Hasta La Creative!

Has your agency spent the last 3 months slaving over an awesome Xmas card to send to clients and friends? If so please send them our way and we’ll post them up early next week in our annual Xmas Card Roundup.

Here’s an animated MC vs PC ad to get us started. I love the fact they used the old stop motion technique.

Okay…who has the best brand in this race? Tough question, right? It all depends on what attracts you most and what your image of our next President should be.

Is it character? How about leadership? Does experience matter… and, if so, what kind of experience? How smart is the candidate? How likable? Does he or she look and/or sound “Presidential”? And, the all-important buzz word after most eight-year Presidencies, “change.” Is being a change agent an important and desirable brand quality here?

Who’s got the right stuff this time around? For the Republicans, is Rudy the best leader with concrete results in public office? Is Mitt the most well-rounded manager – public and private success story? And, just who is this guy Huckabee? For the Democrats, does Hillary really have a lock on experience? Is Barack the kind of change agent that brings us back to the excitement of Jack Kennedy? And, are we ready to embrace the populist approach of John Edwards?

Jump in…let’s discuss.

Technorati Tags: mitt romney, marketing of politics, beyond madison avenue

CyberLover chat bot reports back your romantic progress through a status bar.

Reuters: “A Russian website called CyberLover.ru is advertising a software tool that, it says, can simulate flirtatious chatroom exchanges. It boasts that it can chat up as many as 10 women at the same time and persuade them to hand over phone numbers. The program, so far available only in Russian, will go on sale around February 15, just after St Valentine’s Day, said the CyberLover.ru website. “Not a single girl has yet realized that she was communicating with a program!” it said, adding that the program could also simulate virtual sex online.” (Emphasis mine.)

The site, which is not quite ready for the prime-time yet, also suggests that the software could be used not only to hit up girls, but also to coax guys into parting with their money, or to advertise your website.

The screenshot is one of the two available on CyberLover.ru (they have conveniently added a header in English for the curious Westerners). The columns in the table are: nickname, progress (in percentages, no less), number of messages received, and the time of the last received message.) The progress bar is truly priceless. Average throughput: 10-20 people in 30 minutes.

Dunno. Would be cool if it were real, but it says 2005 on the screenshots, so it can be anything. I’ll put it on the calendar and make sure to follow up in two months, though.

If you have a pro account on Flickr, you can now activate traffic statistics for your photos and pages.

Warning: The Vanishing Fabric Marker should not be used for signing checks.

The 2007 winners of Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch’s “Annual Wacky Warning Label Contest” are in. The one for the vanishing marker could be used as an ad copy. The Watch also has just published a book Remove Child Before Folding: The 101 Stupidest, Silliest, and Wackiest Warning Labels Ever. Another good one is The Warning Label Book.

As I wrote in the Trends post, the current explosive growth in consumer-generated media is not the only consequence of content production tools becoming more accessible. Even more important is the growth of content that is produced and distributed directly by marketers without the institutional media acting as paid intermediaries. Yes, BudTV has not been the biggest success story so far, but it’s also about the myriads of in-flight and store magazines, newsletters, podcasts, branded social networks (P&G, Johnson&Johnson are among the bigger players), websites, films, on-demand cable productions, games.

It’s a big trend, much bigger than whatever technological novelty of the day is attracting everyone’s attention. This is why I’m glad to help spread the word about the first Custom Content Conference (New Orleans, March 9-11, 2008) produced by the Custom Publishing Council. Check out the online Content magazine that the Council publishes, too. Registration is $595 before January 1 and $695 thereafter.

We’re trying out a new venue this week. We’ll be at the "art gallery where you can get a cup of coffee," Pi & Coffee  (419 East 18th Street) tomorrow morning.

According to a recent article from The Pitch:

"Most art galleries need an alternate source of income to keep running — the Dolphin, for example, runs a framing business. But the Pi’s new business model is more fun."

We can get a morning cup and view works by artists such as Celia Butler, John Davis Carroll, Maria Creyts, and many more. Also, PI and Coffee is the home of Missouri’s first art-o-matic vending machine. For $5 you can pull a knob and become an art collector. Collecting art has never been so easy!

Read more about PI and Coffee here and here. See you there.

The Bourne Ultimatum DVD hit the market Tuesday, and the trailer promises more of the same from Matt Damon. Bourne’s character is so resilient if you could bottle his secret for survival you could make at least a million bucks. The TV spot snipped from the trailer reminds us we are privy to the inside scoop on the most dangerous unofficial government agent alive, opening with the statement, “Jason Bourne is at large in New York City.” The tone of that statement is as solemn as a dirge.

For those not already hooked on the Bourne franchise, this trailer won’t do a lot to entice. While the hand to hand combat scenes have the right levels of smacking and thumping sounds and shots, there’s not much going that hasn’t gone before. The possible exception comes when Bourne uses a hardcover book as a weapon, ramming it horizontally against an assailant’s neck—a bonus self-defense tip if you fear a home invasion.

The trailer does sum up the lead character in a brief scene when Damon as Webb/Bourne declares, “They can’t stop me.” His character, always as dry as an accountant five minutes before the annual tax filing deadline, is perfectly captured with that statement delivered in a casual manner, and in the resigned attitude reflected in his body language as he eases from his chair in a room defined in black and white tones.

I have to admit the trailer works a little like a poem here—the compact nature of the video equals the book equals the franchise. Bourne rather expands in the mind as a result, if you’ve seen even one of the movies in this series.

Fans will certainly love another installment on DVD, and I think the trailer is basically preaching to this choir. If you’re a Bourne newcomer, this clip doesn’t offer anything different than typical neo-Rambo clashes courtesy of a brooding leading man who despite assassin Carlos the Jackal’s pursuit, lives to fight another day. In Publisher’s Weekly, a review of the Robert Ludlum novel that inspired the movie noted, “This is formula writing that delivers even less than its meager performance.” The same might be said of the trailer and maybe the DVD as well. Catch the complete trailer at The Bourne Ultimatum Web site.

Natural Architecture, by Alessandro Rocca (Amazon USA and UK).

Publisher Princeton Architectural Press says: Natural Architecture presents sixty-six site-specific installations that use raw materials, manual labor, and natural stimuli to create truly green architecture that is as organic as the materials with which it is created. Projects by Olafur Eliasson, Patrick Dougherty, Nils-Udo, Ex. Studio, Edward Ng, nArchitects, and many others are shown together for the first time. Selected for their commitment to the use of raw materials, manual labor, and natural inspiration, these works are vividly displayed in photographs, drawings, and models. These fantastical creations allow the changing landscape to naturally overtake each structure until it finally decomposes. Each project is accompanied by a series of photographs, drawings, and models. The rugged and surreal beauty of the projects in Natural Architecture question the wisdom of our ever accelerating construction processes and point a way forward, toward a new organic simplicity of structure and form.

Image on the right: Olafur Eliasson, Ice Pavilion, Kjarvalstadir, 1998

Natural Architecture is what the author calls a “little paper museum” which showcases the way artists and architects are creating small and medium-size buildings using the resources of the location and respecting growth process and natural phenomenon. Following the rules of nature used to be the only available option. That was a very long time ago. Today it’s more a matter of installation art. The works presented in the book are therefore in most cases not to be regarded as structures built specifically for the purpose of having people to live or work there. The creators featured in Natural Architecture are affiliated with Land, Earth, Environmental, Bio or Conceptual art and not so much with architecture. Which doesn’t mean that these works have no relevance for architecture as they provide a space for discussion about the conventions and process of architecture.

Niels-Udo, Child, wet petals of poppies, bracken, ilfochrome on alluminium

It’s a very quiet 200 page book. You get all the words right from the start, after that that’s just pictures after pictures with only a statement from each artist to open the chapter dedicated to their work. Inside the book, there are works i find downright awful and other which are so amazing that i promised myself that i’ll try to follow the field more closely. In the meantime two discoveries:

Nils-Udo who has been exhibited his site-specific all over the word since the 80’s.

Morioka Spider, Japan, 2002. Bamboo bars, branches, earth, grass planting, ilfochrome on alluminium

(more images of his work)

Patrick Dougherty is the glamorous one. Dougherty used to be a carpenter and creates fairytale experiments (see front cover of the book) using tree staplings, weaving and nest motifs.

Installation for a Melrose Avenue boutique, using tree sapling as construction material

Videos following the creation of some of the artist’s installations.

At the great Iso50’s blog, with whom I share a healthy obsession for mathematical patterns, I came across the amazing image you see above that, as he himself explains, comes from what is known as a Pythagoras Tree, which as you’ll see at en Wikipedia are pretty simple in its basic composition but can come to create amazingly complex patterns.
 
Any graphics that involve mathematical perfection, amazing color palettes and is modular… is definitelly A+ in my book.