Eurovisions | Muse by Clios

Saudi Tourism Gets Weird, While British Airways Seeks Tranquility

David Gianatasio — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 04:00:01 +0000

BETC Paris channels Dune for Visit Saudi’s “This Land Is Calling.” It is dramatic, beautiful and weird. The flash from desert to sea is particularly breathtaking. We want one of those bracelets. The choice to portray a woman, traveling alone, is meant to underscore how quickly the country is changing.

Uncommon promotes British Airways’ Club World cabin by emphasizing moments of uninterrupted calm. This is an outdoor campaign, so imagine it appearing in loud and sweaty places, like the Underground or Trafalgar Square. It just feels a bit awkward that instead of actually vibing “uninterrupted calm,” it’s rocking “keep the harried masses out.” Is this the time for a message like that? I guess it is for some.

Rest comes at a premium these days. This is especially the case in Singapore, one of the most sleep-deprived countries. Secret Little Agency, a Singaporean outpost of Mother London, worked with Ikea to transform its iconic blue Frakta bag into a symbol of relaxation. Get a load of Resten, a bag that’s pretty much also a pillow. The straps are helpfully labeled “Leave the REST to Ikea,” in case you need hints on how to use it.

Here’s an idea: AlmapBBDO is turning out-of-office emails into ads, inviting people to “reduce envy” in their OOOs by offering recipients 20 percent off their next Novotel stay. Visit www.bestoooemail.com to prep an OOO that saves others money while you’re off lounging.

After all this psychic voyaging, we’ll wrap with something closer to home. Created by TBWA\MCR for limbless veteran charity Blesma, “Not Heroic, Human” features ex-Royal Marine Mark Ormrod MBE, fielding a helicopter pee from his infant. The campaign is designed to encourage people to make estate donations to Blesma, whose vets receive no government financial support. It also takes shots at the tendency to label these people “heroes,” a distant and abstract concept, to focus instead on their humanity. Gotta say, we never thought we’d be bonding with an Invictus Games winner, and the U.K.’s first triple-amputee to survive the Afghanistan conflict, over diaper duty.

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Europe’s Best: Hornbach, Xbox, Tingly Ted’s, Pato Bravo

David Gianatasio — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 09:00:10 +0000

We’re coming out hard this week with McCann London and Xbox, which released an adaptive joystick with custom toppers for people with accessibility needs. Frankly, it seems like an improvement on most both-hands controllers for consoles. “I want to be part of this world!” one of the testers cries. And we think: We do too! The ad concludes, “When everybody plays, we all win.”

Ed Sheeran released a hot sauce. It’s called Tingly Ted’s. In the clip below, Ed hangs out in a food truck and uses the sauce to sign stuff. Work by David Madrid. (Could somebody get Ariana Grande out here to taste this?)

Hands want to keep busy. In “Listen to Your Hands,” Hornbach and HeimatTBWA serve up physical comedy with a man whose hand has its own designs on what’s fun. (No, it’s not what you’re thinking.)

Let’s wrap with alpacas. There’s this Portuguese creative studio called Pato Bravo, which recently launched. It’s using nature-inspired films to illustrate the campaign credo: “Brave by Nature. Effective by Design.” We are soothed, and would gladly watch nonstop reels of this stuff on Netflix while pottering around. You can watch the rest here.

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Paralympics, Škoda, ‘Explore Uranus’ and More Great Work From Europe

David Gianatasio — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 15:00:17 +0000

We’re kicking off with telecom Orange in France and Publicis Conseil. Titled “Quand on aime le sport, on aime le sport” (When you love sports, you love sports), the work depicts the Rio 2016 men’s T13 1500m final for both the Olympic and Paralympic games. That year, the first four Paralympic athletes beat the Olympic winner’s time. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot of great athleticism happening on the Paralympic side that sometimes even outdoes its flashier Olympic sibling. Don’t miss any of it.

Škoda has a deep relationship with cycling. In the U.K., its “Ride With Me” campaign employs Olympian Elinor Barker to get more women out on their two-wheelers. This is a social-first initiative, designed to generate contact among friends—and friends of friends— so everyone can hit the road together. Though it must be intimidating to be some nice ordinary lady taking a ride out alongside your hyper-athletic chum who doesn’t seem to ever remove her elite cycling gear. Work by Leo Burnett U.K.

Remember tramp stamps? They’re back and on a mission! During the Swedish music festival Way Out West, BBDO Nordics opened a pop-up tat parlor where people could get “tram stamps” to show they’re turning their backs (har!) on fossil fuels. The design shows an old-school tram framed by modern tribals, like the tattoos we once knew and loved.

The campaign insight springs from the knowledge that Gen Z likes dressing the way millennials did when MTV was playing Gwen Stefani, I guess. Anyway, it worked. The tat shop was the most visited event space during the festival, with artists churning out one pic per minute.

Charming in an understated, almost sleepy way, Guinness makes its Premier League debut with its largest global campaign. Meet the small island of Eriskay in Scotland, which is one of the trickiest places to play “the beautiful game.” Ten percent of the population plays for the local soccer team. The ad features actual islanders, including players and pub owners. Work by AMV BBDO.

Last on our roster: This isn’t your grandma’s tourism ad. Or is it? We don’t know your grandma. Netherlands-based adult retailer EasyToys gives you “Explore Uranus,” an invitation to become an “asstronaut,” created by Officer & Gentleman. A plethora of visual metaphors serve to invite people to break the butt-play taboo. “Because the last great frontier … is in your rear.” The work went live internationally for what the brand’s calling “Anal August.”

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Europe’s Best Ads: Lufthansa, Amazon Prime and Quaker Oats

Amy Corr — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 09:30:34 +0000

Our ad of the week hails from Serviceplan Group and Lufthansa. “Allegris” is a leisurely survey of the airline’s new first-class cabin experience. We could go into the particulars here. But honestly, the dreamlike film does it better within an ambiance that, itself, feels like being lulled high above the clouds.

In the Olympic Village, much ado was made of the food available to athletes in the dining hall. The teams from England have one specific request: oats, which are more nutritious than, say, a chocolate muffin. Back across the channel, Quaker Oats has taken advantage of the marketing opportunity. “Champions are not made on croissants!” they proclaim. (French Olympians, which total 573 this year, may beg to differ.) Work by Uncommon.

“The Best,” for Amazon Prime in the U.K., celebrates sisterly competition with two women who go on a spree for sports goods after watching the National Women’s Soccer League Game. “Striving. It’s on Prime,” the ad ends. Striving-by-purchase has not always translated to the field as it does in this work. I remember clearly the day me and my partner went shopping for running gear. We didn’t become runners. We became people who wear sweatpants. Work by Wieden + Kennedy London.

Do travel agencies still exist? In Austria, they do. “The Travel Office” by Traktor Werbeagentur for Restplatzboerse depicts the latter’s physical office like an early-’90s TV series opening. It may provide sufficient motivation to leave the country.

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Bodyform, McDonald’s, Ford, Heineken and More Breakthrough Work From Europe

David Gianatasio — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 01:00:17 +0000

Why do girls still see blood in their pants and think they’re dying? That’s the question posed in Bodyform U.K.’s latest, “Never Just a Period.” Women’s health is a battlefield at the best of times. But this work feels especially timely, charged in equal measure with grief, comedy and a well-placed undercurrent of rage. Classical works of art and an orchestra punctuate the drama. Brought to you by AMV BBDO.

The Summer Games are a good time to whip out some fun cross-cultural work. Enter DDB Paris’ “Welcome as You Are” for McDonald’s, a twist on the brand’s longtime slogan “Come as You Are.” We watch a stream of tourists debark in France and use their own linguistic nicknames for McD’s to try locating one. Confusion ensues! In the end, a guy cuts through with the old standby, “Big Mac.” (Luckily he didn’t try that with a Quarter Pounder.)

Where do forgotten beers end up? Heineken’s poetically morose “Forgotten Beers” by LePub doesn’t answer that question. But against a warm rendition of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” it makes the case for forgetting suds. Because what’s happening in the room is the reason for beer in the first place.

Inspired by the #PassengerPrincess craze on TikTok, W+K London’s creative studio Bodega created a Passenger Princess Kit for Ford. The limited-edition set, celebrating the Mustang Mach E with handsfree tech, includes shades, a keychain, multi-rings and more. It was created in collaboration with Beta Design Office and will be plugged by influencers including “soft babe” Nella Rose. On TikTok and Instagram, fans can win their own kits. It’s all very androids-meet-Lisa Frank.

It’s not all fun and games during the Olympics. For Czech NGO People In Need, VCCP Prague created “The Deadly Games,” which compares the suffering of various global populations to popular Olympic sports.

We’ll wrap with some viral Olympic fun. Gymnast Giorgia Villa, representing Italy, is an ambassador for parmesan cheese—no particular brand, just overall. On behalf of this relationship, there are photos of her hugging, flipping over and generally hyping cheese wheels. A perfect 10!

Olympic silver medalist and Italian gymnast Giorgia Villa is sponsored by parmesan cheese and takes many of her photos while posing with large wheels of cheese pic.twitter.com/klx8PEuFPN

— Women Posting W’s (@womenpostingws) July 31, 2024

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Cadbury, Volkswagen, the ‘Jacquemus Olympics’ and More From Europe

David Gianatasio — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 12:50:20 +0000

French agency LaFourmi has begun “Defying Logic” for sports brand Decathlon. It’s a tribute to balls, the people who use them, and the opposite of logic, which is apparently soccer.

For those still seeking their 15 minutes of fame, “My Cadbury Era” gives them another shot. The VCCP London-created AI tool lets you take a selfie, then pop yourself into 200 years worth of Cadbury ads. It is arguably better than that one filter that turns you into an animal.

Get out there and create! For the new Golf R, DDB Berlin and Volkswagen launched a slick masterclass that seeks to both resurrect the consumer-generated content trend, while teaching people how to make better-quality stuff. They’re calling it the “R&Create” initiative. Let’s see if anyone takes heed.

The phrase “fuck around and find out” is usually employed as a threat: Do this unadvised thing, and meet the consequences. 72andSunny Amsterdam hopes to change the connotation with Feeld, a dating app for people who approach relationships Baskin Robbins-style … though these days, there are more than 31 flavors. The campaign swathes Amsterdam with billboards and street art with suggestive messages followed by an overwhelming array of coupling (or throupling, or quadrupling) options. Kink? Submission? Massage? Aftercare? Anybody who’s ever navigated the boggling categorizations on a porn site will blanche. (Or maybe feel right at home.)

We’ll wrap up with a little news. Jung von Matt London created a new offering, NERD (sadly bereft of Pharrell and Chad), designed to connect brands with fandoms, nerds and geeks. The artwork seems to lean pretty heavily on a nostalgia element, suggesting this is a great way to get exhausted Millennials excited about something again. (No promises, though. We’re really, really tired.)

Over in Paris (aka Olympic Village), Jacquemus continues to grace the ‘gram with keen mashup content. Most recently, it shared a carousel of posts depicting “athletes” prepping for the “Jacquemus Olympics.” It might be the only thing that makes us happy.

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A post shared by JACQUEMUS (@jacquemus)

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The Little Prince Returns for Citroën, Plus Škoda and More

Muse — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 14:45:00 +0000

Don’t do this to our heartstrings! Created for the Citroën DS in collaboration with Martin Krejci and Marcel Paris, “Little Prince” takes us by surprise. We don’t even want to talk about it, so just watch it. It helps to have read The Little Prince to fully appreciate the emotional payoff, which we perhaps longed for without knowing it. (Fun fact: The author, Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, was a pilot like the book’s protagonist. And like the protagonist, he just flew off and disappeared. His wreck was found 20 years ago, but the mystique still holds.)

Kicking things off: Co-op’s new brand platform, titled “Owned by You. Right by You,” asks: If you invented a business today, how would it work? The ad, by VCCP, artfully answers the question by providing a dreamy stream of decisions you’d perhaps imagine were logical when businesses are “publicly owned” (except they’re not). In doing so, it basically distinguishes what makes a co-op different from a normal business.

“In the Food for Love” conveys its whole vibe in the title, but we still weren’t prepared for it. Created by Rosa Paris for U.K. grocery chain Grand Frais, it makes strategic use of classic pop music to convey the deep sense of relationship shoppers feel … not to each other, but to the supermarket. Inexplicably, the work makes us miss Grey Poupon.

“Before taking the road, one must learn to share it.” Try telling that to anybody who drives in a city! Škoda and DDB Paris are trying to solve a problem: Since Covid, when the Mayor of Paris installed a whiplash-inducing number of bike lanes, the road’s become unlivable as tensions between cyclists and cars rise. Both think they own the road. Both are jerks in their own special way.

Škoda is a major Tour de France partner, so it’s got both these warring tribes in its DNA. The agency and brand worked with the French Cycling Federation to do a simple thing that may be ingenious, but we won’t know for another 10 years: To train future owners of the road, they created the first-ever children’s playmat that includes bike lanes. The mat comes in a game box that includes a toy car, a toy bike (with a cyclist, natch) and a booklet you can read to your child, who of course will not listen.

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Jacquemus x Nike (With Serena), McDonald's and More From Europe

Muse — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 16:45:00 +0000

Our Eurovisions Ad of the Week is Jacquemus’ in-house-created FW24 drop for its Nike collab. Ahead of the Olympic Games in Paris, it’s a breathless who’s-who set to the JXL Radio Edit Remix of Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation.” Here, Serena Williams strikes a pose. There, Lila Moss dances on a bâteau mouche. Ballerinas take selfies in a shop, boxers face off in a shallow pool. It culminates in giddy muscle-poses, then explodes all over again.

It’s sports culture meets Fashion Week, uncorking joie de vivre like victory champagne. It’s a study in codebreaking. The Games never felt more pop, and the runway never flexed like this. Mom, can we live in Jacquemus’ Paris?

In Sweden, for music festival Way Out West, Nord DDB created the “Future Fan Stage” to play select tracks for sperm and eggs in an IVF lab. In addition to tilting the unborn in their direction, studies show that music and vibrations improve IVF fertilization rates. Really, though, this elaborate shock-value thing is mostly to illustrate how important live music is to humans. The stage was designed by Love Hultén, and looks pricier than our childhood bedrooms.

For those of you following European politics, you probably know the U.K. has finally gone left again. But immigration remains a hot topic throughout the west, where a lot of angry and delusional people with microphones love talking about how migrants are criminals and terrorists. For the Migration Museum, and over the course of the Euro 2024 soccer tournament, Wonderhood Studios created “England Without Immigration,” which rhetorically wonders what the nation’s squad would look like without people from migrant backgrounds. You’d have to bench more than half of the players.

More stuff from Nord DDB, for Swedish intelligence platform Funnel. “Make Data Dance” takes the usual info pitch and filters it through different musical moments. “We make data playful and hard to resist,” a narrator sassily says in an ad titled “Like a ’90s Boy Band for Your Marketing Data.” A girl dances in her room, cluttered like so many data funnels. Also see “Like a Banjo in a Hoedown” and “Like a Shot of Tequila.”

Leo Burnett U.K. helps McDonald’s fête its 50th by breaking it down old-school. Here we are, at a 1980s birthday party, while a kid loses it to “Know How” by Young MC, who’s British born. The work ends with a montage of McD’s restaurants over time. The best part of this ad is the kids, but we like how McD’s is leaning into the nostalgia theme.

Since there’s so much music in this summery edition, we’ll wrap with something dance-worthy.

Chicken Neck Syndrome, Lip Syncosis, Lead Finger Disorder: All are symptoms caused by summer hits promoted by Spotify Italy. All appear in Dentsu Creative’s latest work, dreamily plugging the “Estate 2024” playlist (“estate” meaning “summer” in Italian, and not something most Millennials can’t afford). The lead song in the ad is “Pedro” by Jaxomy, Agatino Romero and Raffaella Carrà, which went big on TikTok (generating 6.2 billion views) and hit no. 1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 global charts.

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Europe's Best Work, Featuring Sacrée Brioche and Horrifying Robot Dogs

Muse — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Hotel chain Accor, a premium partner for the Olympics and Paralympics, released an ad—or rather, a vibe?—just in time for the Games. It’s enlivening work by Havas Play, featuring a Sempéish concierge dashing through Paris while balancing an ice cream cone intended for a Very Important Client. The style is meant to recall Olympic sports, but it also recalls another (very Parisian) competition.

For petcare brand Musti Group, Erma&Reinikainen made a robot dog that looks amazingly like a real pooch, and that simulates the effects of heat stroke as the temperature rises inside a car. This is to scare people into not leaving dogs in their vehicles under the hot sun. The morbid operation is touring Finland, stopping wherever such offenses may occur. In supermarket parking lots, say.

Video Reference

Jul 05 2024 – 3:12pm

David Gianatasio

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Poster Reference

Robot Dog

Musti Group | Robot Dog

With help from DDB France, Volkswagen celebrates 50 years of its Golf with a nostalgic ad set to Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” We see Golfs evolve alongside the lifeline of a woman who grows up through the ’60s, passing on her affinity for the vehicle to her progeny. The work ends with her daughter, now a woman, asking an in-car AI assistant how she can “cheer her parents up.” (We can answer without ChatGPT: Keep your eyes on the road, kid!)

Abetted by agency Heaven, Motorola France goes full AI in “Styled With Moto,” a promotion for the Razr50, which uses AI technology for its camera and as a smartphone assistant. The result is very stylish. We tried not to count fingers.

We’ll wrap with some good old cultural pokery. In the first-ever campaign for French bakery brand St. Pierre, proffering goods in the United Kingdom, a French woman is seen freaking out, Jesus-in-the-temple style, after watching a weirdly pornographic video of a British guy squirting ketchup onto a St. Pierre brioche bun. “Eat avec respect!” the ad admonishes in cartoony Franglais. Work by Fold7.

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Rad European Campaigns Feature Migrant Stories, Mutual Care and (Declan) Rice Rice Baby

Muse — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 12:45:00 +0000

Our European Ad of the Week comes from Singa, a French organization dedicated to heloing migrants. “Professional Downgrading of Refugees,” while nearly a year old, enjoyed fresh attention at Cannes, and is being recirculated to draw attention to Singa’s efforts. Below is the story of Joseph. Check out Laila’s, too. More recently, the group started a Newcomer Comedy Club initiative in France, where migrants perform stand-up. This work is particularly close to my heart as an immigrant, and the child of immigrants, who spent years trying to secure viable work.

In “Gates,” car service Heetch offers a fresh ode to the suburbs of greater Paris. Such areas are mostly avoided by city dwellers and generally seen as where the riffraff live. (It’s also harder to get cars to pick you up there, or take you back, because of these same prejudices.) BETC Paris’ work is a love letter to the “gates” that divide the metropolis from its surroundings—letting people in, watching people go and connecting different worlds.

Rice, rice, baby! In a campaign of the same name, Müller Yogurt & Desserts showcases its partnership with footballer Declan Rice in the U.K. This promotes its Rice Protein offering during a “Summer of Sport.” In a series of billboard installations, Declan is shown holding a 3D car over his head while retrieving a ball. It’s very Popeye. Work by VCCP.

We’ll wrap with a surreal and charming initiative from independent insurance firm Helan in Belgium. Created by FamousGrey, the campaign poses a question: “We all take care of someone, but who takes care of us?” The answer: Insurance! LOL. We like how it illustrates the concept of interdependence.

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