Hasta La Creative!

Well, Al Franken has to tell people he’s serious. Literally.

Will Minnesotans buy it? Maybe. They elected Jesse “The Body” Ventura, didn’t they?

If you updated your iPhone in the last 24 hours to the iPhone Software Version 1.1.3, you’ve likely already experienced the home screen customizations with WebClips.

Just browse to AdPulp.com with Safari. click the Plus sign at the bottom of the screen and choose “Add to Home Screen.” You’ll get the freshly squeezed AdPulp.com icon instead of the shrunken version of the homepage that is added by default.

With one touch of the WebClip, you’ll be instantly transfered to the AdPulp.com home page.

If you are saying to yourself, “What is the 1.1.3 software of which he speaks?” Head on over the iPhone Section on Apple.com for all the update information. If you want to jump right in, fire up iTunes, connect your iPhone and Upgrade.

Note: I’d recommend a fresh Sync/Backup before running the updater, just in case. For Mac users, connect and hit Sync. For Window users, I believe you have a Tab in the iTunes interface specif to Backup.

Tim Siedell is co-founder of Fusebox, a highly regarded brand communications studio in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Politics is a word-of-mouth business. Families discuss it over dinner. Colleagues over lunch. And increasingly, we turn to political communities on the interwebs for more “discussion.” Communities like Huck’s Army, a site run by 19-year old twin brothers.

According to Wired, Huck’s Army could turn out to be crucial for Gov. Huckabee’s campaign as it expands its territory; the campaign hasn’t had the finances to build its own official infrastructure throughout the 24 states holding primaries on Feb. 5.

So who are these new king makers? Brett and Alex Harris got started with online organizing in 2005 with Therebelution.com, a burgeoning Christian youth conference, blog and book-selling business. The boys define the term as “a teenage rebellion against low expectations of an ungodly culture.” Their message: Young people should reject the idea that their teen years are meant for goofing off, and instead find challenges to work on. Their book Do Hard Things, which grew out of a blog post on the subject, will be published in April.

Do Hard Things, huh? Is that kind of like, Just Do It?

Video Podcasts: The Sleeping Giant on AppleTV
January 16, 2008
While Steve Jobs talked for a long time Tuesday at Macworld Expo about the movie rental feature of iTunes and Apple TV, he spent only a short time demonstrating its capabilities for podcasts. In fact, the ability of Apple TV to view podcasts may in the long run be its most important feature.

“Huh,” you say, thinking that podcasts are Wayne’s World run amok. But in Apple’s world, podcasts are any free video and audio programs. They are usually organized as a series to which you can subscribe, but you can also choose one program at a time.

Until now, podcasts have been programs to download and watch later, usually on an iPod (hence the name). But the online demo of the Apple TV podcast feature shows that programs can be played on demand.

Suddenly, this lets any TV connected to the $229 Apple TV box display any of tens of thousands of programs from the Internet. Readers of this blog have heard it before that free, ad-supported Web video will ultimately dwarf the $1.99-per-show downloads that Apple is selling.

Apple has no restrictions on distributing podcasts that have advertising in them. Indeed, Dina Kaplan, the chief operating officer of Blip.TV, which distributes advertising-supported video programming, says Apple has gone out of its way to help support its advertising technology. The New York Times’ Saul Hansell blogs

 no longer do you need to spend $15.00 on a movie you just want to “check out”…which I almost did only 2 days ago… v

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — It appears that MySpace has done enough — for now — to placate state attorneys general who had wanted the popular online social network to use age verification as a means to protect its many underage users from sexual predators.

In what first appears to perhaps be a movie trailer, we see aerial shots of the arctic North complete with dramatic iceberg cliffs, the clear blue sea, under sea ice flows and floating icebergs. It’s matched perfectly with a…

Wal-Mart is the brand urban hipsters love to mock. But what to make of the company’s far-reaching environmental initiatives? They’re hard to argue with and might even persuade anti-Wal-Mart consumers to reconsider their super-store preferences.

Don Moseley, director of sustainable facilities for Wal-Mart, inside the new energy efficient pump house.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Wal-Mart is rolling out new eco-friendly stores around the nation. The goal is to make them 25 percent to 30 percent more energy efficient than existing stores.

On the packaging front, Wal-Mart will begin scoring its vendors on the sustainability of their packaging. The results are expected to influence Wal-Mart’s buying decisions. Wal-Mart aims to reduce overall packaging in its supply chain by 5 percent by 2013.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Vermont’s landmark billboard law, which prohibits roadside ads all across the Green Mountain State, allowing the green and the mountains to shine through. The proposal became law back in 1968 mostly thanks to the efforts of one man, Ted Riehle, a state legislator. Riehle faced stiff opposition from farmers, who made money leasing their land, and from advertisers, who wanted the ad space. But Riehle convinced the state that it would benefit financially and aesthetically by taking the existing billboards down and banning new ones. Riehle died two weeks ago, on New Year’s Eve, at age 83, but his legacy lives on. It’s hard to argue on behalf of billboards, but Steve Simpson of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners did a decent job of it in an Adweek column back in 2004. Read Simpson’s piece after the jump.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Down With Billboards
Just when they can’t get any worse, they get great

By Steve Simpson
Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Billboards should not exist. They block views of neat pastoral cows, hills and barns in the country and fine old brickwork in the city. They seldom have a vocabulary of more than six words. And they entice you to buy whiskey when you’re really just in the neighborhood to buy bail bonds.

No, billboards are blunt, simpleminded and loud — blights on the landscape, visual and intellectual pollutants.

So, just when you’ve decided that in a saner world, billboards would be banished, you spot from a block away a lime-green iPod board — and you immediately congratulate yourself on being a connoisseur of both industrial design and music (are 10,000 songs really enough to reflect my protean tastes?), and then comes the second thought: Is my iPod charged?

Or perhaps you’re driving in Sonoma, and while it would be good for you spiritually to drink in the photogenic vineyards, you don’t mind seeing one of the Clover Dairy boards, with one of its loopy puns: “Tip-toe through Clo’s lips.”

And although art school taught you to hate the vulgarians who puff their messages into 800-point type, the thought crosses your mind that maybe that Altoids board was better art-directed than the strip mall it was blocking.

And while you’d never use art and advertising in the same sentence, you have to admit that some of the Mini Cooper boards have a kind of “installation” quality to them. Not that Alex Bogusky needs any more praise.

Of all forms of advertising — all of which is an imposition and ought to have the decency to be entertaining or at least interesting — outdoor advertising has the most to apologize for and the fewest ways to do it.

It has to make an impression with an absolute minimum of elements. A few words, a simple message, a tastelessly large logo or product shot.

The bad is as bad as it gets. But the good is consistently, surprisingly good.

For years, it’s been the democratic medium in which a quirky museum or a budget-busted zoo could stand right up next to, and outwit, a multinational marketer.

And it’s where big marketers can boil down a message that even muddle-brained middle brand managers can’t bloat.

Outdoor advertising also gives a kind of street credence and instant relevance to brands that maybe no other medium can.

Lately, one of our clients, the famously modest engineers of Hewlett-Packard, has begun appearing in outdoor in a big way, taking over all 160 boards in a subway station, running 15 minutes of content on an electronic board in Times Square, even posting 750-word art histories on a construction wall outside London’s National Gallery.

And as a result, HP seems bolder, more current, more surprising.

Not that the ends justify the means, of course.

Billboards should not exist.

There, it’s settled. All right-thinking people agree. Just don’t go anywhere you might see an iPod board. It might make you weak.

Because some billboards are really good, even if they are really wrong.

Advertising School: Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, USA
Art Director: Aaron Yuan
Published: December 2007