Can Arnold win its fourth pitch in four weeks?

The Havas agency, which is on a mcgarrybowenesque roll, awaits a decision in Southwest Airlines' creative review after landing the creative accounts of the University of Phoenix, American Eagle Outfitters and Kohler since late April.

Collectively, the first three wins represent about $10 million in annual revenue, according to sources; revenue on the Southwest assignment is estimated at $5 million.

Arnold declined to discuss Southwest, but the shop’s Boston office is among four finalists for the business. The others are TBWA\Chiat\Day in Playa del Rey, Calif., Leo Burnett in Chicago and Deutsch L.A. in Marina del Rey, Calif.

Final presentations took place on May 10 and 11 at Southwest’s headquarters in Dallas. Each agency got about 2 1/2 hours to pitch to a group of airline executives, sources said.

TBWA\C\D went first on the morning of the 10th, followed by Arnold in the afternoon, sources said. The following day, Deutsch presented in the morning and Leo Burnett in the afternoon.

The airline is seeking an agency to rethink its core brand strategy and, at the onset, produce a fall campaign. A selection could come as early as next week.

GSD&M has been Southwest’s lead shop for years and will remain on the roster to handle consumer marketing and advertising around the airline’s merger with AirTran, according to the airline’s initial RFP. Select Resources International in Santa Monica, Calif. is managing the search.

The University of Phoenix and American Eagle were Boston wins; Arnold’s New York office won Kohler. 

The most recent win was University of Phoenix, which this week named Arnold as its new lead creative agency. The selection came after a review in which there were two other finalists: Campbell Ewald in West Hollywood, Calif. and Muhtayzik Hoffer in San Francisco.

The school’s media spending totaled nearly $74 million last year, according to Nielsen. That figure doesn’t online spending, however, and Arnold’s assignment includes digital advertising. University of Phoenix’ previous lead shop was Pereira & O’Dell in San Francisco.

Nestlé is finding new agency partners for the brands that are leaving McCann Erickson in Los Angeles. The Swiss global marketer is assigning U.S. marketing duties for Coffee-Mate to roster shop Publicis and is considering that firm along with Ogilvy & Mather, another of its core agencies, for the marketer's Nesquik brand.

Both agencies declined to comment, referring calls to Nestlé, which has yet to confirm.

In 2011, Nestlé spent $26.4 million in U.S. advertising support for Nesquik and $25.6 million for Coffee-Mate, according to Nielsen. (Those amounts do not include spending for digital and business-to-business advertising.) McCann continues to work for those two products in 30 countries outside the states.

Both brands had been handled at McCann’s Southern California office, whose president Cathy Saidiner resigned in March and has since joined L.A. digital agency Blitz. Saidiner’s departure is not necessarily the catalyst for McCann’s dismissal on the accounts—observers say Nestlé is deliberate in making these changes and the agency would have been warned and given the chance to save the accounts.

The future of McCann L.A.’s office is still undetermined. The agency’s remaining accounts are LifeLock and IHOP.

Friskies is taking aim at the national "CATastrosphe" known as Cat Boredom, or CB. "There's nothing more tragic than a blasé cat," Chris Parnell explains in the video below. So true. Luckily, Friskies has a plan. It's so simple—how did no one think of it before? Thanks to AFG& (formerly Avrett Free Ginsberg) for this important addition to the Internet's somewhat sizable collection of cat videos.

For those who have been following the two-year saga of Cornelius Trunchpole—the reputed 1960s adman who is now making a reputed comeback, reputedly—here's the finished film about him. Art & Corny, clocking in at about 16 minutes, is worth it for the musings of industry figures like Jeff Goodby, Lee Clow, Steve Hayden, Gerry Graf, Barbara Lippert and Michael Wolff. Just don't expect a whole lot of insight from Trunchpole himself. He prefers it that way.

Nike had a huge advertising success at the 2010 World Cup with "Write the Future," the epic soccer spot that won the 2011 Film Grand Prix at Cannes for Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam. (It didn't work out so well for the players in the spot, though, many of whom failed notably at the tournament—fueling fears of a "Write the Future" curse.) Now, Wieden + Kennedy London takes over for Amsterdam with a sequel of sorts called "My Time Is Now," which is, in its own way, just as epic as the original.

The theme this time is the hunger of youth, with up-and-coming players like Brazil's Neymar, France's Yann M'Vila and Germany's Mario Götze storming a field—followed by hundreds of others—to compete against established stars like France's Franck Ribéry, Holland's Wesley Sneijder and, of course, Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo. The list of superstars also includes Rafael van der Vaart, Javier Hernandez, Andres Iniesta, Gerard Pique and Jack Wilshere—as well as the retiring Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola. And for those Americans who could care less about soccer, LeBron James even makes a cameo—and it appears he would make a pretty good goalkeeper, too.

The spot has the same dynamic, otherworldly atmosphere as "Write the Future" did—it has a luminous glow, and thanks to some cinematic tricks, the play on the field is presented in a way that's somehow both unbelievably frenetic yet supremely graceful. (It captures the superhuman feeling of high-level sport like almost no other ads do.) The ad also has its tongue firmly in cheek, with comic touches all over the place—most notably, Ronaldo getting completely sidelined because he can't find a shirt that fits him.

If the new spot doesn't have quite the compelling narrative that made "Write the Future" so special (that spot's often hilarious visions of post-tournament adulation or scorn for players who succeed or fail were priceless), it makes up for it by offering more in the way of interactivity. Over at Nike Football's YouTube page, you can watch a version of the film that has embedded "tunnels" that lead to all kinds of hidden content.

Nike simply can't do a mediocre soccer commercial. Here, it's made another instant classic. Let's just hope it doesn't put a hex on the players this time.





CREDITS
Client: Nike
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, London

Goofy pupils aside, this new commercial for travel website Kayak—the latest in a series of absurd spots from ad agency Barton F. Graf 9000—has a bit of a blurred vision. Why did the guy think dilating his pupils would help him see better? That's not how it works. And I think the ad would have been funnier if he'd given his wife a weird compliment she didn't know what to do with, instead of just insulting her. That said, you won't shake the image of Mr. Pupils for a while—and he does reinforce the brand message. A good long vacation from this guy is just what the doctor ordered.

Plenty of subway stations look like they belong in a horror movie, but this Paris promotion for Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus takes the concept to the extreme, setting up an advertising installation in the Saint-Martin stop, deserted for 73 years on the Metro's Line 9. The long-unused platform has been dressed up to resemble an otherworldly cave from the movie, with eerie blue optical effects and a huge stone head, an image that's graced most of the film's often elaborate advertising. Frankly, the ghost station, on display through May 25, beats most typical subway stops: It's arguably cleaner and better lit, and Stoney won't vomit on your shoes. Compare it to the next destination on the line, Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, in the clip below, from Half-a-Million Screenshots, with the couple sucking face and dry humping in an almost indescribably freaky fashion. Oh, mon dieu! The next time I need to get around the City of Light, I'll take Le Bus. One more image after the jump. Via Adverblog.

A perky, energetic character named “Trudy” is central to Roth Partners’ first work for True Lemon, a natural lemon flavoring for water that’s looking to steal share from bigger players like Crystal Light.

Dressed in a bright yellow T-shirt and matching eyeglass frames, Trudy will appear in two TV ads and a series of videos that will live online. In the ads, she pops into scenes like Jeannie from “I Dream of Jeannie” and pitches True Lemon to women as effervescently as “Flo” touts Progressive to insurance buyers.

The campaign, which breaks Monday, also includes social media efforts, contests and events. The total budget for the effort—an estimated $4-5 million—is modest compared to bigger competitors, but it represents the largest marketing push for the brand to date.

“I don’t have to be as big as Crystal Light,” said Al Soricelli, CEO of True Citrus Co., parent company of True Lemon. “When I started here [in June 2010], we had about 2 percent household penetration. We’re hoping to get up to about 6. That would be phenomenal.”

One TV ad is set in a yoga studio and another in an office. In each setting, True encounters a thirtyish woman who represents the consumer that the brand seeks to reach.

“Truth out,” Trudy says in the yoga ad, using her hands to form the signal for time out. In seconds, she replaces the exerciser’s flavored water with a bottle infused with True Lemon.

“Real flavor from real fruit,” Trudy explains. “One hundred percent natural ingredients. Just five calories.” She stays long enough for the woman to drink the True Lemon water, but disappears before she can say, “Umm. That’s good.”

The TV ads will run through August during female-skewing programs on cable networks such as TBS, Bravo, A&E, HGTV, Food Network, Lifetime and Oxygen.

The Web videos were shot in New York’s Central Park and depict a reporter character interviewing passers-by that Trudy hands the product to. Trudy also sings a song.

“She lights up whoever she’s with,” said Rick Roth, CEO of Roth Partners.

The brand’s core target are active, health conscious women between 30 and 32, but they can be as young as 25 or as old as 54, according to Roth.

Roth Partners landed the creative account in December after a review. That win and assignments from The Reader’s Digest Association spurred the New York shop to add a managing partner in March. 

True Citrus Co. is backed by private equity and based in Baltimore. Its product also comes in the form of an ingredient for baking or cooking.

Last September, when Lee Doyle left his role as the head of WPP’s MEC media network, the company said he would stay within the corporate fold in what was then an undefined role. That’s now borne out as Doyle has been named to the newly created job of president, client development, at WPP media network Mindshare.

The move is part of the new management structure under Antony Young who was named CEO of Mindshare North America last summer. Young had previously been the U.S. chief of Publicis Groupe’s Optimedia agency.

Doyle moves over to an agency that is currently the North America, Western Europe incumbent in Unilever’s $7 billion global media review.  Mindshare said Doyle has the new-busines chops for the role. While he ran MEC’s North American operations, the company grew 40 percent and won the consolidated AT&T media assignment, with about $2 billion in spending, and other new business from Marriott, Bloomberg, Michelin, IKEA, Activision, Novartis and Macy’s.

In addition to Doyle’s recruitment, Mindshare said it hired Alexander Ouvaroff as the agency’s West Coast lead. He was most recently evp at Marketing Evolution where he oversaw Anheuser-Busch InBev, and he takes over for Sandy Constan, who recently stepped down from that L.A.-based role at Mindshare. The company also promoted Michael Epstein, who was previously client leader, to president, strategic resources and client services. Two other Mindshare executives have been promoted as well: Jake Norman, managing director business planning and client lead for Tim Hortons and J.M. Smucker is now the president, chief strategy officer, Mindshare Canada, a new role at the company, and  Dervilla Kelly has been upped to executive director, client leadership, another new role in which she is charged with expanding the company's roster of global clients.

QR codes have been exhibiting an uncharacteristic characteristic lately—they've been not sucking as much. We had the Korean retailer's 3-D sunlight-activated QR code, which was scannable only at lunch, when the shadows lined up. Now, we have this Guinness QR code on a beer glass, dreamed up by BBDO New York. It's literally activated by the product—you pour a Guinness into the glass, and the beer's black color fills out the code. (Those inferior amber-colored beers are useless here.) Scan the code with your smartphone, and it "tweets about your pint, updates your Facebook status, checks you in via Foursquare, downloads coupons and promotions, invites your friends to join you, and even launches exclusive Guinness content." In a pinch, it might even send out an SOS signal if you happen to be stuck on the Guinness submarine. More images after the jump. Via @TheSmarmyBum.