With so many niche charitable causes for celebrities to choose, how could you possibly pick just one? In his new PSA, Saturday Night Live alum Kevin Nealon goes for sheer quantity, tackling everything from infantile baldness and bulimic insomnia to out-of-work astronauts and texting while scuba diving. Bad news for the night vomiters, though: It's actually just an ad (made by TBWA\Chiat\Day in Los Angeles) encouraging pet adoptions and neutering. "There are a lot of problems out there, and unfortunately we can't do much about a lot of them," Nealon concludes. "But here's one you can do something about: homeless pets." Sure, it's pretty funny. But what about all those scruffy ex-astronauts panhandling down by the car wash? You could have been their hero, Kevin. Via Copyranter.

To placate northern Argentina's rugby fans and their insatiable lust for hitting things really hard, Ogilvy created a "Rugbeer" vending machine for local beer Cerveza Salta. You have to tackle the machine as hard as you can to get a beer to pop out. The idea is kind of a perverse version of Coke's Hug Machine, as noted in PSFK's writeup, but it's also pretty close to that crazy backpack billboard that people were beating the crap out of in London bus shelters, too. Isn't it also generally considered a bad idea to push vending machines around, in case they topple over? I'm not sure how to take this rash of ads trying to directly court physical violence from people. I mean, I've wanted to punch ads before, but it feels so cheap when they ask for it.

CANNES, France—The Press Lions competition was sealed with a kiss here tonight, with the Grand Prix going to Benetton's provocative "Unhate" campaign showing world leaders kissing, created by Italian agency Fabrica with help from 72andSunny in Amsterdam.

Three executions in particular were honored—the ones with U.S. president Barack Obama and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez; Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and German chancellor Angela Merkel and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. Notable absent was the campaign's most incendiary image—a photo of Pope Benedict XVI kissing a senior Egyptian imam. Benetton pulled that particular ad almost immediately after the campaign broke last November.

The Italian fashion house said the "Unhate" campaign was meant to foster tolerance and "global love," but the arresting images were, of course, much more controversial than that. They did get huge play around the world.

A total of 94 Press Lions were awarded tonight. Three U.S. agencies were honored. BBDO, New York, took home silver for three ads in a campaign for Gillette Odor Shield antiperspirant. Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Ore., won silver for its "Action Hero" and "Rocker" ads for Old Spice Swagger. And Pereira & O'Dell won bronze for its "Blue Brick" ad for Lego.





 For complete coverage of Cannes Lions 2012,
visit adweek.com/cannes.

Specs
Who Partners Steve Stone (l.) and John Elder 
What Creative advertising agency 
Where San Francisco offices 

Steve Stone’s portfolio might read something like a history lesson in the past two decades of media brands—old, new and newer. The last agency he co-founded, Black Rocket, helped put Yahoo on the map with its trademark yodeling campaign. His current agency, Heat, created Condé Nast’s “Point of Passion” campaign in 2005, and over the years, Stone helped promote the publishing house’s launches of Portfolio, Domino and Lucky. Heat is still using its media expertise with yet-to-be-released digital and outdoor marketing for Huffington., HuffPo’s new tablet publication—after helping AOL kick off its Editions app last year. 

CANNES, France—The two bars inside Twix are about to have a falling out.

Mars, which is being honored as the 2012 Advertiser of the Year at the Cannes Lions festival here, took the opportunity to preview the upcoming global Twix campaign for the press on Friday afternoon. Beginning with a grandly produced and wryly comic 60-second TV spot, the campaign is based around the idea of a rivalry between the two Twix bars.

The first spot, which was screened on Friday (but is not yet posted online), is a humorous period piece that presents a ludicrous origin story for the product. It involves two Victorian dandy inventors who invent a single-bar Twix, but are constantly fighting over it—so they split up and create their own factories, each making their own bars.

"Try both, and pick a side," says the tagline at the end.

The first spot launches in the U.S. and Germany next month before rolling out globally. More spots will extend the story about the two Twix factions, backed by a broad multimedia effort. Digital elements, for example, could extend the idea of a rivalry by featuring two competing websites, two competing Facebook pages, and so on.

"We're always look for a creative tension that the brand can solve," said David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO North America. "The product is two fingers inside a Twix bar. They're identical. But we thought we'd tap into the human insight that people love competition and rivalry, and we decided to ask you to pick the left one or the right one as your favorite."

Lubars introduced the campaign with Bruce McColl, global chief marketing officer at Mars Incorporated, as well as BBDO CEO Andrew Robertson. Also present was Chuck Brymer, CEO of Mars's other Omnicom agency, DDB.



 For complete coverage of Cannes Lions 2012,
visit adweek.com/cannes.

CANNES, France—The 59th International Festival of Creativity celebrated a diverse set of Grand Prix Lion winners last week, honoring everything from a simple poster design by an undergraduate student to major cross-platform campaigns by some of the world's biggest marketers.

Four agencies won two Grand Prix each: Creative Artists Agency for Chipotle; R/GA for Nike; and Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Digitas, who teamed up on American Express. The other winning campaigns focused on themes like the environment, tourism, politics, technology, packaged goods and the world's most unlikely mosquito repellent.

In a week of seminars, meetings, lunches on the beach and grueling judging—as well as cameos from Bill Clinton and Debbie Harry—major advertisers did well here. Google work won two Grand Prix. Coca-Cola was a double winner too—in Outdoor for a student-designed poster and in the inaugural Mobile Lions contest for its role in Google's Project Rebrief.

Inventive ideas also flourished. German agency Serviceplan dazzled the Design judges with a solar-powered annual report. And Brazilian shop Talent won the Radio contest without submitting a single radio ad.

See a gallery of the winning work here.

 For complete coverage of Cannes Lions 2012,
visit adweek.com/cannes.

British Airways has an unexpected bit of advice for its typical customers: Don’t fly. The message is aimed at Brits who might be tempted to skip the country during the madness of the London Olympics. The airline, official carrier of the games, describes its push as "tongue-in-cheek," and spokesman Frank van der Post explains: "We’re rallying the country to get behind Team GB and ParalympicsGB to capitalize on home advantage. ... We are encouraging  every extra clap and cheer we can get." The effort is being promoted with the hashtag #HomeAdvantage, which is featured in a giant painting near Heathrow and in  the recently unveiled TV spot from BBH. To the strains of The Clash's "London Calling," a British Airways jet taxis off an airport runway and drives through the streets of London, past familiar landmarks, winding up at the city's Olympic Park. Judging from the ad, Brits would indeed be best served staying home and rooting for their athletes. Why bother booking a flight if the plane just winds up stuck in traffic on the M1?

Timed to coincide with Title IX’s 40th anniversary, Nike and Wieden + Kennedy have created this “Voices” ad paying tribute to female athletes who triumphed in the face of locker room sexism and traditional gender role enforcement. Several incredible women provide the stories for the spot: Olympic boxer Marlen Esparza, pioneering women’s basketball star Lisa Leslie and fellow WNBA icon Diana Taurasi are all compelling. But the clear star here is Joan Benoit Samuelson, who won the world’s first gold medal for women’s marathon at the 1984 Olympics. Her poise and intensity create the emotional center of this spot, which left me confident that she’s probably still in good enough shape to kill me by raising an eyebrow.

Hey, scrawny teenage fops. Back-alley vending machine eat your coins? If only a white-clad Mike Tyson were there to free your trapped energy drink with a gentle rap of his knuckle, then leave you one of his many white-clad lady friends. So goes the strange fantasy in a recent spot from Grey Warsaw for Black, a Polish energy drink. Tyson closes the spot with his line, "Now that's how Black works," followed by the tagline: "Black power." While it's not a racist ad per se, it's certainly awash in awkward undertones. (Not to mention the fact Tyson hands out one of his groupies like he's spotting the guy a $5 bill.) In a second clip, which you can see after the jump, Tyson sings about how Black is even crazier than he is, before flicking a piano across the room and screaming like a madman. According to the Warsaw Business Journal, he has a three-year deal with the brand, which likely means we can expect more weirdness like this. (Via Ads of the World)

Who needs $1 million when you could have a million Twitter followers? OK, you're right, most people would choose the money, but two Martin Agency creatives have come up with a clever way of making the latter a possibility. Twitterich.com is a stripped-down site built with one (extremely ambitious) goal in mind: To gain a million followers for the new @1MillionRicher account and donate them to one random user who has followed the account. "It's not for money, it's not a scam, and you won't get spammed," says the site's video introduction. The project's legal disclaimer says that the winner must agree "not to exploit followers for commercial purposes," but that's a pretty broad and laughably unenforceable restriction. Offering someone an audience of 1 million people, then making them swear not to profit from it, seems either naive or cruel. That said, Conan O'Brien didn't seem to corrupt random fan Sarah Killen (now Sarah Slowik) when he chose her among hundreds of thousands of followers to be his first follow. Today, she's still a normal lady who just celebrated having her first baby. But her windfall was a mere 90,000 followers. That's nothing compared to the fabulous winnings promised by Twitterich. 

Cannes Lions 2012 is over and done. Everybody went home and the only people happier than the winners are the bar staff at the Carlton Pavilion and 72 Croisette. Between strictly adhered to rosé sampling schedules some of advertising's finest managed to find time to give us their thoughts about the festival, about the advertising industry in general, about recruitment and in once case about the entire world economy until 2014.  Here are ten of them with a couple more to be added later in the week. 

View all the 2012 Cannes Six Questions here. 

A funny thing happens when you plaster U.S. cities with posters saying certain types of people "deserve to die." Namely, those people get a bit upset. Wisconsin agency Laughlin Constable and the Lung Cancer Alliance learned that this week when they launched teaser ads with messages like "Hipsters Deserve to Die" and "Cat Lovers Deserve to Die." The posters sparked news coverage in cities like Chicago, where some residents reportedly tore down some of the ads in anger. The lung cancer advocacy campaign, actually called "No One Deserves to Die," was supposed to be revealed at midnight today, but the full site seems to have gone live Wednesday after reporters began covering the public's reaction. "We knew that one would be polarizing," Laughlin Constable strategy vp Denise Kohnke told a Milwaukee TV station. One problem with the campaign is that the message is a bit difficult to grasp in short bites of copy. It's better explained on the website (be sure to scroll all the way down), which describes how lung cancer victims are unfairly stigmatized as having brought the disease on themselves. The result is that, despite being the "deadliest cancer," lung cancer is the least funded in terms of research. "Lung cancer doesn't discriminate, and neither should you," the site says. "Help put an end to the stigma and the disease." That's a bold and socially complex message, one that's tough to decipher from any ad, much less one that says “[a modern social archetype] deserves to die." But what do you think? Will it work?

It’s being praised as one of the most effective anti-smoking ads ever, which is especially impressive considering it required little more than a few pieces of paper and two kids. Ogilvy Thailand's video stunt for the Thai Health Promotion Board racked up more than 960,000 views before being removed from YouTube for some reason. It has since been reposted, with some of the duplicates continuing to gather audiences by the hundred thousand. The video recounts a guerrilla effort in which young children went up to adult smokers and asked them for a light. Every adult approached reprimanded the children for smoking, citing health reasons and other harmful effects. At that point, the children handed each adult a note that said, “You worry about me, but why not worry about yourself?” It also directed them to a hotline to help quit smoking. According to the video case study, most of the adults approached threw away their cigarettes and none of them discarded the brochure. In fact, the foundation reported a 40 percent increase in calls to the hotline.

If there’s one thing that generally doesn’t get much attention—in life or mass marketing—it’s the man-butt. After the male stripper flick Magic Mike opens Friday, that may change. Add to that a new Vichy skin-care campaign where a bunch of guys drop trou to convince us gals to buy cellulite cream, and suddenly everything’s coming up gyrating bums! Vichy's "Booty Break" microsite, created by Montreal's Agence Tuxedo, plays a saucy French pop soundtrack while parading across the screen a number of tight ends that will shake, flex, dance and get slapped on demand. Bow chicka wow wow? The men strip from the waist up but keep their boxers and briefs, so the promo is somewhat safe for work. People seem to be digging it so far, logging nearly 200,000 views, even though it takes a long time to get to the product-related payoff. Which is? If ladies want to love their butts as much as they love these butts, they need to hit the cosmetic counter with $40 in hand to buy Vichy's awkwardly named CelluDestock. After that, shaking and slapping your moneymaker is optional but obviously encouraged.

You don't often hear about the clinical research community raising a ruckus, but Toshiba's new ad seems to be getting the lab crowd in a lather. The spot, touting the Toshiba Satellite Ultrabook's rigorous testing before release, stars a "professional medical test subject" who endures an array of cruel and unusual side effects. There's actually no such thing as a full-time human guinea pig, but those involved in real clinical testing have posted several angry comments on YouTube saying the ad is socially irresponsible. "This message completely undermines the efforts of the FDA, NCI, institutional review boards and other medical research organizations who work so hard every day to ensure that clinical trials are conducted SAFELY so that participants are protected and NOT harmed," notes one viewer. "Medical research is important," says another, "and this trivializes the whole process. Toshiba should be ashamed." (For a good read on the history and reality of clinical testing, be sure to check out Slate's recent write-up on the topic.) Given the relatively small audience of medical testing volunteers, it's unlikely Toshiba will give in to demands to pull the ad or issue an apology.

Are you stuck in a rut? "Stan" and "Mark," the stars of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners' humorous ads for Corona Light, sure are. The beer, naturally, is pitched as the antidote—a dose of the unexpected to enliven their humdrum existences. Now, the agency has launched a follow-up in the form of a "Rut Buster!" Facebook app that lets you make and share customized video montages to encourage your friends to bust out of such monotonous routines. Recipients receive alerts on their walls and can opt to "bust their rut" by viewing the videos, then create responses or "bust out" other friends on their network. I tried it out, but quickly became overwhelmed by the broader irony of being stuck in a rut by spending too much time connected to the Internet and social media. I realized that participating in "Rut Buster!"—harmless, brand-building fun, to be sure—would just perpetuate my cyber-rut and fuel the online addiction of anyone to whom I sent videos. So, I think I'll take a walk instead. Get some sun and fresh air. Just as soon as I find my iPhone.

The pretentiously suave mustachioed Old Spice guy in a white tux—who made his debut a while back in a crocodile- and piraña-infested ad for Danger Zone products outside the U.S.—returns in a shorter and more restrained Wieden + Kennedy spot called "Semi Truck." This time around, our hero explains how courage comes from Danger Zone products as he steps onto a jungle road and gets hit by a big rig. He winds up riding the radiator grill, pressed flat but unharmed, delivering his lines in faux-dramatic fashion to a woman who suddenly joins him as the truck speeds along. This installment tries hard to please but lacks the sharp over-the-top script and sublime gnawed-to-the-bone visuals of its predecessor. I wish Terry Crews were behind the wheel, shirtless, and growling at maximum volume about how the new Fancy Pants spokesdud SMELLS LIKE POWERRR! See the earlier spot after the jump.

Lauren Luke is an expert at covering things up—which is why she's the perfect spokeswoman for a campaign urging the opposite when it comes to domestic violence.

Luke, 30, is a well-known, self-taught British makeup artist whose YouTube tutorials have tallied more than 140 million views over the past five years. London agency BBH enlisted Luke for the clever PSA below, which is rolling out on YouTube as though it were another tutorial—showing Luke covering up cuts and bruises ostensibly inflicted by an abusing partner. The injuries are fake, but the message is all too real. "65% of women who suffer domestic violence keep it hidden," says the onscreen copy at the end. "Don't cover it up." The spot concludes with the charity's name, Refuge, and logo—along with a note encouraging viewers to "Share this and help someone speak out." There is also a URL, refuge.org.uk/lauren, and a hashtag, #dontcoveritup.

The ad's targeting is seamless and couldn't be more appropriate—Luke has almost half a million subscribers on YouTube, many of whom are the teenage girls and young women Refuge is trying to reach. Also, Luke herself says she was once with an abusive partner. "The bruising on my face for the video wasn't real, but my emotions in that video were," she says. "I had a bad experience in the past with a previous boyfriend. He never physically hurt me but I did sometimes fear what would happen next if I said the wrong thing. He could be overprotective and embarrass me in front of my work colleagues or friends because of his aggressive behavior. Sometimes it was like living with a volcano which could erupt at any second—I felt I was walking on egg shells just to keep him from exploding and smashing something across the room."

She adds: "To open up and be honest about something like this makes us feel weak among our friends and family, but in actual fact there is nothing weak about it. Those who are abusive behind closed doors are the ones who are weak. Back then I knew the whole situation wasn't normal, but I didn't know about the help that is out there. And that is why I wanted to work with Refuge—to get the message out to anyone who may need help and support that it's time to stop covering it up."

BBH creative director Pablo Marques called Luke's YouTube channel "the perfect medium" for the message, and added: "The juxtaposition between Lauren's calm attitude and her graphic injuries will come as a great surprise to her audience. Yet the sad reality of domestic violence is that countless women live with violence and fear and cover up the problem on a daily basis."



CREDITS
Client: Refuge
Campaign: Lauren Luke
Client Director of Communications: Lisa King
BBH Creative Team: Jack Smedley, George Hackforth-Jones, Stephen Noble
BBH Creative Director: Pablo Marques
BBH Producer: Jeremy Gleeson & Bryony Dellow
BBH Strategic Business Lead: Carly Herman
BBH Strategy Director: Simon Robertson
BBH Social Media Manager: Claire Coady
BBH Creative Technologist: Richard Atkins
Production Company: Lauren Luke
Directors: Wesley Hawes & Gary McCreadie
Editor/Editing House: The Mill
Sound: Sam Robson at Factory
Makeup: Catherine Burton

It's come to this—girls swapping spit with tusked sea creatures in the suddenly bestial Skittles campaign from DDB Chicago. Walruses do make the occasional cameo in advertising; BBH's pat-a-cake spot for Vigorsol gum comes to mind. In the amusingly detailed Skittles spot, the walrus is presented as some sort of metaphor for Skittles Riddles, whose colors don't match their flavors. It's a little too much to chew on, but one thing's for sure—that beast's leathery, whiskered lips probably wouldn't taste much like fruit punch. Nice VFX by MPC.

On the face of it, patriotism would seem to be an easy sell for American advertisers. In fact, it's not. Flag-waving spots can so easily come off as cheesy and/or opportunistic. It's rare to see a patriotic commercial that feels legitimately poignant—or at least not flagrantly exploitative. Plus, of course, there are the political implications. As Chrysler learned during this past Super Bowl, you can't love America without half of America questioning your motives. Still, as we get set to celebrate the Fourth of July, check out our gallery of partriotic spots—from the loud and boisterous to the quietly poignant to the hopelessly hokey and frighteningly jingoistic. To see the whole melting pot of ads, click here:

Video Gallery: 10 Ads That Really Love America