Hasta La Creative!

Consumers are shifting towards a ‘Team Me’ mindset, meaning brands must be seen to be “demonstrably” acting in their interests, according to new research.

Lexington, KY-based Cornett-IMS, the agency behind “Beardvertising” and whose creative/biz dev guy Whit Hiler also co-masterminded  “Kentucky Kicks Ass,” have crafted the best long and short-form advertisements for a horse farm I’ve ever seen (and also the only long and short-form advertisements for a horse farm I’ve ever seen).

They teamed up with Eye Level Films to create “The Lane’s End Experience: A Short Film,” actually a long ad for Lane’s End Farms, which we’re told is “one of the world’s premier Thoroughbred farms.” It’s not hard to believe that after watching the video. There’s rolling green grass as far as the eye can see, attentive caretakers, and plenty to eat. If I was a horse, I think I’d really enjoy living at Lane’s End. The ad tells the story of Lane’s End beginnings and rise to prominence, with plenty of breathtaking scenery and majestic horses galloping through the countryside. If you’re looking for a horse farm, are a horse, or just love horses, it may be worth sitting through the 4:20 ad.

All kidding aside, it’s very well put together, managing to tell a story in a visually stimulating way over the course of its somewhat long running time. “The Lane’s End Experience: A Short Film” is available at the new Lane’s End website. There’s also a :30 version, which will premiere (appropriately enough) this weekend during the 30th Annual Breeders’ Cup World Championships on NBC Sports.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sony Bravia is promoting its 4K TVs in an ad featuring millions of brightly-coloured petals erupting from a volcano in Costa Rica and flowing down the slopes into a local village.

Social media analyst Starcount looks at the world’s most popular brands on social media in September.

The folks on the Spy line were spot-on as we’ve received confirmation regarding the status of Compass Point Media’s longtime relationship with hair salon chain, Great Clips. A spokesperson tells us, “Great Clips has ended its 25-year relationship with our Compass Point Media unit.  We’re proud of the work we’ve done together over the past quarter century, particularly in developing local connection strategies nationwide. And we wish them continued success.”

During their time together, Compass Point, which currently houses over 125 strategists, analysts and negotiators and also works with clients such as Airborne, Supervalu and General Mills, handled media buying/planning across channels for Great Clips from TV and digital to print and outdoor.

As for where Great Clips’ media duties are headed to next, sources in the know tell us that they’ve now been handed over — minus review — to fellow Minneapolis-based agency, Periscope, though the agency is not commenting on the matter as of yet.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A spoof of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto.

From Adbusters #110: The Epic Human Journey: Part 4, Autumn

We had been up all night, my friends and I, trekking out past the city limits, past the point where the sallow glow of downtown’s artificial light can reach. Candles were lit, as enflamed as our souls. Like them we were alight with the ancient Promethean promise, but this time: ?redeemed. Beneath the flickering flames and pulsing stars, we filled limitless ?pages with our wild vision of the world to come …

Our hearts were racing as the night grew cold and dark; the only sounds … our breath and the rustling of the wind. The North Star glimmered above, its light began to travel toward us billions of years ago, at a time when life on Earth was unrecognizable to life as we now know it. Winking at us from above, as if to say, “there were eternities during which it did not exist—your intellect—the beasts were here alone—breathing, eating and decomposing. There were lifetimes during which you humans did not exist, you believers—just animals alone, they were godless, selfless and reposing.”

We were suddenly distracted by the undeniable roar of our civilization’s most cherished pet—the automobile—speeding along the highway not far enough away … oozing with raucous roars, spewing toxic fumes into our eyes and splattering us with oily mud. Choking on the chemical air as the cars receded into the distance, we remembered the cities we fled the day before, the poisoned salmon found dead in the river, bellies upturned, the polar bear—reduced to skin and bone—collapsed in the Arctic, now barren.

As I raised my body from the ground where I had cowered, mud-splattered and foul-smelling, I felt a red hot beam of defiance and purpose bursting through my chest, throat and out into these words:

“The time has come, my friends,” I said, “Lets begin. At long last, the cult of progress is giving its last heave. We are going to be the midwives at the birth of a baited promise whose time has finally come. We must break down the sacred idols of the old empire—the straight line, growth, rationality, profit, humanism, individualism—one by one. Come with me, friends! Let us tear open the floodgates of the horizon and dance! Welcome in the sunrise of the time to come! With every word we utter and with every step we take, we will banish the ghosts of modernism and its sick child. Nothing is as beautiful as the corpse of this cancerous non-religion that has strangled the world we know for far too long. No more!”

As soon as I spoke these words, a thunderclap cracked overhead and broke open the darkening skies to shower us with cleansing rain. Watching the tail lights fade into the distance—I thought of the skyscrapers, the cubicles, the rows and rows of houses. The grid-like cities. The nuclear reactors. The God-particle, the Hubble telescope. The drones, the iPhones and all the other proud appendages of man’s cunning … all the ways we seek to probe the mystery and colonize it.

For far too long were the glories of mankind’s “modern” era celebrated as the ultimate pearls of millions of years of evolution. For far too long we patted ourselves on the back at every leap of progress and tried to bury and deny the surmounting externalities left in the wake of our esteemed projects and flashy achievements. We thought of ourselves as clever—flouting natural selection and planting mono-crops to feed hungry hordes only to discover we laid waste to the fields. We ?improved ourselves in tantalizing ways, but neglected our animal brothers and sisters. We became an extraordinarily successful species. But this period of success is but a blink in the span of time. And the destiny of every successful species so far … is to wipe itself out. Nietzsche wondered: “Is it really impossible to believe that we wouldn’t use those very talents and resources … to draw back before the abyss?”

It is terrible to think that we have learned so much, “discovered” so much—that we have come to “know” so much—but have forgotten how to live. That we have the foresight to see our potential end, but not the will or imagination to forge another path. We sent a “Curiosity” rover to Mars, but have lost our sense of wonderment for the Earth.

Let us leave behind the god of Logic like an empty fossil, forsaken and foreign. Let us throw out all these rancid memes into the hungry, dungheap of history! Let us trash all the sacred cows that have monopolized our beliefs for eons. Let us demolish the ideals that have hemmed in our imaginations for far too long. And may we make compost of all the bullshit of this bygone paradigm … and out of it, grow something unburdened, innocent, outrageous, raw and totally new.

But before this new seed can receive any light, the ruinous, high-reaching walls that have been built around it must fall. These are the walls of the corporate fortress … and therein, many a grave enemy lurk. First, we must wipe out the energy giants who have made their billions off the destruction of our planet, forbidding the knowledge of sustainable alternatives, making taboo and illegal the resistance against them. Then there are the advertising corporations who have corrupted our most basic instincts and honest desires, who have made us forget what love is and how it is to be expressed, who have filled our hearts with long lists of voracious “wants” that correspond to the length of the assembly lines where these putrid desires are manufactured. We will take on these archetypal mind polluters and beat them at their own game. We will bring their image factory to a sudden, shuddering halt. And then, we must face the media corps, those once great storytellers who were regrettably bought out by the goons of commercialism. News, advertising—now indistinguishable, both feed us lies through shiny teeth. On the rubble of their rotting deceit, we will build a new, transparent ?culture with a non-commercial heart and soul. We will resurrect truth and integrity.

And, last but surely not least, we will have to go full-force and head-on against the Mega-Banks, those dark overlords of Global Finance and their teams of old-fart neoclassical economists. They sold us toxic derivatives, trapping the poorest of the poor who only wanted to put a roof over their heads. They dangled fancy financial “tools” in the faces of the bereft, but these were poisonous, hollow investments that created a cancer inside of their hallowed economic system. And then they came in with the “solution” to the “economic problem,” echoing the logic of Hitler. They preyed upon the vulnerable, and capitalized from it … in billions. These vultures will be held accountable for their grave immorality!

This is why we are declaring “No-Mo!” … ?because we must deliver the world from the gangrene of commercialism, shady corporate CEOs, otiose neoclassical economists and lying media puppets!

We’ll make usury taboo again. We will wipe out the corporate “I.” We will make sure that the price of anything sold tells the ecological truth. We will create a world where ?instead of one overplayed pop-star selling five million albums, five million new voices will be heard. We will give the 0.1% a taste of their own medicine, but first, we’ll hack and reprogram their doomsday machine …

But wait … there is still one last beast, a monstrous Goliath still looming over our humbled frames. After “Mo” did come “Po-Mo”—that bastard child, born of the rape of Creativity by Logic … the most perverted abuse of the intellect that could be imagined.

I once met one of these avatars of Po-Mo. I wanted to know what he had to say about the rising sea levels … of the 440ppm of carbon in the atmosphere, of the plight of the bees and of the demon, Monsanto. But the response I got was just a heinous performance of abstract-intellectual masturbation. This intellectual elite would prefer to use debate to address all matters. The fate of life on Earth? Let’s pontificate about it! They hear us snickering at them, so they carefully craft an astute counter-argument. Ha! They would rather use their esteemed “logic”— their only weapon—to retaliate against our existential challenge. Jargon, no more! We will no longer indulge your debates and critiques. The pioneers of the world-to-come are here and we will grab you by those perfectly crisp collars and toss you into the rubbish bin of the past!

Can you hear it? The ringing of a bell! A wake up call for the old guard intellectuals who hide in offices, protected by theory while in the real world species vanish, forests are turned to packaging, human lives are exploited, ruined and lost. We accuse you old goats of suicidal-intellectualism, for pursuing knowledge for its own sake as the planet burns. You will be punished for forsaking the gift of human intelligence and wrecking it on the shores of vapid academic vanitas. You will be charged with gross negligence in the management of our planetary household. And you will be held to it.

Too long have we been blinded by pride. Too long have we been fighting dirt. Sin. Imperfection. Sex. Mortality. Too long have we been fighting animality, humanity, each other. Too long have we been denying difference. Too long have we been seeing our reflection and our reflection only, in pebbles near and galaxies far.

Then … with our hands covered in good grimy dirt … faces splattered with soil and celestial sweat … in defiance of all the protestations coming from the logic freaks, the cybernaughts, the stubborn technocrats— all those suits and ties that guard the Cult of Reason and the Throned God of Growth—we rise at long last to dictate our will and testament to all the living of the Earth …