Alexa Loses Her Voice (2018)

The Super Bowl is well known for having advertisements so brilliant that people sometimes tune in just to watch them, ignoring the sport beforehand! One of the best Superbowl commercials of all time was the 2018 advertisement for the Amazon Echo. It cost just shy of $15 million, which is around $17.7 million in today’s money. The advert features Alexa (Amazon’s famous virtual assistant) losing her voice, so a desperate scramble is made to find a replacement for it. Along the way, the company employs the help of a star-studded roster of voices, including Gordon Ramsay, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Rebel Wilson, Cardi B, and even Amazon’s own Jeff Bezos. It was a clever advertisement that certainly got people talking, in fact, it was the most-watched commercial on YouTube that year, raking in 50 million views. Amazon certainly haven’t cut their advertising budget since this famous commercial either, they’re regulars on the most expensive Super Bowl advertisements list.

Coca-Cola Hilltop (1971)

Whilst there are certainly commercials that have had bigger budgets than the Coca-Cola Hilltop ad, this is one of the ones that people remember the most fondly. This iconic advert cost $250,000 back in 1971, which might not seem like a lot now, but scaled for inflation, that’s around $1.8 million. At the time, it was the world’s most expensive television ad, but the fact that it has aged so well shows it was a worthwhile investment. The advertisement shows a huge group of people of all diverse backgrounds and cultures gathered together to enjoy a bottle of Coke together. The jingle was so popular that it made it to the top 10 in the Billboard charts, something a whole lot more of today’s adverts should aspire to!

Chanel No.5 The Film (2004)

The most expensive advertisement ever made is entitled No.5 The Film and cost $33 million when it was made in 2004, which is equivalent to around $52 million today. The advertisement took the form of a very short film, lasting 180 seconds. It was shot by the celebrated Baz Luhrmann and starred Nicole Kidman alongside Rodrigo Santoro. Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s late head designer, oversaw the costume department and even made a very short cameo in the finished piece. The film tells the story of a famous actress who runs away with an unknown, but devilishly handsome, man. The two fall in love on their adventure, and of course, the actress wears her Chanel No.5. It’s a beautiful piece of advertising made only more perfect by the stunning Clair de Lune soundtrack, performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

Honda Cog (2003)

Sometimes the best things are handmade, even when it comes to advertisements and the Honda ‘Cog’ commercial couldn’t be better proof of this. The car company decided that for their main 2003 commercial, they were going to create a chain reaction using different car parts. The advert lasted an unusually long two minutes and not a single part of it was computer generated. It was shot in one continuous shot, with no breaks, meaning it was a labour of love to get it exactly right. In the end, it took an eye-watering 606 takes to film correctly. The cost was $6.2 million, approximately $10 million adjusted for inflation; we hope that most of it was paid to the endlessly patient cameraman.

Aviva Names (2008)

This advert took a clever approach to rebranding when it decided that the British insurance company Norwich Union needed to change its name to Aviva. The company sought out famous people who had changed their names in order to make themselves a commercial success. They reached out to Bruce Willis, Ringo Starr, Elle Macpherson, and Alice Cooper and asked them to talk about how their name changes had helped to propel them to success. It was an interesting watch, though not nearly as visually spectacular as the other advertisements on this list. Thanks to the star-studded cast, this commercial’s total spends came in at $13.4 million, around $21.5 million adjusted for inflation today. For a relatively small company, which was a whole lot of money, but the brand has stood the test of time and is one of the UK’s main insurance providers today.

Almost 3 billion people are currently using automated voice software. Research by Brookings, a leading non-profit organization, states that 92.4% of smartphone assistants have traditionally featured female-sounding voices. Furthermore, according to Gartner, people will have more conversations with voice assistants than with their spouses. This form of AI is increasingly a part of our daily life. However, there have been numerous reports of widespread sexist and sometimes abusive language from users.

‘Shut up Sexism’ was created to highlight sexist or gender bias behaviour found when engaging with virtual assistants with female voices and names. A study by UNESCO (2019) outlined how virtual assistants responded to verbal abuse. As an example. When a user says ‘‘You are hot”, the replies vary from “How can you tell? You say that to all the virtual assistants” to “Thank You.”

Credits
Agency Network: Wunderman Thompson
Campaign: Shut up Sexism
Brand: Unilever
Tags: #LuxShutupSexism #LuxStopSexism #StopSexism #ShutUpSexism, Singapore, Electronics, Technology, Public Interest, NGO

“I’m so OCD!”

It’s a common phrase used today to describe anything from being neat freaks to being detail-oriented to being quirky. But the truth is that OCD is a real mental illness that intrudes on the lives of its sufferers. Every time we use the term lightly, we make it harder for actual sufferers to seek help.

To help raise awareness and break stigma during International OCD Awareness Week, the International OCD Foundation will partner with Amazon to give Alexa OCD traits.

*Note: This is student specific work and does not claimed by brand.

About:
The International OCD Foundation is a donor-supported nonprofit organization. Founded in 1986 by a small group of individuals with OCD, the Foundation has grown into an international membership-based organization serving a broad community of individuals with OCD and related disorders, their family members and loved ones, and mental health professionals and researchers around the world. We have affiliates in 25 states and territories in the US, in addition to global partnerships with other OCD organizations and mental health non-profits around the world.

Credits:
Daniel Kang – Copywriter
Samruddhi Pawar – Copywriter
Gabs Samame – Art Director
School: Miami Ad School NY

This campaign is about:
OCD, Technology, Awareness Campaign, International OCD Foundation, Obsessive compulsive disorder, Compulsive Assistance

#HeyUpdateMyVoice website

The movement

“In order to contribute to better education of current and future generations, the movement “Hey, Update My Voice” was created.
A non-branded movement for every brand: women’s rights institutions and company using virtual assistants.

Our goal is to ask the leading Silicon Valley companies to update the responses of their virtual assistants. So that they are no longer subservient and passive, and that they have an active voice and give serious and educational responses when they suffer any kind of harassment.”

Tags:
Sexual Harassment, UNESCO, Gender Bias, Als, Hey Update My Voice, Siri, Alexa, AI assistant, Verbal Harassment, Technology, Innovation, Virtual Assistants, Women Empowerment, Women Rights, Gender Equality, AI, Human Rights, Google Assistant, Bixby, Cortana, Xiao, Lu, Nat, Bia, Vivi, Artificial Intelligence, I’d Blush If I Could, sexual abuse

The guests at the wedding included LGBTQ+ celebrities from Austria who attended the ceremony a month ahead of the EuroPride event that is to be held in June. After the officiation of the union between Siri and Alexa, the newlywed couple even made its way through Vienna in a horse-drawn carriage.

The emotional reaction of the guests present in the audience signified how moving a love story beyond definitions can be. Those who couldn’t witness the wedding in person can download the Pride Skill developed by plan.Net Innovation Studio from the Amazon Alexa Skill store. The function will enable users to not only recreate the wedding vows shared by Siri and Alexa, but it will also give them information about the festivities lined up for the EuroPride event.

We feel that this campaign makes tactful use of two rival technologies to put across a meaningful message about love. We wish Siri and Alexa a happy married life!

The Wedding photos of Siri & Alexa

Website: https://www.siriandalexa.com/

Tags:
LGBTQ+ celebrities, LGBTQ+ community, Artificial Intelligence, LGBTQ+ rights, Siri & Alexa wedding, AI marriage, Siri, Alexa, Siri and Alexa marriage, Siri-Alexa wedding, Technology, iOS, iPhone, Apple, Amazon Alexa, The Wedding of Siri & Alexa

But why does Mastercard want to be perceived as a sonic identity? After a rigorous probe by our team at Campaigns of The World, it led to an interesting insight. Mastercard understands the importance of being identified and remembered in this realm where payment transactions have become extremely seamless. If there is no brand recall value to the enabler brand then it risks becoming unidentified and forgotten. Hence, through its new sonic identity, Mastercard wants to be recognised as the enabler brand and remembered whenever transactions happen at point-of-sales devices.

Mastercard also hired Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park as a music innovator to ensure that the melody chimes with the masses instantly. Mastercard also intends to use this sonic footprint as a means to stay ahead in the game of impending conversational commerce; which is nothing but purchasing through voice-enabled platforms like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. “You don’t just see our brand, you hear it as well,” says Rustom Dastoor, Mastercard’s SVP of marketing and communications for Asia Pacific.

Mastercard Debuts Sonic Brand

Lessons from Mastercard on how to create a sonic brand identity

Tags:
Mastercard News, Mastercard sonic brand identity, Mastercard Sonic Logo, Science & Technology, Grammy Awards, sonic brand identity, Mastercard New Logo, Tech, Mastercard Sensory Lab, Best Innovative Campaigns, innovative technology ideas, best technology campaigns, Mike Shinoda, voice-enabled campaign, Alexa, Siri