Creative Criminals

At the river Rhine, the building of the former Bayer headquarters in Leverkusen, Germany, was altered into a giant billboard with more than 5 million LED lights covering a total of 17,500 square meters (188,000 square feet).

The results of all these LED lights is an amazing light show. For those of you who do not believe that this project is real, they made a making of movie of the project (See after the jump). Unfortunately if you do not speak German, it will be hard to understand.

I’m totally owning Sander his post earlier this day, where there is only one tiny post-it light =)

Bayer AG, third largest pharmaceutical company in the world, is well-known for its original brand of aspirin.

Brilliant in it’s simplicity! I can’t explain exactly why, I think it’s just one of those ads you like or don’t like.
When I saw it the first time I just immediatly thought of post-it’s whitout even seeing the brand on the bottom right. So I don’t know if it’s such a good way to fight the competition of 3M with their post-it’s.

Creative Criminals just can’t hold back.. We want to foresee our followers of the best commercials ever made in the whole world. And with ‘ever’ we mean from the day advertising began.
That’s why Tuesday is from now on a special day for Creative Criminals, called Vintage Tuesday where we publish tv ads, print ads and many others, from the early days..



We will continue to do so for 6 months.. Thereafter, the Vintage-category will gradually be supplemented with new material.
For this weeks Vintage Tuesday we have some commercials that promote smoking. Nowadays it is forbidden to promote a smoking-brand, but in the 30’s till the 90’s it was a whole different story..

PRINT ADS
The following print ads are from L&M (1954), Lucky Strike (1937) and Camel (1956).. The three of them used famous American idols to promote their brand.

Fredrick March, an American stage and film actor that won an Oscar for Best Actor in 1932 (Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde) promotes L&M and says: “L&M Filters are just what the Doctor ordered!“.

Alice Roosevelt, the oldest child of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, promotes the brand Lucky Strike and claims “They’re a light smoke, kind to the throat“.

And the third one is from Phil Silvers, an American entertainer and comedy actor promotes Camel cigarettes with his motto “You bet I’d walk a mile for a Camel“.

Spicy detail, they respectively died of cancer, emphysema (a result of many years of heavy smoking) and a heart attack..

VIDEOS
In the first video you can see how the ‘Kool’ cigarettes tasted so fresh and so clean. It was almost like you had to smoke a cigarette to have a mint breath! Unbelievable..

Check out the rest of this post to see three other TV-ads. The first two ads are promoted by Doctors (!) and the last one is just funny..
Products Tobacco
Country: USA

A transparent decal was placed on this transit shelter to show distance runner Bernard Lagat crashing through. In the second ad the decal is placed on two buildings, so it looks like Lagat is running through the buildings. These two illusions were made for Nike.

Maybe some of you know Ron James, a Canadian stand-up comedian now working for CBC. When the CBC gave Ron the go ahead to do his own series he wanted to develop an animated segment of the stories when he was a kid. For the series they used adult heads and children’s bodies, which is occasionally creepy (in a cool way).

I don’t know why I like this ad, but I think it’s pretty good. I’m not going to tell you how it ends, you just have to watch it for yourself. We’ve seen some similar stuff before, but this one caught me off guard.

A while ago Rindert posted a really cool series of print ads for Absolut wodka. Today I found a new one, but I haven’t posted this one for the creativeness of the ad. I just like the fact a bottle can become so famous, they don’t need to put a label on it, everyone knows this is a bottle of Absolut…

This commercial was made for Medal Paint. At first I did not get their slogan “The right colour matters”. But look closer at the colour of the cat.

In New Zealand this advertising campaign is a huge succes. It is for Instant Kiwi, the New Zealand Lotteries and is about a doofus, named Doug and his alter ego ‘Mexi Doug’. His alter ego is played by Leand Macadaan, a Filipino and he is so popular that many groups were created on Facebook and he even has his own site. The idea is simple, a bit vintage and really funny.. that explains the enormous succes!

The ad ‘Get a Perm’, was listed as one of the most popular commercials in New Zealand on TVNZ Fair Go Ad Awards.

To see more of the Instant Kiwi ads,

I can imagine some people don’t like this post that much, but I think it’s genious! This concept is so simple but it gives such a cool result. Even in the shadow of womens daily activities they can get a nice tan…