Monthly Archives: August 2009
Welcome to our blog. It's a place where we post stuff we like. Latest work, inspiration, pop culture minutiae, you get the idea. Enjoy.
“Creativity can solve anything.”
The director’s statement for Art & Copy easily sums up why great advertising transcends media and becomes woven into the fabric of popular culture. It also characterizes the kind of advertising we strive to create as an agency:
Hate advertising? Make better ads.
What’s different and perhaps surprising about this movie, is that it isn’t about bad advertising, that 98% of which so often annoys and disrespects its audience. I didn’t want to make a doc that just trashes trashy advertising. Too easy, too obvious, and why bother? Instead, granted access to a handful of the greatest advertising minds of the last fifty years, I felt it could be a more powerful statement to focus the film only on those rare few who actually moved and inspired our culture with their work. And that higher standard made me want to make a film that reflected the same kind of disciplined artistic approach that my subjects used.
The films features such ad greats as Mary Wells, George Lois, Cliff Freeman, Hal Riney, Rich Silverstein, Jeff Goodby, Dan Wieden and Lee Clow. Read about the film and watch the trailer here.
Social media is still media.
Establishing an agency viewpoint on social media has only led us back to a core fundamental of great advertising: you are going to be more successful if you utilize media in concert with an idea or concept that engages, entertains, provokes or generally creates an emotional connection.
Most advertising isn’t liked because it doesn’t give the consumer credit for having intelligence. This goes for traditional media and nontraditional media. Being on the radio to simply be on the radio is okay. Being on Twitter to simply be on Twitter is okay too. To be successful, you’ve got to bring an idea to the table.
For Zea Restaurants’ latest campaign, our creative is simple: their take-out is so good, you’ll find any excuse to order. So on Twitter we’ve created a feed that offers humorous, daily excuses not to cook. Rather than reeling off menu items and prices (Zea’s food is a great value), we’ve chosen to entertain and deliver the value message implicitly. And who doesn’t have the daily, mental tug-of-war over cooking or not cooking?
The bottom line is social media is still media. It’s another channel to your consumer, albeit a two-way (or multi-way) conversational channel to your consumer. You don’t like having conversations with boring people or salesmen, do you? Then don’t talk like that in your advertising, traditional or otherwise. Instead, treat your consumers like people. Entertain them, enlighten them, emotionally connect with them, and they’ll become more than your consumers. They’ll become fans.
Isn’t the Internet awesome?
Tonight while researching online music experiments and crowdsourcing, I found this site. Further evidence the Internet is awesome.
Visual search
I’ve got no clue how to pronounce their name, but Idee is up to some cool stuff. This weekend I found a link to their Multicolr software, which extracts “the colours from 10 million of the most ‘interesting’ Creative Commons images on Flickr” and, by using “visual similarity technology,” allows you to navigate the collection by color. It is really pretty amazing. Give it a try.
What is “visual similarity technology,” you ask? Here’s what Idee has to say about it:
Visual similarity technology uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze hundreds of image attributes such as colour, shape, texture, luminosity, complexity, objects and regions.
These attributes form a unique visual signature and are arranged by our software into a visual index of your image set. The compact image signature is calculated quickly, stored efficiently and used to facilitate searches for similar images using an optimized and accurate comparison engine.
The implications and applications of the software are only limited by imagination. For our purposes, it’s a great way to test color combinations and find Creative Commons photos that might assist in comp layouts. Very awesome.
The Red Shirts are coming.
Interns have been around since the invention of coffee. And while we’ve always taken pride in providing an experience that actually teaches students and prepares them to perform, we felt it was time to up the ante. Our newly improved, restructured and repackaged internship program, Red Shirts, has just graduated its first class–and now, we’re looking for the next crop of maniacs. We want the ambitious ones, the ones who live for this stuff, the ones dying to do work that gets talked about.
Check out the shiny, new Red Shirts site–and if you think you’ve got the goods, upload your work/resume. We get tons of requests and have a limited number of spots, so get on it. It’s a great way to get some experience (maybe even some exposure), and it may just land you a real job paying real American currency at Red Square Agency. Ask J’Rett.
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