The beginning of the college-football season gave fans plenty to watch this weekend, but much of the Tuesday-morning quarterbacking seems to be about ESPN’s commercial featuring Ole Miss and Admiral Ackbar. The ad, shown below, recaps a months-long push by students who want the tentacle-chinned, trap-foiling Ackbar from Star Wars to be the school’s new mascot. (He would replace a rebel leader of a different sort, the recently retired... 

Here’s a bizarre campaign allegedly promoting safe driving. Starting next Tuesday, drivers on 22nd Street in West Vancouver, Canada, will be startled by a 3-D image of a girl chasing a ball in the street . The girl is an optical illusion, but the drivers won’t know that. They will react as though she were real. Officials say if you are driving at the posted speed limit of 30 kmph, you will be able to stop in time. And if you are not?... 

These Campari spots from Euro RSCG in Milan have been around for a while. But it’s appropriate that I’ve discovered them a few weeks late, given their visually beguiling depiction of moments frozen in time. Yeah, these self-absorbed scenesters are in no hurry at the local hotspot. They can wait forever for the camera to flash and for those cocktails suspended in mid-air to spill on the floor. The tinkly ambient music, so annoying in... 

PlayStation’s vp of everything , Kevin Butler, returns in this new Deutsch spot promoting the PlayStation Move, the forthcoming motion-sensing game controller platform for the PS3, due in U.S. stores Sept. 19. Everything about the Move is epic, and by the end of the spot, Butler looks like he stepped out of a Capital One commercial. PlayStation shows off the Move a bit more in this earlier Butler-less video .  Read More →

People act like their pets in Vermillion’s cute campaign for the Humane Society of Boulder Valley, which exhorts viewers to “Find your counterpart. Adopt today.” In one spot, a chick uses her tongue to groom herself in front of a mirror and tries to cough up a hairball. Reminds me of a few women I dated in college. See two more spots after the jump. As for the guy who digs a hole with his “paws” to bury a phone, well,... 

This new NRA ad with Chuck Norris is, for the most part, a pretty insulting portrayal of gun owners as goofy, mulleted hicks. Where’s the Kenny Powers cameo? Maybe the point here is to convince NRA members that civic participation beats violent rhetoric that plays up stereotypes, but they have too much fun mocking rednecks for this to be a completely benign gesture (not to mention, Norris is a jerkoff). Kudos for the karate-chopping-the-boombox... 

Leave it to a brand of ink-correction fluid to create the most entertaining YouTube campaign since the Old Spice response videos. The clip below, for Tipp-Ex, with a hunter who encounters a bear at his campsite, sets in motion a whole interactive choose-your-own-adventure game where you decide what the hunter should do to the bear by typing directions into a field above the video. (The hunter uses Tipp-Ex to erase the word “shoots”... 

Zombies are everywhere, it seems, even in American Legacy’s latest “Truth” commercials. Timed to the launch of The Real World ’s 24th season (Jesus!) on MTV, we get Zombieville , a Real World parody with young people on a reality show tormented by the undead. And for a change, it’s not each other. The trailer is below; see the first two episodes after the jump . This all sounds miserably convoluted and …  Read More →

The air quality in Hong Kong is so bad that they’re starting to sell fresh air in canisters, which you can strap to your face to enjoy lovely, brief periods of unpolluted respiration. Available in pleasant scents like vanilla, the beach and “horses,” the canned air is “the revolutionary new product that lets you experience breathing like the rest of the world does,” according to the spot below. Of course, it’s... 

Honey-bee populations are mysteriously dwindling worldwide. In England, the Banrock Station winery created the ” world’s first ad with live bees ” to call attention to the problem. They used queen-bee pheromones to attract a giant swarm of bees (as many as 100,000, according to the BBC) from a nearby honey farm to spell out an “SOS” message on a billboard. No bees were harmed and no one was stung during the stunt.... 

This week’s little bit of manufactured controversy comes courtesy of Sony Pictures, which is it promoting its upcoming movie The Virginity Hit by putting the phrase “Still a virgin?” on outdoor boards, bus shelters and subway walls across the country. (You can see the movie’s trailer below.) For a low-budget comedy with no recognizable actors, this is a pretty smart move, as illustrated by the fact that the ads are being... 

As you may have heard, Apple had a little event today where it unveiled a revamped line of iPods and a new version of AppleTV. Here are two brand-new ads from TBWA—one for the iPod nano below, and one for the iPod touch after the jump . The iPod shuffle got hosed, as usual, getting a makeover but not a new commercial. UPDATE: The featured songs  Read More →

Britain’s Daily Mail got its knickers in a twist about this underwear ad from China featuring a bra-and-panty-clad Princess Diana look-alike . She’s playing a cello, naturally. Yesterday was the 13th anniversary of Diana’s death, and some Brits abroad apparently took umbrage with the ad’s oddly timed appearance at China’s Shenzen Airport. Honestly, who in the Royal Family are they supposed to use to illustrate the... 

This odd, NSFW Greenpeace campaign from the Netherlands is all about keeping things natural, whether it’s the world’s forests or, apparently, your own personal underbrush. The message is a bit muddled, though, as the shock visuals at the end might cause some viewers to take up the cause of clear-cutting rather than oppose it. See the male version after the jump. Osocio has more on the campaign , including a QR-code element.  Read More →

It’s one of the most impressive automotive features out there: the ability to save a man’s life after he falls 39 stories from a Manhattan high rise. And currently, only the Dodge Charger offers it! According to the New York Post , a distraught young actor leaped to certain death from a Manhattan rooftop on Tuesday— only to survive when he landed on a 2008 red Dodge Charger . He suffered a broken leg, shattered ankle and collapsed...