Chickens Running And Beers Flowing: 5 Ads You Should Watch Right Now

A chicken crosses a road, Doogie Howser MD polishes his Oscar and Justin O’Shea walks in slow motion. Yep, it’s just another week in AdLand!

But which ads have caught fire on the web over the last seven days? Here are our five picks.

Enjoy!

5. Cass Beer – T.O.P. for Cass Fresh Beer

South Korea has one of the world’s most dynamic pop music scenes and some of the planet’s most enthusiastic social networkers. The combination of these two factors is what allows Cass’s beer commercial to reach 12,000 shares in under a week.

For K-Pop fans, the major draw here is T.O.P. The Seoul-born rapper and member of boy band Big Bang is one of the country’s biggest stars, with platinum hair to match his album sales. The spot finds the artist performing a David Guetta-style DJ set to a room of ravers, while logos for Cass Beer float subliminally in the background. Of course, at no point does it look like T.O.P. is actually affecting the music in any way, but he does throw some strong shapes in a bright blue suit.

4. CHANEL Makeup – Reverie Parisienne

The title for CHANEL Makeup’s latest spot translates roughly to ‘Parisian Dreaming’, a phrase which has no more to do with its content in English than it does in French. In the ad, a model sports various shades of lipstick and eyeliner while draping different flowers and branches over her face.

Now if CHANEL had really wanted to depict ‘Parisian Dreaming’, I would have recommended a nightmarish sequence in which the Eiffel Tower chases a nude man down a deserted street, at which point he realises he’s late for his driving exam. But then maybe that’s why I’m no longer their creative director.

3. ABC – Oscars: Illusion with Neil Patrick Harris

The Academy Awards are announced in just under a month, bringing to an end the weeks of torturous prognostication known as awards season. The usual hot button debates are already underway, like ‘Why are there never any women nominated?’ or ‘Which attractive British male upstart should we laud this year?’

Perhaps less important among these issues is the reception of the Awards ceremony itself, which every few years surprises everyone by not being outright unwatchable. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are putting their best foot forward by hiring Neil Patrick Harris, an all-singing-all-dancing reminder that even ‘Doogie Howser M.D.’ gets another bite at the showbiz apple.

2. Reebok – Live Free Range

If you thought invoking the Aardman classic ‘Chicken Run’ was beyond the reach of a sporting goods brand, then rethink that right now. ‘Live Free Range’, a surprisingly high-concept bit of athletic satire from Reebok, finds a plucky chicken escaping the coop in search of greener pastures.

First pursued by the farmer across a busy road, in a sequence which heavily recalls the videogame ‘Frogger’, the chicken then comes across a billboard for a franchised mega-gym with “over 1000 treadmills”. Turning away from the cunningly-titled “fitness barn”, the liberated bird instead follows some off-road runners. See what they did there?

1. Mercedes-Benz – A Fistful of Wolves

Putting in an early entry for best (and potentially most underrated) ad of the year, Mercedes-Benz’ ‘A Fistful of Wolves’ shows what happens when a major brand is happy to go so far out of the box, it’s now only a speck in the distance.

Supporting the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Berlin, writer-director Danny Spranga casts Justin O’Shea as a very, very strange man indeed. In a surreal play on Ryan Gosling’s character in ‘Drive’, O’Shea prowls through Berlin in a sports car while comparing himself to a “celestial animal” and other cool-sounding nonsense phrases. Less a conventional advert than an absurdist art film, ‘A Fistful of Wolves’ is absolutely worth your time and I hope prompts a trend of slo-mo walking.