So in Rhode Island there’s a department store chain called Ocean State Job Lot. It’s like Walmart but not. To hype themselves for the holiday shopping season, the store hooked up with Kindling Digital which created the elaborate prank which took shoppers on an adventure which involved Owen Van Winter, an elf, Santa and a guy claiming to be Santa who turns out to be an imposter.

The stunt grabbed a few shoppers at checkout and took them on an adventure to save Santa and, of course, win some free stuff. It’s quite well done actually and, so far, has received a lot of play. For Rhode Island. OK, not to jab a state within which I used to work at an agency I really didn’t like (or, more correctly, didn’t like me) because, all things considered, I like the stunt. And so do 18,000 other people.

If you recall, last month AdWeak teamed with stock footage company Dissolve to launch Advertising Insider. The combination is the best of both world’s.

On the one hand, AdWeak gets yet another platform through which to share his epically jaded advertising headlines. On the other hand, Dissolve gets to share its vast collection of stock footage. But best of all, the rest of us get to revel in the amusement of the two combined!

Here are three more episodes:

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