Paranoël Activity

I'm pretty damn pleased with our agency Christmas card this year. Written and Directed by Acart Copywriter/Videographer Christopher Redmond, it takes a different perspective on that supernatural old guy who breaks into your house once a year while you and your children are asleep:



Thanks to DOP Karl Roeder for helping out.

And some of you may recognize the scary little boy. He has certainly kept me up on many a night.

F'd Ad Fridays: SFW Porn is not a great theme for an Agency Christmas Card

Via TEDOA

Well, duh. Safe For Work Porn is so three years ago.

Toys for tots, tits, tatts

With Christmas within arm's reach, all kinds of marketers are trying to get a piece of the spirit. It sometimes leads to odd couplings.

Chicago's Admiral Theater, which despite the classy name is actually a strip club, is offering to exchange one free lap dance for a donation of a toy for charity.

Aren't all lap dances for the "needy"?

In Memphis, Tattoo artist Jay Guzman is offering free tatts for a toy donation to his favourite Christian cause.

Huffington Post says that when customers bring in a toy worth $25 or more, Monday through Wednesday, they can get a tattoo or piercing of comparable price in exchange. Guzman said in an interview, "Everybody associates tattoo artists with being criminals, bikers, degenerates — and I'm a believing Christian and I believe what better way to be Christ-like than by giving back."

It's a good point. Strip clubs, tattoo parlours... if Jesus the man were here right now, that's exactly where he would do his ministry: among the very people his more hypocritical followers despise.

NZ church keeps up its irreverent Christian holiday ad tradition

St Matthews in the City Church in Auckland, NZ, is known for its controversial billboards. This Christmas, they did not disappoint:

Via stuff.co.nz and Copyranter

Here's a clearer image:

Via The Daily Mail

Well, how would you react if you were an engaged homeless virgin who just found out she was pregnant?


Vicar Glynn Cardy says the irreverent ad has a serious Christmas message:

"It's real. Christmas is real. It's about a real pregnancy, a real mother and a real child. It's about real anxiety, courage and hope. This billboard portrays Mary, Jesus' mother, looking at a home pregnancy test kit revealing that she is pregnant.   Regardless of any premonition, that discovery would have been shocking.  Mary was unmarried, young, and poor.  This pregnancy would shape her future.  She was certainly not the first woman in this situation or the last."

Screw the haters. I love these guys.

Other great St. Mathews billboards:

• This billboard will rise again
• God is an All-Blacks fan
• God is a hard act to follow
• Beware of God
• "Hell no, we're giving up pizza for Lent"
• Same-sex couples on Noah's Ark

PETA helps humans (for a change)

I have plenty of issues with some of PETA's promotional tactics, like sexploitation and making fun of human tragedy, but this campaign I really like.

Last week, PETA donated 100 cast-off fur coats to the Greater Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless, noting that people on the street are "the only people who have any excuse to wear them." They were then distributed free-of-charge.

Of course, they made note of the fact that all the furs had been "donated by erstwhile fur-wearers who, once they found out that animals on fur farms are often bludgeoned or genitally electrocuted, couldn't stand to have carcasses in their closets." PETA marks the coats to make resale impossible, and issues tax receipts to donors.

Donated furs are also used as bedding for animals in wildlife rehabilitation centers, or as props in anti-fur demos.

American audiences are not quite ready for Santa's other helper

No, not Zwarte Piet — although he's not welcome either in the New World.

This is Krampus, an Alpine demon who "finds a particularly naughty child, it stuffs the child in its sack and carries the frightened thing away to its lair, presumably to devour for its Christmas dinner."



What can I say? Those mountain volk are hardcore.

The specific Krampus tale in question is a stop-motion animation (the old-school technique used in the Rudolph Christmas classic) of the Krampmeister showing up at the home of some naughty kinder, licking them with his foot-long tongue,  thrashing the scheiße out of them and carrying them off. Doesn't it just warm your heart?



The short was produced for the holiday edition of Anthony Bourdain's Travel Channel show, No Reservations. According to Gawker, following news of the horrific Penn State child rapes and wide-ranging repercussions, the network felt it was just not the right time to lay this trip on America's parents and pulled it.

F'd Ad Fridays: What to do if Santa comes too soon

AdFreak posted this ad promoting the morning after pill as a seasonal thing. Seems a little not-so-jolly to me, making emergency contraception festive.

And BPAS, "the UK's leading abortion specialist", wants women to get their oops pills in advance just in case they have unsafe sex over the holidays.

It's a little weird. They do give the disclaimer, "The ‘morning after pill‘ should only be considered an emergency form of contraception, other, more effective forms of contraception are available" but it still feels like they're completely ignoring the whole STI issue.

At the American Apparel XXXmas party

The staff at the LA factory and head office apparently got drunk, disrobed, and modelled some awful Christmas sweaters.

So, you know, it was a lot like an ad agency party.

Source: Facebook

F'd Ad Fridays: Underwear models show off their intellect

This video Christmas card from Victoria's Secret isn't doing any favours for the dignity of the modelling trade.



What a bunch of boobs.

Via Illegal Advertising

American Atheist ads fight one myth with another

What a strange strategy. American Humanist is launching this Christmas campaign in Kearny, NJ, Washington, DC, Cranston, RI, Bastrop, LA, Oregon City, OR, Bryan/College Station, TX and Rochester Hill, MI, this month.

The odd assortment of target markets is based on AH's list of places where self-identified atheists have experienced discrimination in their communities.

Here's the example from Cranston:

Jessica Ahlquist, a student at Cranston High School West, filed a federal lawsuit asking that a prayer banner be removed from the public school. The banner, which violates the First and Fourteenth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, includes the phrases “Our Heavenly Father” and “Amen.” Local authorities are asking that the banner remain.  

According to a story in The Providence Journal, “students and adults have called [Ahlquist] a ‘stupid atheist,’ an ACLU tool, a witch and a ‘media whore.’ They’ve also threatened her through e-mails or at school, she says. A former classmate told her that, if she knew what he really thought of her, she would kill herself, she says.”

These bullying incidents, by peers and institutions, shouldn't be tolerated in any case. The implication is that in very "Christian" areas of the US, Atheist-bashing is tolerated by the public.

But is this any way to address the issue? I don't think so. Because various atheist causes have been running anti-belief campaigns like the one below, they continue to brand themselves as "anti-God" instead of just free-thinkers. While the message that there are other atheists out there is not specifically anti-religion, it will be taken as such by the very people who hate them. And so on. And so on. It's a very American "us versus them" approach.

My solution? Lose the whole "atheism" label. It makes the lack of religion sound like a religion itself. If you want to get through to people, don't attack a deeply-entrenched belief that they have not come upon through rational discovery. You cannot argue them out of it.

You need to show them that you are really so "good without God" that you feel no need for comparison. Just be the individual thinker who you say you are. Lead by example in showing the true Christian values of compassion, humility and charity — as opposed to the false Christian vices of xenophobia, pride and social coercion.

F'd Ad Fridays: 12 awkward days of Xmas from down under

Adrants shared this weird Australian underwear and sleepwear promo. It starts averagely enough, with cute little kids, but as the metaphors get stretched further and further in the quest to relate the song's gifts to people in their gitch, it just gets weirder and weirder.

And occasionally, sort of insulting.

The baritone singer is Jack Ladder. I would have preferred Tay Zonday.

Christian church ditches "Christmas", goes with pagan holiday instead

It's Halloween, sure, but The Bay put up their Christmas decorations in September. And when I was out for a walk near my office, I saw this banner on the side of Dominion-Chalmers United Church:

I belong to the United Church of Canada, even though I no longer attend. And I had never heard of anyone being afraid of calling "Christmas" by name.

Sure, there are places where name-checking a religious holiday is considered inconsiderate to those who do not follow the same gods and/or prophets. But I would have thought a Christian church, even a very liberal one, would be okay with putting the "Christ" in the whole thing.

Even stranger is the use of "Yule". I like the term, but it's a religious holiday too. It just happens to be a pagan German one that few today observe.

I'm not at all offended that a church I sort-of belong to (and Canada's largest Protestant denomination) decided to go this way. All I can figure is that they are trying to be welcoming to the diverse community of Centretown Ottawa. The UCC, after all, is the affirming church that welcomes people of all sexual orientations, and often holds religious weddings for people from other churches and religions that are no longer accepted in their own places of worship. It is also the church responsible for this ad:

But it still made me go "hmmmmm..." You?