It was a good week for craft and comedy, as we enjoyed a lush two-minute intro spot for Don Julio Rosado tequila, simple and insightful Heinz print work, and amusing campaigns from Take 5, eos and TravisMathew. Below, check out all of this week’s Top 5.
The online travel brand is taking on more work internally as it builds out its in-house creative capabilities. A Hotels.com spokeswoman noted this is the first campaign the brand has “produced completely in-house.” She declined to comment on how the spend compares to previous efforts.
It’s the newest iteration of Wieden’s first branding for Hotels.com, which positioned the Expedia-owned brand as a matchmaker of sorts between different types of lodgings and different types of travelers when it debuted last April. “Find Your Prefer Somewhere” also marked the end of Captain Obvious, the mascot Hotels.com had used to promote itself as the clear choice of travelers for nearly a decade.
The brand’s former agency partner CPB had developed Captain Obvious in 2014; Hotels.com parted ways with CPB seven years later, and after a brief stint with Tombras, began working with Wieden in late 2021.
Premium holiday resort Club Med has appointed 180 Amsterdam to work on its global creative account, after a three-way international pitch run by France-based consultants VT Scan.
Club Med will work with 180 to develop its brand platform, ‘L’Esprit Libre’ in Europe, North America and Asia. The holiday company has just introduced its first rebrand in a decade, focusing on the company’s luxury offering while emphasising “simplicity, indulgence, nature and freedom.”
Henri Giscard d’Estaing, chairman & CEO at Club Med (and son of 1970s French president Valéry) said: “‘L’Esprit Libre’ is at the heart of the Club Med experience. We’re excited about what 180’s understanding of the brand’s French heritage can do to activate, communicate and evolve this idea in a bold way.”
Laurent François, managing partner at 180 said of the appointment: “Winning this tender for such an iconic brand, part of French advertising patrimony, is a proud moment for 180. It’s a tremendous opportunity to create an innovative approach, focusing on a culture and digital-first strategy.”
Work will begin launching globally in the second half of 2023 and will run across broadcast TV, online video, OOH, social and digital channels. It is being created between 180’s Amsterdam, Paris and New York hubs.
No word on the incumbent, but Club Med has worked with BETC and Saatchi & Saatchi Paris in the past.
Unveiled in the Netherlands last week (no, it wasn’t an April Fools’ prank), the meatball was created from the DNA of the long-extinct woolly mammoth and its closest living relative, the African elephant. It was produced, from Korsten’s idea, by the Australian food-tech company Vow as a buzzy way to educate people about lab-grown meat (also known as cultured or cultivated meat), which is Vow’s business.
As a marketing stunt, it was a huge success, with earned media mentions everywhere from business magazines to late-night talk shows. All of which left Korsten, when Ad Age caught up with him at week’s end, giddy to see the conversation happening globally around a topic that’s long fascinated him—how lab-grown meat could ease the climate crisis and provide consumers with more nutritious and tastier foods options, and how Vow is taking a unique approach in the space.
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“It’s been quite a journey,” said Korsten, who’s now global chief creative officer of Wunderman Thompson. (The campaign is credited to Wunderman Thompson Benelux, with a production assist from the agency’s Sydney office.) “Of the 150 companies in this space, 149 are doing things the same way—trying to replicate beef, pork and chicken. Vow wants to go for something more exotic.”
The reason is simple. If you replicate beef, pork or chicken, Korsten said, people will naturally compare it to the original—and may be disappointed. (“The best people will say is, ‘This almost tastes like chicken,’” he said.) But if you experiment with proteins from more far-flung animal sources, you can develop textures, flavors and combinations that are new and exciting—and potentially even better-tasting.
“It’s a missed opportunity not to take advantage of the potential of cultivated meat to revolutionize the way we think about food,” said James Ryall, chief scientific officer at Vow. “Rather than simply replicating existing products, this technology offers us the opportunity to create something truly unique and better.”
MullenLowe Madrid’s new work for Magnum tells us – as if we need reminding – that nothing quite compares to the joys of the real world.
The #NotAvailableInTheMetaverse campaign follows an avatar on her frustrated mission to escape the metaverse and enjoy the real-life pleasures of a Magnum.
Unilever has been sensibly tentative in exploring the metaverse, paying attention while remaining wary of the hype and alert to potential data issues.
Mark Zuckerberg, in contrast, could be regretting his decision to go all in. When he rebranded Facebook as Meta in 2021, he panicked many marketers and agencies into a headlong rush towards the online 3D universe.
Maybe they were just ahead of their time, but the metaverse has so far failed to live up to its promise, thanks to prohibitive costs and underwhelming demand.
Meta shares have nosedived and Zuckerberg has refocused (but not renamed) the business, while Disney has recently discontinued its metaverse division and Microsoft has done the same, investing instead in generative AI like ChatGPT.
Unilever, meanwhile, retains its healthy scepticism. Sara Paixao, global Magnum digital brand manager, said, “The pleasure of eating an ice cream is not, yet, available in the virtual world. So, in the meantime, we wanted to encourage everyone to take some time offline and experience the real-life pleasure of indulging in a Magnum.”
Tomas Ostiglia, ECD, LOLA MullenLowe Madrid, said: “The metaverse generates many expectations, but also many doubts. As Magnum is the ice cream brand that celebrates real pleasure, we saw it as a great opportunity to take advantage of the wave of doubts about the metaverse to continue building the brand’s positioning.”
There are various real world activations, including a partnership with a mental wellbeing neuroscientist to release the Magnum Pleasure Guide for young people who have difficulty setting boundaries between their online and offline lives.
Media is by Mindshare and PR by Golin.
MAA creative scale: 6
Walmart and Paramount’s partnership gives Walmart+ members free membership in the ad-supported version of Paramount+. The duo announced the plan in August and implemented it in September. It puts Walmart+ on a more even footing with rival Amazon Prime in combining free shipping with video streaming, but at less cost. Amazon Prime membership costs $139 annually, compared to $98 for Walmart+.
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Walmart’s plus-plus deal hasn’t gotten a national TV push up to now, though it has gotten targeted paid media since the fall, a spokeswoman said. And the combination appears to have already helped Paramount+. The streaming service added more subscribers in absolute terms than Hulu, HBO Max or Peacock through late last year vs. a year earlier, up seven percentage points to 17% of U.S. households, according to the year-end report for 2022 from the Advertising Research Foundation’s Universe Study of Device and Account Sharing.
Just getting all existing Paramount+ households to join Walmart+ could more than double the latter’s membership. CivicScience research late last year showed 7% of people in the U.S. reported being Walmart+ members vs. 61% for Amazon Prime.
The Walmart spokeswoman declined to comment on Walmart+ membership numbers said they have grown every month since its launch in September 2020.
Baz Luhrmann and Bombay Sapphire are challenging the creative potential of AI as part of a new exhibition at the Design Museum that will invite a robot to “enrich and enable” human creativity.
It’s the culmination of the “Saw this made this” campaign, and features work that Luhrmann has supposedly handpicked from a global photography competition, launched with Bombay Sapphire. Visitors to the exhibition can ask “Ai-Da Robot” to play around with the winning images.
But who’s to say the photographs in question weren’t generated by AI in the first place? In Luhrmann’s homeland of Australia, camera retailer digiDirect was embarrassed when the top prize in its own photography competition – judged by a panel of professionals – went to an AI-generated aerial photo of surfers on a sunset beach.
Luhrmann, however, is clearly satisfied that all the Bombay Sapphire entries are generated by humans. He said: “Thousands of people have shared the things that have sparked their own creativity – and the results have been extraordinary. I’m genuinely excited that we are shining light on individuals and their expression, reinterpreting it in a truly original way.”
