AdNausea

Goodby Silverstein & Partners have done it again! Well, I guess their Comcast genius came after this one I’m going to talk about, but you get the point. I am late in the game stumbling across this website for Frito-Lay chips and dips (and the post leading me to it). But better late than never, especially in this case.

GS&P have created a website (probably a couple months back) for the company Frito-Lay. This website came out and lead up to the “Made for Each Other” campaign. Both the commercials I’ve seen as well as the website have absolutely beautiful and eye-catching animation and illustration. The music fits perfectly and the commercials look like the very beginning to a trailer to a movie you wouldn’t mind seeing.

On the website, a multitude of peculiar characters await you - interact with them, try to match them with their soulmate. Explore enough and you’re going to find easter eggs and small mini games as well. Now go ahead and click here to visit it and while you’re waiting for it to load (it does take a long time) watch the commercials below. They’re fun. And tell me what you think - have you seen the website yet? What do you think?
>> LOVE SOCKETS, Animation by Blacklist, Melodium, Cobra Creative:

Now, if you’ve ever been unemployed, had a lot of extra stuff to get rid of or wanted to make a little extra money (in numerous ways) you’ve no doubt stumbled onto craigslist.com. I’m on the site myself every day checking in the creative gigs (don’t you do it! They’re mine!) and looking at all the weird stuff you can find. I am very pleased with a post I found today. At first glance, there’s not much different about this ad, Y&R in San Fran is hiring for junior creatives. The ad was for a portfolio fair - you bring your portfolio into their office and they tell you (in an un-sugar-coated way) whether you’ve got what it takes or not. Nothing too weird. But I clicked on a link in the ad and was brought to this. It’s a game, a little like Galaga (which I never was a fan of) to see if you can shoot down other young creatives with portfolio in hand. I’m posting this on my blog, because not only is it fun, but it is a huge step in job postings. Something that used to be boring (like announcing a portfolio open house) is now taken in a new direction and anything that can entertain and interact with the target audience AND makes you want to try their service… well, that’s good in my book.

Visit the site and see what you find - if you live in the area, this is a great opportunity. If you don’t, at least the game is fun!

I’ve updated one of my really exciting pages. If you look at the top of my blog you’ll see a few tabs - one of them includes information about myself. That’s pretty interesting. One of them includes a bunch of fun things to do that will waste your time. Why is this useful?

Well, simply put - if you’re like me, you need a few mindless fun things to do that don’t take much thought but will keep you busy for about 20 minutes or longer. On that page you will find fun links to a few games, places to view awesome advertising, other blogs I enjoy reading from time to time and few things I just added.

• My stepfather sent me a link to a page that you can create a “Pollock-ish” painting just by dragging your mouse on a blank screen and clicking to change the ink color. It’s pretty fun.
• Also, try Replica, which is a fun game where you play against yourself, in a way. Your every move is recorded and duplicated. Took me a few days to completely pass the 10 levels, but I enjoyed it alot.
• Also, for someone who hasn’t heard of Homestar Runner, visit that page. SB and I just started watching the StrongBad emails and I laugh so hard! Anyone have favorite emails or jokes from this page? Comment them, I’d love to hear them.

Enjoy the page!

“Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.” Bill Cosby

I thought that right off the bat (well, not really, but we’re still close to the beginning) I should spread out some basics I learned. I will save a history lesson for another day, but for now, let’s talk about the creative process.

In school, I was told over and over again that a terrible ad tries to do too much. For instance, a strong image paired with strong copy is TOO much and has no sense of hierarchy. Either the image needs to be bent or the copy - never both. So… bent image / straight headline. Or straight image / bent headline. The idea behind this is that either a) the headline makes the image make sense or b) the image makes the headline make sense.

Most of the time it’s pretty evident which is which, but some get a little more confusing. See if you can guess which is which? Answer in the comments if you feel so inclined.

A - Straight headline/bent image

B - Bent Headline/straight image

1. Farbraum - Grabarz & Partner in Germany says “Up to 100% image editing.”

2. Two ads for Formula (A Renault (French Car) Dealership) done by Exclam Comunicacao in Brazil. Let’s dissect this a bit and assume that the image we’re talking about is the car, as well as the banner of web address across the page. The copy is everything else.

3. A print ad for mmMafia Italian food. Let me state that there’s a whole campaign of these with the same headline. If you leave out the tagline about sexy food, it makes more sense.

4. An ad for fire-etc.ca (a division of Lakeland College) If you click on the image you should be able to see a bigger version, but the tagline at the bottom reads - “Maybe emergency training is for you.”

5. Big Dog Motorcycles - This one is credited to Pocket Hercules in Minneapolis

6. Children’s Run (A 2K run held to prevent disease and sickness later by staying healthy now.) This is an annual event put on by the Hospital Aleman and may take a little bit of thought. Or at least it did for me.

7. This one done by Percept/H in India. (It’s for a powerful stain remover)

8. Janapriya - an engineering school ad by JWT, also in India.

9. VW ads from DDB Paris. These are recent, by the way. VW has been holding onto their same print format for a long time. Big image on top, bold centered headline, two or three columns of body copy. (The ads look old, because they’re celebrating the VW being 60.)

10. Bingo Bahiti’s VIP Club - this one is done by McCann Erickson. The headline reads “Treat Yourself.”

11. This is actually spec work from someone. They had the idea, client never bought it. But it’s still pretty brilliant.

12. These for Hard Rock Karaoke night by NMA Canada.

13. And lastly, this one for Dorian’s Lingerie shop.

Hopefully you guys had fun guessing at these. Obviously the visuals are much more dominant than the headlines. This happens for a bunch of different reasons - ranging from how to catch attention, short attention spans, a bad reputation of type, imagery giving off the “higher quality” vibe and more. The next blog will be dedicated to successful ads that use only imagery, followed by the flip side of that coin: Copy only! Wow, that’s going to be exciting.