A Dramatic Ad For Belgium's Launch of TNT Is The Second-Most Shared Video To Date.

To launch the high quality TV channel TNT in Belgium, TNT’s Antwerp ad agency, Duval Guillaume Modem, came up with a very dramatic idea.

To promote the American drama station TNT Benelux, whose tagline is "We Know Drama," a large red button was placed in the center of an average Flemish square in an average Flemish town on April 10th, 2012. A sign with the text "Push to add drama" invited people to press the button.

Watch what ensued:


Todd Wasserman reports for Mashable that this fabulous and compelling ad for the launch of the Belgium cable channel TNT promoting “drama” is the second-most shared video of all time.

According to Unruly, a video research firm. The ad, which was released on April 11, has been shared 3 million times. Only “The Force,” the 2011 Super Bowl ad from Volkswagen, has been shared more.

David Waterhouse, head of content for Unruly, says the TNT ad — called “A Dramatic Surprise on a Quiet Street” — may well surpass “The Force” soon since one in seven people who saw “Surprise” shared it vs. one in 12 for “The Force.”

The ad, which appeared on YouTube on April 11, is now up to 21.5 million views.

Rango Designer Debuts Super Bizarre Super Doggies First Music Video With Obama.

This is so odd, I simply had to share it with my readers. Super Doggies are a musical and 3D visual project created in 2012. The project depicts a "virtual band" of cartoon characters. This band has three animated dog members: Buffy, Abby and Bo and their universe is explored through the band's website and music videos, the first of which debuted today -and includes an appearance by President Obama. Other media will follow, such as short cartoons and an upcoming ‘live’ 3D tour.



Super Doggies are pursuing the dream to perform around the world, with the involvement of local communities, focusing on children. Concerned about their future, Super Doggies has focused its attention on the global issue of youth poverty. The Super Doggies are ‘good citizens’ who want to bring attention to the issue of poverty and work with local communities to highlight their plight. Super Doggies’s citizenship principles are founded on the conviction that the arts, business and social initiatives can, together, contribute to making a better world.



The press release:
The guy behind Rango – which just won an Oscar for best animated feature film – will help introduce a new cast of animated characters with a political bent for this election season – the Super-Doggies.

The trio of singing Super-Doggies includes Barack Obama’s dog, “Bo,” Vladmir Putin’s dog, “Buffy,” and “Abby,” the dog of a South African girl, Imani, who lives in the slums of Johannesburg.

In the 3:45 music video, Imani watches from her house how both Obama and Putin care for their dogs. All Imani has is a raggedy stuffed animal. At one point she writes to both men asking them for a real pet – and in a fantastic scene that climaxes into a dance party featuring both dancing world leaders and their dogs – she gets her wish (Obama joins the action at 2:47)



The story is timely on multiple levels. Both Russia and the US have national elections coming up (March 4th for Russia and November 6th for the US). In fact, there have been several stories in Obama’s campaign promoting how well he treats Bo considering his competitor, Mitt Romney, once placed his dog in a kennel and strapped it on top of his car for a cross-country trip.

The work of Rango’s character designer, Eugeniy Yelchin is familiar to many of us. He designed Coca-Cola’s iconic polar bears, worked on the Film, “The Brothers Grimm” and also designed the opening for HBO’s “Rome.”

For this project, Yelchin teamed up with Grammy Award winning producer Neal Pogue who works with musicians like Nicky Minaj, Lil Wayne, Outkast and Pink. The effort is also getting guidance from marketing veteran Bruce Kirkland who directed The Beatles Anthology project, and has produced albums for the Beastie Boys, the Spice Girls, Radiohead, and Everclear. The overall project is the brainchild of producer Eugeniy Kuritsyn of Global Media Line, a Moscow-based creative producing house with an impressive line of talent to realize this vision. Eugeniy wanted to create a new entertainment product that would ensure collaboration between the best representatives of international entertainment industry.

Later in the year, the Super-Doggies will go on a world tour, featuring holographic dancing and singing dogs combined with the world’s best dance talent and circus performers. A portion of the proceeds will go to animal welfare organizations to encourage people to adopt dogs.

Tour dates and other information will be announced later in the year on the Super-Doggies website: http://www.super-doggies.com/ where you can sign up for the newsletter for updates.

Braille Burger Video Spreads The Message For South African Fast Food Chain Wimpy.

South African fast food chain, Wimpy, wanted to let visually impaired people know that they offered braille menus in all of their restaurants. To spread the word they built braille burgers that blind people could actually read. With the help of skilled chefs they took sesame seeds and meticulously placed them on burger buns so that the seeds formed braille.





The company’s restaurants in South Africa have used Braille, the international language of the blind, on their menus since 2002 but wanted to spread the message and “let people know that Wimpy is a place where everyone can feel at home”.



Ad agency Metropolitan Republic South Africa had the idea to create 15 individual burgers and sesame seeds were arranged by hand on each one to create a message.

The burgers were delivered to three institutions for the visually impaired in South Africa and taste tested by blind people whose reactions were then filmed. The Art Director for the advertising campaign Dale Mullany said the company were delighted by the response.

"The response we had when these people read the message was worth every moment that it took," Mr. Mullany said.

The video (of which there is also a voice over version for the visually impaired), shown below, claims that through social media and the blind community’s Braille newsletters, the message was spread to 800,000 visually impaired people.



Credits:
Director/Editor: Willian Collison
Executive Creative Director: Paul Warner
Executive Creative Director: Peter Khoury
Creative Director: Wes Phelan
Art Director: Dale Mullany
Copywriter: Keith Manning
Agency Producer: Simone Bosman
Retoucher: Darren Bell
Photographers: (Mike Lewis and Nic van Reenen)
Music: Loyiso Madinga

images courtesy of Wimpy and Metropolitan Republic
news source: African Business Review