Weekly wrapup: Beer-inspired silliness FTW, 'hipster' Santa fail

FTW or fail

Each week we select one campaign or marketing move that we agree is 'FTW' (for the win) and one that...isn't.

FTW: The latest silliness from Australia's Carlton & United Breweries and Clemenger BBDO Melbourne (above). It's a series of short clips—all hashtagged with #hellobeer—celebrating the weird activities a group of guys might get up to when they've had a few. We concede that the average group of beer-drinking dudes might not be this ambitious (or this as adept at making props), but the target audience will certainly get a kick out of these, which is the point. It's not quite as blissful as 'Beer chase', but definitely another winner.

FAIL: We're staying down under for #hipstersanta, a campaign by BMF for a shopping mall in Sydney. This is a prime example of trying too hard. Check out the Hipster Santa's website and Twitter feed (200 followers!) for copywriting gems such as these:

I'm down with all shades of the colour red, maintaining my dense and luscious chin-mane, soy lattes and curating cool at Christmas.  

I'm from a place cooler than the North Pole, but you probably haven't heard of it.

Your Christmas gifts totes need Hipster Santa's approval or they're just not worth giving.

Sorry, BMF, we usually like your work, but this is totes overwrought. And at risk of sounding like cooler-than-thou hipsters ourselves, the whole hipster thing (including the whole 'making fun of hipsters' thing) is so over. 

Top stories

The most-read items on CampaignAsia.com for the week of 6 through 12 December.

• 2013 Agency of the Year / Network of the Year winners
• Draftfcb closes Hong Kong office
• Haymarket launches Stuff.tv, relaunches Stuff Singapore magazine
• Mondelez consolidates media with Carat across region
• 'Fast-track Asia' to lead world adspend growth: ZenithOptimedia
• McCann veteran Paul Swee rejoins Hong Kong office as ECD
• Microsoft's Frederique Covington Corbett to head marketing at Twitter APAC
• Minute Maid adds spots of 'sunshine' to grey Shanghai haze
• Unilever, Mindshare detail impact of digital-video GRP buying in recent Singapore campaign
• Red Communication wins Singapore Tourism Board, Tigerair Mandala

Distractions

A few items that crossed our glowing screens this week, most of which are at least tangentially related to marketing.

1. The saga of the Ikea stuffed wolf in Hong Kong. The brand's innocent stuffed toy sold out in the city's three Ikea stores after it became an unwitting political symbol because of two coincidences: 1) Hong Kong has given its much-despised chief executive the nickname 'the Wolf' and 2) The translation of the toy's Swedish name into written Chinese on Ikea's mainland website, when pronounced in Cantonese, is a homonym for an extremely vulgar phrase (this blogger on the Huffington Post will be happy to tell you the vulgar phrase). To relate this to marketing, Ikea handled the situation well by announcing it would donate the sales windfall to charity. 

2. Back in October, Hitachi devised a new corporate vision and then crafted a song to express it enthusiastically. Very enthusiastically. We didn't share it sooner because...well, we must have blocked out the experience. But the world needs to see it. So join us, won't you, in belting out the rousing, poetic lyrics:

Hitachi delivers innovations
That answer society's challenges
With our talented team
And proven experience in global markets
We can inspire
We can inspire
We can inspire the world
The world
The world
The woooooorld!

3. This impressive bit of special-effects work from Honda (by W+K London and Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith at Nexus Productions) came out back in July, but crossed our screens this week because it won a 'TVC of the Year' award in the UK. The concept was to illustrate the company's creativity through the explorations of a pair of hands. Give those hands a hand.

4. This is a Japanese ad for tyres. Our apologies in advance.

That's all for this week. For those taking off after today for the holidays, we wish you a wonderful season and happy new year. For those working next week, like us, we'll have some fun things to share with you—we've been hoarding Christmas TVCs, for example. So stay tuned. As always, thanks for reading Campaign Asia-Pacific.