This is Your Date on Heineken

Okay. You know how perfume and car ads are predictable, banal and basically always objectively suck? Beer ads have this magic way of being the opposite. Think Stella, think Heineken -- hell, think Budweiser for every last Super Bowl as far back as you can remember. What is it about the beer sector that takes a possibility and just stretches it beyond imaginable elasticity...? I have cream dreams about doing beer. (The ads. Not, like ... bottles.)

I'm late to the game in discovering "The Date" (Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam -- of course!), and probably wouldn't ever have seen it if I wasn't doing Epica Awards judging this year, but it has this fancy-free Shangri-La magic that makes you want to go back to the '70s and dance on a table or something.

The making-of is jam-packed with the same playful irony for double the time:

Gaultier Lovers Leave a Scent Long After They're Gone

This ad for Le Mâle, the men's fragrance by Jean Paul Gaultier, has been all over TV this week. It kinda bummed me out until the day I randomly opened the My Little Paris app on my iPhone and saw the variant for Classique (pour femme):



Delectable work that speaks to the respective sexes. See the makings-of here and here.

Previous campaigns reveal Jean Paul Gaultier favors other-side-of-the-coin ads for his dual (and dueling?) fragrances, distilling how vulnerability and predatory instinct manifest in both sexes. This series is called L'Appartement.

You can see what kind of thought went into them, as well as clips from previous series, in this set of videos featuring "maître parfumeur" Francis Kurkdjian:

Kurkdjian on Le Mâle (with English translations):



Kurkdjian on Classique:

Speaking of Rejuvenating the Glossy...

...there's more than one way to skin a cat, and they don't all have to be digital. BONUS -- in this case, an advertiser's responsible.

For client BIC Uruguay, agency TBWA works with print mag Freeway to create an edition entirely in ballpen. It's beautiful; you can almost smell the ink! But maybe that's the pop music workin' its magic on me.

The work reminded me a little of this Mexican Scribe ad, where a boy's entire world is remade in notebook paper.