Working in marketing has its highs and lows. For years I used to revel in the experiences I had at different agencies: Beer Fridays, jeans to work five days a week, Thirsty Thursdays, themed parties, Margarita Mondays, and so on. While we had a good time—and apparently had to de-stress ourselves often—it wasn’t always fun and games. Eventually reality arrived, crashing our party.
Which brings me to my next point: Don’t annual reports just flat-out suck? As hard as I try, I can’t seem to find one endearing thing about them. That is, until now.
German-based ad agency Serviceplan came up with an innovative way to produce a client’s annual report. Austria Solar, a company primarily focused on, you guessed it, thermal solar systems and companies, worked with Serviceplan to create an ingenious annual report that uses the sun’s energy to reveal its content.
The text is printed using special phosphorescent inks that only appear when they have direct or near-direct contact with light. It’s a clever little way to connect the big-picture idea to the physical execution. Check out this video that shows some of the work:
I started my second personal blog the other day. I won’t shamelessly promote it here, but my friends have been inundated with requests for support. I received an interesting response from my good buddy Joe. After reading a few posts he wrote to me, “Impressed how easily you put yourself out there to the masses. I find it easy to present a character for audiences, but feel less comfortable broadcasting myself. Brave.”
Although brief, I was taken aback by his commentary. Was I really wearing my heart and soul on the sleeve of this blog? Was I laying it all out there for the world to see? Surely I wouldn’t be so stupid as to be one of those people who just say whatever comes to their minds, right? You know the type. The blogger who thinks the world gives a damn about the mundanity of his or her life: “Today I bought shoes and already I have blisters. Wait, hold on a second, need some water. Okay, I’m back. Anyway.” Or someone who shares inappropriate confessions, driven by insecurities and the need for drama: “My boyfriend isn’t romantic and often looks around the room when we kiss.”
Is this who I’ve become but in a less exaggerated sort of way? The answer, I’ve come to discover, is maybe. If some of the things I write about come from a place of truth, then maybe I really am broadcasting myself to the world. The thing is, it doesn’t feel like that. For years now I’ve considered these public displays of personality to be fiction.
I’m talking about personal branding. I’m talking about the line, which has become incredibly blurred, between who we are and who we pretend or act like when we participate online, particularly in social media. When I think about the message I put out there for the world to view, I wonder if it’s really me. And again, the answer is maybe.
Personal branding is not a new topic. In fact, it’s become our way of life. Today, people can obtain or lose jobs based simply on the way they brand themselves online. What I wonder is, are we even aware we’re doing it anymore?
I’m reminded of my Facebook page from 2005 (Ah, the gloriously elitist days when you needed a .edu to get in). The page allowed you to fill in fields about your personality: favorite songs, books, movies, etc. They still exist today, but they’re certainly not as exposed and important as they were back then. I remember all the clever things I’d post: Favorite artist—post-mortem Tupac; Favorite activity—avoiding death; Interests—onesies; Favorite quote—“Sometimes I question your dedication to Sparkle Motion.”
It became a persona—a way for me to make fun while having fun. It was also the loss of my creating-a-personal-brand virginity (and just as experimental). It was me choosing to show the world, “Hey, I want you to think I’m funny!” And this has carried on for years. We all do it. Every time we post a Facebook status update or send out a tweet, we’re communicating something about ourselves. We’re making a choice, cognizant or not, about who we are or who we want people to think we are.
Larry Kimmel of the Direct Marketing Association recently said to our company, “Kids today begin branding themselves at the age of 16.” In fact, he’s right. The millennials today learn very early on how to portray themselves in social media. I think it’s going to become harder and harder for future generations to recognize the difference between this online community and the community of our neighbors.
Thanks to my pal Joe’s insightful observation, it made me realize that maybe we’ve all gotten a little too comfortable with our pen names. We ought to step back and think about the content we’re putting out there for the world to see. Whether it’s for privacy concerns or some other reason, unintended vulnerabilities could come back to hurt us. And if I get hurt, you may end up reading about it in my blog.
Check out AdForum’s top five commercials for this week. Judging from these picks, it seems agencies are feeling the funny in all their special areas. All five ads have a dollop or more of humor to them—making this week’s Utterly Orange selection all that more challenging. Even the typically not-so-exciting Cheetos spot has a funnier-than-usual feel to it.
The ad by BMF Sydney, “Delivery Girls,” gets mad credit for a great tagline: Not as sweet as you think. It reminds me of the Mike’s Hard Lemonade campaign that tries to imply Mike’s is not just a girly, sweet drink.
I also loved the Wheat Thins ad whose script, when listened to carefully, is just the words Wheat Thins over and over again. Brilliant copywriting? Just maybe.
All that being said, the clear winner here is mcgarrybowen and its campaign for Crystal Light. Mcgarrybowen has been the agency to watch these past few years, winning awards (and accounts!) left and right. In the past 365 days or so, it has taken on Advil, United Airlines, and Reebok. And those are just the accounts I’m aware of. The Crystal Light ad is funny with a dash of clever. Although it appeals to women primarily (I assume part of the brief), it’s still funny to all. It’s no wonder mcgarrybowen has been so successful these days. You can’t fake great advertising.
Nary a day goes by when we don’t see an ad reminding us of an up-and-coming holiday. With Christmas just barely in our rearview mirror, our drugstore shopping lanes are already filled with Valentine delights. And it seems like only yesterday we were clearing off our pumpkin-littered mantles to make room for menorahs and SpongeBob nativity scenes.
Stepping outside, we see department store after department store brimming with ads promoting whatever Hallmark holiday is in season. I can’t even imagine what Macy’s must spend on its Christmas decor, the Thanksgiving Day Parade, the 4th of July fireworks, and other holiday festivities.
On TV, our commercials play familiar jingles often remade to sync with the product—sort of like this:
The 4th of July reminds us that we should celebrate not only our freedom from British tyranny, but also the fact that our forefathers knew how to party:
In other ads, Santa argues with Best Buy employees, converses with M&M’s, and even dresses in disguise as a car salesman.
We’ve grown so accustomed to these ads that we almost feel as though “Black Friday” and the “Summer Back-to-School Sale” are legitimate calendar holidays.
The word saturation comes to mind.
But what would we do without these ads? What would life really be like if corporations didn’t tie in their products and services with the holidays? How would we prepare? How would we know they were coming? Would the big holidays become more like Arbor Day? Would they be blips on the calendar, forgotten until the week before?
Just think of all the hype that’d be missed! If anticipation is the spice of life, holidays might just be stale bread. Croutons. That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying that if our complaints and frustrations with the seemingly endless supply of capitalistic holiday ads—indeed a complaint box of size—resulted in their absence, our holidays would be croutons.
All right, so maybe I’m not defending the vomit-inducing spots like the T-Mobile commercial above. I’d rather shoot myself in the face than hear that spot again. But it’s just so engrained in us—it’s become the “holiday spirit” we rely on every year. To imagine a life without TJ Maxx dancers, pitter-pattering through our malls and our hearts, is no life at all.
I consider myself incredibly out of touch with new products, widgets, and services. I’m as anti-consumerist/anti-commercialism-y as they come. And yet, I don’t know a world without holidays expressed in this particularly American manner. And quite frankly, I don’t want to.
One hundred days until Arbor Day. Let the countdown begin.
Check out Adforum’s top five commercials for this week. While many of them have been played to death, we still enjoy seeing some of those foreign ads, which are often filled with uncomfortable surprises. At the end of the day, we at Utterly Orange have chosen Unicef’s “Santa” ad for its ability to strike that “serious” chord and remain entertaining. While many ads during the season provide cynical and humorous outside perspectives on our holiday habits, it’s nice to see a commercial that’s genuine. Take a look and cast your vote!
1. Jack Daniel’s – “Holiday Barrel Tree” – Arnold Worldwide
It’s everywhere: on buses, in subways, stores, apartments, and––more often than not––stalls at your local pub. If you’re as paranoid as I am, you’re probably thinking I’m referring to a new flu virus or an easily catchable disease. I’m happy to say, I’m speaking about typography.
Typography, in one sense or another, has existed since the dawn of writing. Even the Flintstones have their own font. But why does typography matter? Yeah, it’s everywhere. We take it for granted and hardly think of the consequences. I mean, can someone really tell the difference between Arial and Gill Sans?
In typographer Thomas Phinney’s article “How to Explain Why Typography Matters,” he describes typography’s many uses, forms, and effects—both subtle and obvious—to justify its importance.
As representatives from a creative agency, we’re often asked to justify our reasons for the use of a particular shape, color, or font. More often than not, the most compelling reason for using a particular font is the client’s brand. Numerous Utterly Orange posts have discussed the importance of branding, but it might be worth reiterating the value a font has for a brand.
If you get a chance, check out the movie Helvetica. This documentary walks you through not only the history of this seemingly universal font, but its impact on modern-day brands. Love it or hate it, Helvetica took us from the hodgepodge mash-up of fonts of the ’40s and ’50s and gave us a style that’s both legible (pragmatic) and malleable (artistic).
Fonts define a brand, and brands define a font. Typography and a brand become one and the same when we incorporate them effectively. Typography is so ingrained in us that we’d have no trouble identifying a well-known Fortune 500 company simply based on the typeface used.
With so many fonts available, it seems practically trivial to continue to develop new fonts. And yet, a sliver of an industry exists where people are coming up with better and new ways to write the words we read. Phinney’s article justifies this the same way fashion designers or furniture makers justify their work. With no shortage of clothes or furniture styles, we continue to create new fashions and new furniture. Why? Simply put, because of trends. The only consistent thing is change. Fonts evolve just as trends do.
After clients are convinced that fonts matter, they often want to take these newfound tools and exploit them. Caps, bold, and “fun” styles like Comic Sans become their paint brushes, screwdrivers, and hammers. Unfortunately, painting a picture red, using a screw that doesn’t fit, and hitting customers over the head isn’t always the best way to produce the right message.
Today, experimental studies are being done by psychologists and typographers on the effects of good typography. These studies help determine what constitutes good typography and typeface design as it relates to legibility. Some research involves hooking sensors to the orbicularis oculi (the muscle around the eye) and measuring things like squinting and frequency of blinking. These sorts of tests help us determine how effective a font may be, whether we see it or not. Forgive the pun.
There’s nothing I more enjoy seeing than people pushing the envelope and making a fuss over things controversial to some and trivial to others.
An advertising campaign showing political and religious leaders kissing on the mouth has recently gotten the attention of many important groups. From the White House to the Vatican, many are outraged at photos of these leaders being used as advertising creative.
Benetton, an Italian clothing company, said on its website that the campaign is meant to support the Unhate Foundation, which opposes hate and is “aimed at exorcising the ‘fear of the other.’”
The ‘Unhate’ campaign strikes a chord with the public on many levels. In this way, I deem this campaign incredibly successful already (even bad press is good press, right?). A successful company decides to support an organization whose corporate objectives are to eliminate an abuse that’s incredibly popular in mainstream media today. You can’t turn on a news station or talk show without hearing about bullying.
To oppose the campaign puts you almost in a camp of hate support. To even the most liberal opposer, it suggests that, while you may be against evil in the world, the fact that you’re against a controversial ad talking about it makes your stance moot.
We have satirical political cartoons that go much further than this campaign. Moreover, some of these cartoons challenge authority, condemn inappropriate behavior, even suggest, dare I say it, hate. And yet, we Westerners get by every day without the threat of attack. We get by knowing that these pieces are meant to simply challenge us intellectually. To make us think about some—sometimes—very important issues.
There are real problems in this world. Was showing our President kissing Chinese President Hu Jintao a tasteful way of bringing them to our attention? Right now, I can’t think of a better way.
For most designers out there, you probably know the site Lynda.com. Well, I came across a neat little section called “Deke’s Techniques.” I haven’t gone through all of them, but I believe most are tutorials from Deke McClelland, a guy who surely knows his design tricks.
This week he discusses a stronger way to use Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation command in conjunction with a mask. Here’s an excerpt from Lynda.com:
Whether you’re aiming for realism or an exaggerated effect that grabs attention, it’s often handy to be able to change the color of one object in a photo without affecting the rest of the image. Most people will tell you to use Adobe Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation command to do this, but if the object you’re changing has hue variations—not just one flat shade of red, for example—this relative adjustment won’t work.
Instead, you need to make an absolute adjustment. And to limit the change to a single object, you also need a mask. “A mask”? you gripe. “They take forever!”
Au contraire. You simply create a new Adjustment layer, select a color range inside the image with a click and a drag, and Photoshop will auto-generate your mask. Then you choose the Hue/Saturation command and make your color adjustments.
It’s the time of year when life as we know it begins to change. Our long, warm, sunny days become short, cold, and gray. Life all around us begins to shrivel up and die. I’m referring, of course, to our never-late-to-the-party season: autumn—elder brother to Father Christmas and Mother Nature’s pimp.
Fall is our reminder that the best part of the year is now over. So suck it up. Life is about to get a lot more difficult. If I were a drug user, I’d have to imagine fall to be the drug user’s final hit before rehab. Enjoy it while it lasts; you’re about to get locked up for six months with nothing but chamomile and reruns of Hawaii Five-O.
This is the time of year when many people in our society celebrate the changing of the seasons. I really don’t see what all the fuss is about. People find fall beautiful and often comment on the changing color of leaves. “Look at the beautiful leaves––they’re changing colors,” one might say. “Isn’t fall beautiful, what, with the color changing on leaves and all?” another might say.
“The leaves are dying!” I might say. When you see a majestic bird recently struck by an 18-wheeler, you don’t comment on its beauty, do you? Would you say “Look at that doe-eyed, little deer lying peacefully on the side of the road. I think it’s taking its last breaths. What a wonderful sight!”?
Sound depressing? It shouldn’t be. At this time of year I’m reminded of an Associated Press article I read that has that Halloween sort of vibe. The article encouraged those with an affinity for the morbid to check out a website called MyDeathSpace.com. At first, I was confused about what MyDeathSpace.com was. My first thought was probably similar to yours: “Here is a website for people who are frustrated with their current social environments and want an online vehicle to acknowledge their discomfort.” I mean, think about it. How many “death spaces” do we all have?
Death Space #1 – You’re waiting in line at Target as the 95-year-old woman uses a debit card for the first time in her existence. You can literally count the minutes until the cashier will inevitably take the card away from the old hag and do it herself. Yet you sit there, impatiently, waiting for the show to unfold.
Death Space #2 – I think we’ve all been here before.
Death Space #3 – You’re waiting in line to pick up a new license. It’s not that it expired, it’s that you lost it. Well, you didn’t really lose it. You put it on the table that night when you had your friends over and everyone did that thing where you show each other what’s in your wallets. But then you get drunk and don’t want to drive, and Liz is being her typical self—crazy—and you just want to get her out of there. So you offer to drive, but then Jim—also crazy—is trying to be the responsible one but always ends up getting way too drunk to make any sense. So you just kind of look at him, as he leans, and try to remember why you’re friends. You decide to put both Jim and Liz in a taxi. The next day you find out that Jim accidentally grabbed your ID instead of his, but it doesn’t matter because he left it in the cab.
Maybe I’m alone here. And maybe I spend too much time in lines. The point is I assumed that the site discussed our personal death spaces as a way to create a sense of camaraderie. A way to say, “Hey man, I’ve been there. I think about putting my boss in a Porta-Potty and tipping it over too.” Well, I was wrong. MyDeathSpace is actually a social networking website for the recently deceased members of myspace.com. If someone dies, you submit his or her death and people can chat about the––sometimes grotesque––details. Oh, and there’s a forum section where you can complain about things like the new features of Facebook that really T you off.
What!? Are people really into this? Are we really so voyeuristic? Burning ants with a magnifying glass: okay. Discussing profiles of dead friends: not so okay! Maybe I just have no clue of what it’s like to be this creepy. I think the darkest thing I’ve ever done was get up in the middle of the night and pee without turning on the light.
I suppose we’re all entitled to our own niche likes and dislikes. You’re able to like the changing of leaf colors for example. And I’m entitled to loathe you.
In the meantime, this begs the question: Can a forum like this really be considered a social medium? Hell, these people are dead.
