"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and drive an affordable crossover sedan, you miss it."

Welcome to cynical Advertising 101. Pander to GEN X by stoking the nostalgia flames. Too bad the car doesn't fit the demographic. How is living a little akin to driving around in a glorified minivan?

Joelapompe has found a fashion-with-guitars layout that looks almost traced. Not a traced as Nazi meat though.
This looks like a case of 'demo love' that can easily turn into copyright infringement, as the example shown there with Dexim copying the work of photographer Jamie Nelson. Digital layouts have a lot to do with the uptick of this sort of thing.

The image that inspired Jean-Paul Goude to create the famous Égoïste ad? Perhaps, perhaps not, and we'll never know. Either way, you must admit the photo Models in Window, New York, 1960 spotted in an old Vogue magazine is fan-ta-stic!

English dub - UK -91 version

Remember the Amnesty posters that depicted torture in far off lands as if they were happening where the poster was? The visual trick used was the transparent meme that hit it big on Flickr earlier, which might have inspired the posters. Later similar ideas appeared Kids company was badlanded for being similar to Amnesty, in execution at least.

"The Ultimate Driving Machine" BMW set its sights on creating the ultimate ad homage, and rung up TRON: Legacy Director Joe Kosinski and editor Jim Haygood for a fresh twist on the "Refuel" commercial.

The BMW 5 series car is minding its own, blazing down a long stretch of desert highway when a massive Boeing KC-135 appears, lowering a fuel dispenser down to the car. The entire KC-135 was built digitally by the crafty people at Digital Domain. The digital production team was led by VFX Supervisor Eric Barba (who was also VFX Supervisor on "TRON: Legacy"). He worked closely with Kosinski to determine stall speed and the kinds of real interactions that would take place between the car and the ground to make the spot wholly believable. Have a look.

As we start to peel, shave, wax, slim down, get manis and pedis and new haircuts and then try on new bikinis for the summer, let me remind all you creatives that fruit & veg peeled in bikini fashions has been done. It's fun to do, but we've seen it. ;)

The fat veg on the right are for magimix XL food processor, and were done by Grey, Tel-Aviv, Israel. The idea is to show "fat" fruit, as the processor can handle big veg. The "Fresh All Summer" fruit was done for Calgary market by WAX last year, and extolls the virtues of eating fruit to look fresh. Thus another idea, but the visual we've seen already. I suspect we all start drawing bikinis on stuff once the sun if out after a winter as long as the last one we had..... Really, who can blame us?

Mad magazine and ad agency Serviceplan in Germany have revived the Economist "light bulb" people sensor poster from way back in a spoof sure to make all adgrunts giggle a little. See, in the Economist poster, the light bulb came on when a person passed underneath it. In the MAD version, it shuts off. Har har har! A bit self-referental for my taste, but advertising people are probably the only consumer group who still buy Mad magazine and old Far Side cartoons so I'll let it slide. ;)

We've done this before , discussed album covers that look like other album covers, and as it turned out the genre of twin album covers never end. There are homages, there are spoofs, there are weird coincidences and then there's the really obvious. Hanson mimicking The Ramones on a Ramones tribute album. Yeah, it's not a Badlander, thanks for the tip tho.

Hey, it *is* space, after all, shouldn't it be cool like the movies? Apparently NASA thinks so. For each mission it has been creating posters and, well, some of them are pretty good knock-offs!
http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10002908.html

Well, since we've already dealt with accusations of ads copying videos today, lets see and example of videos copying videos (and ads), shall we? :)

Look at your giant people in that video. Now back at me. Now at your giants in that other video. Now back at me.

Yep, the video to John Dahlbäck's single "Everywhere" is yet another giants running in the city video. We've seen this before. Is it possibly "retro" now?

If you've watched any MTV back in the 90s (yes, I am a relic - did you know they used to show videos on MTV!), you will have seen Rolling Stones; "Love is Strong" .....

Anyone who is a bit of a geek (like me) knows about the Mojave Phone Booth. It has its own "Mojave Phone booth" wikipedia page summarizing its raise to fame and later demise due to all the traffic of geeks who went there just to play with it. It was removed in 2000, and even the plaque placed there has been removed by the National Park Service. *sigh*

It was the very first thing I thought of when I read this:

Here at TVF we have just launched the very first attempt of live viral ever. 
We put a guy in the desert of the south of Spain, his name is Rob, with a camp and a phone box, and he will be there answering calls of anyone from
around the world. And there will be an amazing suprise...
Check this out: phoneboxexperiment.com

Who will be the first one to enter this viral into the Mojave phone booth wikpedia page, I wonder. I should probably care about the sender, or wonder what the surprise may be, instead I'm busy pouring out a little jolt on the ground for old desert phone-booths no longer with us.

Must scratch another Badland itch. Adfreak pointed out that mutant animals wear converse, and the second image they show with all the posters on one wall reminded me of Amsterdam way back then, where walls of 'wild posters' would annoy me every day because I couldn't figure out if that Two Dogs lemonade campaign from Garbers international was trying to make a "hair if the dog" pun or not. Not that similar, but photoshopping strange new creatures together seems to be popular in Adland.

A little birdie emailed me a good question last night: ..would this be worthy of an ad award for ad creativity?  Reward the ad 'creatives' who found the artist and put the cause to it?  - gee when you put it that way it seems like a no. Has it really become the norm as the Director of the copy-catted "Sorry I'm Late" stop motion film Tony Manonsky said: It feels like some creatives should get the title "researchers" as they sit and scan the web for ideas that they can sell to clients.

See, around a year ago Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo’s was making ice Sculptures of 'Melting Men' and placing them where people would photograph and blog about it. Check Believe it or not's post dated August 2008 and now we find the same ice sculptures doing their melting for WWF. (course, nobody noticed they were so busy talking about that 911 stuff).

Ice sculptures in the shape of humans are placed on the steps of the music hall in Gendarmenmarkt public square in Berlin September 2, 2009. Hosted by the German World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 1,000 ice sculptures made by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo were positioned on the steps in the German capital at noon, to highlight climate change in the arctic region. REUTERS/Tobias Schwarz

See The Toronto Sun, Yahoo news in pictures the Telegraph UK and countless others (not to forget blogs Make The Logo Bigger, DognPony etc.)

Ohgoodie, there's a badlandian-twist to the recent Obama as Joker street art images that are appearing all over the united states. Over at Newsbusters in "Obama Joker Poster Stirs Outrage, Bush Joker Poster Not So Much" they point out that last year when Bush was depicted as the Joker in Vanity Fair done by Drew Friedman, people weren't as outraged.

Then again that wasn't street art seen everywhere either. The creepy part of the Obama poster is that it seems to be a campaign not done by street artists. Over at Metafilter sef-described "one of the guys who co-founded Andre The Giant has a posse" comments on these posters with the zing-twist at the end:

Oh. And one other thing. This is slight, but for the trained eye it's gold. You know that whole, Frank Shepard Fairey vs. AP vs. AP photographer hullabaloo over fair use and the Fairey Obama campaign poster? Well, anyone recognize the Joker-fied Obama image? Say, from the cover of TIME magazine?
Now that's irony!

At this point, it's so meta it's making my head spin.

This weeks mysterious coincidence is brought to you by David Hauser of Grasshopper and his googleanalytics. Did Ogilvy and American express get inspired by “Entrepreneurs Can Change the World” (which would be kind of approriate since it's meant to be an inspiration video, funny)
Is this a case of overly inspired, demo-love, or are these footprints in the digital world there for a much simpler reason -such as; Ogilvy heard from other people that their ad was similar to grasshoppers and wanted to check it out for themselves? What do you think?

Between May 1 2009 and July 26th 2009:
o Ogilvy agencies visited our Grasshopper website over 15 times, spending nearly 3 hours or total viewing time.
o The same Ogilvy agency spent the vast majority of these hours on our “idea” page which contains ONLY our video
o The entirety of their traffic was either around May 4th (when our campaign first launched) or the 2nd week in July (right before their campaign launched).
o The same Ogilvy agency then researched the producer of our video (Sonja Jacob) and visited her site 10+ times, around the exact 2 time period listed above. All the pages they viewed were specific to Sonja’s Grasshopper work.

Lets watch the American Express - Small Business Owners Anthem shall we? Pay extra attention to the music.

Many of you have laughed at David Rees's Get your war on, the simple political satire comic based on clip art and razor-sharp wit. It even has video versions, like "Day Traitors" at Huffington post.

But wait, Jamba Juice's new "cubicle picnic" flash ad looks a lot like GYWO. Like really really inspired by, and in fact using the same clip art, seemingly copied straight from GYWO. What the?

So GYWO calls for a boycot of Jamba Juice, and I have to high-five the guy for this choice quote;

Whoever made this ad is probably a 22 year-old “creative” at some ad agency in Tech Valley, CA. Way to think outside the box, sonny. Have fun snorting cocaine at the nightclub you go to with your friends who work at Twitter or wherever. And no, Adult Swim will NOT buy your stupid cartoon you’re developing with your housemates about four guys who work at an ad agency but are secretly lobsters.

Now, I'm not sure if GYWO can do anything about this, after all the clip art is clip art, and you can not copyright an idea. What is left then? Sarcastic style? Hmm. Had it been trademarked there might be a case. I do know that it was rather obvious David Rees isn't the type to be flattered by a juice-corporations homage to the strip, and it's clear that the strip is inspired by GYWO, not the stock clip art.

The agency behind the campaign is LA shop called Neighbor according to the rumor-mill and Urbaniak. If any of you want to get creative with the same clip art, pick up a copy of Ready-to-Use Office and Business Illustrations and go wild.

The original inspirering video from Oren Lavie - Her morning elegance, released is January.

The hat tip homage - they say that it is based on the original idea from Oren Lavie's music video : Comcast Dreams

And yet another one - this time from Canada: Chateau Bonne Entente - Summer. Ah, I sense a trend here. But is fun to do stop motion, isn't it?

I'm sure there are more, have you seen any other examples?

Our pals at agency spy have found these gems via The Berrics, however Agency Spy's efforts in reaching BBDO Mexico for comment were fruitless. The Berrics, which is run by pro skaters Steve Berra and Eric Koston, has posted the entire snickers commercial on their site calling it "BBDO Atrocity", which should get most skater fans noticing it. (also, it's better quality so you might as well check it out there).

Lets see what all the fuss is about, shall we? Three films inside!

Hats off to the uber-intelligent folks at 'The Economist' who have, in just two words, so eloquently captured how we are all feeling about the current state of the financial markets.

(via netzkobold.com)

102.2 Smooth Radio has done it, FNAC vinyl & Rocketboom have done it, and now Eskils Junker Film joins the trend with their Knight Music video.

 
Dibs on calling this trend twice jumped the shark!

If you're still not bored with the album-cover-collage photo fun, dive into the Flickr LP Portraits Pool for more.