The 2011 Joshys: Part II

Part I

The Don Draper Award: The coolest of the year. Advertising like this is what makes people want to go into advertising.

Winner: Heineken’s “The Entrance”

Cool visuals, a cool song by The Asteroids Galaxy Tour (not Avril Lavigne…), and just overall full of fun swagger.

Honorable mention: Anything else Heineken.

The Durr Award: The dumbest of the year. A very competitive award. Crap like this makes people hate commercials.

Winner (loser?): The stupid Fiat commercials with Jennifer Lopez.

Gratuitous and lame. The one with the dancing is worse, though J.Lo “driving” though the Bronx was terrible too. Especially since it was a body double in the Bronx.

Dishonorable mention: Miller Lite’s “Man Up” campaign and Coors Light’s bar exam spots.

American megabreweries have a low-brow reputation and commercials like these play right into it. Miller Lite isn’t manly. And I thought it was amusing how the Coors Light bar exam ads were played endlessly in the summer, when real law school grads were fretting over the real bar exam.

The Timothy Leary Award: The trippiest commercials. You might not have been on drugs, but these made you feel like it.

Winner: “Heart’s Desire” from Sonic

Love it. Trippy as all hell, this seems like it could be either a drug-induced fantasy or maybe just a fat person’s fantasy. Influenced by The Big Lebowski. The song is really catchy too.

Honorable mention: The Toyota Prius “People Person” commercial. Weird stuff.

The Field of Dreams Award: Field of Dreams is a movie that is known to make grown men cry. This award goes to those tearjerker commercials that have the same potential.

Winner: Johnson & Johnson’s Hospice Nurses

Either of Johnson & Johnson’s other nursing spots could have won, but the “Hospice Nurses” ad had the most personal impact on me.

Honorable mention: “It’s Time” from Get Up!

One of the best defenses of marriage equality that you’ll ever see.

The Onion Award: Best satirical commercial.

Winner: Toyota Venza’s “Social Network”

A very funny campaign. And it’s nice to see that the Facebook generation can take a joke as well as we can dish them out.

Honorable mention: Samsung’s “The Next Big Thing”. People who camp out for consumer products are morons.

Sonic’s Psychedelic Trip

Saw this on AdFreak today, and it’s too good not to include here.

Great commercial. It seems Harold and Kumar would love Sonic too. Cheesy tots sound real nice about now. Not surprisingly, the visuals were inspired by The Dude’s dream sequence in The Big Lebowski. Just listen to the song too. So hypnotic. Delightfully bizarre, but it definitely works.

Vampires Eat At Sonic Too

First, let me apologize for the lack of postage the last few days. A slight case of writer’s block and the need to watch a 19 inning baseball game have thrown me off. But here we go again.

This is…weird. I guess this takes Sonic’s approach of off-kilter car conversations over Sonic and brings it up a notch. Though the end seems to suggest that it’s viewer created, so that could explain some of the weirdness. Sonic’s overall marketing is brilliant though. The company advertises nationally, which means commercials are shown in places where the closest Sonic isn’t for hundreds of miles. This has a few benefits. First, it increases the chances that consumers will want to visit a Sonic while traveling. Second, it makes the chain more popular in new locations. I remember seeing Sonic commercials on Boston TV stations in college, and then the first Massachusetts location opened in August 2009 with waits of up to four hours.

But this ad and many of Sonic’s others remind me of a certain one-hit wonder.