Some things that have left a dent in my brain.

When I’m coming up with ideas, I’ll often have something I call a ‘brain rattler’. A thought, an in, a scenario, something that just keeps bouncing around my head like a pinball. Occasionally, other ideas that make it out into the world do the same. So I thought I’d share a few recent pieces of work that I keep thinking about from time to time.

For the last week I’ve had a weird repetitive disconcerting flute burned into my skull. Just playing on loop. Over and over and over. Here’s why.

Fellow Melbourne indie, Sunday Gravy, just dropped one of the wildest ads of the year for ride share service, DiDi, with acclaimed director, Jim Hosking. The casting alone is a work of art, the deranged aesthetic will undoubtedly divide (if you try to please everybody, you’ll excite nobody), but the really clever bit is the ear-worm of a tune that burrows its way into your hippocampus, tills the soil, settles the land, and proceeds to build a small civilisation in your mind.

Anyone who’s made anything remotely like this will understand what it takes to get this idea up. So, bravo to everyone who touched this. And a very special mention to DiDi CMO, Tim Farmer. slow clap.

Whatever you went through, it was all worth it.

The best ideas often seem obvious in hindsight. “Surely, someone has already done this?”

I love the insight in this Life360 spot from Alto, directed by Steve Ayson.

Now, whether you think ‘tracking apps’ are a good thing or not, or this kind of ‘helicopter parenting’ is a net negative on society (as a kid that roamed the streets in the 90’s I certainly find the concept a little strange), you cannot deny the truth at its core.

When you have kids, it changes you. You think about them, a lot. Especially when they’re not at home. You have intrusive thoughts. You have nightmares. As macabre as it sounds, yes, sometimes you think about your kids dying. It’s one of those quiet truths that people don’t always say out loud - and these guys just went and wrote a grizzly song about it.

While 90% of brands twist and turn and duck and weave and manufacture false truths and drape thin corporate veils over what’s actually real, Life360 just came out and said the thing. More of this please.

This is just more Liquid Death irreverence. They’ve been going hard on the partnerships lately, and this time with a sandwich bar. And in true LD fashion, they never let an opportunity go to waste. When most brands do a partnership like this, they’ll just come up with a retail offer where you get ‘a free Liquid Death with a whatever-the-fuck meal deal’ and be done with it.

In this promo, in one location, for one day, you can get your sandwich cut with a chainsaw. Now, to most folk in a boardroom, one location for one day without a retail offer sounds like the shittest promotion ever - but this has now spread all over the internet, proving that the story is bigger than the spreadsheet. I would guess that this promo would’ve cost LD a drop in the ocean compared to most partnerships - yet garnered a hell of a lot more attention.

Last year, Lynx released a campaign on TikTok. By running a 80-second cinematic masterpiece that opens with a woman shouting ‘put the money in the bag bitch!’. It goes against every single ‘best practice’ when it comes to the platform. It did not research well. System 1 gave it two-stars.

TikTok later named the campaign as one of the most successful brand campaigns to hit the platform.

Well done LOLAMullenLowe and Unilever for casting aside the chains of safety and just backing in good work.

Not dissimilar to SLATHER, Oat Cult is a proactive move by agency folk to start their own brand. Founded by Ben da Costa, Josh Clarricoats, Marc Donaldson, Norman-Jo Kremer, and Richard Dryden, the launch spot is just a brilliant piece of film that takes the positioning of ‘overnight oats without the sacrifice’ and blows up the execution. Firmly falls in the ‘I wish I made this’ basket for me.

Mischief are one of my favourite agencies in the world, and they never miss. To launch the new Slate EV, a brand that is leaning heavily on affordability and customisation, they created a ‘human taxidermist’. Because the truck can be ‘customised for just about anything’.

Where most brands would’ve likely shown lots of different variations to show ‘customisation’, they instead leant into one ridiculous story to show just how far you can go with a Slate. Love it.

And lastly, I’ve posted this before, but I still think it’s that’s good.

Where most brands will wrap ten-tonne chains around their brand assets and guidelines (I once worked on a brand that had a bird as one of its assets and the bird ‘always had to be facing left’ whenever it appeared…like, why?) PopTarts murdered their own mascot and had the winning team eat it live on television. It was the most talked about moment of the game, more so than the game itself, and it was an ad. For PopTarts.

Now, you might look at this work and think, gee, it’s all a bit ‘unhinged’ isn’t it? It’s a bit ‘weird’. It’s a bit ‘out there’. But to that I would ask, is it? Is it really?

What are you binging on TV? What films are you watching? What games are you playing? What memes are you sharing? Line them up with these ads and then ask yourself the question again. Are they really that ‘out there’?

Or has advertising just been incredible beige for so long now they just seem that way?

In a fragmented media landscape, that’s what we’re competing with. Horror films. Open world games. Murder mysteries. Nostalgic TV shows. Unhinged meme pages.

Cormac McCarthy once said, ‘if it doesn’t involve life and death, it’s not interesting’. And he wasn’t bad at telling a story or two.