Hasta La Creative!

Leave it to the Germans to outdo the Canadian workplace advisories with clockwork efficiency, as Klaus the Forklift Operator goes on an accidental rampage that would put Evil Dead fans off their breakfast. It may also rank as the most inauspicious first day at work of all time. The gruesomeness really kicks in around the five-minute mark. Enjoy! (Read more about the short film here. Apparently some companies have actually used it as a training video.)

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Sad news today as the man who introduced the ad world to animation, and enriched the 50’s 60s and 70s with stylishly animated commercials for brands such as Dime Savings Bank, Alka-Seltzer, Green Giant vegetables, Crest toothpaste and Jax Beer and many more – Jack Zander – has driven his BMW bike to the dirt road in the sky.
The New York Times Obituary tells the tale of how Jack got his lucky break

The receptionist stuck her head into the lobby, where Mr. Zander and a friend happened to be sitting.
“Are you fellows animators?” she asked.
Mr. Zander, as he later said in interviews, had no idea what an animator was. But it was the start of the Depression.
“Yes!” he shouted, and so his career began.

CartonBrew has a recent Jack Zander interview from this summer, well worth a read.

One of the great things about Jack, that I think everyone who worked for him would agree on is that he hired and trusted a whole generation of young animators. Jack looked for talent, and didn’t care much about age, race, background, whatever. He wasn’t a New Yorker by birth, but he really was the quintessential New Yorker in his demeanor. And Jack sent some of the best animators in the business out into the world.
His production company was a great place with great people. And he was a great influence. A guy who encouraged free thinking and artistic expression in a business which for all its creativity, can sometimes stifle expansive thought.
He was a great man, and had a huge impact on advertising.

– says our own adgrunt tod.brody
At Animationjournal we found this quote from Jack on creating commercials:

The art form turned out to be a natural for the tube. First it grabbed the viewer’s attention just by the looks. At that time most of the commercials were talking heads or other examples of stand up deliveries. Pretty boring. Along comes the funny pictures and immediately the eye is drawn to the screen. Can t beat that. At that stage of the business all you had to do was make some drawings move. Our audience was there waiting for the message.

The lost 50’s cartoon have some images from Jack Zanders work.

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YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) — You better not pout, you better not cry — or you won't get a GPS device or digital picture frame like the other good little boys and girls who know what's hot in tech this season.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — It has been called a competitor to Wikipedia, Jason Calacanis' Mahalo, Seth Godin's Squidoo and Yahoo Answers: Knol is Google's foray into knowledge aggregation.

Whether spurred by human nature or love of ritual, it's a time-honored tradition to set some goals for the New Year. So in the spirit of new beginnings I suggest the following New Year's resolutions for brands. In fact, the concepts behind the most common resolutions made by people — spend more time with friends and family, eat right, exercise more — apply to brands as well

If you’ve always wanted see a more radical Santa Claus, now the good people at R/GA give you the chance. Tattoo the fatty in red where you want and with what you want.
 
Link: R/GA Tattoo Santa.
Via: NiceToMeetYou.

image source

AFP/Breitbart: “A Japanese company Tuesday unveiled a new device that will allow people “speak” through their ear so they can use their mobile telephones in noisy places. The device — named “e-Mimi-kun” (good ear boy) — doubles as an earphone and a microphone by detecting air vibrations inside the ear, developer NS-ELEX Co. said.”

I remembered a great quote from an old colleague of mine: “The web is the only medium in which you must create content which impresses machines.” This is especially true for headlines, and, increasingly, not only blog headlines. With online versions of traditional newspapers adding Digg Me buttons and incorporating automated contextual advertising and other technological novelties, the fine art of headline writing is under more and tighter constraints then ever before. Why and for what purpose are headlines written today?

1. For others to read the article. That’s what headlines and titles (there’s a difference: headlines have verbs in them) have been invented for, after all: to attract readers’ attention to the content under them. A corollary: it also needs to attract readers’ attention when it is found out of its original context, for example, on someone else’s site.
2. For others to notice it in the RSS reader (this was a topic of a separate post on RSS usability last year).
3. For the author to like it. This is straightforward: you wouldn’t slap a subjectively ugly headline on your article (although in newspapers, copy editors often do) because you will be the one staring at it before anyone else sees it. And long after that, too.
4. For the author to find it. How do you link back to your old posts relevant to the subject at hand? I use my own search box, and I got into the habit of using keywords that I’m likely to remember months or even years down the road.
5. For others to find it. This is the non-profit SEO part where you write you headline so that it comes up for a search on the topic the article is about and helps someone out. This means two things: the article needs to be in the top search results, and the headline needs to prompt the click.
6. For others to find it, for a different reason. In the for-profit world of SEO, you’ll write your headline so that it drives people who search for something that your site in general (but not necessarily each particular post) is promoting. The real trick here is to make the headline keyword-rich without it sounding artificial.
7. For others to find it again, in their own information universe. It is terribly difficult to locate something you’ve bookmarked on del.icio.us when your bookmark count is in the thousands unless you know (or, importantly, you think you know) what the title was (Tags, while invented for a good purpose, are a mess).
8. For the AdSense funnel, where the searcher clicks on your link in the search engine, arrives at your blog, looks around, and then bounces off through a well-targeted AdSense ad that is closer to what he’s been searching for in the first place.
9. For AdSense robots to display the right ads. I don’t really know how much weight is assigned by the AdSense and other contextual ad algorithms to headlines, but it has to be significant since post titles are also page titles.
10. To influence social forces on Digg and other similar content microcosms. There are plenty of guides on writing Diggable headlines out there.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Outdoor gear and clothing retailer REI has handed its estimated $28 million creative and media account to BBDO, Atlanta, according to executives familiar with the matter.