Vote for us! We're freaky!

Adfreak, one of the big US ad blogs out there, picked our LostJaw anti-tobacco campaign as one of its choices for freakiest ad of the past year. So please click through, and vote for us (we're ad number 10, about an eighth of the way down the page as of this writing). It's a great campaign, and we're proud to have been a part of it, and we're super freaky.

The Montreal Metro is Gay!

My friend Shane sent me this video of the first ad campaign for the Montreal Metro. If you love French jingles, porn mustaches, and random, synchronised dancing the way that I do - and who doesn't? - then you will believe this to be the greatest ad of all time.



As someone who works in the industry, I gotta say: if the advertising industry of the 60s was fueled by booze and cigarettes, and in the 80s it was dominated by cocaine, the 70s had to be all about LSD, ecstasy, peyote, and some sort of fish paralyzer mixed in equal amounts.

Vive le Quebec Libre!

Break me off a piece of that Chrysler Car!

This is fantastic: a perfect storm of comedy, marketing genius, and mash-up inanity. The Office? Great, as always. Andy, one of the characters thereon, being unable to remeber the end of the Kit Kat jingle after he calls it the best ad in the world, ever? Even better - especially since it touches on a real-world fear of marketers who are afraid of "good" commericals that don't create any link to the brand. And the fact that someone mashed up all of Andy's incorrect answers with actual Kit Kat commecial footage? Well that's just effing genius.

Tonight, I'm a Marketing Star!

Here's a profile of me at marketingcrossing.com, part of a regular feature they run called "Marketing Star." I'm not all that certain I want to be considered such a thing, but there you go. You'll notice, though, that I choose bacon over ice cream, even when I've not been given the choice.

Back to it, and a good ad for the non-Amy/Britney/Lindsay sort of rehab

I took a Colorado Rockies-like break from blogging for a while (too soon?) so that I could spend all my time with facebook instead. Now that I have almost 500 friends - at least 25 of whom I would recognize on the street - I feel better about myself and I can get back to making fun of other people, as well as places, and things. Nouns, I guess. I make fun of nouns.

But here's something to chew on: a really good ad from Toronto Rehab (link opens your media player in a new window). So much of the best work in advertising - Canadian advertising, especially, I find - happens on the not-for-profit side. This is no exception. I am a little surprised that we haven't gotten any backlash to this one (or at least none that I've heard of) but it's early yet. Anyway, the ending really worked for me, and hopefully it does for you too.

No-so-hidden Agenda.

Steve Paikin, host of TVO's "The Agenda," is really good at his job. I was part of a panel on ethics in advertising - before you comment with "is there such a thing?" let me tell you that five hundred people have already beaten you to that joke - that aired in December, and it is now available as a podcast on the TVO site. Happy listening, and happy New Year.