Hobbs' Top 5 Weirdest Advertising Campaigns: March Edition

Number 5
Amour - Fantasies Happen
Agency - Dare

Advertising a pay-per-view adult entertainment channel on public television? Risky. There's nothing explicit here but plenty of amorous suggestion, portraying typical 'adult' situations but with a twist. Nothing happens. Reminding you that real-life is boring and good things only happen when they're scripted. Great.

Number 4
Huggies - Alfie the Baby
Agency - Ogilvy and Mather

In complete juxtaposition to number 5, Alfie the baby and his brother are promoting 'what happens in Huggies, stays in Huggies'. There's something intrinsically creepy about applying a slogan used more commonly on lads' football tours and stag do's to some nappies (The Hangover, anyone?). Although I do get the tenuous connection. This, coupled with the cutesy pie tweetings of Baby Alfie, just kind of freaks me out.

Number 3
Homeless Hotspots
Agency - BBH Labs

Clarence - clearly loving life

Getting a homeless person off the street? Giving them a chance to make money? Giving them a purpose in life? Sound's like a great idea! But wait, at this years SXSW, BBH gave these homeless souls 4G connectivity so that people attending could get better signal for their phones to tweet about what a revolutionary idea BBH had had. However, this caused a lot of controversy. BBH insist they wanted to put a face to the homeless by forcing people to make conversation in order to get a password, code, grail or whatever so they could get flaunt where they were to all their friends on foursquare. But a lot of people didn't see it like that, dehumanising them, reducing them to mere machines, they'll be taking the job of the talking clock soon. I think I'll leave it up to you decide on the ethics of this social experiment, but you can't deny it's a little weird.

Number 2
Cadbury's Creme Egg - Make them Goo!
Agency - MCSquared

Eight giant Creme Eggs in bullet-proof glass containers were moved around Ireland just before Easter. The eggs appeared to be quite content in their containers until people crowds began tweeting at them #tweet2goo. The more tweets the egg got the more agitated it became until eventually in an Alien-like fashion they exploded. Oh and you could win an ipad or something. Sound's pretty cool, right? Well yeah I guess it is, who doesn't want to see a giant egg explode? I just think it's weird because I don't, never have and never will understand why they all commit suicide? It's eggstraordinary... Sorry.

Number 1
Skittles - Touch the Rainbow
Agency - DDB Chicago

There is little I can say to explain the weird to you, so I feel you shall just have to experience the weird first hand. Mostly the monobrow one. Now Skittles never had normal advertising but a bad outbreak of skittlepox and a slightly rapey skittle encounter in the library are hard to be outdone. Especially the monobrow one.


Contract the Rainbow.


Pluck the Rainbow.


Crank the Rainbow.