Copying and pasting other people's quotes is stealing, not wisdom.

Here's a little piece of advice that I thought I'd share, directed at absolutely no one in particular. (I mean that. That's not sarcasm. Really.)

JUST BECAUSE YOU COPY AND PASTED A "MEANINGFUL, INSPIRATIONAL" QUOTE INTO THE SIGNATURE LINE OF YOUR EMAIL DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU ARE ENLIGHTENED.

Every time that I get to the end of an email and see something like this:

Sounds great. Let's touch bases on this again tomorrow.

Chaz
_________________________________________________________
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the
life you have imagined."
- Henry David Thoreau

it makes me want to get in my car, drive to wherever that person is sitting at that exact moment and shove their keyboard through their eye socket.

OK, that might be a little extreme.

But it's probably not.

Seriously, do you really think that the closing to your email is really going to inspire me to go out and change my life, Chaz? "I tell you what, man, my whole life I'd been living in ignorance until I saw that quote you pasted in that email to me that one day. I went out and sold all of my possessions and ran off to pursue my dream career in professional synchronized swimming. Look at me now! I'm the happiest boy on Earth! And it's all thanks to you and your inspirational quote!"

That brings me to the next point. It's not your quote; you can't act like it's your intellectual property. Just because you say it in every email you send out doesn't mean that you're a better person. In fact, putting your name right above some clever aphorism only highlights how much of an idiot you are in comparison. I don't care, whoever you are, you're not as brilliant a person as Thoreau, Churchill, Roosevelt, Aristotle or whoever else you're ripping off. They arrived at their moment of timeless clarity--that you so capriciously throw around--through a life of hardships, meditation and experience. Go out and alter the course of human history, and then we'll talk about the footer on your email.

In fact, that's another reason why you should be hit over the head with an Amazon box of Bartleby's. There is no way in hell that you can espouse some faux sagacious philosophy to me if you yourself haven't already achieved your own spiritual nirvana through it. If you're sending this to me I'm going to guess that you're probably the head librarian of a middle school media center or are answering phones at a local cement sales operation. Are you really living your dreams? No? Then don't tell me what to do with mine.

In fact, have you even read more than that single sentence of Thoreau's? OK, maybe you were supposed to read a few pages from Walden in ninth grade lit class. But clever you got the Cliff Notes so you wouldn't even have to read it. "Gross, reading." Point number ten: You can't use someone's quote as your mantra if you've never read anything by them or listened to a full speech of theirs or even watched a damn History Channel special about their life.

Basically, if you have to rely on someone else's wisdom as an attempt to counterbalance your own idiocy, you're probably better off just not calling attention to your vapidity in the first place. At the least, invent your own slogan that you really do strive to live by every day. But even then, I don't want to hear about it. That's because: A) I doubt you really do earnestly try to live by it in the first place, and B) if you really do, I should already know that; you shouldn't have to explicitly yell it at me in the closing line of any and all correspondences that we have.

In conclusion, get a life and stop stealing others.

Oh yeah, and this goes for pretty much all Facebook/high school yearbook quotes too.

This has been a public service announcement by me.

Apple + Apple-friendly brands = iPhone commercial

Watching the most recent iPhone commercial, I noticed something interesting. When mentioning its ability to check stocks they flash up a listing of that particular iPhone owner's stock ticker. I found what companies he had decided to invest in pretty interesting. Here's a screen shot I took.



Starbucks, Home Depot, Adobe, Nike, Google, eBay.

How's that for trendy, progressive brands? (Home Depot seems to be the one outlier perhaps.) Also, what d'ya know? They're all up!

Another thing I find rather interesting about this is that Google is not only highlighted but is up exactly 7.00 points to precisely 510.00. Two things are odd about this: 1) the evenness of the numbers which is absent in all the other stocks, and 2) Google's appearance in an iPhone ad considering that they plan to launch their own phone sometime next year.

To be honest, I'm not sure what any of this means. I just thought it was interesting.

Kitty and the Toilet

Crest Glide Floss

And thus begins the tetra-annual glut of ads and miscellania from this quarter's panel.

This campaign for Crest Glide Floss is based on the insight that everyone knows they should floss and don't. Yet, they also know that whenever they go to the dentist they know that he's going to yell at them for not flossing. The cutline is: "Floss. Because he knows when you don't."


Ironically (or perhaps appropriately), I have a dentist appointment tomorrow.

I have been flossing.

Sweet Lifesavers Spot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7BiDR4znXY

This makes me laugh every time. But it also makes me feel bad for the dude at the end.

Well Done Annual Report

Via adgoodness, here's a really fun idea for an annual report called Well Done for the Croatian food company Podravka, produced by creative agency Bruketa & Zinić.

Blank pages printed with thermo-reactive ink are filled in with content after being wrapped in tin foil and baked for 25 minutes. COOL.


Maybe this technology could be used for something else? Maybe a cookbook? Frozen dinner ads?

Someone brought up the question of environmental issues--the unnecessary use of energy. Does that bother you or is the idea just so sick it doesn't matter?

Sometimes people make a war.

http://www.youtube.com/v/--Vaz9jW054&rel=1

Speak, the Hungarian rapper. He wants people to stop the war. Yeah, c'mon.

Arch/land

Big day of wins yesterday between the Student Award Show and Baddies--Gold in (of all things) Package Design for my Goya black beans and rice boxes, Best Facial Hair Superlative and another big Beer Olympics win for Four Hairy Chests. (Three out of four quarters reigning champions.)

So, this has nothing to do with that, but here are some things I shot recently.








I call the last one "Irony, Or, How I Feel Every Day." It's a billboard whose pole is actually in our parking lot at school. Right now there's nothing on it. Ironic.

[Again, these colors are so desaturated on here. It's starting to piss me off. They look like crap on here. But trust me, they are sweet.]

Shed Rain Umbrellas

Bowled Over

Bowling trip with photography class tonight. Pretty fun actually. Makes sense since we were at Funtime Bowling.

I bowled probably the best game of my life by accident--a 150. Considering that that's halfway to perfection, and I'm almost exactly halfway through school, I'm taking that as a sign that I will be a perfect copywriter/art director/designer/photography by the time I graduate next December.

Lovely.





[Also, why does Blogger dull all the colors and saturation of uploaded images? Lame.]

Oh no.

Welcome to the Blogosphere, meatfilleddumplinglolcat.


I'm going to lick you. And you're probably going to taste like soap. Gross.

Brilliant.

Like most things that are amazing, this comes to me by way of my boy Krichmar.

Snoop is perhaps one of the most brilliant artists/marketing geniuses of our time. And here's another reason why:

Snoop Dogg - Sensual Seduction [EXCLUSIVE]
Uploaded by PeteRock

A one-off, for your pleasure

Pardon the expression, but this one just popped into my head today while I was working on a totally unrelated product.

Elementary? Clearly. But still, I find it oddly amusing.


Also, amazing copywriting and art direction skills, huh?

Advertising, It Works on Advertisers Too

There is a widely misunderstood perception of advertising among those who are not intimately familiar with the industry. It's the idea that all advertisers are evil capitalist pigs who are bent on hawking their worthless wares to the unsuspecting masses that they manipulate through immoral and treacherous tactics. On top of that, they don't even care a bit about the inferior products they're selling, just as long as the register keeps ringing.

While the first part of that statement is certainly loaded—and a topic for another discussion—I wanted to take a moment to address the idea that advertisers actively sell items that they themselves believe to be crap. Although, I'm merely a lowly ad student, I can tell you that the majority of advertisers—and certainly the good ones—really do care about their clients quite genuinely. My friends already working are huge proponents of the brands they work for, just because they really do love them that much.

Even in school you can see it; the clients you work on change your behavior just because you've begun to feel a connection to them. After my work last quarter, I'm now a huge fan of Usinger's Sausage. If I were ever to need a moving service, you'd better believe the first place I'd call would be Two Men and a Truck. This quarter I knew next to nothing about Russia before starting on the tourism campaign; now I'm very intrigued to go explore that crazy country someday. I've got a National Geographic subscription coming in the mail ($10 for a year!). And, to top it all off, I've never really flossed regularly in my life before, but since working on Glide I do it every night. I feel guilty if I don't in fact.

Perhaps even more telling is when you feel completely stumped by a client you don't care about. Take tonight for example. My partner and I have been working on the Dell XPS laptop for a week now to absolutely zero avail. In fact, we've been spinning our wheels so badly that tonight we decided to scrap the whole thing and move on. Ultimately it came down to the simple fact that, being loyal Mac owners, we couldn't find any reason why someone would really want this computer over our favorite brand. We couldn't believe what we were trying to say.

Perhaps I'm a bad copywriter, perhaps it's a bad client, but I think that maybe it's not such a bad thing. If I don't genuinely believe that my product will make your life better—if I would never even consider buying it myself—who am I to tell you that you should put your hard-earned money towards it?

The stereotypical moral conundrum brought up in every college advertising ethics class is what do you do if your agency won a tobacco account, and you believe strongly against cigarettes? Do you move on and try to find a new job or shove your conscience into your stomach and ignore it for the next five years?

While that's an extreme case and one that's far different from a silly weekly class assignment, it's still a good question. I suppose it's nice to be reminded, even in school, that being honest is still an important trait to cling onto. As you learn about the clients that you really do care about, you find yourself in a place where you not only produce better work but also produce work that you can be proud of and believe in.

7,000 Words: the last 3 days in photos

Get Tore Up

Peep this sick graffiti from Portugal. Using the environment against itself.

More on Alexandre Farto's site.

'Stache Shoot-Out '07: Day 31 (Final Edition)

Yes, it's been a month of mustache-growing mayhem, and I must say that I am quite pleased with the results. I will continue upkeep on my furry little friend but won't be updating this anymore since it's the end of the official competitor, and everyone else has shave their lip pets off in shame. I'll post results of the judging when we get it.

Other than that, I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving and spends it well with all your loved ones. Cheers.

'Stache Shoot-Out '07: Day 30

I love this man.

glumbert - Henry Rollins doesn't like techno

'Stache Shoot-Out '07: Day 29

'Stache Shoot-Out '07: Day 28

'Stache Shoot-Out '07: Day 27

Big hit at the Georgia game yesterday. Got called Luigi by a stranger on the sidewalk.

'Stache Shoot-Out '07: Day 26

Fea(s)ts of Imagination

I love to be shocked by the extraordinary possibilities of human imagination and invention. Here are two examples that struck me tonight:

The Sea Organ (Morske Orgulje)

Found on the shoreline of the Adriatic Sea in Zadar, Croatia, this is the world's first organ played by the wind. Measuring in at 70 meters and containing seven sets of five pipes, each tuned to their own diatonic chord, this giant natural instrument plays music affected by the wind and tides. Openings draw air in which travels through underground tubes of varying length and is then pushed out apertures nearby. As waves fills up the tubes in random ways, their length changes thus changing the pitch as well. Essentially, the music that you hear is a combinations of several elements in the environment working together to produce a variant, transient piece of music. The organ was built in 2005 by Nikolai Basic and has garnered the chap the European Prize for Urban Public Space. And rightfully so. Check out some of the organ's melodies here.

Codex Seraphinianus
A mysterious package arrived on the doorstep of an Italian publishing house in 1978. Inside was the manuscript of one of the most bizarre books ever created. It contained over 350 pages of inexplicably odd, beautifully drawn illustrations accompanied with text written in an unknown language and alphabet. The code of the alphabet has yet to be cracked, but apparently the system of page number was finally found to be based off of base 21.

The book covers topics from nature (strange creatures and plants, human anatomy, physics and chemistry, etc.) to human constructs (clothing, food, architecture, etc.), but it a surreal, indecipherable way. Truly odd.

The Codex turned out to the work of Italian artist Luigi Serafini which he produced over the course of 30 months. It's all very reminiscent of the Voynich manuscript. But on acid.

Brilliant analysis of our universe? Silly, elaborate joke? Key to understanding the universe? Ron Moore, eat your heart out.

Amazing stuff. Now go make your own.

(More great stuff at this site: Dark Roasted Blend.)