Out to Launch
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
"I met someone." His name is #BusterTheBoxer. Let's launch!
  • Would you pay $30 for a dozen eggs? For the many San Francisco residents living below the poverty line, buying eggs actually feels like an extravagant purchase.

    Tipping Point Community, a poverty-fighting organization in the Bay Area, launched "Poverty Line Prices," an online video and print campaign that illustrates the outlandish costs of daily items to a family living below the poverty line.

    Hidden cameras were placed inside a grocery store in Nob Hill, an affluent San Francisco neighborhood. When regular consumers went to pay for groceries, they were faced with extreme sticker shock.

    The film drives viewers to a website where they can enter their salaries or use the San Francisco average to see how much more expensive items like rent, schoolbooks or groceries would cost if they lived on the poverty line.

    Leading up to Black Friday, coupon inserts featuring marked-up prices will run in the San Francisco Chronicle. The inserts will resemble grocery store flyers, showing items with the inflated prices. Goodby Silverstein & Partners created the campaign.

  • Salvation Army launched "Poverty Isn't Always Easy to See -- Especially During the Holidays," a social media and TV campaign depicting families living in poverty in plain sight.

    To encourage donations, Salvation Army Canada used Facebook's 360-image feature to show how a closer look at a happy family life can find cracks in the facade. Facebook posts initially resembled sweet holiday cards. Using the 360-image tool allowed viewers to move to other parts of the card, which happened to show each family's house. Lamps were missing lampshades and bare, extremely minimal necessities were found throughout the home.

    The TV ad is similar. Viewers first see a home in need of repair and a stressed mother looking at a late bill. She sits between her two kids and does her best to smile for a Christmas card.

    Grey Canada created the campaign and MediaCom handled the media buy.

  • Lidl Ireland launched "Homecoming," its Christmas campaign that highlights the importance of family being together -- not gift-giving -- during the holidays. An Irish family recreates Christmas for their elderly father in their old family home. This place is a mess; no electricity, boarded-up windows, dust, dirt, you name it. This doesn't deter the family from cleaning and decorating the home, just like it was in the past. When his daughter picks him up, the father is fondly staring at a picture of him and his late wife in front of the old home. Emotions are high when the family is all together at the spruced-up home.

    The man gets nostalgic when he looks at an empty chair next to him at the dining room table. Thinking about his late wife, his sadness turns to happiness when his young granddaughter sits in the chair. Chemistry created the campaign.

  • Meet Buster the Boxer in John Lewis' 2016 Christmas ad, created by adam&eveDDB and directed by Dougal Wilson of Blink Productions. The 2:10 video stars a lovable family pet and his secret love of jumping. It all stems from watching the young daughter in the house constantly jumping on her bed. For Christmas, Mom and Dad buy her a trampoline.

    Dad assembles it, during the night's cold darkness, just before Christmas. Buster is intrigued by the large contraption, unaware of its use until a family of foxes, a skunk, squirrel and a hedgehog emerge from the shadows and put the trampoline to good use. While they have a blast, Buster watches from inside, jealous and angry.

    On Christmas morning, the girl bounces out of her bed and outside to see her gift. Just as she's about to climb inside and bounce till her heart's content, Buster cuts her off, leaps in and has himself a merry little Christmas. As Buster jumps, the girl and her parents can only stare, with mouths agape.

  • The moment your introduce your family to the person you're dating is the moment casual dating becomes a serious relationship.

    The latest campaign for Match, "I Met Someone," seeks to capture that moment, when people decide it's time to tell their inner circle about the new person in their life.

    The 30-second spot features friends out for coffee, a single mom eating ice cream with her kids, a man on the phone with his mom, a woman getting a ticket and a woman at a family dinner. Each one has exciting news to share, telling others that they met someone. Even the woman getting a ticket. I've never seen someone more happy to receive one. When love is in the air, a $200 ticket is like a warm, gentle breeze.

    "When you're ready for something real. you're ready for Match," closes the ad, created by SS+K.

  • Ricola throat drops launched The Daily Drop, a Web-based application that aggregates real-time cold, flu, weather, allergy and asthma outbreaks in your area. Once users enter their location, they are asked how they feel: sick, OK or fantastic. The app them loads current temperatures, dust/dander and mold readings, pollen count, flu count and air quality. Blue Chip Marketing created the site, using real-time, localized data APIs from Accuweather, Eventful and Twitter.

  • Random iPhone App of the week:Gipper is a free sports video highlight sharing app that allows users to post, organize and share content by sport and/or high school. The app was created by Matthew Glick, a sophomore Division 1 soccer player at Colgate University. Using the app, players, parents, coaches, schools and club teams can share their best sports moments within their communities.

    The app allows users to search for and filter by sport and by teams associated with any high school in the U.S., and to comment on videos. The app also offers a one-touch slo-mo feature, which allows the user to toggle any video in and out of slow-motion by pressing the streaming video with a finger.