On the day after Super Bowl Sunday, 7 million Americans don’t show up to work, according to the hard-working folks at Coca-Cola. Another 4.4 million arrived at their places of business late this morning, according to Coke estimates.

So the brand's marketing team (and agency team at CP+B) figured that if 11.4 million people are already not showing up or not really serving their businesses at full throttle on the Monday after Super Bowl, why not call it a day (off) and let the entire American workforce stay home for the day?

Coke Zero would like to name the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday Magnificent Monday, according to a company release. “Coke Zero believes that people can more thoroughly enjoy the big game knowing they have Magnificent Monday off,” a press release notes. “This holiday is essentially already happening, but Coke Zero is leading the charge to make it official.” And what could be more important to our national wellbeing than making sure that people are thoroughly enjoying the big game?Continue reading...

As the song goes, "Do they know it's Christmas time at all?" In China they certainly will, if Starbucks has anything to do with it.

The U.S. java giant — a pro at driving loyalty via mobile marketing — has partnered with Guohe Ad, China's leading mobile ad management platform, for a series of three HTML5 premium mobile apps that create awareness for the chain's "massive" Christmas promotion on the mainland.

Communist China? Christmas? Yes, there are folks who celebrate Christmas in China. And if Starbucks and other American brands have anything to do with it, China will soon be the world's greatest Christmas consumer market in the world.Continue reading...

How's this for a Yuletide message: "Demobilize. Everything Is Possible in Christmas time." And we're not talking about laying down your department-store charge cards here, or beating shopping carts into plowshares.

This very real entreaty — "to entice guerrilla fighters out of the jungle to turn themselves in," as Ad Age puts it — comes from the very serious business in Colombia of its ministry of defense urging anti-government guerrillas to lay down their arms. The ranks of the insurgency, run by a group known as FARC, have dwindled to fewer than 5,000 fighters in the Colombian jungles from as many as 30,000 a decade ago. But they're still a thorn in the side of the U.S. ally.

And so for the second consecutive year Lowe SSP3, a Colombian ad agency, is using good old Madison Avenue techniques and digital technology from America, along some indigenous twists, to attempt to persuade more of the remaining guerrillas finally to lay down their arms.Continue reading...

Other brands are joining Pepto-Bismol in attempting to get ahead of cheer-driven consumer behavior during the holiday-celebration season. While the Procter & Gamble brand has called in Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet to promote its abilities to offer relief after major gastronomic expeditions, a couple of non-American brands are laying cover for celebrants who indulge in other distractions.

Argentina’s Norte beer has begun advertising a fanciful, fictional device it calls the Photoblocker (demonstrated above), a tongue-in-cheek, office holiday party-ready app to prevent those candid photos from the night before from incriminating guys with their girlfriends. The high-tech “beer cooler” purports to detect when someone in a bar is taking a photo and leapfrogs the process by issuing a flash that obliterates the offending image – which, of course, was destined for social-media discovery by said girlfriend.Continue reading...

The Brooks Brothers 2011 "Holiday Miracle" campaign featuring a group of natty, singing lambs (watch it below) counts high-profile fans such as Elle creative director Joe Zee and Fenton and Fallon designer Dana Lorenz. What's your favorite holiday campaign this year?Continue reading...

Yes ladies (and men)... he's back! Isaiah Mustafa, aka Old Spice Man, is back in a white towel for a limited engagement as MANta Claus (tagline: "One man. Seven billion gifts"). The five-day digital holiday campaign for the P&G brand kicked off today with tweets and Facebook posts alerting commenters they had a gift waiting on YouTube. Watch the first day of the brand's latest social media response campaign by W+K featuring the award-winning character below.Continue reading...

'Tis the season for certain types of brands. And before we get to the January marketing blowout for weight-management brands, there's something we all must get past. It's gastronomic, too, but it requires overconsumption rather than dieting. It's holiday eating — or, rather, overeating. And Pepto-Bismol is all over it.

The pink post-feast recovery remedy by Procter & Gamble has launched an opportunistic advertising campaign that uses humor, elves and lots of food to make points about Pepto-Bismol. While the references to extreme digestive distress are only oblique, however — no "plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is" jingle a la Alka Seltzer — the point is the timing of the ads.

While Pepto-Bismol ranks as one of P&G's highest-penetration brands, only 7 percent of consumers surveyed claimed to have used it over the last 12 months, according to the New York Times. So now, instead of advertising steadily throughout the year as Pepto-Bismol used to do, the company is taking a "pulsed marketing approach where we focus our spending and our efforts around times when we know people are celebrating," a spokeswoman told the Times.Continue reading...

Saks is back with a seasonal 3D holiday projection at its flagship store in New York. The Saks Fifth Avenue Snowflake & the Bubble projection show is bigger and even more spectacular this year. The 3D Projection mapping show runs every night for 5 hours through Jan 6th, making it the longest outdoor video mapping experience in the world. Also new this year: a Fiat 500 — the Gucci special edition — in one of the Christmas windows.Continue reading...