Hello, 2014! Here Are The Ads We Loved in 2013
As we tune-in to 2014 and shift into a new brand year, let’s take a look at some of the best advertisements of the last year.
Twenty thirteen was a year of big thinking and spreading the wealth. Advertisers continued to move further beyond the 30-, 60- and even 90-second spot. We just couldn’t help ourselves. According to a recent ranking by ADWEEK, here are the Top 10 ads of 2013:
10. Kmart’s “Ship My Pants”
While very low on the sophisticated meter, this hilarious spot was among the year’s funniest – and most surprising. Kmart took a risk on 30 seconds of people seeming to declare that they’d just soiled themselves. The spot touted free shipping on items at kmart.com that shoppers couldn’t find in the store. It was an immediate viral sensation – and has topped 20 million YouTube views.
9. Chipotle “The Scarecrow”
This celebrity cover of a famous song + awesome animation + forward-thinking environmental message = brilliant short film on the evils of industrial food production. Chipotle dialed in Fiona Apple and Moonbot Studios where Apple hauntingly sings “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka over scenes of dystopian fantasy, as a scarecrow escapes from a terrifying job at Crow Foods and returns to handmade food production on the farm. A gaming app gave you coupons for defeating the crows, and you could also buy the song on iTunes. Delightfully dark, powerful yet playful, this long-form morality tale was the year’s best branded-entertainment campaign.
8. Robinson’s “Pals”
Amid the hundreds of big-budget soft drink commercials out there, leave it to a humble British juice brand to beat them all. Two boys spend a day playing together—throwing rocks in a river, cavorting at a playground, playing lightsabers with sticks. Returning home, they pour glasses of Robinsons juice and soak up some TV. Then, at the end of the day, there’s a wonderful twist ending — as one boy falls asleep, the other carries him up to bed, and it turns out he’s actually the boy’s father. “It’s good to be a dad. It’s better to be a friend,” says the on-screen copy. Even after you know the ending, the spot is still wonderfully watchable, as clues scattered throughout hint at the father-son relationship. In a year of heartwarming family stories, this was the most delightful.
7. Volvo Trucks “The Epic Split feat. Van Damme”
The year’s most adrenaline-fueled ads, oddly enough, came from a B2B long-haul trucking campaign. Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors upended the category with its hair-raising test stunts for Volvo Trucks, ranging from a woman slacklining between two speeding 18-wheelers to a man fleeing a herd of bulls in a Volvo FL. The crowning achievement, though, was Jean-Claude Van Damme doing “the most epic of splits” between two slowly reversing Volvo Globetrotters, showing the precision of the vehicle’s dynamic steering. Van Damme delivers strangely poetic narration over the echoing, ethereal swells of Enya’s “Only Time.” It’s a mesmerizing minute of film — odd, audacious, hypnotic, and in the end, epic indeed. And with 60 million YouTube views in less than a month, it had the world under its spell.
6. Nike “Possibilities”
Nike’s world-beating tagline “Just do it” turned 25 this year. And the W+K agency doubled down on it with the “Possibilities” campaign, marrying the brand message to the growing ecosystem of Nike+ users like never before. The problem with “Just do it” lately is that it’s only part of the story. As Nike+ has shifted the brand’s role from inspiration to inspiration plus enablement, the marketing has to shift, too. “Possibilities” did that with digital and social activations that put users through a series of Nike+ challenges — along with a smart, freewheeling spot, narrated by Bradley Cooper, that raised the stakes for the “Just do it” line. Just do it even more, it suggests, playfully using celebrity athletes (LeBron James, Serena Williams, Gerard Pique) as foils for the real hero — you and your Nike+. For agency and client, it was a joyful reinvention and a great start to the next 25 years.
5. Dick’s Sporting Goods “Every Pitch”
Sports advertising worships the rarefied, the transcendent, the superhuman. Not this spot. A masterpiece of craft, it is proudly and profoundly realistic —showing baseball as it’s played, not as it’s perfected. Shot in an eerie fog, it put the viewer right in the action thanks to a single, complex camera move. You can almost smell the grass on the infield as the camera whirls, pans and zooms, picking out the players — all real minor-leaguers — one by one as they coax and cajole one another with timeless baseball chatter. As Rangers prospect Cody Buckel leans back and unleashes a fastball, the spot smashes to black — a cliffhanger ending to 60 seconds of cinematic drama. Steeped in nostalgia, magical yet modern (for a brand that needed it), it was a tribute worthy of the national pastime it depicted.
4. Geico “Hump Day” | Caleb the Camel
“Uh-oh! Guess what day it is!” Advertising’s animal of the year wasn’t a dog, cat, pony, goat or hamster. It was Caleb the camel, the effusive ungulate who roams an office for Geico, gleefully badgering co-workers about the day of the week. Never has a motormouthed mammal been so endearing — in 30-second doses, anyway. So, what day is it? “It’s hump day,” a colleague finally admits. “Woo-woooo!” Caleb cries. (Folks who switch to Geico are “happier than a camel on Wednesday,” the brand’s folksy musical spokesmen explain at the end.) With great CGI and fantastic voiceover work, the spot wasn’t just a high point in the “Happier Than” campaign. It became Geico’s most viral ad ever—the second most shared spot in the world this year after Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches.” Not bad for an ad character’s debut. Your move, gecko.
3. Guinness “Basketball”
Male friendship is a well-worn theme in beer ads. But with its brutal game of wheelchair basketball, Guinness delivered a fresh take that’s both tough and touching — rare and precious territory for any ad. It’s tempting to say the amazing twist ending is what makes the spot, and it is a magical moment. (Spoiler: Only one of the guys is wheelchair-bound off the court.) But the ad is so much more than that. The cinematography is dazzling and gritty. The soundtrack, by The Cinematic Orchestra, is soaring and emotional. And the voiceover copy is perfectly minimal: “Dedication. Loyalty. Friendship. The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character.” Likewise, the choices that went into the spot reveal the brand’s character, powerfully paying off the tagline: “Made of more.”
2. Ram “Farmer”
Super Bowl ads are supposed to be about animals and babies and celebrities. But for the second straight year, a Chrysler brand stopped the party in its tracks — in a good way — with a two-minute meditation on something bigger. Like 2012’s Clint Eastwood ad, this year’s RAM “Farmer” spot was everything Super Bowl ads aren’t — quiet, artful and thought provoking. The still photos of farmers, commissioned from 10 world-class photographers, are beautiful and arresting. (A new coffee-table book collects 240 of them.) And the audio of Paul Harvey’s poetic “God Made a Farmer” speech lends epic weight and grandeur, crossing generations as the ad crosses the nation’s endless fields and prairies. It was, by far, the game’s best ad—a moving tribute to American farmers by an American brand eager to share in their values of dignity, fellowship and sacrifice through hard work.
1. Dove “Real Beauty Sketches”
Only 4 percent of women worldwide think they’re beautiful, Dove says. The brief for this project, then, was simple: Make women feel better about themselves. Ogilvy Brazil did so in startling fashion, producing the most intriguing social experiment and most viral ad campaign of the year. The agency hired FBI forensic artist Gil Zamora to sketch women (sight unseen) as they described themselves, and then as others described them. The differences in the final sketches are stark, and in a way sad, but also uplifting. “You are more beautiful than you think,” said the end line — as simple and perfect a brand statement as there could be. The three minutes of footage from the shoot would become advertising’s high point this year — a clever and poignant exploration of self-esteem that was as beautiful as the subjects it studied.
Golden Mic | Mack Brown, Former Texas Football Coach
Perhaps the greatest play call of the Mack Brown era — which was stronger than a herd of longhorn cattle racing through the Big 12 — was not the more than four decades and four U.S. presidents he outlasted, or the improbable, incredible national championship victory the University of Texas had over USC. Rather, it was the graceful, high road and genteel exit this legendary football coach displayed after the top tier football program fell on tough times.
Brown was a gentleman on and off the field. When it came time to announce his decision, Brown turned what was a news conference all about him and his tenure/resignation and re-focused the spotlight on the memories of 13 college students, 12 of whom attended a rival school (Texas A&M) and died days before Thanksgiving in 1999, in the aftermath of a traditional bonfire celebration that went deadly bad. Brown, you are a class act in every meaning of the word. And for that, you take this week’s Golden Mic.
Each week, The Spin Cycle will bestow a Golden Mic Award to the person, group or company in the court of public opinion that best exemplifies the tenets of solid PR, marketing and advertising – and those who don’t. Stay tuned – and step-up to the mic! And remember … Amplify Your Brand!