Watch: The top 5 creative brand ideas you need to know about right now

Watch the livestream replay above and follow the conversation on Facebook, Periscope, LinkedIn, Twitch and Twitter. Note: Press play above and click here to refresh if video isn't playing during broadcast. Welcome to a live episode of the top 5 creative brand ideas you need to know about right now. Ad Age's Creativity Editor Ann-Christine Diaz and Associate Editors Alexandra Jardine and I-Hsien Sherwood and Reporter Jessica Wohl count down the week's best ideas. As we head toward Super Bowl Sunday, we'll look at standout creative in and around the game, plus a host of other good stuff too—like zombies. 5. Slap Global: Musical Anti-Manifesto Agency: Slap Global As a slap in the face, of sorts, to agencies and companies who pen lofty “manifestos” to promote their credentials to prospective clients and customers, Slap Global, the creative accelerator founded by Gerry Graf and Maxi Itzkoff, decided to do something else: They made a mini-musical. Their new video features scene after scene of people getting slapped in all sorts of places, with a soundtrack penned by composer Andrew Sherman and sung by Ciarán Sheehan, a former Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. The film aims to let future clients “feel” rather than just read about who Slap Global is. 4. Heinz: Draw Ketchup Agency: Rethink Canadian agency Rethink came out with yet another inventive idea for Kraft Heinz. To promote Heinz Ketchup, it went around to various people simply asking them to “draw ketchup.” The responses they got were pretty remarkable, with nearly all of the participants drawing some form of a bottle of Heinz Ketchup—save for one who drew mustard, and another who drew a red blob. The drawings were used in outdoor ads, and there’s even an online contest that will send custom bottles of the ketchup bearing the labels that consumers drew. The campaign ultimately serves to underscore the iconicism of the Heinz Ketchup brand. 3. Sam Adams: Clydesdales Agency: Goodby Silverstein & Partners As we gear up for the Super Bowl, 2021 has, not surprisingly, proved to be an unusual year. Some of the mainstay advertisers of the game have opted out of running spots, namely Coke, Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch’s Budweiser. The latter has decided to redirect its funds to supporting the Ad Council's COVID vaccine push. You’d think that means that the brand’s iconic Clydesdales would be sitting out too, but the majestic steeds are making an appearance after all—of sorts. In Boston and New York on game day, Sam Adams is running an ad featuring Clydesdales run amok in a spot from Goodby Silverstein & Partners. It’s a continuation of the brand’s “Your Cousin from Boston” campaign and feels strangely serendipitous. 2. Coors: Big Game Dream Agency: DDB Anheuser-Busch commands the Super Bowl on game day since it has its exclusive national beer rights. But in yet another surprising brew move, Coors has found a way to insert itself into the Big Game conversation—through your dreams. Along with DDB, the Molson Coors brand has cooked up an intriguing and ambitious stunt that attempts to implant ads into consumers’ dreams. Building off the insight that during the pandemic, people have been having really intense dreams, Coors and DDB worked with a dream specialist and psychologist to leverage “targeted dream incubation” and induce people to have their sleepy time filled with images like snow, mountain streams and refreshment—the kind associated with the Coors brand. They tried it out with test subjects in Los Angeles and will also release a full-length video on Feb. 3 ahead of the game so others can drift away to Coors land themselves. 1. Pringles: Meet Frank Agency: Grey London Like Coors, Pringles, too, is moving into uncharted advertising terrain. In this campaign from Grey London, the snack brand is summoning a zombie from a video game into the “real world.” During a live Twitch session earlier this week, Frank, a walking dead character from the Xbox game “West of Dead,” left mid-stream when the gamer at the controls, Leahviathan, pulled out a can of Pringles. The stacked chips, apparently, were too hard to resist. Over the next couple of weeks, Frank will remain out of the game and will appear in a series of branded content films showing him in the “real world.” He’ll head back to the game on Feb. 10 to be the brand’s zombie ambassador. That's it for the Top 5. Make sure to check out more of the best in brand creativity at Adage.com/Creativity.

Watch: The top 5 creative brand ideas you need to know about right now

Featured Stories