Freak Week: Ads on the Fly

We saw the Germans invent a whole new ad medium last week: flyvertising. At a recent Frankfurt book convention, the agency Jung von Matt attached tiny banners to a bunch of flies and let them loose around the convention center. (The client, Eichborn, is a publishing company whose logo is a fly.) The banners were attached by string with an adhesive that would naturally fall off eventually, not harming the fly. According to reports, even though the banners were lightweight, the flies had some difficulty staying aloft and kept landing on people.Over in Italy, meanwhile, ad agency Milc in Siena will do almost anything to drum up new business. They'll even hack off the heads of their creative staff. That's evident from their new self-promotional ads, which we posted on AdFreak last week. The decapitations (faked, obviously) are not meant to be seen as punishment for the art directors and copywriters' lack of talent. Quite the opposite. The message here is that their wonderful ideas have languished because of advertising cutbacks. The ads, then, are intended to get clients spending again. The copy explains: "To cut your communications budget means to cut your own future." Completing our European tour, we came across food items with disembodied human faces starring in a bizarre and hilarious collection of promos for a new cooking show called Family Supercooks. The program is all about eating familiar foods in healthier ways, and so the spots, from RKCR/Y&R in London, feature healthy foods chatting with their unhealthy alter egos (a grilled sausage and a fried sausage, for example). There are 16 clips overall. The best character might be the sadistic ketchup, which threatens, with a screaming cackle, to smother a frightened fish finger sitting on a plate below.Finally, the award for most unexpected line to open a juice commercial went to Purity Organic last week. "Yeah, we've got dildos," says a middle-aged woman, talking on the phone in a store as the ad begins. It turns out she's a porn-shop clerk, and after describing to the caller the various sex toys available for purchase, she takes a swig of the juice. Onscreen copy reads: "Be more pure." Correction: Last week in Freakweek, we credited a disturbing spot for Alimaña toys to Y&R Mexico City. In fact, it was done by Y&R creatives on the side and was not an agency production.Best of Brandfreak: Manwich is flying its freak flagAdFreak's sister blog, BrandFreak, doesn't take kindly to uninspired food marketing. Two weeks ago, they voiced collective embarrassment over KFC's courting of the United Nations in a mock attempt to get "Grilled Nation" accepted into the organization. Last week, it was a Manwich spot from DDB San Francisco that raised our brethren's ire. The ad shows a bunch of kids taking part in a school play about Farmer John's vegetable patch -- except one girl shows up in a Manwich costume. The point is, each quarter-cup of Manwich equals the nutritional value of a half-cup of vegetables. But no one in the ad seems to understand this -- neither the girl's friends nor her parents. At the end of the ad, having already been lightly bullied by friends, the girl sits down at home to eat a Manwich while still in her Manwich outfit -- misunderstood, humiliated and ultimately cannibalistic as well.

Brand Marketing

Freak Week: Ads on the Fly

Tim Nudd

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Tim Nudd