For those seeking another reason (besides Facebook) to screw around at work, just ask for a Mac.
The Art of Office brings Mac users back to Apple's roots as a graphic design darling. Here, artists can upload stuff they've created on the Mac Office suite (Word, Powerpoint, Excel) for creative critique in the vocal cult of Mac elitists.
Some (well, most) seem promising but are kind of a letdown. Like this. We expected an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza, but all we got were a bunch of gigantic eyes staring at us.
Then again, we didn't think Office allowed for much creativity along this vein, so it's impressive even while it disappoints.
There's this little video ad that's been hovering in the corner of our MySpace homepage for over 24 hours (which means we've seen it about 648 times). It is entitled "AT&T Simplified Billing." In it a girl named Justine demonstrates (via iPhone) how AT&T simplified its billing process, thereby simplifying her life.
Backstory: Justine complained about a very long, very high bill in a previous spot on her blog, so to appease Her Highness AT&T decided to remove its itemized detail.
The fruits of UGC are finally being realized.
A few days ago we watched this (subtitled!) video for the Miss Teen America pageant, in which Miss South Carolina is asked (by a girl named Aimee Teegarden! Who finds these people and how do beauty pageants get so many of them?) why 1/5 of Americans can't locate the US on a map.
Her response was curious at best, but the point she made was that too few Americans have maps, and we also need to help South Africans and the people in the Iraq.
This on its own is probably not worthy of rantage, but this - inspired by Miss South Carolina's epiphany - kind of is.
more »
Given: It's hard to make SEO interesting or even appealing to marketers who would rather be designing graphics for a direct mailer or fantasizing about making music videos.
MRP Web Media gives us The Lost Brad Tapes, a compilation of the world traveler's attempts to become a website success. Supposedly these tapes have just been liberated from a vault, where they were wrongfully hidden on account of their incendiary nature (you know, kind of like The Secret).
In the first installation we find our hero in the desert, talking to a disembodied voice who is supposed to represent a website sage. He reminded us of James Brown, which resulted in us looking up James Brown clips for half an hour in order to validate this resemblance. It turns out he doesn't sound much like James Brown at all.
more »
It's always nice to see a model with a sense of humor. For her Intimates collection, Elle Macpherson put together a funny little set of ads that 1) look completely home made, 2) have a quality of the impossible and 3) are still sexy.
Check out Drummer Girl and Bubble Girl. (We really liked Bubble Girl.) Others include Balloon Girl, Saucer Girl, Tuba Girl, Bomber Girl and Joke rGirl.
The Glue Society directed the spots, with help from The Names Agency.
- Uh Oh. Not good. Cynopsis reports, "Online job seeking site Monster.com suffered a security breach potentially exposing the confidential information of 1.5 million users then waited 5 days to report it."
- Gap ads featuring John Mayer and Lucy Liu get facials scars, mastectomy, respectively.
- Copyranter wishes Diesel would return to its usual form of advertising which made no sense and was sick.
- We love it when agency execs are escorted to the door by security.
- Advertising Age reports AT&T has placed its $3.4 billion media buying and planning account into review. A consultant is involved and incumbent agencies have been invited to pitch.
OK, then. Let's celebrate skid marks and itchy butts over at Jockey's Stop Squirming site which promises to Tame That Booty. Yes, indeed. Delight in such antics as The Booty Smack, The Bum-Muncher and Crotchcapades. There's all kinds of other stuf on the site too but we just couldn't get past The Scoot. Eew.
While we admire Jockey's efforts, we have to admit we think Hanes' are better. Not by much though. Especially when it involves a cute but unsanctioned bikini contest promotion. And...we'll take Jennifer Love Hewitt anytime over a guy scooting his ass along the floor.
Diesel is really good at developing fairly coherent creative ideas and then half-assing them. For its Fuel for Life thing, which we kind of mentioned here, the gritty-chic company takes its "For successful living" slogan and applies it to a perfume (the aforementioned Fuel for Life).
Then it pimps out its homepage with all this busy-as-shit promotional material - most of which Adverblog valiantly tries to cover.
But what really ticks us off is the Italian model who greets us at outset with the burning rhetorical question, "Are you alive?" And he never stops asking. He keeps asking.
more »
Inc., a magazine that covers topics of interest to entrepreneurs (which means mainly profiles of each other), has just expanded its yearly Inc. 500 to 5000. Kind of. To save on glossy paper, the magazine is only doing the standard 500; the full monty appears online.
This probably started out as some sort of office bet:
"Stop joshing, Stan. There are not 5,000 companies worth mentioning out there. And even if there were, it would be killer to get all those copywriters to dredge up a profile for each one."
Or else a financial analyst was really hurting for something to do.
Anyway, check out the Inc. 5000 here. MarketingVox pointed out that Red Ventures, Charlotte and HydraMedia, Beverly Hills topped the Marketing and Advertising Top 100.
We don't know a ton about either company, probably because they're private-sector, but we do know HydraMedia is home to a classier set of chicks than most. A strange slant for this industry. Maybe they were onto something after all.
Young Guns work is usually great but when you have to wait like an entire minute...or more...for a site to load it's well, off putting. That said, this new work, which comes in the form of an online musical, takes us through the day in the life of an award show virgin. All the cliches are here. And there's even appearances by Alex Bogusky, David Droga and Lee Clow. Even the audience can participate.
We particularly like the reference to timelines as akin to having "a clock jammed up your ass." Ooo. Ooo. And there's school girl outfits too! The longer you watch, the better it gets.
|
