Jessica Yu Swaps Her Ride for Ford

Iron Lung – out of the way… Jessica Yu’s new Ford is taking your place.

A few weeks ago while documentary filmmaker Jessica Yu was in Toronto premiering her debut feature narrative film PING PONG PLAYA, the massive “Swap Your Ride” ad campaign she directed for Ford started sweeping across the country. If you’ve had your TV turned on one of the major networks the past week or so, chances are you’ve seen some of these “Swap Your Ride” Ford spots — real people, swapping their rides for a week and they have no idea they were getting a Ford — sound familiar? That guy, with the glasses on his head? Blue shirt? The other “Can I keep this?” Guy at the end?

Yeah, they’re everywhere. And even though these little spots won’t be hailed as the next “Happiness Factory” of car advertising and honored with dozens of creative filmmaking awards, the entire “Swap Your Ride” campaign was so massive and executed so well… it’s pretty amazing. The whole slight-of-hand Jessica Yu and the production team pulled on all the participants (over 80 people in 4 cities) by withholding the fact they were actually filming a Ford campaign, that they didn’t know they’d be driving a Ford and as far as getting a true “consumer message” across — it seems Ford couldn’t be more happy with quips like “I got bad news for the Suburban”.

On directing the spots, Jessica Yu says:

“The challenge of the project was in orchestrating a situation that would elicit honest reactions from our participants,” Yu said of directing the spots. “Over the course of the shoot you could see how the participants embraced the role of being ‘consumer experts’. Unlike a conventional campaign, we were able to document the way people use their cars in real life and that discovery process made it fun.”

Press release here.

Want to Swap Your Ride? Visit here.

State Farm Insurance – Science Fictionized

Kudos to Adfreak for tipping me to State Farm’s new campaign that has the feeling of Richard Kelley’s DONNIE DARKO, yet, instead of a trippy sci-fi coming-of-age film, they are spots touching on car theft and wind damage:

I think this series of spots (more on the YouTube) has some great stuff going on and I’ll be digging around to see who the director is, because if it is not Richard Kelley, someone blatantly ripped off his signature use of odd, interesting sound design/music with LSD-like visuals… which isn’t a big deal, because people rip of stuff all the time.

Nice ads though.

Speaking of Richard Kelley, check out this clip from his new movie SOUTHLAND TALES.

UPDATE: The spots’ director is Noam Murro. Now, let’s go back to our awesome daily rituals.

Technorati Tags: richard_kelley, southland_tales, state_farm_insurance, wind_damage, commericals, donnie_darko,

(Wieden+Kenney) + Michael Mann = Quick and Badass

Ad giant Wieden + Kennedy of Portland, Oregon has a nice insider blog that makes any visitor feel creatively inferior and extremely jealous of what seems like a job at Coke’s Happiness Factory. Anyway, awesome Coke commercials aside, W+K recently did the new Nike “Quick is Dead” campaign, which harnessed the amazing visual talents of fiction filmmaker Michael Mann. If you haven’t seen the Mann directed spot “The Plan”, watch it here. Beyond that masterful :60, W+K has some great stuff going on with interactive content and web features:

W&K and Ensequence partnered to create an iTV element available to Dish Network subs with DVRs where viewers will be able to navigate through the ad to learn about the product and watch additional footage. iTV will also allow viewers to experience the ad from Tomlinson’s point of view. A digital application, via W&K and R/GA, includes interactive video content at Nike.com.

This news report goes into a little more detail and shows what Dish Network subscribers (all 230 of them) get to access:

Personally, I think this is pretty great stuff and see a lot of people wanting to access these “special features” like the training and interview footage with the athletes themselves. Ah, so, why limit it to the freakin’ Dish Network?

Anyway, you can access all these goodies at the Nike website anyway, so check it out quick before you’re dead.

Technorati Tags: michael_mann, nike, w+k, wieden_kennedy, tomlinson, commericials, advertising