Mmmmm, cheese. I love cheese. Everything from camembert to gorgonzola, and their lovechild cambozola. In fact I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like cheese, maybe it’s just the circles I travel in, but damn I can even skip the crackers. So I never understand why dairy boards need to create ad campaigns for cheese, like the California “Happy Cows” ads. Our neighbors to the north, specifically the Dairy Farmers of Canada, have come up with their own version of cheese pushing with their All You Need is Cheese ad campaign.

According to Adweek, “As the weeks pass, the grater will move along the billboard simulating more and more cheese being eaten.”

The commercials, one with a dad looking for a second helping of lasagna that has to prove he’s worthy by fixing the roof, repairing the sink in the bathroom and massaging his wife ends with the tagline “All you need is cheese”, the other shows a couple eating cheese together which leads to steamed car windows at a look-out point then the delivery room with their quadruplets and the tagline “If you home is full of more love you’ll need to serve more cheese.”

Obviously they’re playing off All You Need is Love and grating in some cheese. But does cheese conquer all? Is cheese really an aphrodisiac? I’m inclined to believe that it is only if the setting includes a bottle a wine and some sort of incendiary device like candles or a fireplace. Which is a fairly common pairing…so perhaps, yes. Do I dream about rubbing cream cheese all over my imaginary boyfriend and licking it off? Sometimes, yes. There may be something to their claims.

The campaign was created by TAXI Montréal (whose website I really like) and M2 Universal handled the media buy. The campaign includes television commercials, print and a microsite. The website is funny and well thought out but doesn’t offer much more than a thin slice of humor and a couple of recipes. It is a good step toward entering the collective Canadian conscious just like the happy cows of California. But it’s not as though those cows made me eat more cheese or buy exclusively Californian for that matter, so I still don’t get the whole purpose.

Stats:
PR0
Alexa N/A
Compete N/A

Screenshots after the jump. (more…)

~Did you miss your chance show your love of ketchup? Don’t worry, the Top This user generated commercial challenge from Heinz is coming back in October.

~Crispin, Porter and Bogusky is at it again with a weird site for Coke Zero called Sue Zero that emulates a bus-stop lawyer’s website alleging that the lack of difference between Coke and Coke Zero could be worthy of litigation.

~Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker, right? Red Hook, of beer fame, has started a contest site that asks you to Defy Ordinary by uploading your images of you, well, defying the ordinary. What does that mean? I dunno. But I think that the picture of the guy passed out after drinking Red Hook holding a stuffed bunny rabbit is funny as hell.

~In other alcohol news, Christi Vodka is coupling two obvious soulmates, vodka and nakedness. Need I say more. NSFW.

Ok, so I came across this site today. 5 Gum, a microsite created for 5, a sugar-free gum from Wrigley. Amazing Flash animation, and by amazing read=over the top. Who signed off on the budget for this one? Gum, really? No, really??

Seriously people. I would love to be a fly on the wall at every damn marketing “brainstorm” meeting where the client is being pitched a viral marketing campaign. Especially companies that have never delved into online marketing. I can almost hear the conversation, “You know what you need to do? You need an AWESOME website. Flash. Yes, Flash! Cause everyone is doing Flash. And some kind of game. Yes, a game where people challenge each other using YOUR product. That would ROCK!”
But when they did their market research (assuming they did) they forgot that their audience is…well, their audience doesn’t care about GUM while they’re online, and would probably not give two poops about their OVER THE TOP high budget website.

Okay okay, I’m being critical. Bear with me. I speak the truth, you know like buddha-truth. In college I got a degree in Italian (totally unrelated, che cazzo vuoi?) but I also studied folklore. Specifically I studied jokes and childhood games. Because of course the silly ritualistic games we all played, the ones passed down generation to generation, are constantly being redone, refashioned, relabeled to fit our current cultural landscape. It’s what we do. Whether stories or games. We rewrite them, rework them, make them updated. The problem is that when you become aware of this fact you in turn become a conscientious observer of mindless cultural patterns and it becomes sickening, ad nauseam. So I tried, despite the fact that my immediate thought was that they spent way too money for a fancy Flash site just to promote gum, to play along. I entered the site and checked out the section labeled “Play RFC”. Okay cool, some kind of game. First of all, intro’s way too long. So you hop in a elevator and enter some futuristic cyber-crazy ala-star-trek place then you pick one of three “flavors”, rain, flare or cobalt. Each flavor has a power (and for marketing purposes corresponds to an actual gum flavor) and basically you choose one then a couple of fists come up, shake at each other, and the computer-opponent hits you with another flavor and you either win, lose or tie. Sound familiar? Right, it’s Rock, Paper, Scissors. YAWN. I haven’t played Rock, Paper, Scissors since I was, what, 9 years old? Come on…please, leave RPS to the folklorists.

It gets better. There’s also a place where you can play other users online. So, I was curious and checked it out. Wanna know how many other users there were online with me? Come on, take a guess. Alright I’ll tell you. ONE. I can’t really type at this point because I’m laughing too hard. Laughing at the sound of marketing budgets being flushed down the drain, and the ever so delicate sound of a resignation letter gliding gently from the fingertips of some 20-something year old who thought he/she would be able to tell his/her future employer, “Yeah, I was the one behind the whole 5 Gum phenomenon!” to hear it make an almost imperceptible swoosh as it lands on the Director’s desk to then slink out of the office at noon glancing back before exiting at the turning doors of the job he/she told EVERYONE about just to make them all jealous because they had to take underpaid postcollege internships. Hahahaha. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating here, but indulge me my perverse fantasies, please.

Point is, when will they get right? Some do. But most don’t. I suppose it takes a combination of intelligence, savvy, and experience, but that’s not all, it’s that je ne sais quoi that only someone who watches, observes constantly, and sees the bullshit for what it is and knows exactly how to re-purpose the bs into an ABSOLUT winner. With all competition out there in the Gum marketing arena you don’t want to play “me too” with brands like Stride.

Or you could try feeding the rumor mill with ideas like the wrapper is edible. Now that’s brilliant.

Stats:
PR0
Alexa 557, 686
Compete N/A

Screenshots after the jump. (more…)

~Do you believe in karma? Well the Ad Council thinks you should. They’ve started a website Get Good Karma with a lame slow-loading game to measure your karma. Frankly, I think karma is a glorified guilt mechanism, you can do good things and still get hit by a truck the next day, or like their commercial surrounded by a swarm of locusts.

~If I had a sympathetic doctor I would surely have an unhealthy addiction to painkillers, but alas like everyone else I’m an over-the-counter junkie. I usually keep a 500 count bottle of generic costco brand ibuprofen in my back pocket. Would I change brands to Aleve because they came up with a silly “viral” all flash website called The Aleviator? Probably not.

~Bouncing boobs? This is NSFW but funny as hell. Pick your bra cup size then your level of activity. For real fun choose the FF+G cup and the extreme level of activity, hot damn! You get a flash video of naked boobs bouncing, boobs in a regular bra, then boobs in Shock Absorber bra. Do not miss this one.

~Why do people create sites that are only “optimized for IE 7″? And why then when you click to enter the site do they make it a pop-up window. And why do companies still put millions of dollars into marketing obesity inducing foods? Trans fucking fatty acids people, walk away from the donuts.

Alright, so I heard about this one before but I wasn’t really following it. In all honesty, comics are not my thing. The Dark Knight opens July 18, 2008 and the hype machine is already kicked into high gear. The other day I came across WhySoSerious.com and when I went back to it today it was redirected to Rent-A-Clown, a site with the look and feel of the early days of the internet featuring eerie images of badly made up clowns for hire. I wish I had taken some screenshots of why so serious before it was changed, but who knew? Previously in this campaign were the sites IBelieveinHarveyDent.com and IBelieveinHarveyDentToo.com (not much there now hence no links).

Like I said, I haven’t been following this but apparently they’ve been setting up websites hidden with clues to lead fans to other sites or to view a trailer of the movie. According to Pink is the New Blog, at Comic Con “one lucky person received an interesting dollar bill which led to a website (whysoserious.com) which led to a game, which led to the first teaser trailer for the new movie. As soon as the site was discovered, rabid fans got to deciphering the clues which led to the final prize of the teaser trailer.”

*_{image via Banshee1013 on Flickr}

Fun stuff. If that’s what you’re into. Here’s what I noticed when I was looking at the source code for Rent A Clown, they had some text commented out:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAmHAHAHAHAHaAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHdAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHeAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAyHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAoHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAuHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHlAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHoAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAoHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAkHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA

If you look closely there are extra characters in between the HAHA’s in the hidden text. String them together and you get “made you look”. Clever. It must be fun working on this campaign. Whether or not the movie lives up the hype remains to be seen.

Here’s the trailer:

Stats:
PR0
Alexa N/A
Compete N/A
(Take into consideration the site was created July 29th so it’s one day old)

Screenshots after the jump. (more…)