Month: November 2012

A random song + thoughtful art direction + barely suppressed hilarity = a video I’m usually guaranteed to love. Apparently these are two guys from ad agency TBWA/Helsinki (my guess is they’re a creative team, with guy on the left as art director and guy on the right as copywriter), and they are having the kind of after-hours fun that makes people want to work in ad agencies.

Camera quality and general skill level has increased a lot in the past few years, but in the early days of YouTube I used to love Back Dorm Boys (aka ‘Two Chinese Boys’) for the same reason:

Excellent demonstration of the fact that the world loses a child every 3 seconds.

[By Grey Dusseldorf, which inexplicably still has a Flash intro on its site.  However, said intro does have those ‘Greynautz’ things that became so popular in the ‘Happy Birthday from Grey Worldwide’ video, so I suppose there’s something to be said for referencing brand equity.  I suppose.]

One of the funnier PSAs I’ve seen in a while:

Video by The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (www.saih.no).

The message:  “Imagine if every person in Africa saw the “Africa for Norway” video and this was the only information they ever got about Norway. What would they think about Norway?

The pictures we usually see in fundraisers are of poor African children. Hunger and poverty is ugly, and it calls for action. But while these images can engage people in the short term, we are concerned that many people simply give up because it seems like nothing is getting better. Africa should not just be something that people either give to, or give up on.

The truth is that there are many positive developments in African countries, and we want these to become known. We need to change the simplistic explanations of problems in Africa. We need to educate ourselves on the complex issues and get more focus on how western countries have a negative impact on Africa’s development. If we want to address the problems the world is facing we need to do it based on knowledge and respect.”