Teamwork.com continued its amusing series poking fun at fickle, arrogant clients.
Lighthearted advertising continues to break through, and we saw several different flavors of it among this week’s top campaigns.
We had fantastical food and slapstick streaming campaigns, and our favorite work of the week was a full-on comic parody of the advertising business itself. Along the way, we also saw a clever environmental effort from a hotel brand, as well as the latest bit of nostalgia from a top fast-food chain.
See the week’s full Top 5 below.
This comical bit of whimsy communicated the comfort of Kraft Mac & Cheese through a memorably furry metaphor—a bear hug, with emphasis on the bear. Nicely shot in a “Where the Wild Things Are” style by Sam Brown of Imperial Woodpecker, the 30-second spot plays like an enjoyably fantastical dream to communicate “that Kraft Mac & Cheese feeling.”
Cornett brought attention to climate change in a clever way with the “Climate Wake-Up Call,” an initiative in which Hotel Marcel—an eco-friendly hotel in New Haven, Connecticut—is offering wake-up calls to guests featuring information about the warming planet. The effort features prerecorded messages feature CBS’s David Pogue and ClimaData’s John Morales, as well as eye-catching in-lobby signage.
Hotel Marcel wants you to stop hitting snooze on climate concerns.
For more in-your-face comedy, WorkInProgress delivered a pair of frantic, slapstick spots for Sling TV, emphasizing the cord-cutting platform’s customizable options. Starring a jailbreaking cowboy and a peripatetic wall-mounted fish, both spots brought the laughs, effectively differentiating Sling from its competitors.
McDonald’s has made hay with nostalgia campaigns these past few years, and here’s the latest: Collector’s Meals featuring illustrations from past Golden Arches partnerships, including Beanie Babies; Barbie and Hot Wheels; Hello Kitty and Peanuts; Universal movies “Shrek,” “Jurassic Park” and “Minions;” Coca-Cola; and classic McDonald’s characters such as Grimace and the Fry Kids. The spot below, called “The Great Cup Odyssey,” nicely heralds yet another W+K campaign to move beyond messaging and into packaging and menu plays.
Everyone loves a good skewering of the ad business, and this B2B campaign from Teamwork.com—a platform to manage project workflows—pokes fun at a character everyone loves to hate: the client. The second video in the series (below) rolled out this week, but you should start with the original, which broke in April, for the full effect. Anyone who’s dealt with client frustrations, from arbitrary feedback to a God complex, will get a chuckle from these cathartic shorts.
