Commentary

Out to Launch

Candies gets back to potty humor. Tiger Woods spoofs Caddyshack. La Opinión announces its new agency and new campaign. Welcome to highlights of ad campaigns launched recently.

Candie's Spring print campaign features Kelly Clarkson and Jenny McCarthy and another toilet. The company brought the two women together to recreate two of the brand's memorable images in one ad. In 1997, McCarthy was featured in a print ad, posing nude on a toilet wearing nothing but her Candie's. Last season, Clarkson appeared sprawled in a bathtub adorned in more than a million dollars worth of jewelry and nothing but her Candie's. The new ads features Clarkson and McCarthy in compromising situations, including together in a bathtub adorned with more than one million dollars of jewelry, as well as a recreation of the "toilet" ad. The ads debut in the Mar. 8th issue of US Weekly and will continue in run in April and May publications such as Seventeen, YM, Teen People, Elle Girl, Teen Vogue, Hollywood Life and Jane. The campaign was created in-house and highlights the brands footwear, apparel and accessories collections.

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Tiger Woods is spoofing the movie "Caddyshack" in a commercial to showcasing the unique ways that American Express comes to your aid. The ad premiered during the World Golf Championships and the Academy Awards on Feb. 29. "Tigershack" is a look at what happens when the world's most famous golfer meets the world's most famous gopher. Tiger Woods plays Carl Spackler -- the greenskeeper with gopher issues. The commercial, which uses the script from Caddyshack as well as original footage, shows Woods' schemes to destroy the gopher. But just like in the original movie, Woods doesn't have any luck getting rid of the gopher. However, Woods has something Carl didn't -- an American Express Card, which he uses to hire an exterminator. With a "secret weapon," he lures the dancing gopher out of his hole. So unlike in the movie, Woods' greenskeeper has a "happy ending" and the American Express Card becomes "The Official Card of Happy Endings." The ad was developed by Ogilvy & Mather.

La Agencia de Orcí & Asociados has been chosen as agency of record for La Opinión. Wasting no time in getting to work, the agency launched consumer and business-to-business advertising campaigns for the newspaper, designed to reinforce the paper's leadership position within the Los Angeles community. The campaigns use radio, print, and OOH components. The tagline of the campaign is "Lee La Opinión y ve más allá"/"Read La Opinión and see beyond, go beyond." The ads target Los Angeles Latinos, both men and women, who value product quality, family tradition, integrity, community commitment, and innovation. The b2b campaign uses real-life testimonials from high-level and high-powered executives to convey the benefits of advertising in La Opinión. The testimonials describe how these executives have been successful in reaching the powerful Hispanic marketplace and demonstrate how they have "gone beyond" traditional advertising. The campaign targets media professionals and those companies interested in reaching the Los Angeles Latinos through advertising.

And without further ado, the world's largest ad placed on a building. A 209,401-square-foot wrap of a front page from the Financial Times newspaper has been admitted to the Guinness World Records book. The ad, designed by Doremus Hong Kong and conceived by mediaedge:cia Hong Kong, supported the launch of the newspaper's Asian edition. Eighteen spidermen skyscraper climbers wrapped 50 floors of the 88-floor IFC 2, the largest building in Hong Kong and fourth-largest building in the world. The ad ran for one month.

LevyTenny LLP has created a campaign introducing Mobile IM from Verizon Wireless to a younger audience. The effort focuses on building awareness and communicating the advantages of Mobile IM from Verizon Wireless to the youth market. The product allows subscribers to send and receive instant text messages right from their Verizon Wireless phone - as easily as if they were at their computers. Users can even access contact or "buddy" lists so they know when their friends sign on. Verizon Wireless users can choose the service provider they want to use when IMing friends - either AOL, MSN, and coming soon, Yahoo!. The campaign began on Mar. 1 and consists of TV, radio, and magazines components.

Read Us. Talk Us. Trust Us. That's the tagline for Us Weekly's latest campaign, created by Deutsch NY. The ad demonstrates how celebrity culture has become a language all its own, one in which the Us reader is fluent. In the first of two :15 spots, a response of "I know!" in reference to celebrity couples can mean more than you'd think, and in "Boys," celebrity names are substituted for verbs or nouns. The ads launched on Feb. 19th on national cable, including: Oxygen, Lifetime, MTV, VH1, Style, E!, SoapNet and TV Guide.

NetZero has been running Pepsi Challenge-like spots since late last year. The ads compare the company's dial-up accelerator service to regular dial-up service across America (which tastes better - is it Coke or Pepsi?). The campaign consists of four :30 second spots (airing in LA, Chicago, Nashville and Boston) and one :60 second spot. Due to their popularity, a few :15 second spots are also running indefinitely. The campaign was created in-house.

In website launches this week:

e-tractions has launched a political website for Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's) urging 18 to 24 year olds to join his political action group, True Majority. TrueMajority is a grassroots education and advocacy project, which aims to promote activism on key political and social issues among college-aged men and women. The goal of the first media campaign is to have 10,000 people register on the True Majority site. Not straying far from his business roots, the cartoon version of Cohen on the website uses Oreo cookies to represent the amount of federal money spent on military defense concerns, versus the important social and global programs Cohen's organization champions. Cohen also offers sensible ways to improve various programs by redistributing a small portion of the cookies currently earmarked for the Department of Defense.

VisionConnection, a one-stop, accessible and interactive Internet portal with the latest information on vision impairment, its prevention, and vision rehabilitation, has launched. The site's features include large type, legible fonts, reverse contrast, and text-only pages for people with partial sight. The site also provides an accessible environment for people who are blind, as it is designed in such a way to work with screen reader and magnification software and offers text equivalent of images. Forty vision organizations - including Lighthouse International, and Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) - worked to develop the portal.

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