Hasta La Creative!

Dear Jane started it, oh yeah, it’s all her fault that I sat here and tried to remember all the brands that I used today and made a timeline of it. Fora brief moment I tried to figure out if I could make a logo-tastic site where one could generate one of these timelines but I soon snapped out of it and just went ahead and photoshopped this little collection of possibly ‘exotic’ (to non-swedes that is) brands.
Check my timeline out inside.

Other people who had fun with this (because it ain’t no fun unless you see more!)
A Binary life: A day in brands
Phils blogging: Where We Encounter Brands
Ekeys hideaway (french brands!)
Mike Vogel’s Brand Timeline portrait
Creativebeef: Friday in brands
Yonkis(?) went ahead and did his already back in 2004 . Way ahead.
Fox’s Den: My Brand Name Day
beyondrivalry : Brand Timeline portrait

I’ll do my best to keep track of anyone else doing this (if you link here, I’ll find you) and update this post accordingly.

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Erik Nordenankar doesn’t do things half-assed. In fact, he’s created The Biggest drawing in the world with a little help from a GPS device and DHL. This was his end of school project at Beckmans and I’m willing to bet money he’ll land an awesome job pronto. In fact, if DHL doesn’t pay him some money to us this as the viral campaign it already is, I’m going to get mighty peeved. YOU HEAR ME DHL?

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For about the last year or so, if you live in the States and have cable, you’ve probably seen the occasional commercial for LifeLock, a company that offers ID theft protection. In a brazen bit of showmanship and trust, their CEO had his actual social security number printed on the side of a mobile billboard (aka “truck”) and driven around to prove how good their services are. Along with their million dollar guarantee, I bet you just can’t wait to start punching in their toll-free number and handing over your s.s. and c.c. numbers, eh?

Well, according to the Charleston Gazette, you might want to reconsider making that phone call.

Bonus: Superadgrunts, view one of the ads here.

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What the heck is that campaign really selling? All I’ve learned so far is that bunnies are prone to temper tantrums when stressed and frickin’ cute with their tongues sticking out. I’m not sure what to buy now. Maybe some carrots.

Things You Can’t Do Coked Up, and I have only one to add: “read that three page blog in it’s entirety”. What? Coked up is advertising related. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.

Meatwater – oh my. Go around and read the product descriptions. It’ll take you a while to find that it’s a photographer’s publicity piece. Nice work, and really icky product idea.

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Brand tags is a site where you can tag a brand/logo and see what other people have tagged it. I have a feeling that the trademark holders won’t like this place much, at least not when you look at tags that sound more like consumer complaints….

Starbucks is bitter black heroin bland branded burned burnt burnt coffee , Wal mart is bad evil harmful cheap crap junk treason, comcast is cable internet sucks, Splenda is cancer fake sugar. Coca-Cola fares much better with the big words being always classic coke drink red soda sugar.

Extra credit fun: play the reverse tag game and guess the brand behind the tags!

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So, I was doing some gardening, that is weeding out linkrot, from the Collections of ads links in the adlinks spurred on by the sudden spike in emailed questions to me this past week asking “do you know any good ad collection sites?” Well, yeah, but the links I know of, like most other things in my ad-sticky brain are actually already online y’all, so if you missed it here’s me pointing with a giant foam finger at it. *points* —-> Adland’s ad links.

American Package Museum. Oh aren’t they so swell looking? “The primary objective of this site is to preserve and display specimens of American package design from the early decades of the 20th century.” And they do it so well with nicely lit photographs that makes it feel like we’ve taken the Delorian to the past.

Good Logo! You know when your client needs a mockup yesterday and then sends you the logo in the shape of a badly pixellated .jpg? Good logo has saved my ass plenty of times, and serves as a inspiration site when creating logos so I don’t make something far too similar to what is already out there.

Truth in advertising – Cigarette ads from back when “nine out of ten doctors smoke ’em”. How fab.

Ad Classix – where you can browse and buy retro ads from the early 1900s to the 1970s. “AdClassix.com has spent years gathering a unique collection of original, authentic print advertisements spanning the last century. We deal only in the original vintage advertisement produced for any given product. We do not deal in digital copies or mass produced duplicates.”

The History of Advertising Trust Archive:“Over our thirty years of existence we have brought together the largest archive of UK advertising in the world. From the outset our mission has been to make this material available for study and research at the lowest possible cost. HAT Archive houses unique collections and study resources dating from the early 1800s to the present day and we are always looking for ways to develop them and improve our services.”

You too, dear adgrunt, can add your link to the links, but you’ll have to be logged in to do so (spammers really love to try and get one past me there – they have carefully scripted automated bots that hammer the site for days at a time, for real). You can help weed out dead links too, just “report dead link” if you find one that is, this way we keep the link archive fresh and choc full of gems for all adgrunts in the world.

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Welcometowallyword adgrunt reckons Citroën unmistakeably German Nazi ad is a total lemon.

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Not satisfied with passive advertising anymore, Rolling Stone and Men’s Health magazines will be offering some interactivity with their ad space.

What they want people to do is take a cell phone picture of a print ad in their magazine, send it to a special number and the readers will receive an offer or reward in return.

Pardon me while I play catch-up with some of the submitted links I managed to not have time to post during this messy week.

Skywriting move over – now there’s flogo (presumably at www.flogo.net but their site seems bust) – it’s like a mini Foam City in the sky. What they’ve done according to livescience is “uses re-purposed artificial snow machines to generate the floating ads and messages, dubbed Flogos. The machines can pop one Flogo out every 15 seconds, flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500.” Seems more like sky-logo confetti to me but whatever floats your boat.

Soviet lemonade labels – because labels are cool.

How big of a font nerd are you? Take this handy Quiz to find out. First one to get 34 out of 34 wins the “font nerdiest” title here.

Copywriters, I dare you to come up with a better description of this house for sale. “Tony Hawk meets Mathew, Mark, Luke & John!”

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Some headlines this morning. Bear with me, the coffee hasn’t hit yet.

Social networks need to be useful to make money – file under obvious.

Liberty Mutual are buying Paul Tilley keywords – file under incredibly bad taste.

Tampax challenges Playtex on advertising claims – file under “O.B. users laugh and roll their eyes at both of them”.