Artful Advertising

In 2014, Dempster's bread rolled out its new Canadian-produced television spot "The Beauty of Whole Grains" to promote its new line-up of 100% whole grain breads. Not only is it a music video, it's also a flipbook style animation involving 220 slices of bread captured in mid-air as they pop out of toasters as a frame-by-frame sequence. While the more than striking resemblance to "Last Leaf" can't be denied, it's still an inspired move to tell a story of bread using the product itself as the medium.

In the world of marketing, this trending art form has introduced a wave of possibilities for visual advertising. The Netherlands Burger King team released this eye-catching promotional poster, which took a novel approach to the usual fast food ads that regularly feature uninspired images of the latest menu items. As intended, it caught the eyes of several beauty-savvy female bloggers and fashion style magazines, including makeup vloggers looking to imitate the burger design in a tutorial.

Nicolas Deveaux is a CGI motion artist and director who has made viral video waves with his uniquely photo-realistic yet surrealist depiction of animals performing human-like acrobatic feats and other unusual acts. Companies often take notice not only of what's trending in the general realm of visual media, but of a particular artist who stands out for his or her distinct style. When Deveaux came out with his '5 mètres 80′ (2013) animated short of high diving giraffes, which was inspired by an earlier project called ‘7 Tonnes 2′,  (2005) featuring an elephant jumping on a trampoline, he gained the attention of not only hundreds of online blogs and foreign film festivals (winning a number of prizes) but also companies looking to harness his talents to represent them, including big name brands like Cartier (2014), who commissioned this ad via his production company Cube Creative.

Crop circles aren't usually discussed as "art pieces" as often as they are cited in the realm of conspiracy theories by X Files and Area 51 enthusiasts. But the scientific consensus is that all crop circles are man-made, which makes them a pretty fascinating art movement, considering the complicated nature of their secretive, intricate, anonymous, and globally widespread creation. After Doug Bower and Dave Chorley publicly admitted in 1991 that they personally began the crop circle phenomena as an elaborate hoax since their first sightings in the late 70s, a second wave of crop artists were inspired to create their own sophisticated pictographs. A UK-based art collective called Circlemakers was founded in the early 90s to create crop circles both as an art practice and for commercial clients. Companies like Papa Johns have cleverly latched on to the media circus effect that crop circles tend to spark, and contracted artists like Stan Herd to create promotional crop circle artwork for their brand.

Sticky Note Art uses the popular multi-coloured office supply to create collages in pixel art style, which lends itself well to classic video game homages, both static and animated. In the world of fine arts, sticky note installations like Rebecca Murtaugh's have made their mark. But as a form of expression it is more often considered a prank than an art form, due to its roots in college campuses like M.I.T. The 2011 "Post-It Wars" in France and Seattle gained a lot of media attention as the phenomenon of sticky note mural competitions between office buildings spread. Office Max, the makers of Post Its, took advantage of the marketing opportunity their product had inspired. They sponsored the creative duo at Eepy Bird, most known for their Extreme Mentos and Coca Cola Experiment viral video, to create Extreme Sticky Note Experiments, which blurs the line between advertisement and corporate-sponsored art, since the product placement is impossible to avoid. Perhaps the most surprising example of sticky note art in advertisement, in which something other than Post-Its themselves are promoted, is this guerrilla marketing ad from Brazilian footwear company, Melissa. They not only pulled off an impressive stunt with their 350,000 sticky note stop motion animation, they used the medium to its advantage and got people to engage with the brand by leaving their own notes on the art itself.

Street painting goes as far back as the sixteenth century, but modern sidewalk art has taken a new twist in recent years with the use of anamorphosis to create optical illusions that appear to be 3D. Several chalk artists have acquired worldwide recognition for mastering this technique, including Edgar Müller, who beat his own world record for creating the largest 3D pavement art installation. The greatest appeal of 3D chalk art for advertisers goes beyond its popularity, and has more to do with the fact that people have a hard time resisting posing with the art itself. Its interactive quality not only actively engages us, but multiplies the number of eyeballs that end up seeing the art when we enthusiastically share all the pictures we took with it. Chevy Sonic's viral advertising campaign highlights all the best qualities of 3D sidewalk art.

Rube Goldberg machines have their origins in art from their namesake's artist's cartoons, in which the the concept of an overly-complicated contraption that uses chain reactions to perform simple tasks was created. Long before the smash-hit OK Go music video "This Too Shall Pass" tapped into the viral video potential of these devices in 2010, artists like Peter Fischli & David Weiss had used them as art installations, immortalized in their Swiss film Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) back in 1987. While Rube Goldberg machines have largely been used as visual gags in children's movies and cartoons, they lend themselves well to advertisement since they are powerfully capable of holding your attention for the duration of their domino-effect. Honda made a wise move when they decided to use one for their new Honda Accord model in their commercial "The Cog", which now has over 5 million views.

Face painting no longer needs to be enjoyed exclusively at children's parties and carnivals. Artists have begun capturing their skin-canvased masterpieces with photography and forged a new-found respect for the art form. James Kuhn gained international attention as a "face paint illusionist" with his 365 Days of Self Portraits project, while Guido Daniele took advantage of hand puppetry for his animal paintings, which gained him the title of "2006 Hero of the Year" by Animal Planet for his work in WWF's Give a Hand to Wildlife advertising campaign. Many other advertisers have also taken note of this sudden surge in body art, and there seems to be a particularly popular trend among car agencies using nude, painted contortionists to mimic their auto bodies (pun intended).

Carl Warner is an artist widely recognized for his intricate Food Landscapes photography, which combines landscape "painting" with still life using edible mixed media - or ingredients, if you will. Kraft's ad campaign for their Calorie-Wise salad dressings follows a similar recipe, while adding the magic of animation to bring their Waterfall and Venice edible landscapes to life.

Tilt-shift photography has been growing more and more in popularity in recent years with the advent of post-production filters that allows the effect to be easily emulated. In the late 2000s, videographers began experimenting with this aesthetic, which makes real life landscapes appear to be composed of miniature maquettes. The trend caught on with Vimeo artists like Sam O'Hare, creator of The Sandpit. It wasn't long before advertisers took a liking to this effect, which lends itself well to commercials involving cars since it creates the enchanting illusion of making them look like Hot Wheels toys. Allstate was one of the first to take note of the growing buzz when they released their own commercial with the tilt-shift effect in 2010. Meanwhile, this Italian ad for the KM Sicuri model was released overseas on the same year.

Making hand shadow puppets is probably one of the most ancient forms of entertainment along with cave painting. Somehow these simple optical illusions still have the power to amuse modern audiences. Theater dance troupes like Pilobolus make use of their entire bodies for their shadow art, which they've performed on Conan O'Brien. In the advertising world, the art form seems to be particularly favoured in car commercials like Volkswagen's Phaeton or Hyundai's Santa Fe.

Sand Art can be considered both a form of animation and performance art, since the transitions and stories that emerge from watching one image transform into the next are most captivating when they are created for a live audience. Kseniya Simonova became the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent in 2009 with her stunning sand art performance, which brought the audience to tears. Before this art trend became more popular through video sharing, with other artists like Ilana Yahav, Hungarian artist Ferenc Cakó had already created this series of Animal Planet broadcast bumpers.

I first discovered PES through his stop-motion short Western Spaghetti, which was so widely popular in 2008 that TIME named it the #2 Internet film of the year. (His sequel Fresh Guacamole would later become the shortest film ever nominated for an Oscar). Little did I know that Bacardi had already tapped into this director's talents with their ad campaign for their flavoured rum line: Coco, Razz, Apple, and Limon.

Light writing photography was a very hot (not new) art trend just a few years ago. It naturally led the way to experimentation with flashlight stop motion animation. Sprint was smart enough to hop on the bandwagon at the right time with this commercial.

Artist Tell No One posted his low fi video experiment Seaweed on YouTube in 2010. One year later, a Turkish bank hired him to direct their TV campaign Forest in the same style.