Have y’all seen these recent ads for Sauza? Hmm. Hunky guy with muscles narrating against a kitschy backdrop. Wait, I’ve seen this before! It’s gotta be good, right?
Sauza Tequila, “The Refreshing Lifeguard” (2013) – 670,000 views
Hey! That wasn’t the least bit entertaining. Thanks for making my minute of procrastination totally not worth it.
Sorry – we’re making a point. Ever since W+K’s Old Spice campaign broke the YouTubes with 46 million views, it seems like everyone in the hemisphere has tried to replicate its success. Of course, male ad icons are nothing new, having been a marketing staple since the days of the Marlboro Man and the Brawny lumberjack. (Btw, have you seen Brawny boy’s 21st century makeover? Eesh. Someone should let him know mustaches are in again.)
Okay, by now we’ve all had this message beaten into our brains: A lot of women have self-image issues. But the folks at Ogilvy Brazil finally figured out a brilliant way to prove it: Hire a criminal sketch artist to first draw women as they describe themselves, then as other women describe them. The differences are astounding.
We like ads that make you think. Ads that don’t blare their message at you through a megaphone. Ads that inspire you to support a cause that was barely on your radar yesterday.
This new campaign from Dentsu Shanghai checks all of the above boxes. The idea is so powerfully simple, you don’t even need to understand the Chinese in the corner (but if you can read it, we wouldn’t mind a hint). We love that each ad tells a story through a single image that’s at once understated and cataclysmic. We will also promptly be returning the polar bear rug we recently purchased for our office lobby. (Just kidding. Too soon?)
The sophisticated-meets-cheeky, political cartoony illustrations hit the nail on the head, magnifying the idiocy of the hunter, and of the entire situation itself.
Whew! What a crazy wild whirlwind these last two weeks were. Jonny had an audition for Glee, a photo shoot in Bali, and dinner at Zooey Deschanel’s house. Our intern’s newfound popularity has got him so booked, we may need to hire another intern to do the stuff Lil’ Jonny used to do.
Now that life at Mortar has returned to some level of sanity, we finally have time to blog about how supremely successful the Save Jonny campaign was. We reached 500 followers in 6 days – 18 days before our target date. That’s like getting an A+ when you were sure you were headed for a D.And the numbers are still growing.
Yeah, yeah, we know – you've seen this by now. But we're giving it some (more) gratuitous play because it has semi-nudity and people wearing bear heads not because it has semi-nudity and people wearing bear heads, but because we liked what this fellow Adam had to say about it:
"Statistically dubious, mildly patronising and about 3 years too late to
be relevant. The internet isn't going to destroy the ad agency. Blogs
aren't going to destroy TV. The internet forces a more open dialogue,
sure, and makes it harder to cover up a bad product with a good ad.
The internet is the world's largest communications tool, connecting you
with thousands of people you wouldn't otherwise be able to connect with.
Good advertising understands this. Bad advertising doesn't."
We couldn't have said it better ourselves. Wait, maybe we could have: Use the internet (and all the other media at your disposal) to talk with your audience, not at them. Right?
