Olympic NyQuil Knock Out!

The other day as i was watching Tv I had seen a new set of ads for NyQuil. These commercials feature people sleeping, however they all have tremendous colds. There are tissues all over the bed and stuck to their faces and a bottle of NyQuil in the background. The characters are all out cold, snoring away and making other disgusting noises you'd expect to hear from the extremely ill.
What I like about this is that it gives you an exact picture of what the product does. We all have been sick and tried to go to bed with no success, and what does NyQuil do? Lets you get the best night sleep you could ever imagine when you are sick (bring in their slogan). It's rather funny as well, so that adds to the viewers enjoyment of seeing this commercial and becoming familiar with it; score #2 for the advertisement's effectiveness.
The only ad I could find for this campaign so far is the one with Winter Olympics sponsorship, starring Apollo Ohno.

Top 10 Viral Ads

Ad age has released its top 10 viral video ad campaigns and there are quite a few which I found stunning. First thing, I'm glad to see VW atop the list!!! This guerrilla campaign was based around one thing, "The Fun Theory". People are less active and one thing that has done this is our refusla to take the stairs when alternative lazier methods are available. So how can taking the stairs be more fun?
What was done was a fabric laid out to look like a piano over the stairs and when people walked on it, it would play musical notes. In the end more people took the stairs because it was more fun, and additionally more healthy. This tells me that VW is pushing the fact that they are a fun company with even more fun cars to drive as well as hopping on the healthy living movement.


The next one that caught my attention was a video I had seen before but did not know it was an infomercial; "KEN BLOCK GYMKHANA TWO THE INFOMERCIAL". As a fan of cars and everything performance Ken Block's gymkhana driving is simply astounding. We know from the beginning that it is a DC ad. However as the video goes on we can notice that there are acutally a lot of other companies getting their share of the ad time. This is once again prooved in the credits where Subaru, Monster, BF Goodrich, and Crawford Performance are "thanked". This ad definately conveys the message of what type of people where their clothes and what they're line represents.


This one didn't have all of the glamorous bells and whistles of the last two but is great at makeing the viewer want to find out more. "Verizon Droid Big D" does this nicely because it gives you a quick list and a quick shot of what the phone looks like and what it does.


The Durex "Get It On" video is simply hysterical and gives us that typical condom message of use one and then go forth an fornicate!

Trivial Pursuit Batttle of the Sexes

It's the age old question of who is smarter than who, men or women? Trivial Pursuit has further questioned this by asking people to take part in their experiment. It's a game putting women and men head to head in a battle of wits so that we may once and for all determine who is the superior sex (guys we need to step on it). This interactive experience is teamed with a very humorous video displaying men and women doing rediculus things while a rolling score talleys all the screw ups.

Slap C-Rap!

So the new Slap Chop Rap has to be the most painful 3 minutes on tv. The original slap chop commercial was bad enough, now they've gone and chopped up the film and added music to the bunch. It's very strange how they cut from "music" to speaking like it were a normal infomercial.

Das Polo!

The VW Polo, a smaller version of the popular Golf (or Rabbit), is cool. VW's new commercial features the new Polo in the 1950's on main street America (with a cast that looks straight out of Grease). The Polo is by no stretch a fast little hatch but what it lacks in speed it makes up cosmetically, this is what VW is pushing in the commercial. Granted my opinion is biased because I love VW's, but I've found that VW has typically very good ads.

Alcohol commercials must know something we don't.

The theme right now appears to be whiskey commercials are funny and manly. Jim Beam seems to agree with there, "Guys never change" campaign, which clearly is trying to market to a male demographic. I love how these commercials play off how a real man drinks Jim Beam and that guys never change and neither does Jim Beam. Plus I just think they are really funny.

First post. Fav ads.

I've decided to start blogging about my favorite and least favorite advertisments. Currently my favorite ad is the Jameson Lost Barrel. It's incredibly epic that it doesn't seem like another commercial. The ad is obviously promoting a strong male figure being associated with their whiskey. It truly has an amazing ending with John Jameson appearing at his own funeral carrying the lost barrel. (Ad Age seems to agree that Jameson has been doing something right as well. Link to article)


Levi has also two ads out that I enjoy from their "Go Forth" campaign. Both featuring a poem being said behind video of younger adults wearing jeans (Levi of course) going about their everyday lives, but it shows all the different people who wear their jeans so it appeals to a larger market. I really enjoy poems a lot, I feel they are very inspiring and since the images we are seeing are young adults overcoming something it syncs so well.