August 31, 2007
Pearl Izumi Running Shoes.
This ad persuaded me to read it outloud to my co-worker. That makes it awesome. I’m not sure of the agency behind it, but thanks to Advertising for Peanuts who found it in the first place.
July 30, 2007
Falling Garden.
The site is in German and the three years of the language that I took in high school are failing me. So I can’t tell you what it’s for or about, but i can tell you the obvious: that is that it’s beautiful.
July 27, 2007
My Portfolio is Me.
I got the latest Communication Arts the other day (Photography Annual 48) and found quite a few things of interest. I’ll post about a few others later, but one of the things that really stood out was actually an ad for the Academy of Art University. The copy, which was a tad bit cheesy but believable in a Hell yeah! kind of way, was interesting.
“My portfolio is me, everything I am and it’s everything I’m not. It’s my weakness and my strengths. My self-confidence and -esteem. My past, my present, and most definitely my future. My portfolio is where I’m going, where I’ve been, places I shouldn’t have been, gone and shouldn’t go. It’s everything and just a book. It’s my inspiration. My generation and it’s never finished, never done, always a work in progress. It’s everything I’ve ever seen, heard, touched, smelled, sensed and believed, and my worst fears and all my hopes at the same time. It’s the beginning of the beginning and the end of an era. And so much more than a phase. It’s my portfolio, and describing it is describing me.”
Posted In ads
June 28, 2007
Rethink: Contemporary Art.
Rethink of Vancouver, British Columbia is a cutting edge agency.
The agency’s philosophy – creative and otherwise – is pared down to the essentials. Pencil rough storyboard presentations (no PowerPoint). Notes in client meetings are taken on walls covered in chalkboard paint. Any leave-behinds are tucked into blank white folders, DVD covers, or booklets stamped with a small backwards circle R – the Rethink logo. Even business cards are generic – they’re plain white with blank spaces for the handwritten name of the staffer and a phone number or email address. The web site itself is a blank white screen with a small glyph saying “web site.” Pretty Cool.
This is my favorite project of theirs. Fifty-thousand buttons were displayed, each printed with a single word representing one of a hundred possible responses to contemporary art. The public was free to walk away with as many as they wanted in this installation for the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver.
June 27, 2007
The Dogme Manifest for Advertising.
I came across this in the Design Annual 46 from Communication Arts magazine. Working in the business some points I wholeheartedly agree with, while others are a little much. Let me know what you think.
1. No headline will begin with “Something is wrong when…”, “Exactly at what point does…” or “Has it ever occurred to you that…”
2. Access to all awards show books shall be limited to one hour per month. Maybe
3. No commercial or Internet film will be shot in winter. In Jamaica. On a beach. WIth a little bar with a grass roof. Where they serve those blue drinks with mango slices.
4. No celebrity voiceovers shall be permitted unless at least three people in the country actually recognize who the hell it is.
5. No further use of chimpanzees on the Superbowl shall be allowed.
6. The same goes for chickens.
7. And gratuitous beasts.
8. Art directors will not be permitted to use Photoshop until an actual concept has been determined.
9. All creatives who get off on debasing, senseless or sexis humor and feel compelling to impose it on civilized society shall have all previous memories of Saturday night frat house binges erased from their memory banks.
10. No shots of mothers holding babies.
11. No meaningless taglines that don’t add a damn thing to the campaign other than give the client something to put on coffee mugs and t-shirts at the annual sales meeting.
12. Anyont caught sleazing a slash on an awards show entry form because, after all, “If I hadn’t suggested switching paragraph 4 with paragraph 2, this would have sucked,” will be dropped down the elevator shaft. Naked.
13. Creatives shall be barred from imposing the same idea that won them the Palm d’Or, gold One Show pencil and D&AD Best In Show on every project they come in contact with until the end of eternity.
14. Whining will not be permitted under any circumstances. This includes budget whining. Account executive whining. Client whining. Client’s wife whining. Lack of creative freedom whining. What-do-you-mean-I-can’t-use-Nadav-Kander whining.
15. No goatees.
16. Audible groans when being asked to do radio is off limits. Radio only sucks because you’ve made yourself believe it does.
17. When presenting, no words over three syllables shall be used thus allowing the actual work to prove how smart you are.
18. No vacation plans shall be changed at the 11th hour, thereby causing your spouse to question your life priorities in the name of taking one for the team, assuming the team has never taken one for you.
19. Except in dire emergencies which does not include “The client is going on vacation,” “I’m sorry I sat on the brief so long” and “I need to meet my roommate at the airport,” creatives shall keep the concept of the All Nighter a fond, but distant memory of college days, understanding that there comes a point when editing a brand video at two in the morning begins to feel a lot like walking out a 39th floor window on LSD.
20. During office hours, no billiards, dart games, Nerf basketball or other distractions masquerading as creative stimulators will be permitted. If you want stimulation, get on a plane for Amsterdam.
21. Every creative will be required to go through an entire day once a week without saying the word “viral,” unless you’ve recently been on a float trip down Ebola River.
22. The term “mockumentary” shall be banned at all times.
23. No account executive shall be permitted to actually suggest in client meetings that “we might want to think about street art.”
24. No further reference to hijacking shall be allowed unless you’re comfortable with the idea of several large gentlemen with wool suits, earpieces and Ray Ban sunglasses removing you from your cubicle while you’re playing Texas Hold ’em online.
25. Copywriters shall glue their laptops shut for a period of a month during which they will reaquaint themselves with a pad of paer and a No. 2 pencil. No, not a pen. Not a Pentel. A pencil.
26. All creative department wastebaskets shall be replaced with much bigger ones.
27. No copywriter shall own a thesaurus. There is no fancy word in a thesaurus that is better than the simple one that just pops naturally into your head.
28. Creative teams shall produce on campaign per year for a nonprofit organization of their choice with no interntion of entering said campaign into any awards show anywhere on this or any other planet.
29. The use of music shall be prohibited from all emotional TV spots until such time as the spot itself, sans music, is capable of making at least twelve people cry like a river.
30. For a period of one week, no creative shall use humor in a radio spot.
31. Especially a beer spot.
Shanked from Ernie Shenck’s article in the November 2005 Communcation Arts.
Posted In ads
June 18, 2007
How to know when you’ve done a good ad.
I love this…
It’s not an easy thing to know. A good ad isn’t like a ball everyone sees sail over the fence for a homerun. Or a kiss, that when it’s over your eyes open on someone else’s heat. A good ad is a tricky, slippery, evasice beast that doesn’t like to be caught, won’t stand still, won’t come out when called. A good ad is a greased pig when it comes time to put your hands on one. Masters of disguise, good ads sneak out of you in bars, the shower, dreams, even in advertising meetings, and run away to lost pages in your workbook or torn up sheets in office wastebaskets. There are even good ads that hide inside other ads and remain unrecognized even when shown on television. (Heck, there’s likely a good ad hiding inside this one.) Some people think you can only tell a good ad when it appears in an advertising award show. Some people would say theonly good ad is one that “sells product.” Whether or not these are helpful identifiers of what makes a good ad good is not the point here. (I would say emphatically they are not.) What we’re interested in is how do you know – the moment you’ve done it – when you’ve done a good ad. How do you decide to stop writing, talking ot thinking and grab the little bastard before he makes a getaway, pin him down on the floor and call for the creative director? One word. There’s one word that, if it fairly describes your ad, tells you you’re done. It’s not honesty though that’s an excellent virtue good ads often contain. It’s not funny or provocative or wow or … The word is art. In my gentle opinion, the word is art. An indefinable monster of a word that means something slightly different to each person is the secret to good advertising. When you’ve made art, stop. Until you have, don’t. I believe it’s that simple.
(stolen from Mark Fenske)
Posted In ads
June 7, 2007
Ad Goodness of the Day.
If you look closely at the different elements of the room you can see that it’s not really a sketch at all, but words put together in a way such that they take on the shape of the different pieces of furniture. Not that I’ve ever seen this done before or anything, but it really took me a moment to decipher that that’s what was going on in these ads.
And I just thought this was the coolest, most unique idea for a “business card” that I’ve ever seen…
