Hasta La Creative!

I didn’t even know that Starbucks had drive-throughs, I mean if they do then why the hell does Britney Trainwreck Spears keep stopping for her double-grande-3000-calorie grande-venti-fix with whip cream while hordes of paparazzi cover her every step? Oh. Nevermind.

I did know that Starbucks had a Cheer Pass promotion:

The cards were handed out at Starbucks locations last month, and this month at various surprise events along with free beverages or other treats.
The cards carry messaging that encourages people to do something nice for someone and then to pass the card along to someone else who in turn offers an act of kindness and on it goes.

Now news stations are reporting on random acts of holiday cheer – Chain Of Kindness Runs Through Starbucks Drive-Through somewhere in Florida – where presumably a Tai-Chi master started the chain to teach the impatient guy behind him a little zen. Yeah, that doesn’t sound in the least bit scripted. But that’s not the only report of such a chain, Pittsburg live reports that it happened in Starbucks in the Greengate Centre in Hempfield, and the intarwebs is a-buzzing with this story check the comments here at Metafilter for some “It happened to my sister”, though yes they are being sarcastic. Even Starbucks cups carry a story about someone passing the cheer on except then it happened in Riverside, California. Either this is happening everywhere or someone is just making this crap up – what do you think?

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Talk computers with a group of wired types, and one fact will become evident. Fans of the Mac swear by the product with fervor normally found at a tent revival in a small town where religion is a passion rather than a pastime. The journalists and graphic artists I know are especially fond of Mac, and these professionals sing the praises of that product so consistently I’m thinking of going that route when my current PC goes wherever a PC goes once its purpose becomes irrelevant.

The Christmas ad touting the Mac over the standard PC is a model of subliminal and direct messaging. For one thing, the Mac fan looks the part, down to the baggy jeans and sparse hair tufts on his chin. The PC fan fits the bill—a run of the mill management type in a tie and khakis, who buys into his product without question—brainwashing comes to mind.

The ad carries a message in low-key style typical of a company that makes a quiet no-frills statement and who has carved a niche for itself by offering less not more only in the messaging style. The humor can be appreciated—even Santa (not thinned down here for political correctness, but shown in jolly fat elf mode) casts a doubtful eye at the PC fan as he breaks the rhythm of the popular Christmas song. Making a strong suggestion without alienating or viciously bashing the competition—that’s a Mac trademark, and it works well in this Apple commercial, especially with Santa the central figure who, by directing a simple glance full of meaning, apparently agrees with the geek. In other words, what’s good for Santa should be good for us.

McKinney sent me an e-mail about that employee who recently spent 78-plus nonconsecutive hours inside an inflatable snowglobe at the agency’s office in Durham, N.C. Is work from actual clients that scarce? McKinney’s claims that “Snowglobe Boy” became “a Web phenomenon” and set some kind of “world record” are pretty dubious. His first appearance on AdFreak didn’t garner a single reader comment! (This blog is my digital bible of cool—make it yours.) Plus, he didn’t even write any songs in the globe, unlike Cartel, which managed to toss off a few three-chord clunkers during its overhyped spring incarceration. I’ve got an old beanbag chair in my cube, and I’m not leaving it for … OK, stopwatch out … there! Sixteen consecutive seconds. I’m an Internet sensation! Oh, and like the McKinney guy, I’m “eco-friendly”—I nibbled on an Au Bon Pain salad while I was writing this post. Where’s my Green Effie? I’m probably disqualified, as the beanbag chair is leather.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Please tell me this ad with its not so subtle “tank cannons are phallic!” symbolism isn’t for real. It does direct viewers to kontraktnik.mil.gov.ua at the end so it just might be though. If this is really how they lure young men to the Ukrainian army, those young men must be pretty disappointed that they aren’t roaming the country in their awesomely cool tanks picking up miniskirt-clad babes in every town. I mean seriously, they’re selling “Join the army” on cruising? Tank-cruising no less, which is cooler than a convertible, I must admit. Found via the idea grove.

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The AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin and Milwaukee’s Serve Marketing are taking “a less dogmatic approach” to advocating teenage abstinence. This means threatening them with herpes. At least, that’s happens when you dare to suggest on the Maybe You Should Wait Web site that maybe you’d like some action. This is also their idea of winking, subtle humor. However, if you’re interested in waiting to have sex, you get to enjoy a fake infomercial in which Dr. Richard (get it? Dick!) Woody hawks all manner of products to make you (and others) as physically unappealing as possible, to make abstinence easier. But this project, like all of its peers, is doomed, as band camps across America have shown us. Perhaps they could try some of that “comprehensive sex education, which includes lessons on safer sex,” that they claim to have.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

The Green Effie, honoring effective eco-marketing campaigns, shouldn’t be the only new prize at the show. In a long-overdue and pleasingly ironic inversion to its mandate, I propose that the organization also fete the least effective effort of the year, honoring work that’s instantly forgettable and fails to generate any brand recognition or sales. If this sounds familiar to any agencies out there—and I suspect it will strike a few chords at Lowe—consider entering, if you can even remember which ads you wanted to nominate. If you can’t, they’d probably win. But that’s confusing, so let’s move on. As a prize, I’d suggest a gold Cannes Lion. I can call for such a category because, as my performance evaluations keep reminding me, I’m the least effective member of the AdFreak organization, and its second-worst-dressed (sorry, Griner). Needless to say, list your nominees below. We don’t want to bug the Effies with a glut of sarcastic e-mails about a nonexistent prize. Do we?

—Posted by David Gianatasio

we just got this note in our inbox:

Zebra Crossing is now one of the most popular element of guerilla marketing. This time, it has been used in order to draw attention to the “Settimane dell’Architettura e del Design“, an international appointment between designers, architets and passionates.
MTN Company, a brave and innovative integrated communication agency of South Italy, has experimented zebra crossing advertising in Cava de’Tirreni (Salerno) using 7 different decorations realized by the local ceramists.

I didn’t even know that Zebra crossings were such a popular media space – one would think that traffic laws would frown upon that sort of thing.

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Soomi Park is studying for a master degree of Digital Media Design at IDAS (International Design school of Advanced Studies), Hong-Ik University, Seoul.

Born from a curiosity about new types of emotional design, his Digital Veil project engages with the increasing fascination and banalization of plastic surgery not only in Korea but also in many countries around the world.

Digital Veil looks like a simple LCD used as a veil for the face. Through some modification of the device, the viewers watch neither the face of the wearer nor the B&W animations on the LCD screen but a hybrid between the two.

Digital Veil is a very intriguing piece. It was inspired by the quest for beauty. Have you tested it on women obsessed with their looks? How did they react to your project?

I prepared the exhibition “Run_Human” last July at the Triad New Media Gallery (Seoul, South Korea) with my supervisor David Hall and media designers Jinyoung Choi and Minsoo Kang. Digital Veil was a part of my project displayed at the exhibition. Before the exhibition in July, I staged a street performance with two models wearing the Digital Veil and LED Eyelashes, another media work of mine that portrayed fetishism. The performance attracted a good number of passers-by who responded to the grotesqueness of wearing the veil and eyelashes on the face. I think they were also intrigued by the way dynamic animation was printed on the face by wearing the LCD screen directly on the head. At the exhibition, I put the Veil on mannequins. But I was able to place the Veil on both on a model and mannequins during the opening, and I think having a person to wear the Veil communicate my design intention in a more effective way to viewers.

Another project item, the LED Eyelashes, is a set of artificial eyelashes attached with LED lights. I tried to project Korean’s obsession to big eyes, and how this fetishism is interpreted into excessive plastic surgery done on the eyes among Korean women. I really thought the obsession with big eyes can be represented through media design, because both yearning for bigger eyes and projecting the look through lights can be done by distorting the representation and creating new images. The LED Eyelashes have a mercury sensor that controls the light on the face. When wearing the LED eyelashes, you look embellished as if you were wearing a piece of fashion jewelry. It was really pretty and models who wore them and viewers who watched them wanted it!

I was very satisfied with people’s reaction. People were actually having fun with my design product and my design intention was communicated to them. I was particularly happy about the fact that people were amused by the distortion of images with which they were obsessed. I want to be a media designer who makes enjoyable products. Media fashion design products like the Veil and the Eyelashes actually represent people’s deepest inner desire in a way the desire can be externalized through design in a less serious manner. The desire of wanting to have bigger eyes and to get plastic surgery targets to deform their original figures, and in my view, people are excessively obsessed with the deformation, to a degree that can be called fetishism. My interactive media and fashion design piece does not disfigure people’s appearance and is hopefully less damaging to the body, but it generates the similar effect. I’m hoping that people can see that the media fashion can be one of the solutions for this fetishism through the LED Eyelashes and the Digital Veil.

What kind of animation appears on the screen?

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