There is no denying that some historical figures have been so completely awesome that modern “celebrities” can’t begin to touch them. Art student Jenny Burrows and copywriter Matt Kappler put together a hilarious and unquestionably awesome fictional ad campaign showcasing some of these historical badasses.

The ads each compare a contemporary celebrity with a historical figure, pointing out how “hardcore” the famous people of the past really were. As much as we idolize celebrities today, most of them don’t even come close to the total dominating awesomeness of the ones who rule our history books.

“Historically Hardcore” is the type of campaign that could definitely drum up some interest in history. Do your kids think a day at the history museum is boring? Fill them in on a few facts about just how tough those “boring” people of the past were and chances are they’ll be begging to learn more.

Originally created as a fake campaign for the artist’s portfolio, the ads featured the name and logo of a real museum at first. But after the ads started circulating online, the museum requested their name be removed. It is hard to understand why, since it seems that these fun ads could only improve the image of any museum.

We see advertisements every day, but few of them are creative or shocking enough to make us stop and take notice. These brilliant campaigns not only look impressive, but also grab the viewer’s attention long enough to let the message sink in. While you might not care about the product or cause being advertised in these ads, it’s hard to deny the genius involved with designing something so eye-catching.

100+ Unique Uses of Traditional Advertising Media

One of the most difficult challenges an advertiser faces is getting someone to pay attention to something they see every day. Making mundane billboards, benches, escalators, stairs, elevators and buses into interesting advertising spaces isn’t easy, but with a clever idea, even the most boring canvas can come alive.

16 Creative Billboards (and 15 More, and Yet 18 More): There are those that see billboards as distracting obstructions in city skylines and there are those that see potential greatness in these sky-high blank slates. These billboards show just how cool the space can be when the design involves just a little bit of creative insight.

15 Clever Bench Ads: When most people see an advertisement on a bench, they just plop down, but with inspired ads like these, people find it hard to just sit there, and instead take pictures and tell their friends.

15 Great Escalator& Stair Ads (and 15 Elevator Ads): Rather than just applying pictures or words to stairs, escalators and elevators, these creative ad campaigns play with the tiers, doors and movements, placing them at the top of their game when it comes to elevated advertising.

Transportation With Style: Bus ads are seen by pedestrians and drivers alike, but whereas most of these ads are forgotten almost immediately, the playful messages on these buses stick with viewers throughout the day.

Over 100 Great Guerrilla Marketing Movements

Guerrilla marketing is one of the most innovative forms of advertising. These playful and thought-provoking installations make the viewer feel strong emotions about what they are seeing, even if it revolves around a corporate message instead of a work of art.

What is guerrilla marketing?: For a better understanding of guerrilla marketing, and to enjoy some brilliant campaigns, this WebUrbanist exclusive, eight-part series is a must see. It covers the origins, corporations, nuances, social uses, types, and future of guerrilla marketing, along with answering that difficult question, “is guerrilla marketing right for you?”

22 Ads From Bizarre to Brilliant: Everyone from bookstores to condom manufacturers to laundry detergent companies, is in on the guerrilla marketing bandwagon these days, but that doesn’t make these ads any less entertaining.

14 Fun Urban Street Ads: These ads, often created by professional artists, tip toe the line between marketing and artwork. The result is visually-stunning ads that actually get people to stop and take note.

12 Extremely Effective Guerrilla Marketing Stunts (and 13 More): Unlike most forms of advertising, guerrilla marketing isn’t limited to traditional mediums and can even interact directly with the viewer. These galleries are filled with 25 effective guerrilla marketing campaigns that were attention-grabbing enough to get people to stop in the street.

10 Intense Public Guerrilla Marketing Posters: Marketers have used posters for centuries, but these 10 shocking ads use their specific installation locations to make a much more powerful statement than any picture could on its own.

15 Cool, Crazy and Innovative Guerrilla Marketing Campaigns (and 15 More): These guerrilla campaigns show just how varied the mediums can be when it comes to the art of advertising. With everything from shopping bags, billboards, subway installations, crosswalks and more, these ads get attention in almost every way possible.

Over 100 Effective Advertisements For Great Causes

Public service announcements, political organizations and charities often have small ad budgets and end up with less memorable marketing campaigns as a result. These campaigns show that a well-presented powerful message can get plenty of attention, even without a huge investment.

15 Great Green Ads (and 11 More, and Yet 29 More): These days, everyone knows the environment needs help. The trick is to move viewers from the realm of knowledge and inspire them to actually take action. These ads did just that.

15 Ingenious Humanitarian Subvertisements: The environment isn’t the only cause worthy of attention. These 15 ads inspire the average shopper to take action to help their fellow man, whether that means donating blood, food, money or time.

18 Creative And Bizarre Safe Sex Ads (and 20 More): With some schools still teaching abstinence only programs, safe sex ads are an important social contribution, helping to reduce unplanned pregnancies, and the spread of dangerous and deadly diseases.

20 Brave and Bold Advertisements

Advertisers have to carefully toe the line of socially acceptable messages and imagery, but sometimes they find a company willing to break the rules. These 20 ads crossed boundaries, in some cases resulting in effective communication with the audience, but not all of the advertisers were so lucky.

15 Cool and Crazy Controversial Advertisements: It takes guts for a company to use revolting imagery, graphic content or pro-drug messages to promote their message, but these 15 ads successfully pushed boundaries and came out ahead.

5 Examples of Guerrilla Marketing Gone Wrong: Of course, not all daring moves pay off. These 5 attempts at guerrilla ads not only failed miserably, but resulted in everything from resentment to bomb scares.

From severed arms to crosses made from marijuana, shocking imagery in ads aims to get our attention – and that they do. Advertisers are using bold and bizarre visuals to draw eyes in an increasingly cluttered world and their attempts range from disgusting gross-out tactics to clever interactive displays. Some of these 15 ads effectively help us remember what might otherwise be an obscure brand, while others fall flat, or worse, make us sick.

Finetra: Where Even Nightmares Come to Rest

(image via: scary ideas)

Finetra’s bedding is so comfortable, your razor-toothed evil alien demons will give up on their nightmarish intentions and just curl up with you instead.

You Eat What You Touch

(image via: adpunch)

Mmm, hamster muffin! This ad for Unilever’s Lifebuoy antibacterial soap tries a gross-out tactic to make people paranoid about what germs might be lingering on their hands when they eat.

If You Aren’t Totally Clean, You Are Filthy

(images via: creative advertising world)

A similar ad for Just Liquid Soap states, “If you aren’t totally clean, you’re filthy.”

Exhibit Yourself

(image via: trends updates)

The grotesque image of a man holding open the flayed skin of his chest, showing off his internal organs to the world, is meant to tempt viewers into ‘exhibiting themselves’ at HypeGallery.com, a place where users could show off their artwork and films.

Farewell to Arms

(image via: trendhunter)

A severed arm on the street would definitely attract some attention, and it was a fitting guerrilla stunt for the DVD release of Quentin Tarantino’s gory 2007 movie, ‘Death Proof’, in Amsterdam.

Mmm, Roach Pizza

(image via: ads of the world)

Imagine devouring an entire pizza and then seeing a cockroach in the box. A pest control company calling itself Dr. Barata (Dr. Cockroach) made up these boxes to scare pizza consumers into calling for help… or maybe just calling health inspectors on the pizza joint that thought these boxes were a good idea.

This Might Make You Puke

(images via: ads of the world)

Italian B-movie store Bloodbuster brought on the gags with a series of puke-themed posters that say “you can’t please everyone.” Doesn’t it make you want to rent one of their movies?

Get Them Off Your Dog

(image via: hooked on ads)

Gross out tactics aren’t the only way to get attention. Clever and interactive, this massive Frontline poster on a mall floor turns people into fleas when viewed from above.

Kiss My Glass

(image via: ad hunt)

Does this ad campaign imply that wearing Glassino sunglasses makes you look like an ass?

Samsung MP3 Player

(image via: ads of the world)

Evidently, this ad for a Samsung MP3 player is telling us that using their product is like having a tiny rapper yelling into your ear. Which is to say, awesome.

We Protect Your Cattle from Almost Everything

(image via: pixel pasta)

Barbed wire company Ideal Alambrec is up front about their product’s limitations: it’ll protect your cattle from almost everything. But when it come to aliens, there’s simply no guarantees.

Does It Matter How You Achieve Your Spiritual High?

(image via: ad freak)

Wonder Cafe, a forum for spiritual discussion, courted controversy with this startling ad featuring two joints formed into a cross. Whether the ad is interesting or crass may depend upon your own religious views, but it definitely attracted some attention.

Those Are Some Dangerous Nose Hairs

(images via: animal)

In what seems to be a bit of a safety hazard, Panasonic twisted power lines through the nostrils on a series of billboards in Indonesia to push nose hair clippers.

Come As You Are (Darth Vader)

(image via: advertolog)

McDonalds told the world to ‘come as you are’ in a long print ad campaign that featured some unexpected characters – like Darth Vader here, who somehow doesn’t seem too happy with his meal.

Don’t Talk While He Drives

(images via: fubiz)

This Bangalore public safety ad, aiming to prevent cell phone-related accidents, tells us that if you keep someone on the phone while they’re trying to drive, you could end up with blood on your hands… and on your face… not to mention splattered all over your clothing and bedding. Careful, that stuff stains.

It’s not every day that you come across an absolutely stunning and somewhat disturbing series of photos entitled “Golden Pig and Bitches”. But you never know what you’re going to get from Romanian art collective Carioca Studio, a group of professionals that produce astoundingly creative and well-crafted ads, campaigns and projects.

Carioca’s work may range from fun and goofy to dark and bizarre, but it’s always fresh, unexpected and unflinching, which is exactly what makes their ads so effective – it’s hard to turn away from the issue of child slavery when photos of children chained up like animals are staring you in the face.

Every single image in Carioca’s portfolio, from energetic and colorful campaigns for companies like Pepsi and Twix to their looser, more artistic personal projects, is incredibly visually striking. It’s hard to say whether every detail is carefully thought out or some kind of magic simply occurs in the studio, but all of these images are the result of a concerted group effort.

“Carioca is a photo production house,” an anonymous member of Carioca told WebUrbanist in 2009. “We have production, photo, postproduction, and CGI departments. We have here 3 in-house photographers (which are also the partners in Carioca, together with a production guy). We use to sign the works as Carioca (because indeed every visual is a collective work) and we like it to be that way.”

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but there are times when the packaging matters just as much as what’s inside. When you’re shopping for anything from a bottle of juice to a new pair of shoes, the package is what catches your eye long before you consider the merits of the actual product. That’s why designers spend so much time and energy designing the perfect container for every product imaginable. Some are perfectly sensible and some are so far out that you can’t help but wonder what they were thinking. These packaging designs are some of the most eye-catching and wonderfully inventive from recent years.

Fast Food Fun

(images via: TheDieline)

Eating at a fast food restaurant is always fun for kids, but what about grown-ups? This Burger King concept from designer Bernadette Coughlin would let adults have fun creating their own Burger King from their various food packages, and switching his appearance by changing out the pieces.

(images via: TheDieline)

Just as fun is this suite of interactive, modular takeout packages for the Food City chain. The boxes are totally waterproof and free of glue, and the customer transforms them from box to eating tray. Add-on containers hold sides and sauces, making for a customizable experience without any excess waste.

Healthy Foods Can Be Fun, Too

(images via: TheDieline)

On the other end of the spectrum is this brilliant brand of healthy snacks called VitaMeal. They’re aimed at reducing childhood obesity by putting appropriate serving sizes of healthy foods into places where kids congregate, like schools and recreation centers. Each product has a “personality,” making them easy for kids to get excited about. The vending machines themselves are modular in nature so they fit into the available space, and they’re designed to work with special “credit” cards that bear the likeness of one of the snack characters. Parents put credits onto the card and decide which snacks their little ones can and can’t buy.

(images via: Toxel & Gajitz)

Making healthy foods more appealing is often just a matter of the way they’re presented. Above, fruit juice is packaged in boxes that look and feel like real fruit skin, making them interesting to the touch as well as delicious to the taste buds. Just below that, a new concept for packaging healthy foods puts carrots, celery and blueberries into packages usually reserved for very unhealthy products. Carrots are packed like cigarettes, celery comes in a French fry container, and blueberries are in a blister pack like chocolates…all in the hopes that consumers will want more fresh, healthy foods if they come in unusual packages.

The Packaging Is the Product

(images via: Treehugger 1, 2)

As beautiful as some packaging is, sometimes it’s simply excessive. With some products coming wrapped in two or three layers of plastic, paper and cardboard, it’s enough to drive any environmentally-minded person crazy. So when a company integrates their packaging into their product design, it’s a win on every level. At the top, Hangerpak is a box to ship tee shirts that transforms into a hanger once in the customer’s hands. Below that, Lite 2 Go is a modular hanging light kit that’s packaged inside its own shade, greatly cutting down on the amount of waste generated by each individual product.

(images via: Treehugger)

One of the worst parts of bringing any new product home from the store is having to deal with all of the wasted packaging – this is especially true of carefully-packed items like televisions. They usually come with layers upon layers of styrofoam, cardboard, plastic and plenty of little paper leaflets. But this packaging design from Tom Ballhatchet is different: it’s actually functional. The box formerly used to hold a television transforms into a stand for that television; the cavity that once cradled the TV and kept it safe turns into shelves for your DVD player and other accessories.

Smells Like Creativity

(images via: The Dieline 1, 2)

Women’s perfume is often packaged in lovely curved bottles, but men’s cologne is usually stuck in plain square or rectangle containers. These two concepts take men’s fragrance to a whole new level of packaging design. At top is Scent Stories, a concept from Polish design studio Ah&Oh. The bottles are all based on classic literature, featuring quotes from Poe, Orwell, de Sade and Laclos stories, along with tops that resemble characters from memorable pieces by each author. Below that is Levelus, a tongue-in-cheek package for a manly fragrance; the level is functional and can actually be used to straighten picture frames in the bathroom while you get ready for a big date.

It’s All About the Shoes

(Images via: LovelyPackage, Gizmodo, Treehugger)

It’s often said that you can’t improve on the design of the mousetrap – and the same goes for the humble shoebox. But that doesn’t stop some designers from trying to cut down on shoe packaging waste or simply make the box more interesting. At top is Milli, a concept from student designer Jenny Kim. Milli stands for both millimeters – the unit of measurement used for bullets – and milliseconds – the unit of measurement that often decides the winner of a race. Her bullet shoebox represents the speed and power needed by runners. Bottom left is a brand new packaging design from Puma that incorporates a less-wasteful box with an exterior bag, eliminating both the laminated cardboard box (which is often hard to recycle) and the single-use exterior plastic bag. Bottom right: Newton shoes are packaged in 100% recycled cardboard (rather like cardboard egg carton material) and instead of being stuffed with paper, the shoes are stuffed with a pair of socks and a reusable shoe bag.

Drink it Up

(images via: TheDieline, LikeCool, TheDieline and DesignYearbook)

Beverages – from sodas to sports drinks to alcoholic beverages – already come in a wide variety of packages. But often, when we go into a store not sure of what we want, a unique package can be the deciding factor for our purchase. Above, beverages packaged in these incredible bottles would be sure to catch any shopper’s eye.

(images via: Reuben Miller and TheDieline)

Not all packaging innovations are for the sake of aesthetics only. These unique packages were designed with a desire to make lives easier. Above, a resealable soda can would prevent bugs and dirt from contaminating an open soda while allowing advertisers a brand new spot to reach their audience. The rectangular soda bottles would be the first major change to the shape of plastic beverage bottles, but it could save untold amounts of money. Packaging beverages this way would allow them to stack more closely and save room, thus drastically reducing transport costs.

(images via: LovelyPackage, TheDieline, VisualAdvice, PackagingoftheWorld)

Although most of us don’t want to admit it, a product’s packaging has a huge impact on what we purchase. Would you rather have a package on your shelf with a boring plain label or one that has clearly been designed to please the eyes and be useful? Above: flavored vodka comes in astonishingly cool flasks, the design of which won a bronze award at the 2009 German Art Director’s Club Competition. Lower, the 360 Paper Bottle could dramatically cut down on plastic bottle waste and still give the consumer a fun drinking experience. The “Milk” package is a two-liter carton which was designed as an experiment in unique packaging and communication. Bottom, a visual representation of what’s inside: a spoonful of sugar.

Playful Packages

(images via: TheDieline 1, 2)

It can be almost painful to throw away the coolest packaging – when you select a product based on how it’s packaged and bring it into your home because you like the way it looks, tossing the package into the trash is a little heart-wrenching. These products allow you to keep the wrapping around. Top, a set of dice help you decide what to be for Halloween while the canister they come in is an endlessly entertaining toy. Below that, a package containing rolls of film also works as a pinhole camera. It comes complete with instructions to help you construct your own photographic masterpiece.

You’ve Got the Music in You

(images via: PackagingoftheWorld 1, 2)

Music, being creative and highly subjective, lends itself well to creative and innovative packaging. Here, Peter Gabriel and the band Marrow both went with unusual packaging ideas for their music.

(images via: Azltron)

Science vs. Witchcraft did something a little different with their CDs and packaged them in old floppy diskettes, complete with retro labels and paper sleeves. As an added bonus, users can play a text-based game when they insert the diskette into a computer.

(images via: PackagingoftheWorld)

You wouldn’t use just any earbuds to listen to all of that creatively-packaged music, right? Audiovox designed these packages knowing that many people choose their earbuds as a fashion accessory rather than an electronics accessory. They put them in these personality-rich packages to help consumers decide which personality fits their lifestyle and their needs the best.

Power Up: Health Products

(images via: PackagingoftheWorld and Gajitz)

Any parent knows that getting kids to take vitamins can be a rather difficult task. These Omega-3 supplements come in kid-friendly packaging that might once and for all end the battle over taking or not taking vitamins. Below, creative first aid packaging whispers, rather than shouts, what’s inside – leaving the product to speak for itself.

Beautifully Creative Packaging

(images via: PackagingoftheWorld and Freedom of Creation)

There’s really no question that we’re simply drawn toward creative, attractive packaging. Even if the product is exactly the same as the one next to it, we simply want the one that looks more interesting. Whether it’s Mr. Clean packaged in dumbbell-shaped bottles or L’Oreal skin cream nestled in a golden sphere, many of us will buy a brand other than our usual when a different product offers a more attractive outer wrapping. Even though the packaging often just ends up in the trash, that first impression in the store makes all of the difference. Most of us decide in a split second, right when we see a product for the first time, whether we’re going to buy it. Since we can’t test out every product in the store, we rely on the packaging to tell us part of the story and draw us in.