Take a Few World Tours, for Love or Sport. Make a Run for It! No Sacrificial Lambs Here
Our Euro ad of the week is this serotonin-swathed '80s style video, "Together We Go Further," by adam&eveDDB for Eurostar. Two women lock eyes on the train and transform into cartoons à la a-ha!, adventuring from Amsterdam to Brussels to London to Paris to Cologne—cities now serviced by the newly-combined Eurostar and Thalys. Their trip promotes the Eurostar Club program. It's like a sweet and colorful cereal.
There's a Jean de la Fontaine fable in France called "The Wolf and the Lamb." It doesn't end well for the lamb. To promote its Fall '23 collection, Coperni adapted the tale to depict a utopian relationship between humans and machines, using a polymorphic video featuring Lila Grace Moss and "Spot" robots from Boston Dynamics.
This whole thing is designed to make us feel more comfortable with the relationship between AI and creativity. That's why there aren't any sad lamb hangovers in its depiction (because between robots and people, nobody doubts who the lambs would be). On a website powered by Epic Games' Unreal Engine, endlessly different algorithmically-generated versions of the story spool out. Each last 40 seconds, and riff on both the fable and Coperni's latest designs.
In Argentina, gas and electricity company EDP collabed with Havas Lisbon to make "United For a Wonderful World," which depicts astronauts crooning the Louis Armstrong classic to our little blue dot. Its depiction of the "Overview Effect" gets pretty close to giving it to us until the jarring CTA voiceover at the end. The only thing we ended up doing collectively was wincing.
Idris Elba zips through London with his progeny—on loveseats!—to promote some Sky Cinema subscriber bait: Two free movie tickets every month! (We'd take those.) Not much else here, just some gratuitous fun Elba. (He's been doing Sky Cinema ads forever, so this relationship is like an occasional snack drop. Expectations ain't high, it's very chill.) The piece was conceived by Sky Creative, and directed by Rodrigo Valdes of Birth's U.K. office, led by Kate Elson.
It's not often that suicide prevention work feels cinematic and fun. Yet that's what we get in this not-very-PC offering by agency Great Guns, for the U.K. charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM). The latter appointed comedian Romesh Ranganathan as their ambassador and he is *chef’s kiss.*
For client Triumph, which it won late last year, Herezie Paris created a print campaign where the rotations of women athletes and dancers, seen from above and mirrored, invite one to consider breasts (but in an artful way?). This backs the brand's Triaction Sports Bras. It's pretty and we wish we had a more graceful description for it. Alas, life is compromise.
Let's stay on-topic: For Alexander Monro Hospital in The Netherlands, TBWA\Neboko teaches you the alphabet all over again. With boobs. This is, of course, for breast cancer.
Iconoclast and Halal Amsterdam made a visually pleasing video to promote a "Culers del Món" ("Colors of the World") capsule collection from Patta, FC Barcelona and Nike. Throughout the world (and somewhat in the style of "It's a Small World"), fans of FC Barcelona communally sing the club anthem "Cant del Barça." X-ray shots show the club colors running through their veins (blue) and arteries (green)—what the agency calls their shared Barçablood. The collection was released in Patta stores on Oct. 13, and can be found on the SNKRS app, fcbarcelona.com and certain Nike partner stores soon.
If you can steal something from a French Distance shop—then outrun distance sprinter Mickael Zeze, who'll be hot on your heels—you can keep what you've purloined. That's "Rob It to Get It" by BETC Paris.
Alongside the Association of German Advertising Film Producers, Akkurat Studios in Berlin launched Pitchstandard 2.0, an initiative designed to make pitch culture more fair. "The entire market of advertisers will benefit from these standards, since the effort of customers and agencies in the areas of producing, creation and cost control will also be reduced," they write. We'd love to peep some pitch reform, and we're glad to see prod companies giving it a go. Production often gets short shrift in the creative sector.
Moving, shaking: Mother London won the M&S Clothing business, following House 337's loss of it. Over at Alexander McQueen, Seán McGirr was appointed creative director, succeeding living legend Sarah Burton, who elaborated the brand beautifully after McQueen's death. McGirr was the creative force behind J.W. Anderson, which has a very cute Wes Anderson vibe. We're curious to see what he contributes to McQueen's intentionally vampy DNA. Right now, with nothing but speculation at hand, it all feels very "leathery nightlife meets Wednesday afternoon tea." Marcel Paris has two new co-presidents: Youri Guerassimov and Gaëtan du Peloux, who'll be working with Pascal Nessim. (A triumvirate! That historically works so well).
