Dvein
Renderfarm: Renderfarm Solution
Music: Evgueni Galperine, Sacha Galperine
Sound Design: Oriol Tarragó

Introducing director Jeff Low’s first music video – “We Met” for Jennifer Courvoisier.

Coming out of an election period in Canada, when director Jeff Low saw people canvassing door-to-door for votes, he thought, wouldn’t it be funny if they were asking home-owners if they could come in and dance for them instead of soliciting for votes. So the concept for this music video was born.

When told of the idea, Courvoisier, who Low knows through friends, loved it and the song “We Met” was chosen for the video – which is fitting as they are going around meeting people.

The video was shot over two days in Toronto with Courvoisier and the crew knocking on about 75 doors asking to gain access to perform and film.
“I was surprised by how many people would open their doors to us,” says Low. “It got to the point where we were shocked when people didn’t let us in. I couldn’t believe how many people were willing to let cameras into their homes.”

Song: We Met
Artist: Jennifer Courvoisier
Director / Concept: Jeff Low
Director of Photography: Carey Hollinger & Jeff Low
Editor: Jeff Low

Also check out George W Bush's and Bin Laden's legacy in advertising.