This is a creative and poignant advertisement that’s been making the rounds on YouTube. I won’t spoil what they’re advertising about — trust me, this one is really very good. You won’t know it until it hits you in the end.

This Sprint commercial employs an awesome flashlight-painting stop motion animation. Basically, if the artist chose to do it the real way without CG, they used a flashlight to draw each frame of the stop motion animation during a long exposure shot. It had to have taken days to accomplish, and, I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of coordination that was necessary to pull it off. Also, the music is from the eclectic Australian band Architecture in Helsinki.

The Original Commercial

UPDATE: The following video is a behind the scenes look at how they made the commercial. It turns out they did do it the long and hard way, without any assistance from computers or lit wires. Truly amazing. Thanks rw for the pointer!

Making of the Sprint Commercial

This goes into the inane category: Jeremy Harper is counting to one million and broadcasting the entire thing live. He’s also blogging about the whole experience. To make money, they’re letting advertisers sponsor blocks of one thousand numbers, using eBay to auction off each block. Basically, it’s similar to the one million dollar homepage idea, except this time, it’s a boring video of a guy counting.

However, as we’ve learned from the internet before, viral media can be both boring in principle and successful. He’s currently on the 29000 block, and they’ve gotten around 30 sponsors.

Below is a YouTube vid of Jeremy starting his count:

In one of the busiest advertising spaces in the world, Adidas employs a clever ad in Tokyo to catch people’s attention. Basically, it’s real people hanging from the billboard playing “vertical soccer”. Very inventive.

While I was filling up the tank today at a Shell, I noticed a video screen above the filling station. Yes, now we can all watch videos during those few minutes of dead time while waiting for tank to fill. I didn’t catch the name of the advertising agency, but it’s most likely GSTV, which provides a whole network of advertising and other content to gas stations.

It was actually pretty entertaining, even though it was all commercials. They’ve conducted various studies, and have found that most people don’t mind watching, and that they have a high brand retention as well. Looks like a win-win situation for consumers wanting a little bit of entertainment and advertisers wanting to fill every crack of free time with ads.