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This video by Dove is a well-done public service spot encouraging parents to talk to their girls about body image before the media does. This is some nice positioning work for Dove, itself a beauty brand, trying to place itself outside the anorexic mass media mold.

The video is part of this site and its ‘Dove Self-Esteem Fund’, aimed at buying back self esteem from England’s foreign creditors. The 21st century economy is a strange and mysterious thing.

In the end this still breaks down to brand building, but its easier for a brand like Dove to criticize its own industry than it is for a cigarette company to pay for anti-smoking ads. Dove really can legitimately find ways to sell beauty products without inflicting psychic damage to women, while it’s hard for a tobacco company to claim it doesn’t support the use of tobacco products.

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Pictured: Phil Collins

I have to say, I really love this commercial. It’s a very simple concept done well, and the presentation over ninety seconds lets the suspense build to the appropriate level.

When the drum set is revealed you know the instant before it happens that there is about to be an oddly placed drum solo in the middle of this long winding ballad which is actually not about seeing someone drown. But we now know the song is clearly about a gorilla excited beyond words that Cadbury now features a glass and a half of dairy milk in a new chocolate bar. And he expresses this joy by rocking out.

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Let’s take Viagra and jam

First of all, has anyone here tried to play the upright bass after taking Viagra? It’s not possible.

If you haven’t seen this commercial, or an edit of it, it features a band singing about Viagra to the tune of ‘Viva Las Vegas’. This may be the only thing worse than a song you like being co-opted by a TV commercial: a TV commercial covering the song and inserting its brand name into the lyrics.

(Oh there is more…)

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It’s just like every fucking Thanksgiving

This one-minute spot for Bud Light I unfortunately don’t have any back story on. I would suspect it never aired, and is just used to promote the bud.tv link mentioned at the end of the spot.

This spot is pretty good, especially for the times where it’s not 100% clear what the swears actually are intended to be. The woman’s reaction to “that’s doesn’t count” might be the high point of the spot.

It’s really a shame the FCC is so uptight about this kind of thing, though I guess some of you out there have fucking kids to raise.

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A caveman MMORPG is in the works* *not really

Geico’s caveman campaign has started running TV spots for cavemanscrib.com, an extension of their cavemen characters into the Internet world.

If you haven’t visited in a while, they’ve added a lot of new material (when the site loads you select ’snooze and rejouve’ for the newer interactive content). What impressed me most was the plethora of movies hidden throughout the apartment, all of which I’ve linked directly to from this page, thanks to their Youtube clone, cmoviesonline.com. This is a fictional site that just takes you back to the crib, similar to the fake dating site, iheartcavemen.com (which you can see a fake commercial for on the DVR in the apartment.

The updating of content on this site really will help to make it successful, many sites like this fall by the wayside because they fail to do this kind of updating in any meaningful form.

If you look hard enough on the site, you can find a bonus piece of trivia: the artwork used to decorate the apartment was by Roger Seigmund.

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