Classic advert for Skoda’s new “Superb Combi” car. The ad features glass harp player Petr Spatina playing on 597 Schott Zwiesel crystal wine glasses filled with different levels of water, and laid out in the shape of the new car. Great creative idea showing that the car has up to 1,865 litres of luggage space, hear more of Petr’s glass music here. The ad was beautifully created by Leagas Delaney, Hamburg. Hat Tip: Adfreak

I’m a big fan of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without borders). They are an international medical humanitarian organization working in more than 60 countries to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe. Basically they go to the places most organisations wouldn’t dare go, and help those who need it most. Volkswagen & Maxim have just teamed up to support them  in Haiti by auctioning off a celebrity-autographed 2010 Golf GTI hood.

VW collected more than 50 celebrity signatures at the 2010 Maxim Party to celebrate the Super Bowl this past weekend in Miami.  Celebrities included Evander Holyfield, Olivia Munn, Marisa Miller, Floyd Mayweather, Jermaine Dupri, Warren Moon, The All American Rejects, Gavin DeGraw, Nelly, Robert Horry, Joanna Kruppa, Ndamukon Suh, Kevin Connolly, Nick Lachey and Tom Arnold.
Bidding starts at $1000. Please help them by bidding your best on eBay, just click on the following link: http://tinyurl.com/haitimsf
If $1000 is a bit steep, please still go to http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/ and donate what you can, they are all modern day heroes and need our help.

At $2.8 million dollars per 2010 Super Bowl ad space lets see the highlights that the world of advertising came up with this year. Overall seems to be a bit of a drop in standards compared to years past, but below are the highlights. For a complete list of the other ads go to Adweek.

Oh and congrats to the New Orleans Saints on winning the game 31-17 !

Snickers: Betty white

Coca Cola: Simpsons (Hard Times)

Doritos: Dog collar (Crash the super bowl)

Doritos: House rules (Crash the super bowl)

Doritos: Casket (Crash the super bowl)

Cars.com: Timothy Richman

Dockers: Wear No Pants

Dove Men: The Journey to Comfort

Bud Light: Light House

Dodge Charger: A Man’s Last Stand

Bud Light: Asteroid

Bud Light: Voice box

Bud Light:Stranded

Flo TV: My Generation

VW: Punch buggy

Google: Parisian Love

Kia Sorento: 2010 Big Game commercial

Motorola: Megan Fox

Denny’s: Chicken Warning

Audi A3 TDI: Green Police

This has to be the best road safety PSA I have ever seen. The spot was made by the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership to encourage people to put on their seatbelt while driving. Normally road safety ad’s in the UK and across the world are designed to shock, and generally contain some pretty gruesome footage. The above spot does the opposite, it’s beautifully filmed and uses love to get the point across. If only all PSA’s were made this way. The people behind the campaign have even used graffiti artists to turn local sites in Brighton previously littered with unsightly tags, into large scale public place artworks to support the campaign, showing the web address and logo. For more info go to http://www.sussexsaferroads.gov.uk/

Very clever work from Euro RSCG 4D. Most car brands leak teaser pictures of their new models, but not Volvo. RSCG and Volvo decided to do something very different for a change. To help launch the new Volvo S60 they employed Turkish artist Esref Armagan, who is an artist, but with a difference, he is blind !

They have released the above video on youtube and facebook showing Esref at work painting the new car. The end result is I think you will agree, something special, maybe he should replace Peter Horbury as Volvos chief designer, we would certainly be driving around in some more interesting cars !

Below is the real new S60, its hard to tell the difference between the painting and the real thing.

(Hat Tip to the legend that is Patrick Collings)

Almost forgot to write about this little beauty from Brisbane-based advertising company Play TV, which was submitted to an online competition to find a new Yaris car ad by Saatchi & Saatchi Australia for Toyota. The ad features some classic / classy lines like “I hope I haven’t come too prematurely” and “she can take a good pounding in any direction”. Needless to say it won the competition but didn’t manage to air for long as petty people with no humour / wit started to complain. They couldn’t stop the ad from spreading virally via YouTube etc though, and its now become a huge success. Congrats to all involved and what a fab outing in the digital world for Toyota Australia, this amount of exposure would normally cost a fortune !

Over the weekend I spotted this fab commercial for Peugeot featuring Current IRC champion Kris Meeke. In the above spot you can see Kris getting rally style shopping/social driving instructions directions from his co-driver girlfriend.  Nice work from Euro RSCG, London. To read more about the spot click here.

I’m sure most of you would have seen the infamous viral video by urban stunt cyclist Danny MacAskill (if not click here to see it). Now he has done a nice ad spot for the new Volkswagen Golf estate.

The clip was filmed in Lisbon by TRY advertising.  So far so good, in just 3 days they have already had over 70,000 plays on YouTube alone. If your brand wants a online viral campaign, often the easiest thing to do is find something that’s already hugely popular and jump on board.

Last week I organised the second Audi Cape Town MVP day. The general idea if you missed my last post on it, is to get Audi cars into the hands of SA’s most influential people in the digital space and have some fun while we are at it. The members are hand picked, and we only allow 8 people at a time to keep it select and private. MVP (Most Valuable Player) status gets you invited to excusive Audi events and track days along with a few preferential other things. This time the following fantastic people were in attendance: Lili Radloff, Justin Hartman, Matthew Buckland, Bradley Voges, Charl Norman, Joe Botha, and Sue Rutherford.

The weather was yet again fantastic and the legendary Chapmans peak drive was open, so we popped over to Bob Skinstad’s wonderful Toad restaurant in Noordhoek for a fab late breakfast snack, then we gave away a special test drive in the new Audi S4 and the fantastic Audi R8 V10 to two lucky people. Next we drove for lunch at the Cape Grace and were treated to a wonderful meal from Audi Centre Cape Town.

The cars we used this time were the Q5, Q7, A5, TT and a bonus test drive for two in an S4 and an R8 V10. My favourite for the day had to be the Q5 3.2 Quattro, I cant believe how sporty and solid the drive was and its pretty stunning looking too, especially considering I normally loath small SUV’s.

I have added a selection of pictures from the day below, for more pics check out Joe Botha’s pictures here and here.

As an avid car fan I really enjoyed watching this new Porsche commercial for the new Panamera saloon car. Nice work from Cramer-Krasselt, Chicago. They managed to get 50 of the most iconic Porsches made to date and filed them using a helicopter and some modified Porsche Cayenne film cars. Check out the nice making of video here or visit the dedicated Porsche family website.

Lovely idea by Volkswagen in Stockholm, Sweden. They have created a site called Rolighetsteorin.se or “Theory of Fun” in English (To translate text just use http://translate.google.com). The site features several videos all dedicated to the idea that happiness is the easiest way to get people to change. The three videos that are up there so far show how to make people not FAIL when putting litter in a bin, How to get more people to take the stairs than the escalator, and a teaser video of how to make recycling more fun.

The Piano staircase resulted in a 66% increase in people taking the stairs than the escalator, and the fun noise making little bin resulted in about a 70% increase in litter in the bins ! Nice one VW.

Good work from Ogilvy Cape Town, They recently did this nice spot for Castrol EDGE featuring Football legend Cristiano Ronaldo. The ad was shot in Namibia, Manchester and the remainder in and around the Western Province. Great work considering they only had Ronaldo for 6 hours (his scenes were all shot in Manchester). Wonder how much BMW paid to be featured so prominently ?

Agency: Ogilvy Cape Town, Client: Castrol,  Executive Creative Director: Chris Gotz,  Director: Ian Gabriel Production: Giant Films.