Finally, with help from WPP-owned 171 Partners, HTC is getting creative. For their new “Here’s to Change” global campaign to promote  the HTC One smartphone, the brand has enlisted Robert Downey Jr. as both the star and purveyor of creative input. Engadget suggests that this is new CMO Ben Ho making good on his promise to make HTC’s voice louder.

So far, we’ve got RDJ as mysterious, self-important “Subversive Thinking,” a man with Terry Richardson glasses and a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He flies in a helicopter and enjoys high-fives. He wears a puce-colored tie. We meet him in HTC’s first teasers: “Big Things Ahead,” “Prelude to Change,” and “The Arrival.” The entire “Change” campaign should run 24 to 36 months, with the first 2-minute spot debuting Thursday. And with any luck, our main man will be quirkily cooing to that cat.

We figured we’d hold off on posting about this until this afternoon because it’s Friday and you might actually be able to view this in full, if you haven’t already, because it deserves to be.  Werner Herzog, the legendary director, writer and/or producer of a million projects including Grizzly Man during his 50-year career, has gone behind the camera once again for the above documentary, From One Second to the Next. This is the epic, poignant, sad and important extension of the ongoing “It Can Wait” PSA campaign initially launched by AT&T that has now been supported by the other major wireless carriers including Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

Herzog, along with BBDO New York, continues to hammer the message home that texting while driving doesn’t shouldn’t mix via the tales of four different people who were affected by it on either end of the spectrum. Be safe this weekend and if you’d care to, take the “It Can Wait” pledge here. Credits after the jump.

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This column has been pinballing around my head for the past few months. I’m curious about hashtags. I’m under the impression that although everyone knows what a hashtag looks like, not many people pay attention to Twitter statistics beyond Follower counts. And now that every commercial – online or televised – comes with a hashtag, many of which seem perfunctory, I want to make an inexact science a bit more exact by evaluating basic Internet data and applying it to our coverage for the previous week.

Twitter clearly has value. Celebrities of varying degrees get paid silly amounts of money for sponsored tweets (sidebar: did you know that Melissa Joan Hart makes $9,100 for some of her tweets? That’s more obnoxious than silly). With money and brand equity to be had in the Twitter economy, every company can now slap a hashtag onto a visual ad and pretend to know what it’s doing. Remember when Newsweek ran with #MuslimRage? Or McDonald’s unintentionally eviscerating itself with #McDStories? Twitter can be tricky for the lazy and oblivious.

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You’ve never seen an episode of the fictional figurine drama “The Real Soccer Moms of Datalandia,” but you’ve probably seen a show just like it. And for anyone who has encountered the frustration of a malfunctioning TV signal or a storm-induced blackout, missing that crucial moment in whatever show you’re watching can make you want to punch your monitor until it breaks (side note: if you have Time Warner Cable, this process happens daily). Though we watch the shows, we, as consumers, don’t really pay attention to how the sausage gets made, that is: how the wires and signals connect to make sure that our real soccer moms stay on the screen.

For the past few weeks, General Electric and Mekanism have been using a series of online videos to explain this process to consumers. The newest spot, “Stormageddon,” is shown above. I’m not sure if consumers care much for big data explanations. They’d rather watch bad reality shows where women frequently toss glasses of pinot grigio on each other. Thinking about how General Electric makes the sausage feels a little like they are patting themselves on the back as their bank account gets smaller. If I liked sausage, I’d rather just eat it. Check out a second clip after the jump.

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Where art thou, David Caruso? The subhead of the announce about this reads, “DDB Canada launches arresting campaign for the Vancouver Police Foundation” and somewhere a PR intern is smiling with self-satisfaction. Initially, the Vancouver Police Foundation approached DDB for a print ad that they could distribute in local newspapers with 1950s flair. Thankfully the agency got back to them and said something along the lines of, “Today we use computers.” Thus DDB Canada’s hometown office created a social media campaign around police sunglasses, wherein community members can purchase the glasses and, if they snap a photo of themselves and share it with the hashtag #VPDPartners, win a Ride-Along experience. The Department’s website will feature the photos from the contest.

Two 30-second spots advertise the sunglasses, with the best one featuring a large man skidding on the hood of a car. We watch him, like a beached whale, for a little too long until the tagline arrives: “Wearing the sunglasses supports the cops. It doesn’t make you one.” It’s cute, and shows why we need advertising agencies. Otherwise, these spots would have been 6×9 Ariel-font jokes in the back of the Vancouver Sun.

“In the short term, the goal of the campaign is simply to raise awareness for the Vancouver Police Foundation and show support for the VPD by wearing the sunglasses,” says Martina Meckova, executive director of the Vancouver Police Foundation. “Our long term objective is to increase the membership of the Foundation and broaden the support base, so that more people in Vancouver can benefit from the work that we do in the community.” Second spot after the jump.

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BBDO New York and Foot Locker know that Clippers forward/dunker Blake Griffin is a commercial machine – Subway, Kia, Jordan Brand to rattle off a few quickly. So for their latest joint venture, “The Endorser,” the creatives decided to physically hook up Griffin to a machine called The Endorser as if he were programmed to place products. For some Lob City support, Clippers point guard/whiner Chris Paul steps in as a foil to turn off the machine and show us the difference between Real Blake and Robot Blake.

The spot is another smart and self-aware sports bit that takes advantage of an athlete’s public persona through subversion. Griffin is usually stone-faced or arrogantly posturing on the court after huge dunks, but he’s built up a quiet niche as a funnyman on television. Just see this Grantland piece from March that discusses why Blake’s comedy is more complex than you might think. The only issue with Blake is overexposure, like, when his sponsorship brands debut separate commercials within the same week. His Jordan “Blake and Drain” spot, which alludes to MJ and Spike Lee ads from twenty years ago, is even better than the Footlocker commercial. And for that reason, “The Endorser” might get lost in the ever-expanding Blake Griffin commercial merry-go-round. Credits after the jump.

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On the football field, Peyton Manning runs the Denver Broncos with a robotic efficiency fitting of a man with a giant, shiny forehead. His younger brother Eli roams the sidelines for the New York Giants with the mopey glare of a six-year-old who wants to pick his nose but can’t because cameras are watching. Usually, the funniest thing about the Manning brothers is that they’re so unfunny. They’re stiff and white. But every once in a while – don’t forget the acclaimed “Football Cops” – they unleash some comedy genius for a football-related commercial.

The newest addition to the Manning oeuvre is a fake R&B music video created by Grey for DirecTV and NFL Sunday Ticket. #footballonyourphone. Remember that hashtag. It’s going viral, because a company that deals with an incredibly popular sport got two huge stars to subvert their normal personalities and completely buy-in to a goofy campaign that could’ve been an abandoned Lonely Island digital short. In the first 12 hours or so after it hit Youtube, the clip reared in 100k views.

Everything about the spot is smart, right down to the tiny Archie Manning cameo and the best/worst hair design you’ll see this year until American Hustle, starring Bradley Cooper’s curled terribleness, hits theaters. Peyton may be known as the more gregarious of the two brothers, but Eli is a vastly underrated comedian in his commercials. He ends up stealing this show with some odd riffs on milk, blouses, and Alexander Graham Bell. Pay attention, brands: This is how you go viral.

If you live in either Chicago or Boston, you may have watched (or wanted to watch) the Stanley Cup Finals, in which case you realized that you don’t have access to NBC Sports. After some McGyver-ing and hooking you iPad to your TV, you got thousands about thousands of commercials advertising that NBC Sports would be broadcasting every game of England’s prestigious Barclays Premier League. After digesting this fact, you immediately stopped caring because 1.) You’re an American who likes ‘merican sports and 2.) Again, you don’t have access to NBC Sports.

But who better to make you, an American without access to NBC, care about this development than Jason Sudeikis, a former Saturday Night Live cast member who has appeared basically fucking everywhere in the last month? First, dude quits SNL. Then, he starts going on a press tour for his terrible-looking new movie, Meet The Millers, where he stars opposite Jennifer Aniston, who plays a middle-aged stripper. Then, he joined ESPN to count down the top 50 “This Is SportsCenter” ads last week. Then, he made cameo appearance in Drinking Buddies, a new film playing on Apple TV before it hits theaters at the end of the month and stars Sudeikis’ real-life fiance, Olivia Wilde. Then, Kiran shows me this and asks me to write about it, compelling me to start complaining about how Jason Sudeikis is fucking everywhere these days. Then, wouldn’t you know it, he releases a viral video YESTERDAY where he leads a parody version of Mumford & Sons, with Ed Helms, Jason Bateman and Will Forte starring as his bearded indie-folk backing band.

Seriously, it’s absolutely impossible to get rid of this guy. Watch him play a dumb American coach who doesn’t get soccer above in a new campaign from the Brooklyn Brothers (who you may remember from those kick-ass John Krasinski/Alec Baldwin New Era spots), and then don’t talk to me about Jason Sudeikis until you’ve developed some sort of Sudeikis repellant.

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Adidas and Sid Lee are framing the new “Unite All Originals” as Run DMC vs. DJ A-Trak, but the versus bit comes on too strong. The campaign is much more affable than combative, think of it as a buddy cop combo where there are three buddies instead of two and the buddies like to wear black felt hats.

Run DMC’s famed history with Adidas dates back to the 1980s, and they’ve been lending their benign street cred to the three stripes ever since. A-Trak may not be comparable as a household name, but he’s a worthy spokesman for the next generation, as you can see in some coverage from early March. For this new campaign, the two acts are combining for a fan-controlled music video that will be dictated user voice commands. A true embodiment of “My Adidas.”

Credits after the jump.

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When Lollapalooza kicks off its annual Chicago invasion today, there will inevitably be the droves of concertgoers who spend more time recording music on their smartphones than actually watching the music, which this year comes from the likes of Nine Inch Nails, The Cure and Queens of the Stone Age. Three staffers from Leo Burnett – designers Derek Heinze and Adam Prewozniak and writer,  Jake Reilly – are attempting to put a stop to the digital nonsense, asking anyone who goes to a concert to experience the music on their one. Lighters are acceptable, although you can use those at your own risk.

After the jump, you can see more graphics for the movement, including a photo of Jane’s Addiction frontman/Lolla mastermind Perry Farrell signing his support on some posters (we’re sure the Yeah Yeah Yeahs approve as well). Oh yeah (“Superhero” joke).

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