Fake behind-the-scenes footage, where celebrities are playing exaggerated versions of themselves, can be fun if a bit narcissistic. Luckily, that's not the case for Cookie Monster in Apple's latest iPhone 6S spot, which features, you guessed it, behind-the-scenes footage. 

Somehow the BTS spot is even more delightful than you'd assume.

Of course, watching Cookie Monster respond to a bored director's commands with cheer is endearing. And he's even more impatient than last time, which helps the previous spot's joke build. 

But what works best about this footage is watching Cookie Monster be repeatedly surprised by Siri; his wonder is infectious. 

Plus, even if you aren't an Apple or iPhone fan, or even a Sesame Street fan, it's just fun to watch a puppet amazed by technology. 

Parting is such sweet sorrow when it comes to one of the most iconic brand spokesmen ever. Yes, Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man in the World is leaving us—he's headed on a one-way flight to Mars.



So, what better way for him to celebrate leaving Earth than giving away all of his earthly possessions? With help from Havas Worldwide, the Heineken brand presents a geniusly prop-styled and photographed smattering of knick-knacks in "The Coveted Collection".

You can enter to win this stuff, including a round-trip flight to Mexico and the chance to live in a "17th-century domicile [that] was once a royal pied-à-terre, a pirate hideout and most importantly, the former hacienda of the Most Interesting Man." 

Below is a gallery of some of the better items, complete with some of the best copywriting in the business, that help weave together the rich tapestry that is our beloved hero. 

1) Aegean Captain's Hat
"The respect he has for the sea is mutual. And his nautical prowess is known throughout the world, including in landlocked countries such as Switzerland and Paraguay. This is his favorite captain's hat. He once dove into the Bering Sea to retrieve it, after a gust of wind blew it overboard."

About this item:
• Size: 23" circumference
• Age: 41 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Wool crown, patent leather brim, black and gold corded detail, silk lining
 

2) Handcrafted Fork
"He makes meals from scratch, all the way down to the cutlery. And he considers this three-pronged fork to be one of the most underrated of his many achievements. This is due mostly to the fact that he made it with just an anvil and a single gloved hand."

About this item:
• Size: 8" x 0.75"
• Age: 19 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Gilded cast iron
 

3) Waikiki Classic Wooden Surfboard
"The perfect wave waits to catch him. And this vintage board, which he carved out of a koa tree, is his favorite. Witnesses on shore have reportedly seen him re-teaching an injured dolphin how to catch a wave, orchestrating a flash mob of hula dancers, and even delivering a baby on deck."

About this item:
• Size: 9' 6"
• Age: 51 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Resin-dipped fiberglass with faux-wood finish
 

4) Victorian Ice Axe
"He's never had a bad day. But if he had, it wouldn't be because he left his ice axe at home. Reason being, he's never once used it. He prefers to use his bare hands. He did, however, like to bring the ice axe along for aesthetic purposes."

About this item:
• Size: 2' 2" x 11"
• Age: 61 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Red painted steel body with serrated adze
 

5) Soaring Spirit Pole
"Even his boredom is profoundly interesting. That's how he came about creating this gem. He whittled the totem pole from some driftwood he found while sailing on calm seas up the Pacific Coast. They say if you look close enough, you can see yourself in it—even if you're a penguin."

About this item:
• Size: 7'
• Age: 13 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Handpainted, sculpted foam
 

6) Prized Spanish Guitar
"It's been said that his melodies' melodies have melodies. And more often than not they came from the strings of this Spanish guitar. In fact, whenever he carried this guitar, he would only speak Spanish out of respect for its rich history. Similarly, he only speaks French when holding a French horn."

About this item:
• Size: 3' 4" x 15"
• Age: 47 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Laminate white wood with mother of pearl insets
 

7) Pageant Silken Sashes
"One of his evenings from his time in Morocco has become the basis for a best selling novel. As you might have guessed, these sashes played no small role in what was an epic blindfolded night that involved exotic food, dancing and charades with hands. You may not have been there, but you should've been."

About this item:
• Size: 2' 10.5" x 4" (3)
• Age: 21 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Heavyweight Japanese bridal satin
 

8) Oval Scuba Diving Mask with Snorkel
"He once crossed the English Channel without telling anyone. And this is the vintage mask and snorkel he wore. He had them custom made before custom made was a thing, and they've seen more of the ocean than a fully matured coelacanth."

About this item:
• Size: 5" x 6" mask and 16" snorkel
• Age: 47 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Tempered glass mask with rubber strap and rubber snorkel
 

9) Winner's Circle Portrait
"The expression "Don't count your chickens before they hatch" doesn't apply to him. This painting is a perfect example. It was completed the day before the race. And the trophy seen within the painting was handed to the Most Interesting Man long before anyone even knew which horse was his. Upon winning, he was seen riding the horse home."

About this item:
• Size: 28" x 22"
• Age: 5 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Oil on canvas in copper-finished frame
 

10) Championship Bowling Shirt
"His bowling average is a perfect game. He is also credited with bringing some much-needed flair to the world of bowling by not wearing socks and donning what is now universally known as the Bowling Shirt. This is the shirt he wore when he beat Von Hoffer in a sudden-death match back in 1973."

About this item:
• Size: Men's Large
• Age: 43 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Knitted piqué cotton
 

11) Highland Scottish Kilt
"This kilt is no ordinary garb. Beautifully framed, it is a reminder that when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and when in a sword fight in Scotland, wear this kilt. In fact, they stopped making this pattern out of respect for him."

About this item:
• Size: 1' 11.5" x 1' 4" kilt, 7" x 7" sporran with 1' x 8" chain
• Age: 22 Years Old
• Materials/Composition: Pleated wool with leather buckles, leather belt with ornate silver buckle, leather sporran with tassels

Adolf Hitler's notorious autobiography/fascist screed Mein Kampf (translation, My Struggle) was published in Germany this year for this first time since 1945—after the Bavarian government's copyright expired. 

Predictably, its appearance caused much Sturm und Drang. It also generated a powerful response from the Berlin office of Ogilvy & Mather, which produced a competing book, Mein Kampf gegen Rechts (My Struggle Against Racism), in an effort to combat right-wing extremism and intolerance. 

Ogilvy's effort spotlights 11 diverse individuals who have fought against xenophobia and injustice. They include concentration camp survivor Mosche Dagan, former Afghan refugee Wana Limar (now a host at MTV) and Irmela Mensah-Schramm, who has dedicated her life to removing Nazi graffiti wherever she finds it. 

The latter, a white-haired granny, cuts an especially memorable figure in the project video below, proclaiming "I want to destroy hate" while brandishing a spray-paint can in one hand and a brush in the other. 



It's sobering to consider that Mensah-Schramm has removed more than 100,000 images of Nazi slogans and hate propaganda in the past 30 years, a fact that underscores the need for more ammunition in the struggle against bigotry and ignorance. 

"Due to the immigration of refugees, we are facing in Germany a growing right-wing extremism and an open everyday racism," Tim Stuebane, executive creative director at Ogilvy Berlin and leader of the book project, tells Adweek. "In the last election, a new right-wing party shot from 0 to 24 percent. All this is very painful to see. We had to do something against it, but what? Then we learned that Hitler's Mein Kampf would be republished. We thought—absolutely the wrong signal at this point of time." 

Reclaiming the conception of the words Mein Kampf

The project seeks to "reclaim the conception of the words Mein Kampf from the Nazis [and] create a spectacular trigger for PR and social media to talk about the current situation of society in Germany" and elsewhere, Stuebane says. 

Those missions have been largely accomplished. Clearly, Ogilvy's book touched a nerve in Germany. The first printing of 11,000 volumes nearly sold out, with 1 euro from every sale supporting Gesicht Zeigen, a nonprofit group that fights for social justice. Copious media coverage has spurred a broader conversation, which Ogilvy hopes will turn Mein Kampf gegen Rechts into Unser Kampf gegen Rechts (Our Struggle Against Racism). 

Stuebane calls on people working in media to join the cause. Their power to inform and shape public opinion, he says, could prove invaluable. "Imagine doctors watching an accident, doing nothing," he says. "That's [the same thing as] communication professionals [silently] watching the rise of right-wing populism. It's our duty to do something against it." 

Indeed, there's an urgent need for more voices of sanity to rise up and drown out the din of fearmongering that rings louder than ever these days. 

Seven decades after Hitler's demise and the defeat of the Nazis, the struggle continues. 

CREDITS

Campaign: Mein Kampf – gegen Rechts
Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Berlin
Exec. Creative Directors: Tim Stübane, Birgit van den Valentyn
Creative Directors: Björn Kernspeckt, Sebastian Kraus, Daniela Schmidt, Stese Wagner
Art Directors: Matthias Bauer, Philipp Bertisch, Andreas Richter, Stephan Westerwelle, Joschka Wolf, Collja Lorig, Michael Mogk
Copywriters: Janne Sachse, Anke Roell
Client Service Director: Stephen Kimpel
Account: Iskra Velichkova, Carsten Kaiser, Patricia Podewin
Editor: Lutz Meier
Art Buyer: Martina Diederichs
Photographer Dominik Butzmann
Agency Producer: Georg Ilse
Postproduction Press: Simon Geis/vividgreyde, Schröderstraße 9, 10115 Berlin
Film Production: Tony Petersen Film GmbH, Brunnenstraße 181, 10119 Berlin
Regie/Director: Florian Baeker
Social Media Strategy: Rochus Landgraf
Programmer: Robert Georgi
Publishing House: Europa Verlag, Berlin/München/Wien
Publisher: Christian Strasser
Public Relations: Claus-Martin Carlsberg, Barbara Stang
Ogilvy Public Relations: Anna-Karina Berels, Anna-Lena Daniels, Laura Kolb, Julia Steckel
Media Planning/Buying: Mindshare/Christian Scholz, Dietmar Birkner/Kinetic Worldwide Germany GmbH

Ever wonder what people in Ireland do for kicks? Well, if you want to see for yourself, Aer Lingus runs 12 direct flights daily out of North America. Or you could just save money and time by watching the latest videos for Irish Spring.

The enduring green-and-white deodorant soap, which hit store shelves 44 years ago, is undergoing a brand revival. Not only is there a new Signature for Men Body Wash that's clearly aimed at younger buyers, but the brand also created a bunch of video shorts, all of which show purported snapshots of rural Irish life.

They include a trip to the Dublin Fish Market, where a fisherman named Sean uses Irish Spring so he can "go from catchin' bass to chasin' lass."

There's also Shane, who throws boulders during the Celtic Warrior Games. Shane "keeps his girl Molly" by showering with Irish Spring before meeting her at the pub. 

Then there's poor Liam, who cheers so hard at the Gaelic football match, he spills his beer on his head—and "that's a perfectly good waste of a drink," quips the narrator in a heavy brogue.

Viewers over 40 might get the feeling they've seen this sort of thing before—probably because they have. The new videos (created by agency Red Fuse) are certainly a callback to the Irish Spring spots that ran endlessly in the early 1980s—unforgettable to this day for their feigned accents, burly boggers, freckled lasses and other cringe-worthy stereotypes.

"It feels like an amateur ad," says Rex Whisman, founder and chief strategist of the BrandED Consultants Group, referring to the Celtic Warrior spot. "It doesn't feel like Irish Spring has evolved. It feels stuck—even backward. They've missed an opportunity to say that, in the last 30 years, the world has changed."

Changed, he means, to the point where ethnic, gender and national stereotyping aren't really such great marketing ideas anymore.

Irish Spring is a brand in the portfolio of Colgate-Palmolive, a CPG colossus that grossed $16 billion last year. It can afford whatever cutting-edge marketing it wants. So why is the soap brand still up to these Celtic shenanigans?

That's a tough one to answer. Neither Irish Spring's parent company nor agency Red Fuse responded to Adweek's requests to discuss the brand's revived marketing. And independent marketers like Whisman are puzzled. If you're going to rejuvenate your band, he says, "I wouldn't start by going down a path to the past."

The past he's referring to began in the late 1970s, when Y&R began producing 30-second spots for Irish Spring—a soap characterized by its "Ulster Fragrance" and marbled, white-and-green appearance.

Though the tags were catchy ("Fresh and Clean as a Whistle!") the spots ladled the soap's "Irishness" on pretty thick. That might have been intended to overcompensate for the fact Irish Spring actually originated in Germany—Iriche Frühling—and had nothing to do with Ireland at all.

Y&R's commercials featured bruising men in Aran sweaters and Donnegal caps. To a backing track of flute music, they ran, wrestled and rode horses on rolling green fields—all while their meek and pretty women gazed at them adoringly.

Everybody addressed one another in an accent so thick you could cut it with a knife—that is, if the knife weren't already being used to cut open a bar of Irish Spring so the narrator could explain the wonder of having "two deodorants" in the same soap.

"I remember those original commercials back in the 1980s," says advertising and marketing executive Petur Workman, whose practice area includes branded video content.

Back then, he says, feigned Irish accents and fawning women didn't raise eyebrows. But today? Even though Shane's girlfriend is an assertive woman, she's nevertheless "his girl" Molly, complete with red hair and the accent. "It's not PC anymore," Workman said, "and I found [the new effort] offensive. Even if it's targeted at the Irish community, it's a slap in the face—who in the hell talks like that? They're also cutting their noses to spite their face, because a lot of women use this product."

The (Real) Irish Perspective

Maria McGarrity, a professor of Irish literature and culture at New York's Long Island University, surveyed the new videos and concluded that they "display the typical, essentialist view of Irish culture, its fiery lasses, drunken revelry and faux accents that might as well offer a 'top of the morning to ya' as an overture. The only thing I think is missing is a paddy wagon."

If a brand is going to tap into Irish culture, McGarrity suggests, it should do it for real. "Instead of the staged, Irish Aran-sweater sporting, ginger haired [actors], why not use actual scenes of Ireland, its sports, people and fun?" she asks. "There is plenty of excellent material in the country without resorting to its worst evocations."

Whisman agrees. "The ethnic element is risky, and the gender piece is risky," he said. "I'd suggest that they look at women in a leadership role, and not make it feel like it does here. It could be considered sexist." Instead of Shane starring in the ad, Whisman suggests, why can't a woman do it? "Or you could have the men and women going up against each other in rugby or something--some element of progressiveness."

But could it be that these perceived slights are actually the point? Americus Reed, a brand identity consultant and professor of marketing at Wharton, points out that creating controversial content is a proven way of making consumers curious about a brand.

"We find in the research that when you use a little bit of WTF, this delayed effect takes over. You forget the odd or annoying part and you're left with the brand message and a higher awareness of the brand." It's tempting, he says, looking at these tired Irish tropes, "to think, 'you guys are out of ideas.' But actually, it's quite nostalgic."

Besides, he notes, younger viewers will have no institutional memory of the old spots anyway. And judging from the comments posted to the brand's Facebook page (the comments we can see, at any rate), it seems like some consumers took the spots as a joke. "Haha! I haven't seen an Irish Spring commercial in years!" wrote one. "The new ads are so fun. Good on ya, boy!" offered another. Said a third: "These are genuinely funny! Go get 'em, Colin!"

The week's almost over. Have you wept at your desk yet? If not, have a gander at this powerful animated short for Scarlett Contra El Cancer, made by New York City animation company The Studio—with music by Hook+Line.

Clocking in at nearly three minutes, the short stars a sad little girl who is recovering from a cancer-related amputation, and ends up overcoming her despondence through ballet. With lovely artwork (especially the background), smart pacing and a song that challenges Sarah McLachlan's ASPCA commercials for Most Emotionally Torturous, this ad says a lot about adversity, struggle, grit, and ultimately, kindness.



That last element is the most important, since it ties into Scarlett Contra El Cancer's mission to help children with cancer in the U.S. and Latin America. Part of this mission involves empowering children through media representations they understand, and this project knocked it out of the park.

CREDITS
Production: The Studio
Director: Alison Abitbol
Executive Producer: Mary Nittolo
Producer: Jenna Gabriel
Creative Director: Mary Nittolo
Art Direction: Alison Abitbol, John Holmes, Juan Mont
Early Concept Development: Mike Ocasio, John Holmes
Narrative: Paolo Cogliati, Alison Abitbol
Modeling: Juan Mont
Animation Red and Blue World: Juan Mont, Adam Rozanski, Victor DeRespinis
Character Animation and Compositing: Juan Mont, Hee Jin Kim, Mike Sime, Ozan Basaldi, Jackie Garbuio, Eric Kilanski, Adam Rozanski, Victor DiRespinis
Matte Paintings: Alison Abitbol
Rigging: Malcolm Carrott
Lighting: Mirelle Underwood
Editing: Jackie Garbuio, Malcolm Carrott, Adam Rozanski
Character Development: Alison Abitbol, Mike Ocasio, John Holmes, Adrian Mateescu, Juan
Music: Hook+Line
Songwriter/Vocalist/Producer: Abby Diamond
Co-writer/Producer/Mix Engineer: Kyle Patrick
Violin: Bryan Senti
Cello: Yoed Nir
Mastering Engineer: Joe LaPorta
Special Thanks: Grace Ramirez, Antonio Navas, Solange Rivero, and of course Scarlett

Annalect founder Scott Hagedorn will serve as the network's CEO. Omnicom Media Group

Four months after winning the $2 billion P&G North America media review, Omnicom Media Group today unveiled its third media network. The new organization will be called Hearts & Science, and P&G will be its inaugural client. Sources close to the matter clarified it will not be a single-account "dedicated" unit and that it will look to expand its roster in the future.

"With the addition of Hearts & Science, Omnicom Media Group has three distinct agency brands, all focused on driving client business results," said Omnicom Media Group CEO Daryl Simm, adding, "OMD is the world's largest and most creatively awarded media agency. PHD is the global leader in communications planning. Hearts & Science will be highly focused on data-driven marketing. All three agency networks benefit from the full scale of Omnicom Media Group's activation and buying resources and our industry-leading Annalect data and analytics platform."

Late last year, Omnicom picked Scott Hagedorn, founder and CEO of Annalect Group, to be Hearts & Science's CEO. Hagedorn, who previously served as both managing director of OMD East and U.S. director of digital for the entire OMD network, will bring his data-driven sensibilities to bear in leading the new unit. Following his departure, former Annalect chief analytics officer Slavi Samardzija will be promoted to global CEO with former chief marketing officer Erin Matts serving as North American CEO.

"As data-driven marketing and applied audience analytics in mass media have gone from a fringe to a core practice, the industry can't lose sight of content's role in creating connections between brands and consumers," said Hagedorn.

Omnicom has been recruiting aggressively to staff its new operation in the months following its P&G win. Adweek's AgencySpy blog recently reported that Deutsch CMO Tara Levine and Grey New York chief digital officer Zachary Treuhaft had left their respective agencies to join what will now be Hearts & Science.

Kathleen Brookbanks, who joins Hearts & Science from its sister agency OMD to serve as chief operating officer, said the new network will open its offices at 7 World Trade Center with 175 employees and that the number will nearly double by the beginning of the third quarter. Additional offices will soon open in Puerto Rico and Canada, and Omnicom also plans to launch new international units in the second half of 2016.

P&G global brand officer Marc Pritchard recently spoke to various trade publications regarding his plans to streamline the company's network of agency partners, and Hearts & Science is in some ways the product of such industry-wide moves toward consolidation.

Hagedorn said, "Hearts & Science has been designed to protect the balance and leverage the connections between information and emotion, combining data-driven planning and buying practices with orchestrated content creation, delivery and optimization across all touch points."

The latest news comes a day after the larger Omnicom organization announced the formation of TBWA\WorldHealth, a new global network formed by consolidating its LLNS and Corbett agencies with the aim of disrupting healthcare marketing.

Today's announcement regarding Hearts & Science was somewhat rushed due to a series of leaks, but Omnicom plans to release more information about its newest network in the coming weeks.

SK-II, a Chinese skin care brand, took over a so-called "marriage market"—where Chinese parents go to post elaborate personal ads for their daughters—to stand up for all the "leftover" women who aren't married, and are treated shamefully, after age 25.

A "sheng nu," or "leftover woman," is a derogatory term for an unmarried woman over 25. The film shows the pressure these women face from their parents and society—and often, themselves—to marry young, and then leads up to the poignant moment where they stand up to their parents' pressure.



Last year, Prestige International skin care brand SK-ll launched #changedestiny, an ongoing global campaign to inspire and empower women to shape their own destiny. This year, they've continued the theme with "Marriage Market Takeover," created by Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors in its first ad campaign in China.

It used to be that female beauty marketing was all about fear—fear of living up to an ideal, where the product was positioned as the solution that would make you feel better about yourself. But that philosophy has changed thanks to mountains of marketing that have made the point that looking good and feeling good are two different things. This campaign is another milestone on the road to turning around the very meaning of the beauty, and this time, it's international.

The marriage market is a place where Chinese parents essentially advertise children as marriage potential, listing their height, weight, salary, values and personality. In some cases, women are unaware that their parents have listed them on the market.

SK-II took over a traditional marriage market and created a huge, beautiful, night-lit installation created with its own version of "marriage ads," which were actually messages from hundreds of independent women saying they want to be in control of their own destiny, and could actually be happy without being married.

We get to see the wonderful reactions of the parents who, earlier in the film, were downright harsh—calling their daughters unattractive or worse, while sitting right beside them. After reading the display, they change their tone, moved by the words and beautiful photos of their daughters presumably wearing SK-II products.

If any were still backwards curmudgeons, we didn't get to see them in the film.

This is a powerful message, and one that's needed in many places. When I lived in Japan, unmarried women over 25 were still called "Christmas cakes," a reference to being discounted after Dec. 25. In Russia, I understand they're called "old maids," no food analogy.

But with women delaying marriage the world over to focus on education and careers, the stigma is going to fall. It'll only be a matter of time, and some well-placed messaging.

Chatbots are coming to digital marketing, and they're also shaking up the agency-brand relationship.

Since it starting using Slack in April 2014, digital shop R/GA has gotten 1,500 of its 1,800 staffers across 15 offices on the project-management platform. Meetings at the agency have decreased by 30 percent thanks to the collaboration software, and R/GA says teams are able to make decisions 30 percent to 40 percent faster when clients, including brands, comunicate regularly via Slack.

"There's this ecosystem of all different services, bots or integrations that you can plug into Slack. That makes it pretty different from other collaboration platforms," said Nick Coronges, R/GA's chief technology officer. "Because you're getting so much more done through this instantaneous messaging, there's less of a need to have very frequent or daily check-ins where you sit down and go over what's going on."

R/GA built a Slack bot that plugs into the agency's directory of names. Staffers can ask the bot to search for people by name, skill set or experience when staffing a project.

Each office has its own Slack channel that any staffer can drop into to see what colleagues are working on, and there are also subject-matter channels where people can learn about new technologies like virtual reality.

"There is a VR channel where people across the entire company can learn about what each other are doing in VR," Coronges said.

The offices also uses Slack to have a bit of fun. For example, technologist Kumi Tominaga in New York sits near the office's ping pong table, and people used to ask her if the table was free through Slack. Working with a group of technologists, she set up a sensor on the table that connects to Slack so people see for themselves.

Tominaga also created Bluetooth-enabled hairpieces that lit up whenever someone sent an emoji to a Slack channel during the agency's holiday party last year.

R/GA also sets up private channels it uses to message back and forth with clients and outside companies collaborating on a project. Brands in particular are notorious for not embracing change, but Coronges said R/GA's clients are increasingly using work-management platforms on their own.

"Because Slack has done such a great job in marketing the platform and the product, it has reached a tipping point with brands," he said. "I'd say [it's] surprisingly common that the brands themselves are using Slack. Either they have an instance of Slack that we'll plug into or we have an instance of Slack that they'll plug into."

Of course, changing the culture of a big agency is a tough mandate, but Coronges said R/GA stuck with Slack because it can plug into a slew of other services.

"Because the [user interface] was really well thought out, we were able to get broad adoption outside of technology, so we were able to bring in designers, strategists and producers who also loved using Slack," he said.

That doesn't mean Slack has completely replaced face-to-face meetings.

"There's huge value in face-to-face communication, and we spend a lot of time collaborating together in rooms with whiteboards, but those meetings become more impactful [with Slack]," Coronges said.

While Slack is more established—Ogilvy, AKQA and IDEO are among those also using it—other agencies like Weber Shandwick are plugged into Facebook at Work, the social network's collaborative platform. Weber Shandwick recently finished onboarding 3,500 employees to make tasks like document sharing and real-time editing easier.

And as more brands like Taco Bell,Sephora and H&M build bots that talk to consumers, the move toward using bot platforms like Slack and Facebook at Work also gives agencies a bit of hands-on experience.

"There's this culture and technology moment where these conversational interfaces are going to be much more widely accepted," Coronges said. "It's going to change how all enterprise services think about creating a bot. [Brands are] just now figuring out how to build and deploy mobile apps, and now what they're going to be doing is figuring out how to deploy those same services through conversational enterprises with bots."

Sagami Original Condoms has filmed animal courtship rituals as performed by humans, and the results are both strange and seductive. 

Talented dancers, dressed in the colors of the respective animals, do an amazing job of recreating the hops, wiggles and foot wobbles of our bestial brethren. See how many of the animals you can guess before the reveal at the end. (I only got three.) 



The spot was directed by Greg Brunkalla of Stink, with creative by White Briefs. But it's more than just a great video. You can also visit the website, Act of Love, which has some amazing dancing icons and descriptions for 73 different animals. And if you're really, really into it, buy the coffee table book, Act of Love—billed as the world's only visual dictionary of animal courtship rituals.

But the real question is, why did a condom brand film humans pretending to be animals?

Above and beyond the encouragement to go and do it like animals, Sagami Original seems to have seized upon the realization that love is a verb. As they put it on the site, "Perhaps humans talk too much. We use too many words and misunderstand each other. We think too much and end up feeling afraid. But animals don't worry over their decisions. They act out of need and express themselves instinctively. This is pure strength, and primal love. Whether human or animal, loving means taking action."

And if you're getting some action, you're going to need some condoms.

The Tribeca Film Festival today announced finalists for its first branded content award. That's right—even New York's sought-after film festival is championing the marriage of entertainment and advertising.  

Eight brands are in the running for the Tribeca X Award, which is sponsored by GE: Derek Lam, American Giant, Samsung, Olympus, Balvenie, Robert Graham, Kenzo and Radio Flyer Wagons. 

"Tribeca has always celebrated great work, great storytelling, and we believe that brands can be great storytellers, too," said Andrew Essex, CEO of festival owner Tribeca Enterprises. "Facing the loss of traditional canvas because of ad blocking and over-the-top television, brands are being forced to out-think rather than out-spend and really produce work that competes at the highest level."

Genna Terranova, director of the festival, agreed. "For us, it's not about who's produced a great story; it's about that story itself," she said. 

As for GE, the brand wanted to sponsor the award "to inspire brands to push the envelope in their storytelling and strive for content that is just as engaging as the best entertainment, films and documentaries," said Linda Boff, chief marketing officer, GE.

Many of the filmmakers—including Michael Rappaport, Brandon Oldenburg, Ariel Schulman and Rob Meyer—behind the branded content are alumni of the festival, explained Terranova. "That brings along the authenticity that we're looking for, that the filmmakers have a creative vision for the work," added Terranova. "That's what we're really recognizing with this award: originality, creativity and the collaboration [between brands and] artists."

The festival selected finalists from over 100 submissions, which included documentary and scripted work as well as short-form and long-form content. 

"We got so many submissions in a short period of a time for a new award, which is significant that there are many players in this space," said Essex. "This is a rising tide forcing others to think about how they can make better work."

Laurie Anderson, Scott Carlson, Judy McGrath, Liev Schreiber and Hank Willis Thomas will serve as the Tribeca X Award jury. The winner will be announced at the festival's annual awards ceremony on April 21. 

Here's a look at all of the branded-content finalists: 

10 Crosby
Brand: Derek Lam
Directed by Benjamin Dickinson, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Albert Moya and Andrew Zuchero

American Giant X Wild Card Boxing
Brand: American Giant
Directed by Michael Rappaport

Hearing Colors
Brand: Samsung
Directed by Greg Brunkalla
 

The Irrational Fear of Nothing
Brand: Olympus
Directed by Paul Trillo

Raw Craft with Anthony Bourdain
Brand: The Balvenie
Directed by Rob Meyer

Second Sound Barrier
Brand: Robert Graham
Directed by David Wain

Snowbird
Brand: Kenzo
Directed by Sean Baker

Taking Flight
Brand: Radio Flyer Wagons
Directed by Brandon Oldenburg

Distracted driving is a serious problem. But while the stats are staggering—3,100 dead and 424,000 injured in crashes involving distracted drivers in the U.S. in 2013—they remain just numbers, without much visceral pull.

SR22Agency.com wanted to change that—to show distracted driving in real time. So, it set up cameras over I-95 in Florida, filmed for 20 minutes and examined the footage to see how many drivers weren't fully focused on the road.

Some 2,151 cars were filmed in all. Check out the disturbing footage here.



It's a pretty great experiment. And the way it's been shot and edited, making the road look like a raceway—which, let's face it, it is, however insulated you feel going 70 in your glassed-in vehicle—has a chilling effect.

Here are the numbers from the experiment: Of the 2,151 total drivers, 185 of them (8.6 percent) were distracted. Of those 185 drivers, 81 percent were talking on the phone; just over 9 percent were texting; more than 6 percent were eating; and more than 3 percent were otherwise distracted.

SR22Agency.com has lots more info about the problem of distracted driving on this website. One caveat: It is legal in Florida to talk on the phone while driving. If you don't consider talking on the phone to be distracted driving, the numbers go down significantly.

SR22Agency.com is an organization that creates original research around issues concerning drivers around the country. It also provides resources to those seeking information about an SR22, a vehicle liability insurance document required by most state DMV offices for high-risk insurance policies.

Equal Pay Day is happening Tuesday in the U.S., thanks to the American Association of University Women. And you don't have to attend the 3 Percent Conference to know that the gender gap is painfully real both within and beyond the American advertising industry. 

But the professional divide between men and women is even more stark in certain societies.

According to a recent study by the World Economic Forum, Romania ranks very close to last among European Union countries on matters of gender equality despite passing a "Law for Equality of Opportunity among Men and Women" in 2002. 

The Bucharest offices of MRM/McCann recently partnered with French-style bakery chain Paul to bring attention to this ongoing struggle with some sweet treats bearing a very sharp message—real pies that double as pie charts outlining the problem. 

The project includes such delicacies as "The Misrepresentation Cake," which notes that men make up 88 percent of Romania's parliament, and a "Startup Exclusion Cake," revealing that the number of Romanian entrepreneurs who are women (13 percent) is almost as shamefully small as the number who serve in government. There's also the "Extremely Rich Cake," which shows that just one of Romania's 25 wealthiest people is a woman. 



"The bittersweet project takes a mission to spread the data, create awareness, and spark conversation in every household in Romania about the importance of closing this gap," says MRM/McCann CEO and chief creative officer Nir Refuah, noting Romania's poor showing in the World Economic Forum study.

The pattiserie, Paul, claims that the "bittersweet" pies are the world's first-ever "social desserts line." "The CSR project has started from a social issue every Romanian woman faced at least once in her life," says the company's CMO, Monica Eftimie. "Knowing from research data that sweets are more often consumed by women than by men, we are launching a range of cakes to spark the conversation about gender inequality, inviting women to take the necessary steps for having the same rights as men have." 

Those steps will involve far more than a series of conversations over dessert, but all progress is welcome. As the 2015 U.N. Women "He for She" project's tagline put it, "Gender equality is not just a women's issue; it's a human rights issue that benefits everyone."

Five percent of the cake project's revenue goes to the FILIA Foundation, a nonprofit that will use the funds to train rural women to compete more effectively in the modern job market.

For every beautifully executed golf shot, there are thousands of not so beautiful ones—shots that land in the water, or the woods, or get carried away by an ill-timed gust of wind. Golfsmith is finding the humor in such moments in its new ad campaign that launches today.

Three 15-second TV spots and one 60-second spot running online and on Golfsmith's social channels poke fun at missed golf shots and golfers' subsequent tantrums. After one bad shot, a golfer says, "Freaking wind," and the voiceover says, "Yeah, you tell that wind." In another spot, a golfer yells at himself after a poor shot, and the voiceover says, "Go easy on Steve, Steve. That was the club's fault." Golfsmith then encourages golfers to pick up new clubs or gear because "every shot is an opportunity for your next one."

"We hope to increase customer loyalty by showing that Golfsmith is the best place for golfers of any level to shop for their game by showing humorous, relatable moments that then segue into why customers should visit our stores," Kim Lewis, vp of omnichannel marketing at Golfsmith, told Adweek.

The campaign, developed by agency Preacher, helps clarify Golfsmith's tagline, "Anything for golf," Lewis added. "Our stores have always been the place for golfers of all skill levels, but we've never done a good job of communicating that through our messaging," she said. "That was the major goal of this campaign. It clarifies that 'Anything for golf' does not just mean that we're a place for people who would do anything for golf, but that we will do anything for golfers. And we have anything golfers need for their game."

The ads also set Golfsmith apart from other golf brands, said Seth Gaffney, founder and chief strategy officer at Preacher. "So many golf brands, through their marketing, appeal to the avid player," he said. "There are only so many perfect shots you can show, so Golfsmith is setting out to appeal to a broader audience than just the hard-core golfer. The word we used was 'approachability.'"

CREDITS

Client:  Golfsmith International
Director of Brand and Creative:  Brian Thompson
Vice President, Omnichannel Marketing:  Kim Lewis
Vice President, Seasonal Planning and Marketing Partnerships:  Debbie Adams
Agency:   Preacher
Chief Creative Officer:  Rob Baird
Chief Executive Officer:  Krystle Loyland
Chief Strategy Officer:  Seth Gaffney
Copywriter:  Joe Hartley
Art Director:  Cody Ackors
Agency Producers:  Stacey Higgins
Brand Director: Amanda Cruz VanAntwerp
Business Affairs:  Susan Conklin
Production Company:   SMUGGLER
Director:   Randy Krallman
Executive Producers:  Patrick Milling Smith, Brian Carmody, Allison Kunzman
Head of Production:   Andrew Colon
Line Producer:  Alex Waite
Director of Photography: Corey Walter
Stills:  Dylan Gordon
Casting:  Sonnenberg Casting

Edit House:  CARTEL
Executive Producer:  Lauren Bleiweiss
Editor:  Edward Line  
Assistant:  Kai Yu
Music:  Marmoset Music "La Mancha" by Don & the Quixotes
Mix:  Rohan Young/LIME
Assistant Sound Engineer:  Mark Nieto
Finish House:  Cartel
Senior Flame Artist:  Jim Bohn
Colorist: Marshall Plante @ NTropic/LA

Everybody in business dreams of getting that big break—an out-of-the-blue phone call from some corporate big shot who could make a company's future in a 10-minute meeting. Last June, French cookie company Michel et Augustin got just such a break, including the phone call and the meeting.

The call was from none other than Starbucks—the assistant to CEO Howard Schultz, to be specific.  The coffee giant had a request: Could Michel et Augustin ship some cookies to Seattle, pronto?

Since it was already Friday night in Paris, the cost of getting a fresh batch to Seattle by Monday morning was astronomical. That's when co-founder Augustin Paluel-Marmont decided he might as well just send an employee, who could take the cookies as a carry-on.

"Who wants to go to Seattle for the weekend?" he called out to his staff. Nobody really did, but the brand's U.S. communication manager, Charlotte Cochaud, and its head of audiovisual content, Hassan Strauss, nevertheless volunteered for the 10-hour flight.

Then they made a pivotal decision. If Cochaud and Strauss were going to go to the trouble of flying a big box of baked goods all the way to Seattle, they were going to bypass the assistant and put them directly into Schultz's hands (not that the CEO knew they were coming.) And to bump up the odds of getting into the big man's office, the pair decided to shoot video of their odyssey and post it in real time as a multiepisode series on YouTube, reasoning that Michel et Augustin's fan base would help them with their pitch to Schultz. It was a nervy move, but Cochaud believed that when big breaks come, you go all in. "I just decided to try," she says now.

The result was unique in the annals of content marketing: a minute-by-minute documentary of how a small brand got its big break.

'Supersonic' cookies

Michel et Augustin started in 2005, when Paluel-Marmont, who'd given up a career in economics in favor of baking, and his childhood friend and a trained pastry chef, Michel de Rovira, began making cookies in Paluel-Marmont's Paris apartment. In Paris, competition in the baked goods business is pretty stiff, but the pair saw an opening in the market for high-quality, packaged cookies made from all-natural, GMO-free ingredients. After munching their way through 400 test batches, the duo settled on a signature recipe—one they still use—and Michel et Augustin introduced its "supersonic cookies" to the public. (The company makes many varieties of cookie, from chocolate-covered baguettes to puff palmiers, but "supersonic" is a flashy term the founders use for marketing purposes.)

By 2015, the company's volume hit $35 million. Michel et Augustin had baked some 150 million cookies which it distributed to 23 European countries. The only thing left was to hop the Atlantic. Renting space in a converted industrial building in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., advance man Antoine Chauvel spent the next year hitting the pavement, offering cookies to every coffee shop and specialty food shop that would try them.

"Antoine knocked door to door and said, 'Hey guys, we're French and we're baking supersonic cookies,'" Paluel-Marmont says. The cookies are all baked by pastry chefs in France, so Michel et Augustin had a compelling sales proposition right out of the gate. But Paluel-Marmont points out that it doesn't much matter where cookies come out of the oven; it's the recipe and the ingredients that ultimately make the sale. "We're not inventing rockets here," he said. "When people taste the cookies, they buy them."

One of the places Chauvel went was the Bedford Cheese Shop, a gourmet institution near Manhattan's Union Square. The store liked the cookies and put some out for sale. A few weeks later, a buyer from Starbucks dropped by and helped himself to a supersonic cookie.

The meeting of their lives

By the time Cochaud and Strauss volunteered to fly to Seattle, they had only hours to pack—clothes and cookies—for the next afternoon's Delta flight out of Charles de Gaulle. Before they even left for the airport, Strauss started filming. Cochaud recounted the call from Starbucks and appealed to Michel et Augustin's fans to "help me meet Howard" by taking pictures of themselves with a cup of coffee and posting them with the hashtag #AllezHowardunCafé (which roughly translates to "Hey, Howard, let's get coffee together."). "We can convince him to meet us, because we only have 48 hours," Cochaud implored in the video. "It will be complicated, but we'll get there."

Allez Howard Episode 1 was ready for YouTube before Cochaud and Strauss even left Paris. They shot Episode 2 on the way to the airport and Episode 3 on the flight. The third episode featured footage of Cochaud trying to sleep in a coach seat with her box of cookies, signing off by saying, "Howard, here we come!" By the time they landed in Seattle on Saturday afternoon, 100,000 people had posted photos of themselves with cups of coffee. Cochaud printed them all and bound them in a presentation booklet, then headed for the first Starbucks location at Pike Place, where she did man on the street interviews and handed out cookies.

Starbucks, meanwhile, had picked up on the pair's social media activities and advised Paluel-Marmont to tell his ambassadors to cool it with the web publicity. "Apparently, Starbucks finds our way of doing things a bit scary," Cochaud said—to Strauss' video camera as part of Allez Howard Episode 4. Cochaud was undeterred: "Quite simply, it's the meeting of our life," she said.

In the end, Starbucks decided to forgive. On Monday morning, Cochaud and Strauss were led to Schultz's office, where they gave him the cookies and the booklet of fan photos.

"Charlotte, I am amazed that you're in Seattle, and I'm so proud of you to come all the way from Paris to Seattle to meet me and talk about your cookies," Schultz told her. "Starbucks will take a very good look at this product."

Of course, Strauss caught Schultz saying all this on video, which he promptly posted as Allez Howard Episode 5.

As it turns out, Michel et Augustin's odds of landing in Starbucks were probably better than they realized when Cochaud and Strauss flew to Seattle. According to Lizzy Freier, managing editor of Technomic's Menu Analysis, "Large chains like Starbucks are going in this anti-chain direction and trying to convince consumers that even though they have a huge presence, they still care about high-quality and premium fare, local products and artisanal producers. By partnering with this small Michele et Augustin company, Starbucks is attempting to tap into this artisanal trend."

Hitting it big in America

Starbucks wound up doing a test run of Michel et Augustin cookies in 415 stores and in January decided to roll the cookies out nationally in all 7,624 of its locations. It's hard to say whether it was the guerrilla video effort or the personal visit that made the difference. Than again, maybe it was just the cookies, which were already generating buzz in the months since they'd come to New York.

Cochaud believes the visit had a lot to do with it. "We had a tasting session, and Howard served me coffee," she recalls, adding that Schultz was impressed with "our entrepreneurial way of thinking."

"I think he was touched because he remembered when he was an entrepreneur," she said.

For its part, Starbucks seemed swayed most by the cookies—but the social media effort probably didn't hurt, either. "Foremost, we look for a delicious product made with quality ingredients," a spokesperson told Adweek, adding, "We always appreciate a spirited and authentic story from a passionate entrepreneur like Michel et Augustin."

Michel et Augustin's Charlotte Cochaud chats with Howard Schultz (center) at Starbucks' corporate headquarters

Specs
Who CEO and ecd Matt Faulk
What Brand design agency
Where San Diego

Matt Faulk founded the agency Basic to help lifestyle, fashion and entertainment brands tap into youth culture. It sure can't hurt that the 30-person agency is comprised of a room full of 20-somethings. As a millennial himself, Faulk acknowledged it can be challenging working with experienced Fortune 500 CEOs and telling them how to run their businesses, but he knows how to win them over. "We go in and try to sell the personality of our team," Faulk said. "We're confident in our work and will put it up against anybody's." That strategy has helped win BB Dakota, Nixon watches and Incase. Basic in February worked with fashion brand BB Dakota, launching a new website, complete with videos and articles aimed at millennial women. By positioning BB Dakota as a lifestyle brand, Basic helped boost sales and attract more customers to the website.

This story first appeared in the April 11 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

A few days after Christmas 2015, visitors to Guns N' Roses' website noticed that something looked different. Atop the page was the band's bullet logo, a pair of opposite-facing revolvers girdled by a thorny rose stem. It hadn't been used since the group's early days.

For much of the world, the change passed unnoticed. But for the GNR faithful—especially those who'd been in mourning since the punk-metal powerhouse's disintegration circa 1993—it was a sign. As Loudwire.com reasoned, "The emblem is synonymous with the band's classic lineup," and that, concluded E! Online, meant one thing: "A reunion may be in the works."

As we know now, a reunion is exactly what it'll be. Sporting three-fifths of its original lineup, the band that Salon called "a high-functioning, talented train wreck" will play two Saturday nights at Coachella later this month, and then kick off 20 stadium dates that promise to be "the most chaotic tour of 2016."

Frontman Axl Rose (l.) and guitarist Slash are the best-known members of GNR's classic lineup—one symbolized by the group's original logo, which promoters couched in a desert landscape (r.) for the Coachella festival the band will headline. Photo: Kevin Mazur

That the most notorious metal band of the 1980s (OK, except for Mötley Crüe) will be headlining a music festival in the California desert is proof of an unlikely phenom: The hair metal that Gen Xers rocked out to is now legitimate fare for their millennial offspring. "We don't have arena rock bands now, and there's a need for that," explained Andrew Hampp, a former editor at Billboard who's now vp of brand strategy at music-marketing firm Mac Presents. "Now that it's been a full generation and a half since Appetite for Destruction, there's a lot for [younger fans] to connect with."

They'll connect with the music, of course, but also with millions of dollars of Guns N' Roses merch. Which brings us back to that logo.

It's among the most famous band insignias ever created—up there with Led Zeppelin's fallen angel and the Rolling Stones' hot lips. And, like many brand badges, GNR's has undergone some revisions—from the skull-and-cross design (generally credited to tattoo artist Bill White) that adorned 1987's Appetite for Destruction to the communist-style red stars of 2008's Chinese Democracy (which few recall because frontman Axl Rose was the only original member still in the band).

But it was GNR's original logo—the Bullet—that still quickens the pulse. It appeared on 1986's Live ?!@ Like a Suicide, a four-track EP pressed shortly after the GNR came together from the ruins of bands Hollywood Rose and the L.A. Guns. Popular lore holds that drummer Steven Adler drew the design himself—a great story, but one that's hard to credit given Adler's reputation for being zonked on coke and heroin much of the time.

But wherever it came from, the logo—which will appear on the official guitar picks Slash is using on the tour—is a rock icon, even in its variant forms. "It's gotten to the point where just about any rose tattoo is synonymous with the band," Hampp said. "It's transcended the Bullet."

This story first appeared in the April 11 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Specs
Current gig Head of marketing and partner solutions, Viacom
Previous gig Head of sales and marketing, music and entertainment, Viacom
Age 52
Snapchat mainchair2323

Adweek: You've been in sales at Viacom for 11 years—a year in this new role. Where have you left your mark? 
Jeff Lucas: When I started with the entertainment group [in 2007], I made it client centric. And then when I got to the music group, I made that client centric. Prior to that, all the different channels [had separate sales forces]. And what I found was we had about 10 different sales forces based on whatever networks they covered competing with each other. It's not really all about competing for money; you're competing for time. And it's very hard when you're going to clients that have over 100 paid cable networks coming to them, plus radio, plus digital, which can be ad networks' platforms, plus print, newspaper.

How are your clients reaching millennials?
We put content on a constant basis every day across all those platforms. We also allow an advertiser to go for a ride along those platforms. We have a very big component called Viacom Velocity, which is our integrated marketing arm. And that is also our content creation arm—we've built an entire creative agency within our house. The No. 1 thing the clients are looking for is how to appeal to millennials in that authentic voice that will resonate with them.

How do you know what will resonate?
[Viacom has a proprietary measurement tool called Echo Social Graph] that's all about sentiment analysis. When content starts to go viral, we want to know what's what. We just created for you something to share with your friends; when you share it, you're going to get comments back, and we want to know what those comments are. So we track those comments in part with social tech platform Canvs, which measures 56 different emotions for that sentiment analysis. And of the 56 different emotions, the No. 1 emotion you want is brand love. And you want that to be true brand love. If you can resonate so much that a client loves that piece of content, wants to share it and really believes in it, that's going to be someone who's going to use that product, someone who's going to buy that product. And you're not going to get much closer to someone's heart on that product.

What's some recent millennial-geared content Viacom has produced?
The Hershey's What's Up Moms holiday campaign. We found that the What's Up Moms [a troupe of funny moms with a YouTube channel] resonate better than anybody with millennial moms. With Hershey's it was holiday cheats. So all these different ways like you can influence your decoration, your creativity for the holidays through things around the house. One was making a really cool thing with a sled and candy canes, putting the Hershey bar right on it as the part of the sled.

How is Viacom adapting to what millennials want?
MTV News is coming back, because all the research shows that millennials want to know about the news and they don't necessarily trust nor like traditional news services. They want to find news digitally.

Is Kurt Loder back?
No, it's so funny you say that, though. I did say once maybe we should do promos with him leading into the new guy—Dan Fierman, who came from Grantland.

Last question—looking toward Gen Z, what are you doing?
I think Gen Z is top of mind right now.

So millennials are over?
Well, no, no, no. But you always have to look where you're going. You have to look where you are and look where you're going. You have to look ahead.

This story first appeared in the April 11 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Millennials famously crave deeper, meaningful involvement with the world around them—and they often view athletic footwear, apparel and gear as a means of strengthening that connection and enhancing their personal growth. While old-school appeals focused on sports stars, product performance and fashion are still in the running, some brands have pivoted in recent years, taking an increasingly holistic, lifestyle-focused approach to get their pitches across the finish line with the all-important young-adult demographic.

"For the millennial generation, their relationship with brands is more than just 'tell me,'" said Al Moseley, president and chief creative officer at 180 Amsterdam. "They need actions and authenticity that show you can be a valuable part of their lives."
 

KEDS

Themes of personal empowerment and confidence—hallmarks of millennial-focused marketing—are amplified in recent work from Keds. Allison Williams, Ciara and Tori Kelly portray strong, capable women prepared for all challenges that might come their way. Crafted by KBS, the work reflects the "multifaceted character" of its audience, said Keds chief marketer Emily Culp. "I focus on developing with my team content that should not only be able to stand on its own, but also consumed together to create a richer story." Though the message is heartfelt, Keds keeps the atmosphere light in the ads tagged "Ladies First Since 1916," striking "exactly the right tone" for millennials, who don't appreciate preachy ads, said Matt Powell, a sports industry analyst at NPD Group.

SPALDING

Walton Isaacson's first work for Spalding, which sells athletic equipment and apparel, is something of a hybrid. Launched in February, "True Believers" fuses athlete-endorsement tropes—Portland Trail Blazer Damian Lillard is featured—with content that encourages fans to believe in themselves and make the most of their abilities. The work attempts to forge a bond between the brand and consumers, positioning Spalding as a team player in helping them realize their own hoop dreams. "This strategy has been successful for us in reaching millennials because it delivers an experience and not just a product," said Kenyatta Bynoe, Spalding's vice president of marketing.

Spalding True Believer: Damian Lillard from #TrueBelievers on Vimeo.

ASICS

This year, 180 has launched two very different campaigns for Asics with millennials in mind. "One With the City," which broke last week, employs quirky animation to tout the new Tiger GEL-Kayano Trainer EVO sneaker. The centerpiece video shows a cool dude whose body is comprised of buildings, bridges, road signs and other familiar elements of the urban scene.

Asics' "Want It More," which dropped in February, fuses lifestyle and "tough-fitness" motifs, presenting fiercely determined millennials who work up a sweat in weight rooms, on yoga mats and in boxing rings. That effort "speaks most powerfully to something deep inside the women and men who make up the millennial generation," said Judy Austin, a marketing professor at Boston University. "I am in awe of the artful balance that portrays women as equal with men."

BROOKS RUNNING

The undead enliven Leo Burnett's cheeky cinematic spot for Brooks, in which zombies invade a town and head straight for the sneaker aisle. Donning Brooks shoes, they go for a dawn (of the dead) run and undergo an amazing change that illustrates the tagline, "Running makes you feel alive." In the spot, Brooks attempted to portray the transformative power of the product, but not everyone approves of how they brought the message to life. "While zombies do resonate with this generation, the commercial seems inadequate in linking core millennial values with the product," said Manish Tripathi, co-director of the Marketing Analytics Center at Emory University's Goizueta Business School.  

CONVERSE

Of course, millennials came of age in a world saturated with digital media and social sharing, and they generally expect their favorite brands to be as tech savvy as they are. Converse, working with ad shop Anomaly, answered that call last week, introducing an interactive mobile game starring Vadim Makhorov and Vitaliy Raskalov, who became famous for scaling skyscrapers worldwide. Packed with dazzling aerial photography, the game—touting the Chuck Taylor All Star II line—lets users share the experience with the extreme climbers as they ascend Moscow's 1,112-foot-tall Mercury City Tower. NPD's Powell said the offering smartly taps into millennials' "sense of adventure and their love of video games." Around Valentine's Day, the Anomaly team released an innovative split-screen film, Lovesick: Converse Couples, spotlighting dancers, musicians, graffiti artists and others who discuss their work and relationships. That push has garnered considerable praise for its inventive storytelling, with critics applauding the fact that Chucks aren't shoehorned into the narrative.

This story first appeared in the April 11 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

What's the matter with "kids" today … at work? Across our great nation, grumpy middle managers, executives and owners alike are wondering who these fresh-faced, impatient and entitled millennials think they are with all their outsized demands.

I'm here to tell you.

Scott Hess

At the intersection of evolving generational values and the empowering nature of new technologies resides a new type of worker, one for whom a j-o-b is supposed to be (gasp) f-u-n. It's supposed to mean something more than just a paycheck.

Perhaps today's millennial salarymen and women are the figurative sons and daughters of Office Space's infamous Peter Gibbons, who put it thusly: "Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements."

Gen X peers, let us not forget: Peter Gibbons is one of us. He said out loud what we were all thinking in the late 1980s, and now, the millennial workplace invasion seems to have adopted his clear-eyed vision as their workaday ethos. Should we really be mad at them? As we seek to recruit, motivate, manage and retain young workers, here are a few things we might want to accept, or even embrace.

It's all about work-life integration
Mad that your twenty-something staffer doesn't alt-tab away from Facebook when you slither up behind her? OK. But how do you feel when she answers your email in seconds at 10 p.m. on a Wednesday? Unlike Gen X icon Allen Iverson, for whom "practice" and "the game" famously were separate, millennials see work and life as an integrated whole, reflective of an ongoing journey to find meaning and money, together. Bring on the nap rooms and the mindfulness classes.

And don't tell me about how "we" didn't get to mix business with pleasure. Fact is we mostly couldn't. If we were lucky enough to have a computer, we didn't have email yet. And if we had a phone on our desk, it didn't dial long distance unless we punched in a code. Many of us even had to log our personal calls. Dude …

Let's face it, when we went to work, we were stuck there. Our desks were where we sat, and we worked (or at least did a good job faking it). If we wanted an illicit break, we smoked, God help us.

Why won't our young colleagues sit still? Because they have more computer firepower in their front jeans pocket than we did in our entire server closet. Because they have more connectivity in the coffee shop next door than we did in the executive video-conference suite upstairs. Let 'em roam.

Parents are on board
Think millennials spend way too much time thinking about and talking about their parents? Shouldn't they just grow up? You're missing the point. At our agency, as we began to plan for another rousing edition of "Bring Your Kids to Work" day, one millennial employee joked, "Oh, you mean 'The Parade of the Bosses' Kids?'"

What did they want instead? "Parents' Day!" Before you roll your eyes and launch into a rant about how these young employees need to learn to stand on their own two feet while pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, consider this: We tried it. And it was awesome.

More than 100 moms and dads (and grandparents!) joined us in our office the first year, and more than 150 showed up for the second. Coming to Chicago from as far away as New York and San Francisco, these engaged "olds" (many of whom were, sadly, about my age) joined their kids for a half-day program comprising media agency basics, a parenting panel, a job shadowing segment and one of the most rip-roaring happy hours in agency history. Want to engage and retain your millennial employees? Maybe start by wooing their parents.

LinkedIn is the scoreboard (and the switchboard)
Here's another path to engaged millennial employees: show them explicitly how their current job responsibilities will translate into a more robust LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: LinkedIn is a client.) That's right—help them write their digital resumes by clearly spelling out the skills they're gaining by working for you.

Wait, what? We're supposed to help our millennial employees advertise themselves to other prospective employers?

Whereas those of us over 30 likely spent the first five years of our careers buried in cubicles laboring to gain intel and contacts across our broader industry, millennials are plugging into the LinkedIn matrix on Day One (or before) and thereby gaining an immediate window on the job market.

This is a genie whose bottle is broken, folks. LinkedIn offers our young colleagues and charges a kind of career scoreboard that they love to light up. And by helping them do so, we're not only keeping them happy and engaged, we're also burnishing our own reputations as managers and employers.

They don't know the rules
Forget everything else I've written—which is easy to do if you're as old as I am—and remember this: If you want your millennial employees to act, work or dress a certain way, you may just need to tell them.

The unwritten rules of the workplace are gone. Jos. A. Bank and Brooks Brothers are no longer the unofficial haberdashers of the first job. Headphones are the new fedoras. And the mass of millennials don't go home to change before they head "out for the night." They're already stylin'.

Contrast that with when I landed my first "real" job in 1989. I knew how I was expected to dress: just like my father did. Dark suit. Red-ish tie. Muted shirt. No hats indoors. No headphones over my ears as I walked to the fax machine. No vintage high-tops or uncommonly cool Stance socks adorning my calves. The rules were the rules, and they had been that way for generations.

We did not make personal calls during work time. We did not manage our daily fantasy sports games or our nightly Netflix-dates from our smartphones. We did not eat fragrant sushi or food-truck enchiladas at our desks. These things weren't done. Hell, in many cases, they didn't exist!

Today's young employees likely enter the workplace without a monolithic notion of how things are supposed to be. Dress codes are many and varied, if not nonexistent. Rules and customs around social media and personal phone calls and meals aren't ironclad; they vary from company to company and job to job.

Millennials don't march into our offices with native notions of how things are done here. They're neither dumb nor rebellious. They're new, just like the rules. So if you expect things to be done a certain way, be explicit. Don't assume they know. They don't.

Granted, given their desire for work-life integration, they're likely to resent rules that are too constricting. Which might lead them to call their parents to complain. Or to update their LinkedIn profiles ...

Based in Chicago, Scott Hess (@scotthess) leads "Human Intelligence" at Publicis agency Mediavest | Spark.

Last week, we looked at a project from a Brazilian photographer who invited friends over and took their photos after one, two and three glasses of wine. That seemed like a fun exercise in shedding inhibitions.

This week, we're featuring a project from Trinidadian-born, New York City-based photographer Patrick Struys that was surely a lot more awkward for the people involved.

For the "Porn Portraits" series, Struys had his subjects sit in a viewing booth and watch five and a half minutes of pornography—a video he assembled personally—and took their photos by positioning the camera lens through a peephole. The reactions are pretty amusing, ranging from laughter to shock to sheer embarrassment.

Check out a bunch of the photos here: 

The subjects knew they were being photographed, which was part of the concept. And that created a complex dynamic—the subjects are reacting to being watched watching porn, as much as they are reacting to the porn itself. This makes them charmingly vulnerable, which they each deal with in their own way. 

"Being photographed for the whole duration of the film addressed head on the way the subjects expressed themselves when faced with sex in a nonsexual or 'public' situation," Struys tells AdFreak.

Struys says he tried to make the video as inclusive as possible to every person's sexual orientation and/or tastes. The subject themselves appear to be naked, too, though actually they weren't. "The women were actually wearing tube tops, and the men were shirtless," Struys says. "The intention to have them appear naked was driven by the fact that people usually are in some 'state of nakedness' when they are being sexual—whether that is participating or watching in private."

Laughter was a very common reaction to the awkward situation. "The reactions were great," Struys says. "Obviously, initially people did laugh or smile. However, usually about two or three mins in is when I would get their more 'honest' or 'natural' reactions.' "

Struys believes his presence as a straight man heavily influenced the results.

"It became very obvious to me that women and gay men were much more comfortable showing their interest or expressing their sexuality in front of a straight man behind the camera," he says. "That was something I hadn't really taken into consideration when I first started. I wasn't expecting to encounter as many of those moments. However, all the straight men seemed very uncomfortable watching the film with me present and expressed this by laughing, joking and talking throughout the entire shoot."

See lots more of the photos below.