Morning Update: Trump’s Insta-poo campaign; Adland candies for Valentine’s day; Facebook to auto caption video ads; HBO Now falls short
The Drum: Smear campaign for Donald Trump poops up on Instagram
No, the headline is not a typo. And yes, this campaign hammering Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, involves ordure. ‘Pieces of Shit For Trump’ is the brainchild of San Francisco-based barrettSF and is “helping” spread the “love” of the presidential candidate.
Pieces of Shit For Trump is an Instagram-based marketing effort that plants campaign flags in piles of poop around cities and encourages voters to get their hands dirty, as well. The account went live yesterday, just in time for the New Hampshire primary.
AdWeek: These Valentine’s Day Sweetheart Candies Have Sexy Messages Just for Ad People
The folks at Calgary, Alberta, ad agency Evans Hunt really love their clients. In fact, they might be in love with them. That’s judging by their Valentine’s Day campaign to send custom sweethearts candies to clients marked with ad-themed love notes like “Project Manage Me,” “Lay That Type” and “Brief Me Good.” The agency had the candies made, and then made print ads out of them, too, which you can see here:
So, where did the idea come from? “Remember that Valentine’s Day episode of the Simpsons where Bart makes his own sweetheart candies? We thought, hey wouldn’t it be cool if we made our own candy for ad agency peeps—the idea took off from there,” the agency tells us. Production was fairly straightforward, but there was a character limit.
AdAge: Facebook Will Start Automatically Captioning Video Ads
If you’re one of those people who’s complained about video ads playing automatically with the sound blaring, Facebook has heard you. Loud and clear.
According to Facebook’s own research, 80% of people react negatively when mobile video ads begin playing loudly in content feeds and blame the platform as well as the brand. But on the other hand, it found that 41% of videos are meaningless without sound.
Mumbrella Asia: One of BBDO Guerrero’s stock image creative stars looks sad
BBDO Guerrero has just made a number of new hires and promotions, and has joined the stock image parody craze with this cute effort to celebrate its new gathering of creative talent.
But poor Emman Carandang – second from the left – appears to have gone a bit far in his own interpretation of deep-in-thought. It appears that the ‘brief’ the five-some has been given to crack for the purposes of this photograph he finds to be more worrying, or perhaps depressing, than inspiring.
Cheer up Mr Carandang, you just got promoted.
The Verge: HBO Now has ‘about 800,000 paying subscribers’ 10 months after launch
HBO was supposed to have a big hit on its hands with HBO Now, its cable-free streaming service that launched last April, and today we’re getting an idea of how it’s doing. During an earnings call this morning, HBO CEO Richard Plepler said that HBO Now has “about 800,000” subscribers paying $14.99 per month for access.
That sounds pretty good for a service that launched 10 months ago and only expanded to multiple platforms seven months ago. But it falls short of what investors were looking for, with expectations on HBO to have over 1 million — if not closer to 2 million — subscribers by now.
AdWeek: Factory Gets ‘Radical’ in New Effort for HEAD Tennis
Despite its reticence to speak with the press, Factory Design Labs appears to be alive and well, as evidenced by the agency’s new spot for HEAD Tennis, created in collaboration between the agency’s Denver and Zurich offices.
The 30-second spot stars Scottish tennis pro (and current number two player in the world), Andy Murray. Entitled ‘Radical’, the spot is light on dialogue and narrative and heavy on the VFX, featuring an embodiment of the brand’s logo escaping a Murray blast and overtaking the city before the ads ends with the tagline, ‘The Future is Radical’.
barrettSF (where do they get these names?) should remember the saying of James Michael Curley, the Democrat mayor of Boston: “Every knock a boost”.
No one who likes Trump will be put off by the barrettSF campaign, but it might rile enough undecided voters to support him just out of resentment at the viciousness of the attack.
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