After Shohei Ohtani damaged a billboard with a foul ball, Coors Light stepped in with a fun commemorative can.
Most industries strive to minimize uncertainty, but sometimes that’s where advertising thrives. We saw several examples this past week, from AI’s endemic randomness put to good use in a tourism effort to a brewer’s lightning-fast response to a smashed billboard. We also enjoyed surprisingly weird work from two different continents—and one ad whose location may forever be a secret.
Below, check out the Top 5 campaigns of the week.
A billboard on a deserted island won’t get many IRL eyeballs, but it was eye-catching to the rest of us nonetheless. The fun visual alone does a lot of the heavy lifting here, but wine brand Silk & Spice also added a treasure-hunt element to its “Meant to Be Discovered” campaign. Anyone who actually locates the remote ad will find a wine bottle, corkscrew and glass waiting for them in a box attached to the structure—so you can enjoy a solo happy hour as you ponder how to get home.
Find this billboard IRL and be rewarded with the product on the spot.
Getting Peyton Manning to front your sports marketing campaign isn’t exactly a groundbreaking strategy. Thankfully, everything else about this NBC Sports promo was delightfully unexpected. Manning quickly veers into bizarroland with the ludicrous suggestion that the network kick off its Paris Olympics coverage next year by building a baguette blimp. Soon, Manning picking pieces off the spongy dirigible and eating them is a LOL moment, and the whole spot is entertainingly odd—part one of what will hopefully be a charming campaign for months to come.
Speaking of odd, this Singaporean campaign for a maker of QLED TVs takes this week’s WTF honors with its depiction of a naked dude on a kitchen table getting stuffed like a turkey—a disconcerting metaphor for how immersive PRISM+’s TV-watching experience is. And that’s just one of three wacky executions, brought to life by renowned oddball director Wuthisak “Un” Anarnkaporn. In a region that loves its absurdist comedy, these spots are no doubt going over well.
Yes, we’ve seen lots of campaigns use generative AI to create intentionally bad creative for laughs. But this Myrtle Beach tourism ad on Reddit (reimagining the beach resort as a horribly futuristic place called “Mittary Best”) really stands out, not just for the weirdo imagery but for the commentary around it. For every wacky pic in the Reddit article, MMGY wrote some very funny copy, faux-saluting AI for its ingenuity—and faux-bashing the agency for being second-rate. As the bots come for our jobs, at least we know we can comfort ourselves with gallows humor.
Whose hand is that, anyway?
Plenty of reactive advertising involves doing a lazy social-media post and calling it a day. But when Shohei Ohtani smashed a Coors Light billboard with a foul ball in New York in August, Rethink jumped in with a bigger plan. Soon it unveiled a commemorative can, featuring a black square that mirrored the dead pixels on the damaged digital board at Citi Field. It also welcomed Ohtani’s team home with activations at Angel Stadium in early September. Fun and well executed, this was another good reminder to double down whenever your brand is presented with an unexpected spotlight in culture.
After Shohei Ohtani damaged a billboard with a foul ball, Coors Light stepped in with a fun commemorative can.
