Apparently the Apple TV nervous system isn't as resilient as their computers. Post first day of shipping, ZDNet spills the beans:
Non-Apple TV owners can enjoy the out of box experience by viewing the opening video which one crafty person ripped from the hard drive and posted in all of it's 720p glory. You can also download the Quartz Composer Screen Saver and the Now Playing Screen. And if you're truly hard-core you can download the entire Apple TV OS, and (conceivably) install it on another Mac.
And apparently that was just the easy stuff.
First generation Apple TV = FTL. Here's to hoping the almighty iPhone fares better.
We've always loved Ripley's Believe it or Not and this campaign for the show, hosted by sloppy seconds Superman Dean Cane, leaves us with a sense of validation. We're not the only freaks out there. We're not even the worst-looking. And that's nice. Work by TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris, South Africa.
Is it safe to use the word "freaks" anymore? There's probably a PC variant that's escaping us right now, mainly because we don't want to come up with one out of worry we'll have to use it. If you can think of one, you deserve some 100 calorie cakes.
Anna Chlumsky of My Girl and My Girl 2 fame is all grown up now and will be starring in a CW comedy pilot entitled Eight Days A Week. The show will follow four women in their twenties who are assistants to successful top New York Executives. Hasn't the Devil Wears Prada thing been done already?
At a program development meeting in LA yesterday, ABC introduced a new commercial format which would have actual paid commercials appear in media vehicles shown in the network's dramas and sitcoms. In other words, a character on a sitcom might be watching TV, an actual ad would appear on the screen withing the show and then it would widen out to the viewers TV and be viewed in standard fashion. The plan, still in development, would also incorporate print ads seen in magazines depicted in shows as well as ads shown on cell phones. Presumably, there wouldn't be official commercial breaks rather the commercials would be embedded within the show and appear individually rather than clumped together the way they are now.
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- A tipster attending OMMA Hollywood tells us R/GA Chairman and CEO Bob Greenberg told his VP of Visual Design Nick Law not to sit on a panel he was scheduled to participate in because, apparently, he's stealing too much limelight.
- Commercial ratings, versus program ratings, are fast becoming the gold standard and many, including Starcom CEO John Muszynski, will be using them in this year's upfront.
- If you're in search of an email address, Tattoo Projects has created Abalooba, and email address search engine.
- MTV's The Andy Milonakis Show which will premiere on a wide variety of digital platforms - including iTunes Store (www.iTunes.com), Amazon Unbox, AOL Video, MTV Mobile, MTV On Demand, MTV2.com, Wal-Mart Video Downloads and Xbox LIVE Marketplace for Xbox 360 - all prior to the show's on-air MTV2 debut on April 27th.
- Entries for international viral awards show, Germ, must be submitted by March 31.
- The New Yorker, Wesley Autrey, who saved a man from being hit by a subway train in January, is featured in a new colon cancer PSA campaign.
- T wallow in the oddity of Japanese culture, check out a few kinky commercials for Axe in Japan.
- Copyranter disses the Siemens' ongoing wannabee hipster campaign complete with headlines like "Bling Bling" and "Chill."
James Cash Penney. Isn't that an awesome founder name? It pulls 10 times the weight of humdrum John Rockefeller. There's miles of branding potential behind a name like that.
Unfortunately JC Penney's isn't known for taking advantage. As kids we considered Penney's a tier above Sears - if you're desperate or you wait too long you might find a good prom dress there, but you'll probably lie and say you got it on sale at Macy's.
To offset this sad effect, Saatchi and Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts enlists the lame duck brand for a Lovemarks repositioning. Watch the initial couple of ads and read the Garfield review at Advertising Age.
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If you're a caveman (no, not the Geico caveman because you, my friend, would somehow think this is yet another slight on your kind) and you're eating a "Half Chocolately, Half Candy, Half Crazy" Vertigo bar from Topps Confections, you might want to keep your arms close by. The campaign, which kicks off March 19, was created by Duval Guillaume New York and will air through May 28 on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, ABC Family among others. Here's a look at one of the four :15's.
We tend to go for the melodramatic, the wannabee hipsteresque and anything with Laura Prepon but we're just not sure about ABC's new drama october road. The anachronistic selection of music in the form of Boston's Don't Look Back and REO Speedwagon's Take it on the Run, tries way too hard, and strangely so, to define the period of time between the main character's leaving town and his return a mere ten years later.
If, as the main character in this series did, wrote a book that so maligned his hometown friends, why would he return? Oh wait. This is TV. This is conflict and conflict is a key ingredient in drama. Too bad it comes off like a 13 year old whining to their parents because they won't allow the kid to spend yet another hour mindlessly IMing senseless missives.
Oh, and that last line of the episode, "the way I see it, this thing's in diapers," has to be the lamest attempt at creating a catch phrase since Lacey Chabert tried to make "fetch" work in Mean Girls.
No one ever gets tired of fully-developed women in school uniforms or reality television. Why not mash them up?
That's the logic behind VH1's Charm School, a reality show hosted by Mo'Nique and featuring chicks with names like Pumkin, Smiley, Goldie, Bootz, Buckey and Buckwild. We don't know how well the show will pan out but we are big proponents of the charm school thing. Charm school worked for us! Before our intervention we were mobbin' down 65th and answering to the name of Snake-Eyez.
Glad those days are over. But apparently the journey's worth watching. Tune in; at the very least you get to see a bunch of chicks talk about how they take pictures and hug people all day, and what could be funner than that?
While television content may be king, the overall user experience is moving in to claim checkmate. How we interact and interpret television currently is on a static plane of directional geography: surfing channels up, down, left, and right. Helping break the tangible and virtual norms at the recent SXSW conference, David Merkoski (Frog Design) narrated the audience through an up and coming product yet to hit the markets.
Appropriately titled Mondrian, the product set to go public next year, is a TV navigation and recommendation Zoomable User Interface (ZUI) that attempts to rethink TV user interaction. A few major differences with Mondrian is that a user no longer needs to be stuck within nested menus while navigating and it has an active anticipation engine that takes in the content, time, and environment you watch in to build a profile and recommendations. It goes without saying that Mondrian becomes an easy target for Big Brother contextual advertisers. While there have already been proposals for all-advertising channels within the ZUI grids, Merkoski remained unclear on any efforts to save the product from advertising overload.
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