In other comedian/car brand hook-up news comes word of Toyota's deadpan new campaign for the Yaris, featuring comedian Michael Showalter (of Wet Hot American Summer quasi-fame) in eight spots.

The campaign is described on the Yaris Facebook page as "It's a car! Using only the most standardly standards, the standard features that come standard on the Yaris make it the car-iest car in its class (of cars). Go ahead! Take a gander and bask in its utilitarian extravagance!"

He touts a different "feature" in each spot, from the wheels on up, on a microsite (toyota.com/itsacar) that also features a multiplayer game optimized for Google Chrome. Check them out below.Continue reading...

Ally Bank this week rolls out its "People Sense" campaign. Below, watch more new spots from Chrysler, Cigna, Dove, T-Mobile, Transamerica and more.Continue reading...

Have you gotten your Nature's Fix? If not, Nestle's new campaign is here to entice you.

Launching with three animated videos (and more to come), the campaign by America's largest bottle water seller is aimed at changing people's drinking habits from sodas and sugary sports drinks to a sparkling water alternative consisting of three natural ingredients: 100% spring water, fruit essence and bubbles.Continue reading...

"What the hell are they doing?!" That's a question asked during the NFL's opening Sunday not pointed toward one of the teams, but instead at Audi. In new messages form its luxury campaign push, Audi's brand campaign is getting dangerously hokey.Continue reading...

Here's an unexpected entrant in the daily deals fray: BP, which has launched a location-based daily deals service to reinvent the brand and dip a toe in the muddied waters of consumer engagement one year after the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

The offers, available only to consumers in the UK, are being updated on BP’s corporate website .The tagline for Today’s Offers: ‘Keeping BP’s great offers at your fingertips.’ What a difference a year makes as sales and deals strive to trump a company’s performance track record once again.Continue reading...

Levi Strauss is working hard to make itself a global brand. To that end, Levi’s has been beefing up its human capital, the better to bring its global campaign and corporate citizenship message to the world.

The brand just hired Beto Guajardo from Avon to serve as global VP of strategy, following its recent hiring of Rebecca Van Dyck as global CMO, a marketing whiz who Bloomberg reports “led Nike Inc.’s ‘Just Do It’ campaign and helped Apple make the iPhone a best-seller,” to help revive the Levi’s brand.

“I had always worn Levi’s, but they sort of drifted away in my mind,” said Van Dyck, who was wearing Levi’s (of course) and prefers to go by "Becca," to Bloomberg's reporter. “I want us to be present and show up and be confident, and that’s going to be appealing to young people as well as old people who grew up with Levi’s.”Continue reading...

Continuing its teaser pre-launch marketing campaign, Tabco isn't giving much away ahead of its Aug. 15th tablet reveal, although its new teaser spot (below) offers a sneak peek while taking a swipe at Apple's iconic 1984 commercial with a lemmings-like line of automatons clutching, and then ditching, their tablets.Continue reading...

Fed up with being “the other mayonnaise,” Miracle Whip launched a "Take a Side" campaign earlier this year.

Eager to turn the brand's historic positioning as the also-ran to Hellman's, it rolled out a new tagline, "We're not for everyone," and a personality-based series of spots featuring celebs ranging from Jersey Shore's Pauly D (who said he hates it) to CNN's James Carville (who loves it).

To expand on that, the Kraft owned brand has launched a YouTube contest soliciting videos from the public about how its off-white spread has affected their love life, for better or worse. The incentive for the invitation: $25,000 to use for a wedding or a divorce.Continue reading...