Giant Balloons Company

– Christie Brinkley’s daughter, Sailor, will appear in her first ever ad campaign at the age of 15 for Claire’s.

– Apparel company Primitive has gathered together the hotness of all its models; Christine Mendoza, Alexis Lopez, Justene Jaro and Rosanna Castillio, among others, under the Twitter and Instagram hashtag #primitiveladies.

– Digiday takes a look at why so many media planners are women.

– Working with RPA, Honda, basically copying the Old Spice Response Video campaign, launched a campaign that would respond to people who tweeted why they want a new car with the hastag #wantnewcar

– How Carlsberg beer became so awesome.

– Gatorade makes it easy to do it one more time.

– Here’s that Confused.com “blowjob” ad.

Taking a page out of the Honda Cog playbook — which took a page out of the Rube Goldberg playbook — Purina, with help from Deep Focus, released new work that has dogs partaking in an intricately staged feeding session.

It’s one thing to get multiple machines to perform in perfect Rube Goldberg harmony. It’s quite another when you add the unpredictability of animals. But Deep Focus achieved admirable — if not delightfully cute — success with this impressive work for Purina.

Who knows if that last tennis ball had help reaching the dominos and who cares? It’s a wonderful piece of work and who doesn’t love a good dog trick video? Clearly a few do as the video, released July 2, has been viewed 1,722,534 times on YouTube.

We’re not sure if this Dove Camera Shy parody entitled Creepy Dude is funny, annoying or just plain bad. In the parody which follows the original’s theme of girls hiding from the camera, a creepy dude begins to photo bomb shy girls in various scenarios. It them gets really creepy when Creepy Dude comes front and center to completely disrobe. It closes by asking, “Why did you start thinking you were beautiful?”

Can we have that 1:08 back, please?

This past Canada Day weekend, john st. teamed up with a new not-for-profit, Stop the Drop, to help raise awareness for the drop in Lake Huron’s water levels and drive government action. The result was a stunt that called attention to the plight of Lake Huron’s lowering water levels by placing hundreds of messages in bottles on the beach giving voice to a lake that can’t ask for help on its own.

Often times I like to use what I call the “alien test” when reviewing advertising. What’s the “alien test” you ask? Well just imagine if an alien race decided to come check us out and, while orbiting the planet and listening ion on our activities, they found this thing called YouTube. And on this thing called YouTube they found this MySpace promotional video (released last month) in which the likes of Pharell, Ciara and Mac Miller cavort with a bunch of hipsters.

Just what would these aliens think while watching these people jump around like buffoons and break stuff while listening to noise that appears to have been designed to poke holes in the ear drum?

Yea. They’d quickly move on to the next planet. Whether or not humans decide to stop by a take a look at MySpace of move on to the next thing is unclear at this point. The music-focused social network recently boasted 31 million unique site visitors in the 14 days following its recent re-launch.

Way back in 2009, BBH London created a seat-of-your-pants commercial for UK soda brand Robinsons. The ad showed the edge-of-your-seat excitement British fans experienced as they cheered for a British player to win for the first time in 73 years. A win that, sadly, never happened. Now, after 77 years — and four years after BBH London created the ad — Britain has won Wimbledon and the Robinsons ad now has a proper ending.

Over the July 4 break, Britain’s Andy Murray won Wimbledon, besting Novak Djokovic to bring Britain’s 77 year losing streak to an end. A voiceover added to the end of the original ad reads, Worth the wait, wasn’t it?”

Worth the Wait:

Original ad:

– True Blood’s Kristin Bauer van Straten gushes about her No Kill Los Angeles animal shelter dog.

– SXSW is now accepting proposals for conference programming through its PanelPicker interface. Anyone can submit panel ideas which will then be voted upon by the community at a later date.

– For anyone who has southern blood running through their veins, this Chevy Silverado “Strong” commercial will resonate. Actually, it will resonate with just about any American.

– Here’s a couple of quirky Tempur-Pedic commercials from Carmichael Lynch that will make you Chuckle. One. Two.

While everyone is busy trashing Apple’s new “Designed by Apple in California” campaign, Droga5 is out with new work for Motorola that touts the brand’s new Moto X which is not just designed in America but also manufactured in America.

The print campaign hypes July 4th, American spirit, independence, freedom and, despite the challenge, the fact the phone will be designed, engineered and assembled in America. Which, if we were to nitpick, doesn’t really mean that each of the phone’s assembled components are actually all made in America.

But, hey, tomorrow’s July 4th and that means lots of food on the grill, delicious drink, time on the beach in the sun (finally) and boatloads of explosive fireworks. Oh, yea, and no work! So rather than nitpick, let’s just be happy the phone bbrand that used to be cool might actually be cool again.

Along with its hugely successful and Cannes Lions-winning Real Beauty Sketches, Dove is out with Camera Shy, a :60 that focuses on the propensity of many women to shy away from the camera when it’s aimed at them. Created by Ogilvy, the work is accompanied by ose Murphy’s “Peek-A-Boo” as woman after woman hide from the camera until a super asks, “When did you stop thinking you’re beautiful?”

It then shows images of little girls having no fear in front of the camera suggesting camera shyness is culturally induced. Which, of course, may be true. Except for the fact all one has to do is spend a little time on Instagram or Facebook or any number of other image-focused sites to find thousands of mirror shots and selfies.

Which, of course, is not to belittle the fact that, yes, many won are, in fact, camera shy and do question their beauty.

Today, Geico launches a new ad campaign that reminds us just how familiar we have become with the brand’s tagline, “Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen minutes or more on car insurance.” And they are having a bit of fun with the few who haven’t yet embedded it in their psyche.

In each of two ads, a person recites the line and another responds, “Everybody knows that” which causes the first person — feeling slightly off-put — to cite yet another insightful (and quite silly) fact.

In response to her husband, a wife, looking bewildered, responds, “Well, did you know that some owls aren’t that wise?” We then see two owls carrying on a discussion during which one owl is, in fact, not that wise.

In a second ad, a co-worker responds, “Well, did you know that Old MacDonald was a really bad speller?” We then, of course, see Old MacDonald himself screwing up a word no farmer should ever have difficulty with.

No doubt, we will see many other similar scenarios play out as the campaign progresses much is the same way we have seen with the quite brilliant “Happier Than” campaign.