Tag Archives: ad

Advertising alum Anthony Cardenas’ Penn and Teller Mazda spot lands Super Bowl slot

Mazda CX-5 : Penn and Teller 30 second spot from Anthony Cardenas on Vimeo.

Anthony Cardenas came to Art Center’s Advertising program equipped with equal quantities of talent and doubt. He doubted whether it was wise to spend several years pursuing his second undergraduate degree. (He had recently received his B.A. in Marketing from CSU Northridge). He had questions about how he’d finance his degree. He also wondered whether it made any sense for him to focus on copywriting at an art and design college.

But eventually his anxieties lifted once he discovered that his unconventional choices — aka his differentiating qualities — were fueling his success. “Everyone I was in school with wanted to be an art director, so why not be a copywriter?” Cardenas remembers wondering. “I enjoyed it, my peers seemed to enjoy my writing and found it funny (or they were really good at pretending to laugh), and I thoroughly enjoyed doing that more than sitting on a computer comping all day. So, I made it known to all of my friends and teachers that I wanted to become a copywriter, and I was the only one at that time really.”

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Building a better Super Bowl spot, Art Center-style

When I think about what it takes to create a great Super Bowl spot, I can’t help but first think of all of the things we had to tell our teams NOT to do to create one.

  • No animals doing things animals can’t do.
  • No old people doing things old people can’t do.
  • No inanimate objects doing things inanimate objects can’t do.
  • No Martians or other forms of aliens.
  • No cavemen.
  • No deserted islands.
  • Nothing that uses the soundtrack from “2001 Space Odyssey.”
  • Nothing that features a chimpanzee, even if it is doing things chimpanzees can do.
  • No one going to heaven.
  • Nothing that requires you to play me a special effects reel from a company in Finland before telling me the idea.
  • No 70′s hits and site gags.
  • No patriotic attempts to make people cry.
  • And please, no old chestnuts I killed last year.

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