A Gross-Out Dozen for a Top 10

La Comunidad’s new campaign for MTV Latin America is a madcap romp through the mind of an adolescent boy.

Twelve television commercials, each a vignette built around sex shop visits, body piercing, breaking wind, sock-sniffing, zit-popping and the like, promote the network’s top-rated Latin American show—Los 10 Mas Pedidos (The 10 Most Requested Videos).

The spots also encourage viewers to vote for their favorite videos, a process so wildly skewed and unpredictable that it served as the basis for the campaign’s tagline: “We don’t judge what people like. We just show it.”

“The inspiration for our branding effort is real life,” said Jose Molla, president of the Hispanic agency’s Miami office. “Our target audience is a 15-year-old boy. This stuff would not work if the target was thirty-somethings.”

La Comunidad operates a second office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is managed by Molla’s younger brother, Joaquin.

The commercials, ranging in length from 15-45 seconds, will run for the next three months on MTV cable outlets across Latin America.

Each TV spot builds to a crescendo of both public and intensely private gross-outs viewed through a Candid Camera-style perspective, precisely tailored, Molla said, to teenage tastes.

One ad depicts a muscular man painfully removing a swatch of chest hair with what appears to be gaffer’s tape. In another, an over-enthusiastic pet owner more than returns his dog’s affectionate face-licking. In a third spot, set on a Miami beach, a fat man cavorts like a beached whale in a micro swimsuit.

The Molla brothers bring solid branding experience to the project, their second for MTV Latin America’s creative director, Cristian Jofre. Jose Molla spent four years at Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Ore., working on the Nike account. Joaquin Molla is a former creative staffer at BBDO Argentina.

Jose Molla and Guillermo Tragant shared art direction and copywriting duties. Jorge Colon of Miami’s Letca Films directed.

La Comunidad staffers also oversaw set design, opening and closing sequences (a visually stunning montage of parading eyeballs, noses, arms and legs), bumpers and other packaging elements for Los 10 Mas Pedidos.