Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam goes big in its new work for Booking.com, with a 60-second spot that tells the epic story of a "booking hero" whose knack for finding the perfect accommodations helps him not only enjoy a great vacation—it helps him fulfill his destiny.

We follow the guy's whole life, from a chance encounter with his future wife in a hostel through a romantic proposal at a chateau—and then through the downs, and mostly ups, of family life and professional success.

Four 30-second spots, with 15-second cut downs, will also roll out soon, along with five contextual online films that match user Google keyword searches.

We spoke with Genevieve Hoey, creative director at W+K Amsterdam, about the campaign.

AdFreak: What made you choose the idea of heroism for this campaign?
Genevieve Hoey: It's a relatable, human insight—which is our currency for Booking.com. We know people have a small amount of vacation days each year, so it's vital to get vacation accommodation more than "just right." Understandably, people want to absolutely nail their vacation, and that's what this campaign is all about—how Booking.com helps people to get it booking right, leaving them feeling like accommodation heroes. Booking.com's aim is to make every precious trip, booking right. And as you'll see in this year's work, the right accommodation can even be life changing.

Why follow one guy through a series of life changes?
Dennis is an everyman, likable and relatable. Following one guy allows us to dramatize the epic results of a lifetime of well-booked accommodations. We want people to see the potential for themselves to be accommodation heroes and embark on their own journey though Booking.com's vast range of incredible properties.

How outlandish did you want to get with the plot?
We're always writing and honing until the very last minute, working closely with our Booking.com clients. The work this year is definitely dramatized but not exaggerated—it's all in the realm of possibilities. The idea behind each script is rooted in either a Booking customer review or an interesting Booking.com data point. Ultimately we're hoping to delight our fans with the most relatable and entertaining Booking.com work possible.

What was the biggest challenge on this production?
We always shoot in Booking.com locations. The biggest challenge is choosing which ones from their 600,000 properties across the world. This year we wanted to show Booking's wide variety—they have 25 different property types. So, to excite people with the life-changing possibilities at their fingertips, we shot in medieval castles, rustic log cabins, on rooftop infinity pools, in historic penthouse suites and so forth. We worked with A-list director Dante Ariola to create sweeping cinematic odes to vacation greatness, to show people the rewards of getting accommodation booking right, with Booking.com.

As Old Spice took to Grand Central Terminal this week to promote its latest line of nature-inspired scents, we caught up with brand spokesman Terry Crews to get his thoughts on personal branding.

The key, says the ad icon and  "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" host, is to simply embrace who you are. That approach has helped him succeed in a wide range of roles, from NFL linebacker and movie star to bodywash pitchman and game show host. 

As you'll see in the video above, he also has a lot to say about his fellow Old Spice ad star, Isaiah Mustafa. In fact, Crews' impression of "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" is practically perfect.

Kanye West held an outdoor concert in front of the Flatiron Building in New York on Thursday night, but not everyone was completely welcoming. In fact, Partners + Napier's NYC office (at 11 East 26th St.) spelled out a message for the rapper on its windows—obviously a reference to Kanye's latest Grammys antics.

Agency execs Matt Dowshen and Jason Marks told Gothamist:"We are an agency actively researching the effects of out-of-home advertising. We found out Kanye was playing outside our building, and we wanted to make a point about being in the right place at the right time with the right message, and how that can be amplified through digital channels. And … don't fuck with Beck."

In other words, those who troll will get trolled back.
 

PNYC welcomes @KanyeWest to Flatiron for his performance tonight. http://t.co/t2bLVIUN6s#nba#allstarweekendpic.twitter.com/JNZVX5idFK— PNYC (@pnycagency) February 12, 2015

Ever since Microsoft introduced Cortana, its personal assistant for the Windows Phone, it's been slamming Siri for her vanity and uselessness. Now, for Valentine's Day, it's proposing that you give Siri the old heave-ho for good—and begin a torrid affair with her archrival.

Check out the two new spots below, from m:united. The second one has a particularly cute subtext, although Siri would tell you to watch out—that this is one suitor with a menacing agenda under all the sweetness.

CREDITS
Client: Microsoft
Agency: m:united
Co-Chief Creative Officers: Andy Azula John Mescall
Executive Creative Director: Yo Umeda
Senior Copy Writer: Thom Woodley
Senior Art Director: Trinh Pham
Director of Creative Technology: David Cliff
Head of Integrated Production: Aaron Kovan
Executive Producer: Carolyn Johnson
Junior Producer: Monique Fitzpatrick
Managing Director: Kevin Nelson
EVP Group Account Director: Tina Galley
SVP Group Account Directors: Darla Price, Jason Kolinsky
Account Director: Melissa Trought
Account Supervisor: Greg Masiakos
Assistant Account Executive: Emily Glaser
Project Management: Stella Warkman
Production & Post-Production: CRAFT
Director of Photography: Larry Kapit
Editors: Nate Troester Carlos Hernandez
Music: "Big Top Polka" Erin Gemsa
Media Agency: EMT

Specs
Who Bob Carrigan
New gig CEO, Dun & Bradstreet
Old gig CEO, IDG Communications
Age 49

What specifically is Dun & Bradstreet able to do for advertisers now?
We have applications for procurement managers so they can see the supply chain and make sure all their customers are legitimate and healthy. We have lots of solutions that help marketers in general to help customers, and a lot of the use cases are secular.

You guys were managing a huge database of commercial info before it was cool.
Yes, and now it's very relevant to the programmatic ad space. We've spent the last few months building a platform in a way that's useful for agency trading desks and DSPs, and we're working with a few companies to learn the usefulness of this data for advertising. As the programmatic world moves more and more into the b-to-b space, we're looking for an opportunity to surface that data in a way that makes it easier for marketers.

How is Dun & Bradstreet going to change over the next few months and years? And how is Droga5 going to help with those changes?
Part of it is just positioning—we have these crown-jewel assets we sit on as a brand, but we need to modernize it so that we understand all the cool things we can do. We want to talk about how we can help human beings manage their customers and their risks, and Droga5 is perfect for that. I hope that's reflective overall of the change here to thinking more from the outside in. We're looking at modernizing this company in all its elements.

Everybody talks about big data, but you're pretty serious about data quality. How are you guys working on that?
If you go to Data.com, that's basically a storefront for our data that's natively available. If a company is using a Salesforce CRM, it's great to have the application because we can provide data to help them keep very accurate customer records. If they type in a name, we make sure it's correct. The CRM is only as good as the data in it. This idea of data embedded in software is becoming increasingly important.

What's next for D&B?
We have supply chain management, we have compliance solutions, and we clean and optimize customer lists. We have our Hoover's application, which small to medium businesses use to identify prospects. There are future opportunities, too, in figuring out how to surface our data in ways to properly engage with their ad targets. We're thinking much more expansively, given all the cool stuff going on.

Why make the move to D&B?
It was a company I'd known about for a long time. The opportunity to transform this company into a modern industry leader was a great one. We're focused on a b-to-b space, a space that I knew and loved, and the world is increasingly becoming data-driven.

A few months back, someone in the pages of Adweek suggested that, given all the changes technology has brought us, we need to redefine advertising.

I disagree. Advertising has always been about connecting brands with people. It still is. But today we know a lot more about the people with whom we want to connect and almost every day we're given new tools to help us make those connections. Plus, now, if we do it right, those folks we actually engage will connect with each other and with all their friends to help us build a whole community of brand fans and activists. We've always said that word of mouth is the best medium of all. Augmented by word of Web, it's even better.

There's no question that the advertising industry has changed dramatically. But its purpose is still the same. And while we obsess about all the changes, it behooves advertisers to remember the basics that haven't changed and won't. Chief among these non-changes is human nature itself—the obsessive drives that motivate the people we're trying to influence. As they always have and always will, people seek brands that will help them survive, help them succeed and help them take care of their own. They want brands that will help them be loved and admired and that will, in some way, enrich or improve their lives.

Although I'm no longer involved in the day-to-day business, someone recently asked me how I see the advertising industry evolving. As a response, I suggested we define a period between 1950 and, let's say 2030, and then divide it into three unequal parts.

Beginning in the '50s, we had the "Creative Revolution" inspired and led by Bill Bernbach, who broke all the rules that had been established by the early high priests of advertising. During this period we learned to respect the intelligence of the consumer, how to engage people with humor, irony, wit and emotion. We learned the importance of craft and the power of a well-told story.

All this turned out to be a better way than relentlessly pounding unique selling propositions into people's heads. Mindless repetition was just one of the tactics favored by those who had gone before.

Then, at the end of the last century, came the "Digital Disruption" during which advertisers were given amazing new tools to help make those all-important consumer connections. Mountains of data helped advertisers better understand and more precisely locate their prospects. Digital messiahs proclaimed the end of Madison Avenue, and at times it seemed the obsession with technology was diverting attention from the basics. I was often reminded of what Henry David Thoreau said at the end of another century: "Men have become the tools of their tools." I feared that we sometimes did things just because we could, not because they were right. Had the digital disruption turned into a digital distraction?

But now I believe we are on the cusp of an even more promising period of industry development, a period where the lessons we learned during the creative revolution about craft and storytelling with emotion and humor will combine with the tools and data brought to us by the digital disruption. For want of a better label I'm calling this new period "The Ultimate Revelation." (To me it sounds kind of prophetic, even biblical.)

And what will be revealed in the ultimate revelation? Among other things it will become quite clear that there is a profound divide between creating a buzz and creating a brand. There's an important difference between a one-off stunt and an enduring brand story. There's a difference between an algorithm and an insight into human nature and between mere contact and true connection. Finally, there's a wide gulf between big data and a big idea.

There will be other truths revealed in the years ahead. More than ever, brands will need authentic and compelling stories that are told consistently across all points of engagement. We'll learn again as we learned with the advertorials of an earlier time that native advertising compromises the integrity of both brands and media. It will also be revealed that media strategy and creative strategy need to come back together, and words like "digital" and "traditional" will lose their meaning. They will blend into one word called "advertising," the art of connecting brands with people.

I could be wrong about all this, of course. To borrow a line from Oscar Wilde, "I am not young enough to know everything."

Keith Reinhard (@kreatividad) is the chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide. 

You probably didn't know bros were an endangered species.

Dairy brand Organic Valley is out with "Save the Bros," a mock PSA asking for help weaning musclebound dudes from conventional protein shakes in favor of the company's new Organic Fuel product—which it's touting as free of "artificial flavoring, sweeteners, GMOs, toxic pesticides, antibiotics or artificial hormones often found in other 'health' products."

The two-minute, tongue-in-cheek video, created by Humanaut, stakes out its position early, opening with the smirkingly ambiguous claim, "Bros are pretty amazing," before proceeding to make a slew of other dubious arguments. One woman actually worries to the camera that in a world without bros, no one "would make comments about your physique that aren't appropriate, but still appreciated."



In other words, for an ad that, at moments, panders to its target by trolling everyone else, it's pretty funny—deftly sending up cheesy public-service tropes, while also largely poking fun at the consumers it's trying to woo. Ultimately, everyone is treated to images of bros doing yoga, bros looking at eggplants like they're aliens (because, let's be real, they are), bros meditating on mountaintops, and bros making pottery, as part of bros' efforts to better themselves. 

There's also an accompanying website that hawks "Save the Bros" paraphernalia, like T-shirts and duffel bags, and obviously, tank tops and trucker hats. (They might want to do a slightly tighter job of filtering the Instagram posts it pulls in by hashtag—on Monday night, one screenshot of an iChat, under #brolife, read, "Life is like a penis; it is simple, soft, and relaxed. Then women make it hard.")

Luckily, you can rest assured that even if you don't share the ad, the bros will be fine.

CREDITS
Client: Organic Valley
Product: Organic Fuel
Campaign: "Save the Bros"
Agency: Humanaut
Creative Adviser: Alex Bogusky
Creative Director: David Littlejohn
Associate Creative Director: Mike Cessario
Copywriter: David Littlejohn / Mike Cessario
Art Director: Stephanie Gelabert / Sean Davis
Production Company: Fancy Rhino, Chattanooga, TN
Director: Daniel Jacobs
Producer: Katie Nelson
Director Of Photography: Annie Huntington
Editor: Tyler Beasley
Production Designer: Chad Harris
Music Company: Skypunch Studios
Composer: Carl Cadwell

Prestin Persson really drives men wild in Ford's "Speed Dating" prank for the Mustang.

Persson, a leading stunt car driver, was hired by the automaker for a prank video from Team Detroit and production house The Work. The guys in the clip, all aspiring actors, believe they're auditioning for a new dating show starring Persson, and are unaware of her skills behind the wheel. After meeting in a bistro for supposed "chemistry checks," Persson takes each for a spin in her red Mustang GT, which is fitted with hidden cameras, naturally.

At first, the dudes act all macho. One brags that he's "a very adventurous guy." Another, bizarrely, describes himself as a "ninja." (She should've smacked him.) Yet another offers to drive so he can show Persson "what this thing can do."



Ultimately, she shows them, in an empty parking lot, with some crazy-ass, high-speed driving straight out of an action movie. Brakes screech! Rubber burns! The reactions are predictable but amusing. One dude barely manages to croak out "Why are we going so fast?" as he grips the armrest for dear life. Another laughs spasmodically, as if he'll never stop. A couple of guys get into the spirit of things, shouting, "That's what I'm talkin' about!" and "Yeah, baby!"

When the gag is revealed at the end, all the men seem like good sports. Ford exec Andrea Zuehlk assured USA Today that the unsuspecting guy had fun, "but a lot of things hit the cutting room floor." (Perhaps some bits of lunch hit the Mustang's floor? Maybe we'll find out in a behind-the-scenes clip someday.)

The vibe is similar to Jeff Gordon's "Test Drive" pranks for PepsiMAX. And like those viral smashes, Ford's effort is tearing up the fast lane, with almost 10 million YouTube views since its launch a week before Valentine's Day.

CREDITS
Client: Ford
Agency: Team Detroit
Director: The Work

Jesus Christ pulled off some pretty impressive brand stunts in his day: turning water into wine; healing the blind; feeding the multitude with the loaves and fishes. But when it came to one of the biggest stunts of His career, He turned to Montreal's 1one Production—at least, according to this "never-before-seen original footage" of Christ and his marketing team from a couple thousand years ago.



As self-promo films go, it's pretty well done. "With the evolution of media, and the viewer becoming more intelligent (and cynical) towards traditional advertising, we need to create stunts that can't look like anything short of amazing," says Jean-René Parenteau, executive producer and associate at 1one. "When it comes to doing that, you want an expert, not someone who's just hoping they can pull it off. This has been our focus for the past five years. Stunts aren't a new trend for us. It's what we've always done and focused our expertise towards."

CREDITS
Client: 1one Production
Agency: lg2
Copywriter: Philippe Comeau
Director: Pierre Dalpé
DOP: Barry Russell
Producer: Jean-René Parenteau
Production House: 1one Production
Music and Sound Design: 1one Production

Making out-of-home ads that are hard for people to see sounds like a terrible idea. But Daiya Foods does just that with clever ad placements in a new campaign that plays off the line, "It's easier to notice this ad than notice our pizza is dairy-free."

Some ads are running where few people look (like on top of a bus), while others are almost too small to see (tiny stickers on benches, crosswalk lights, elevator panels, phone kiosks and more) or go by too fast to read (taxi tops).

The campaign, by TDA_Boulder, extends to digital and print, including full-page ads with tiny 2¼-by-¼-inch headlines in magazines such as Cooking Light, Every Day with Rachel Ray, Fitness, Health and Food Network Magazine.

CREDITS
Client: Daiya Foods
Agency: TDA_Boulder
AD: Austin O'Connor
CW: Dan Colburn
CD: Jeremy Seibold
ECD: Jonathan Schoenberg

Specs
Who (l.) president Mark Mayer; CCO Josh Mayer
What Full-service advertising agency
Where New Orleans

Just like its clients, Peter Mayer Advertising has its roots firmly planted in the culture and history of New Orleans. The Big Easy agency specializes in bringing local clients into the national spotlight. Take Zatarain's, the New Orleans-based food and spice company. For the past 13 years, PMA has helped the brand rise to national prominence while still keeping its hometown authenticity. In May the shop helped Zatarain's break a Guinness World Record by hosting the world's largest crawfish boil—a New Orleans tradition. Other brands have taken notice. Both the National WWII Museum and Kennedy Space Center have enlisted the agency to take their local presence to the national stage. Peter Mayer's sons, Josh and Mark, who serve as CCO and president, respectively, now run the shop. What's their secret? "We're unlocking the cultural truth about a brand and sharing that with a larger audience," said Josh Mayer.

Men and women would get along better if they just had more domestically themed emojis to help them communicate properly in their text messages, says Ikea.

The Swedish furniture maker and brain-hacking home-retail maze is playing couples therapist in a new campaign from the Netherlands that announces the launch of Ikea Emoticons. These special little text-message pictures will supposedly reduce friction at home by letting you more efficiently text your significant other about having, for example, vacuumed the house.

Ridiculous as that premise may be, it's a cute idea. And the resulting alphabet includes some clear winners, like a symbol for Swedish meatballs, as well as harder-to-explain gems, like a symbol for a green-eared dachshund. (Where in the real world does such a thing exist, without taking peyote?)



In the video, a salesman with a thick accent and expert method of smugly grabbing his white lab coat tells you where to download the emojis to your phone.

Alas, a number of reviews in Apple's App Store pan the whole thing as a false promise. The emojis, critics claim, are not small at all but giant pictures that you have to copy and paste into your texts, which requires granting the app full access to a phone's keyboard. (And funny thing, not everyone trusts Ikea.) Another review, which doesn't read at all like an Ikea agency employee wrote it, blames the complaints on Apple's coding restrictions.

Sadly, there are more fundamental flaws. For some inexplicable reason, the alphabet doesn't seem to include a cinnamon bun emoji, or, even worse, a person tearing his or her own hair out and screaming while standing over a pile of sticks and pegs that are supposed to become a shelf emoji. Which means you'll have to fake it with an Allen wrench and an angry face, just like in real life.

Via PFSK.

Parents who are perpetually late in dropping their kids off at school, take note. This new Famous Footwear video shows you how to arrive on time and in style.

It shows stuntwoman Shauna Duggins tearing through quiet suburban streets in her minivan—which happens to be customized with a 550-horsepower engine—to get her kids to a Famous Footwear store. It's not just fast driving: She performs donuts in cul-de-sacs and weaves between recycling bins to complete her mission.

The video, created by digital shop Shareability, is called "Momkhana"—a parody of the intense driving style "gymkhana," which was popularized by rally car driver Ken Block. (It's not totally clear what any of this has to do with footwear, but then again, Block's videos were sponsored by his own D.C. Shoes brand.)



While the children in the video aren't actually hers (and were replaced by mannequins for the especially dangerous stunts), Duggins was selected because she actually is a mother. It also helps that she's got impressive driving skills and apparently no fear of high speeds. (If you want to see how the video was pulled off, check out the behind-the-scenes video below.) 

Needless to say, you shouldn't start tearing through your own neighborhood like this. But if you see Duggins in your rearview mirror, you might want to pull over and let her pass. 

It's the moment you've been waiting for—the 2015.GIFYS.

What are the .GIFYS, you might ask? They are, obviously, an awards show for the best animated GIFs on the Internet—as nominated by a panel of GIF experts, insofar as such people exist—and ultimately decided by you, the public.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Los Angeles is the organizer. And now, in the competition's second year, GIF search engine Giphy has joined as co-host.

There are awards for animal GIFs, and cat GIFs—a separate category, of course—and art, and music, and politics, and film and television. There are awards for GIFs that will hypnotize you ("Can't Look Away"), and make you nostalgic ("Throwback"), and just kind of creep you out ("Weird").



Some of the 55 nominees are excellent, like baby goats doing backflips off other baby goats, and a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon man swiping the face of a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon woman like an iPad, and a Nick Offerman head bouncing through a field gobbling bacon.

The judges who picked the nominees include writers and visual artists for news sites like Mashable, The Huffington Post, New York magazine, and, naturally, BuzzFeed, as well as execs from companies like Daily Motion and Reddit. Internet-famous cat Lil Bub is also somehow a judge, which seems perplexing, given cats thankfully don't have thumbs.

If you like wasting your time looking at GIFs, it's worth a gander at the full collection. Voting ends Feb. 22, and your voice could help decide which mini works of circular clip art earn the highly questionable honor of becoming "permanent fixtures in an Internet hall of fame."

But you also know that when an ad agency creates, as a means of self-promotion, a crowdsourced competition celebrating snippets of self-referential Web culture, that the awards show glut truly has imploded into a black hole.

I'm not sure Cadillac's "Dare Greatly" spot—ushering in a big new campaign that will break Sunday on the Oscars—will ever win any awards. But the commercial, among the automaker's first efforts from Publicis, is distinctive and represents a shift from Caddy's approach a year ago.

A passage from Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 "Citizenship in a Republic" speech—delivered by a female narrator—washes dreamily over slow-motion images of Manhattan streets. (Cadillac, of course, is moving its global headquarters from Detroit to New York City.) Some folks walk, others run. Bikers glide past. All of this happens s-l-o-w-l-y. We're getting a car's-eye view, presumably from a Cadillac, but no vehicles are actually shown.

"This is the start of a redefining of Cadillac's core values," a brand rep told the Detroit Free Press. The 90-second online spot will be chopped into a :60 and a :30 for the Academy Awards, while two other Cadillac spots—at least one of which shows a car—will also run during the broadcast.



"Dare Greatly" is hypnotically shot and quite arresting. Plus, it's got built-in resistance to criticism. "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better," the voiceover says.

Ouch! Then who does count?

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood … who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Strong stuff. With an understated voiceover and ethereal visuals, it's far less polarizing than Cadillac's "Poolside" spot from IPG's Rogue, which broke during the 2014 Winter Olympics and went on to become one of the most controversial ads of the year.

I much prefer Roosevelt's prose to scary-privileged Neal McDonough in the pitchman's pulpit. That guy was just a big bully.

CREDITS
Client: Cadillac
Agency: Publicis

LELO, the luxury sex toy brand, is getting into the movie business. And fittingly, it's sexing up the marketing around it with a pretty creative interactive trailer.

The trailer is called PlayTogether, and the hook is that you have to watch it with someone else. It syncs up two smartphones and displays video across both of them, and the viewers have to make choices together about which scenes to watch next.

If that seems less about sex and more about getting along well together—that's what the movie is about, too. The first mainstream film produced by a sex toy company, it's called Beyond The Wave—and it won't feature any sex toys or accessories. Instead, it takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where men and women have chosen to live separately (which, sex toy use aside, wouldn't seem to bode well for the future of what's left of the human race).

The movie stars Casper Van Dien (Starship Troopers, Sleepy Hollow), Emilie Ohana (Paris, Je t'aime) and newcomer Zhu Wei Ling. "On the surface it's a love story, but deeper than that, it's a reminder of how to enrich relationships in an increasingly individualistic and divided world," the filmmakers say.

Check out the traditional trailer below.

When you think of Photoshop these days, you might well envision fashion models being airbrushed within an inch of their lives. But there's so much more to the image editing software, as Adobe reminds us with a colorful, energetic spot celebrating Photoshop's 25th birthday.

The 60-second spot, created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, will air Sunday on the Oscars in select markets. It steers clear of the fashion business entirely, focusing instead on two other industries that use Photoshop heavily—design and illustration, and film itself.

The latter makes perfect sense for a spot breaking on the Academy Awards. And the former serves up plenty of beautiful, hypnotic images that keep the spot hurtling along, helped by Aerosmith's 1973 power ballad "Dream On."



Adweek spoke with Alex Amado, Adobe's senior director of creative and media, who called Photoshop's 25th birthday "a huge milestone" for the company.

"It's the tool we put out into the world that's had the broadest impact," he said. "It's used in the design process of pretty much everything we see and touch these days—every ad you've reviewed, all the photography in every publication, everything from logos on T-shirts to billboards, industrial design and the movies."

The spot, he said, is both a tribute and a challenge to Photoshop's users.

"It's a tribute to the amazing creatives who have used this product and helped us evolve it and conceive of even greater uses," he said. "And we want to challenge the next generation of designers and artists and photographers and moviemakers to dream even bigger, and we'll help them get there."

Aside from the movie images, most of the art in the spot was sourced from Behance, the Adobe-owned creative community. (There's a Behance collection here that links out to the artist pages of many of the featured works.) The images were chosen for their cutting-egde artistry, and also, in certain cases, for matching up with some of the "Dream On" lyrics.

In almost every shot, someone appears to be manipulating the image using Photoshop, which is a nice nod to the product without being overbearing. "If it were just a montage of images, then it's just a slide show set to music," Amado said. "We wanted to give it more motion and action. And this way, it represents the kinds of things that happen to images as designers work with them."

As for the lack of fashion imagery, Amado said Adobe didn't want to clutter the spot by showing too many uses of the software across too many disciplines. "If we had fashion and product design and package design, we thought it might be a head-scratcher," he said.

More broadly, Amado did address the criticism of Photoshop's role in perpetuating unrealistic body types. "People use Photoshop in incredible ways in art and commerce, design, astronomy, medicine," he said. "It's used in special effects in film, but it's also used in solving crime. We don't like it when it's used in negative ways, and we don't support that. But we also feel that the good far, far outweighs any challenges."

Amado credited GS&P for coming up with "the heart of what made this ad sing." And GS&P co-founder Rich Silverstein, who was heavily involved in the concepting, added that it was high time Photoshop had a birthday party.

"It's not only about retouching celebrities or creating fun Internet memes. It's an amazing tool that helps imagination come to life," he said. "It's hard to find something in the last 25 years that hasn't been touched by Photoshop. We wanted to show that once you open a Photoshop file anything can happen. It's an unsung hero, and it was time to sing its praises."

CREDITS
Client: Adobe
Project: Photoshop 25th Anniversary – "Dream On"
Length: 60 seconds

Product: Adobe Photoshop

Agency: Goodby, Silverstein & Partners
Co-Chairman/Creative Director: Rich Silverstein
Creative Director: Adam Reeves, Patrick Knowlton, Will Elliott
Associate Creative Director: Sam Luchini, Roger Baran

Executive Producer: Tod Puckett
Producer: Timothy Plain
Director of Graphic Services: Jim King
Business Affairs Manager: Heidi Killeen

Account Director: Joel Giullian
Account Manager: Cassi Norman
Account Manager: Chelsea Bruzzone

Brand Strategy Director: Anne Faricy

Director of Communications Strategy: Christine Chen
Senior Communications Strategist: Joe Gruchacz
Communications Strategist: Victoria Barbatelli
Jr. Communications Strategist: Tara Hughes

Production & Postproduction

Director: Brady Baltezore, Mike Landry

Editorial Company: Rock Paper Scissors
Executive Producer: Angela Dorian
Producer: Cristina Matracia
Editor: Grant Surmi
Asst. Editor: Arielle Zakowski

Color: Chris Martin @ Spy Post

Graphics Company: eLevel Studios
Executive Producer: PJ Koll
Creative Directors: Brady Baltezore, Mike Landry
Producer: Luke Dillon

Artists: Nathan Shipley, Kyle Westbrook, Chad Ford, Jessica Gibson, Karim Fawzy, Jon Corriveau, Devin Earthman

Final Mix: Dave Baker

Photoshop Effects Artists: Sam Nordemann, Kleber Lacher, Philip Chudy

Artwork Collaborators:
Adhemas Batista
Ahmed Emad Eldin
Alex Trouchut
Alexey Romanowsky
Anka Zhuravleva
Anthony Hearsey
Anton Semenov
Artur Szygulski
Bill Mayer
Brian Miller
Chris Slabber
Claude Shade
Clifton Harvey
Cristian Girotto
Damián Domínguez
Dan Elijah Fajardo
David Fuhrer
David Mascha
David McLeod
Edit Ballai
El Grand Chamaco
Emi Haze
Evgeny Kazantsev
Fabian Flenker
Fede Cook
Flora Borsi
Foreal
Gerrel Saunders
Henrique Cassab
Jakob Wagner
James Roper
Jason Seiler
Jerico Santander
Jimmy Williams
jonathan ball
Jordan Metcalf
José Bernabé
Juan Carlos Paz -Bakea
k2man*
Kittozutto
KJA Artists Fredrico
Kristina Varaksina
La Boca
Leandro Senna
Lucas Zimmermann
Luke Choice
Mario Sanchez Nevado
Mart Biemans
Martin Grohs
Maxim Vasilyev
Mike Campau
Oleg Dou
Paolo Todde
Pawel Nolbert
Peter Stylianou
Richard Perez
Rik Oostenbroek
Romain Laurent
Rubén Álvarez
Ruslan Khasanov
Ruslan Khasanov
Sasha Vinogradova
Stu Ballinger
Tejal Patni
ThisisMessor
Thomas Koch
Thomas Muller
Tim Tadder
Vault 49
Vincent Viriot
Zaki Abdelmounim
Zooka

Sure, renowned advertising creatives Gerry Graf, Tor Myhren, Rob Reilly, Tiffany Rolfe and Ted Royer are riding high these days. But things are about to come crashing down in a serious way.

The AICP takes a dismaying look at each of their lives 35 years from now in a hilarious series of videos, unveiled today, promoting the call for entries for the 2015 AICP Awards.

Each of them is in horrifying shape, having seen their careers—and their lives—spiral into utter shambles. The one thing they can hold on to is their long-past success, which the AICP has helped to preserve. (AICP-winning work gets archived in the Museum of Modern Art, which is more validation than most ad people ever get.)

"Craft your legacy. We'll protect it," says the on-screen text. The accompanying website is craft-your-legacy.com.

The spots are hilariously written (Reilly and Graf conceived the concept with AICP president and CEO Matt Miller) and nicely directed by Brian Billow of O Positive. And kudos to the actors for their delightfully disturbing takes on past-their-prime ad people.

CREDITS
Writing Credits
Gerry Graf, Barton F. Graf 9000
Tor Myhren, Grey
Rob Reilly, McCann
Tiffany Rolfe, co:collective
Ted Royer, Droga5

Creative Concept
Rob Reilly, McCann
Gerry Graf, Barton F. Graf 9000
Eric Monnet, McCann

Production
Brian Billow, Director
O Positive Executive Producer: Ralph Laucella
Executive Producer: Marc Grill
Production Supervisor: Christina Woolston

Casting
Grande/Morris Casting
Casting Director: Faye Grand

Editorial
Editor on "Tor Myhren": Charlie Cusumano

No.6NY
Editor on "Gerry Graf": Jason Macdonald
Editor on "Rob Reilly": Justin Quagliata
Editor on "Tiffany Rolfe": Nick Schneider
Editor on "Ted Royer": Dan Aronin
Senior Cutting Assistant: Ryan Bukowski
Executive Producers: Corina Dennison, Crissy DeSimone
Producer: Malia Rose, Kendra Desai

Graphics
The Studio

Audio
Color Audio Post
Partner, Mixer: Kevin Halpin.
Mixer: JD Heilbronner
Partner, Executive Producer: Jeff Rosner

Equipment Rental
Hello World Communications
Feature Systems

Actors
Gerry Graf: Gene Ruffini
Tor Myhren: Jim Murtaugh
Rob Reilly: George Riddle
Nurse: Stevie Steel
Tiffany Rolfe: Marie Wallace
Ted Royer: Frank Ridley

Website
Istros Media Corp.

All films were shot on location at Droga5

A creative team from DDB Sydney gives the Cannes Lions logo a sex change—and proposes a "Cannes Lioness" category—as a way of challenging the creative festival to reward work that reverses the trend of gender-based objectification in advertising.

The 90-second video below, "Sex Sellouts," explains the idea, though the judging criteria for the proposed category are awfully vague. (We're told the Lioness honors work "that changes the culture of objectifying women in order to sell stuff," but that's about it.) Still, using industry awards to inspire ad professionals "to go against the strategy that sells so many hamburgers"—and by extension, fuel a broader media-driven conversation in society—is ironically appealing.



The video was created in response to the brief "Change the conversation around sex," and it won gold in the third round of Young Glory, an ongoing competition for advertising students and professionals. DDB worldwide creative chief Amir Kassaei evaluated the entries. Lest anyone think he simply tossed a prize to his own network, however, Young Glory maintains that the creators weren't identified in the judging phase. (Nepotism in ad awards? Never!)

Philip Thomas, CEO of the Lions Festivals, appears to be a fan. "We love the thinking behind DDB Sydney's idea," he tells AdFreak. "The representation of women in this industry, and in society at large, is something Cannes Lions feels a responsibility to address. Last year, we launched the 'See It Be It' initiative to accelerate creative women's careers in the industry. This year, we've been working hard, together with the industry, on a big idea that we'll be ready to announce in the next two weeks. It's really encouraging to see that the whole industry—veterans, rookies, male and female—is at a stage where we want to fight for the same vision."

It's unclear exactly what that "big idea" will be, or if it will in any way resemble a "Lioness" category roaring into this year's festival.

The Oscars are just around the corner, so now's as good a time as any to start amping yourself up by revisiting past highlights. And the show's producers, with help from 180LA, are making it easy to get a quick fix with the four new ads below, cut together by Oscar-winning editor Kirk Baxter.

The first, "And the Oscar Goes to," features a parade of stars—too many to name, though movie buffs might have a fun time trying to rattle them all off—doing their best victory dances. Their exuberance is pretty moving, even if it's plenty vain, too.



A second, "Holding Oscars," features the campaign's most poignant moment—one second of Robin Williams looking around in breathless gratitude, a genuine scene that makes the loss of such a talent sting all the more in hindsight.



The third spot, a multilingual Kumbaya "Everyone Speaks Oscar," can't help but be a bit corny. (Sure, movies are a universal language, sort of, but really, where would most of us be without subtitles?) Still, the Academy deserves a nod in the Best Lie category for trying to pretend Hollywood isn't a U.S.-dominated enterprise, and implying the winners are an ethnically diverse bunch—when in fact they're mostly white.



The fourth ad, a Valentine's spot featuring the likes of Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hanks kissing their wives at the show, is cute enough, set to the fairly obscure but anachronistically charming sounds of "Am I in Love" from 1952's Son of Paleface, performed by Bob Hope and Jane Russell.



For good measure, 180LA also commissioned a series of 15 posters featuring the Oscar statue alongside various artists interpretations of imagination (a popular theme in ads because it's hard to hate).

The results feature a number of nods to the award show's roots in the Art Deco era, but the standouts are really the weirder takes—like Hattie Stewart's leering, winking cartoon hearts, and Blastto's surrealist eyeball sculpture. Because if those aren't apt metaphors for America's unhealthy obsession with celebrity, what is?

CREDITS
Client: Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
President: Cheryl Boone Isaacs
Chief Executive Officer: Dawn Hudson
Chief Marketing Officer: Christina Kounelias
Marketing Manager: Ford Oelman

Agency: 180LA
Chief Creative Officer: William Gelner
Creative Directors: Zac Ryder, Adam Groves
Copywriter: Christina Semak
Art Director: Karine Grigorian
Head of Production: Natasha Wellesley
Producer: Nili Zadok
Chief Marketing Officer: Stephen Larkin
Account Manager: Jessica DeLillo
Account Coordinator: Alexandra Conti
Planner: Jason Knight

Holding / Goes to / VDay
Editorial Company: Exile Edit
Editor: Nate Gross (Holding)
Editor: Will Butler (VDay; Goes to)
Executive Producer: Carol Lynn Weaver
Producer: Brittany Carson

Foreign Language
Editor: Dave Groseclose
Producer: Brian Scharwath

Color, Visual Effects, Finishing: The Mill, Los Angeles
Colorist: Adam Scott
Color Executive Producer: Thatcher Peterson
Color Producers: Natalie Westerfield, Antonio Hardy
Color Coordinator: Diane Valera
Lead 2-D Artist: Robin McGloin
2-D Artist: Scott Johnson
Art Department: Jeff Langlois, Laurence Konishi
Executive Producer: Sue Troyan
Visual Effects Producer: Kiana Bicoy
Visual Effects Coordinator: Jillian Lynes

Recording, Mix
Recording Studio: Eleven Sound
Mixer: Scott Burns
Assistant Mixer: AJ Murillo
Producer: Dawn Redmann
Executive Producer: Suzanne Hollingshead