inspiration for inspiration
Yes yes, the celebrity hugging forces of (RED) are trying to besmirch a perfectly good colour. But I couldn’t help send in a piece for the World AIDS Day 24 hour Dazed Digital broadcast. They are accepting video, stills and stuff. If guys like Rankin and Helena Christensen, among others, can send in a self-promoting piece of flotsam, why can’t you? The above is my poor effort.
And by the way, Dazed Digital looks pretty good and is worth a visit anyways.
The Tokyoflash website describes the 1000100101:
Straight off the wrist of a Moon Base Commander from a 1960’s Sci-Fi classic, this watch features all the things that you’d expect. Flat metal panel, cryptic flashing lights, carbon fibre style strap and display that looks like it’s gauging your oxygen level.
All I can say is I want one. Right now. And I thought the Nooka Zen-H was cool.
I’ve never been one for cards. I rarely send them. I don’t believe in the extra holidays that have been created by greeting-card companies, like Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. But I still bow to the pressure and spend my cold cash on expensive, disposable cards for the people who will punish me the most if they don’t receive them. But if there’s an extra hoop to jump through, like buying stamps and trying to find an address, forget it. That’s why I love the new Starbucks holiday campaign: I can send fantastic customized messages to everyone in my digital address book for free. And it’s easy. And it’s really really fun.
My favourite part is the phone integration. When you get to the personalized card page, you can call a (toll-free?) number and leave a message, answering-machine style. But as you press buttons on your phone, the website you are on updates in real time. The phone message is converted to a digital file, which is then embedded in your card. Not only that, but the sound file goes through some kind of analysis which is parsed by a flash movie and then applied to the lips of the character you choose. So as you hear your own voice in the preview of the card, you can watch a Chinese dragon, or a gingerbread man, or some other character, actually mouth the words.
Starbucks has chosen to listen to these messages, to make sure they are not death threats or abusive, which means each message sent is delayed for up to 48 hours. That’s the only real bummer, especially in this age of instant gratification. But like I mentioned earlier I never send e-cards, and I’ve already sent 3 in the first 10 minutes of interacting with itsredagain.com. Go check it out. And if you’d like, send a customized card to us at 1% and we’ll post our favourites. (email 1percentblog@gmail.com)
Nooka is the brainchild of artist and designer, Matthew Waldman. in 1997, Matthew had a flash-back to a first grade math class while staring at a large wall clock in a London hotel and was struck by how few options there were for time display. He then sketched his ideas for potential designs on a napkin and brought them back to New York. After working on the designs, he submitted them to his legal team, and indeed, they were unique enough to patent!
The linear and graphic representation of time with Nooka watches presents a more intuitive way to view time. The visual mass increases as time passes, giving weight to an ephemeral and abstract concept. Once you’re used to the new visual paradigm, you may never go back to standard analog and digital time displays for your wrist.
The Ad Feed is inspired by popURLs.com, a site that really does nothing more than pull in feeds from the most popular sites on the web. Ad Feeds aggregates the best of the Advertising blogs, sites, videos, print, and outdoor. It’s a convenient one-stop-ad-chop if you’re into that kind of thing, and we’re into that kind of thing.
Here’s a list of some of the sites they’ve pulled in:
Adage
Adweek
Adrants
Adfreak
Agenda Inc.
NY Times Business-Media
Adjab
Adverblog
Media Buyer Planner
Design Charts
MIT Advertising Lab
Clickz
Logic + Emotion
PSFK
Adpulp
American Copywriter
Seth Godin
Beyond Madison Avenue
plus: Quotes, TV Spots, and Print Ads.
**phew**
They neglect, however, to include a few of my favourites:
Creative Juice
Adverbox
Billboardom
Banner Blog
Advertising Ourselves to Death
If any of you have the time to read all of these sites on a regular basis, you obviously don’t work in advertising.
#199– “The client loves your ad, she really does. She wanted me to tell you that. She just wants to change the visual and the headline.”
(Agency, Account Executive to creative team)
Check out these and a few hundred other AdVerbatims, thanks to Trish K. You can also submit your own, not that anything this silly ever happens at our shop. 😉
Go watch a few episodes of Making Fiends. This is great work created by animator Amy Winfrey. As described on Wikipedia:
“[Making Fiends] follows the interactions between Vendetta, a nasty, evil-hearted girl that regularly makes monsters called fiends, and Charlotte, a happy-go-lucky girl with every intention of making friends with Vendetta (despite her complete failure to realize that Vendetta despises her cheerful nature).”
Season 3 has begun, and over 20 episodes can be viewed on Amy’s website. My 4 year-old loves it and so do I. Charlotte’s weird little happy songs are a highlight. I guarantee the theme-song will get stuck in your head for days. Consider it South Park for the pre-school set.
Adrants mentions Yahoo! Canada Answers game Karma’s Quest on their ad blog. They do not judge it as good or bad, but give it a nod.
What are you waiting for? If you’ve got a hankering for dishing out wisdom, and think you really know your fellow men and women, then this game is for you. It serves up real questions and answers created by real people (including real spelling errors and grammatical atrocities) and you need to guess or intuit which answers were chosen over others by your peers. It takes a few rounds to get into it, but once you get the a taste it can be quite addictive. Go serve the common good.
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