Freak Week: Magical Thinking

It's rare that a guerrilla campaign ties in seamlessly with a company's brand advertising both in idea and execution. But Definition 6, a small Atlanta agency, managed it perfectly with its "Happiness Machine" video for Coca-Cola, which rolled out online last week. Wieden + Kennedy's recent brand work, of course, has centered on the idea of a magical Coke machine, aka the "Happiness Factory." So, Definition 6 decided to install a very special Coke machine in a college cafeteria, and filmed students' reactions to it. At first, it appears simply to malfunction, spitting out one free bottle of Coke after another. But soon it begins dispensing everything from flowers and pizza to 6-foot-long sandwiches and balloon animals. The happiness proved contagious, as beaming students ate it up-figuratively and otherwise.In celebrity-endorsement news, the best performance of the week was turned in by Rebecca Romijn, who did a non-mommy "Got Milk?" ad a decade ago-and has now returned for an encore with her twin babies in tow. "The last time I did this campaign, in 1998, we shot it in Times Square, middle of a tropical storm, during rush hour, in July, without permits," she told People magazine. "I thought that was chaotic. Well, guess what? Shooting with 9-month-old twins when one of them is not havin' it all day long [was worse]." Some suggested the babies needed milk mustaches, too, but no such luck there.Meanwhile, on a much more depressing note, Venables Bell & Partners released a new campaign last week for the Montana Meth Project, a group that's been graphically warning teens of the dangers of meth use for several years now. The new spots will ruin your day every bit as effectively as the old ones did. Friends of meth users provide the narration, pointing out physical locations where their friends experienced life-changing moments -- both good and, eventually, terribly bad. The narrators, having said and done nothing to stop them from using, find themselves complicit in their friends' downfall.Finally, if nothing else, it was a good week because it featured another new Rhett & Link spot in their "I Love Local Commercials" series. This time, the Internet comedians found themselves in Austin, Texas, doing a spot for the True Blue Tattoo Parlor. Using classic reverse psychology, the ad urges you, in no uncertain terms, not to get a tattoo or piercing, because you'll regret it forever. "People will stare at you," say the parlor employees. "Elderly women will be afraid of you. Children will look at you and cry."Best of BrandFreak: Rosetta Stone laughs at its own adYou have to like a company that embraces the buzz surrounding one of its ads, even when that buzz is mostly ridicule and contempt. Case in point: Rosetta Stone, the foreign-language learning-software maker. A while back, the company released a print ad with the image shown here, and the copy: "He was a hardworking farm boy. She was an Italian supermodel. He knew he would have just one chance to impress her." Humorist Ian Frazier found this so amusing that he wrote a whole comical article for The New Yorker imagining what, exactly, the farm boy would say to the supermodel in his rudimentary Italian. Now, as AdFreak sister blog BrandFreak reported last week, Rosetta Stone is embracing the idea -- and asking the public to imagine how the story ends. It's a nice lesson in not taking yourself too seriously. Oh, and you have until Jan. 29 to send in that photo, text or video submission. Buona fortuna!

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Freak Week: Magical Thinking

Tim Nudd

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Tim Nudd