Think Nimble (SXSW finalé video)
Student produced creative short, art directed and produced by Lily Bussel, Skye Selbiger, and Bjorn Johnson. All video used is found footage from Vimeo and the student produced work takes no credit for any of the artistic talent of the individual clips themselves.
Nimble Final Final from skye selbiger on Vimeo.
End of the Term
The following are the four steps to make your band and your band’s own album cover.
1 – Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random”. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2 – Go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last five or so words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.
3 – Go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/?. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. If you can’t download the image, then just screenshot it and crop it in photoshop.
4 – Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.
It can take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour to make, but it is a ton of fun to see what you get matched up with. I spent maybe about 10 minutes on this. I wanted to add another step through dafont.com, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to have the person get a random font to use. Anyways thanks again tostumbleupon and blog.mflow.com for giving me something to do.
Transparency
[Another post about our future in the Ad Industry]
One of the major focuses of a Journalism: Advertising student at the University of Oregon is being a “T” shaped student. “T” shaped meaning have a good-to-strong understanding of multiple aspects of Advertising. What I understand by multiple aspects of Advertising, is that it means to understand how a campaign works, strategy, the creative brief, how individuals thinks, how the client thinks, how to work in a team, etc. There is a lot to have a grasp of, and to go along with that you need to be tuned into one or two specific aspects like copy writing, development, strategy, account planning, media planning, or art direction/design.
Now how “T” shaped students can also be related to agencies and how they work. Agencies are like “T” shaped students, because they are required to know how to do everything, but will often focus in on some specific areas of interest that separates their agencies from other ones. The biggest difference is transparency. After reading an article on digiday called, “Confessions of an Agency Tech Vendor” by Brian Morrissey, I was unnerved by the fact at how many agencies are not transparent about their ideas, pitches, and the use of Tech Vendors. I would never claim to know more than I know or be able to do more than I can actually do. So it’s a bit scary when I could be going into a work environment that’s built on convincing a client of an idea that cannot be done potentially and then if it can be done, people aren’t receiving credit for it. So how can we fix this?
Solution: Be transparent about what you know and how you know it. Also further what you know, as a creative I want to know as much as I can about how things work and what it takes to make things works on all scales. This way I don’t sound like a jackass when I go to my development team and say go build this and it can’t even be done.
Correct Use of Digital Media
At time when EDM is picking up fans at an exponential rate, and the rave scene is trying to pick up it’s image after the incident at EDC two years ago, Ultra Music Festival 2012 just made one of the smartest branding/advertising moves by making the decision to stream their festival this year on Youtube with Google Play. (Link Here)
After hearing about multiple cases where brands wanted to create youtube channels with zero to almost no strategy, this is an example where it works incredibly. Lets take a quick look at the swiffer situation. They created a youtube channel in 2007 where users could post videos, but in 5 years they have only reached 607 subscribers and ~440,000 video views. Swiffer didn’t need to make the Youtube and the amount impressions they have made aren’t really that high. Where if we look at UMF TV, in under 12 hours the channel has almost 7,000 subscribers and almost reached 600,000 views, and will probably reach 1.5 million+ by the end of the weekend. The amount of impressions the channel will make in three days for having to spend very little money setting up a live Youtube stream will be incredibly high.
We also happen to be experiencing so many miss uses of digital media/media tools in branding/adverting, so when I heard about this and got to see it live I was very impressed. Firstly impressed by the quality of the sound, video, and camera work, then secondly impressed by their decision to make this move. This is a great example where a Youtube channel actually makes sense.
Bam bam, there goes my idea.
I don’t normally like to write about advertising that I see, because I like to think of my blog as a place to share my thoughts and reactions to things that are happening in my analog life, however this particular ad created by Passion Pictures for the 2012 Miami ADDY Awards sparked an outburst on FastCo.Design that I found unwarranted and complete misread of the ad itself.
Here is the ad:
I’ve never actually worked at an ad agency, but I do know what it is like to go up in front of an “audience” of respectable peers or people of power and present an idea or piece of executed material. I know it can be scary and nerve-wrecking to do this, because it’s like putting yourself up on display. But I’ve learned to remember that you are not your idea, and when your idea fails, you pick yourself back up and get back to work. You do it better, and if you fail again, you do it even better the next time.
I found this ad particularly hilarious, because it juxtaposes two men’s three ideas as two children and an old man. The young children could represent unrefined ideas that they just came up with, which they believe to be brilliant, so they get shot down gruesomely. And rightfully so. I would never present something to someone that I hadn’t really sat with and refined.
Or another way to interpret the ideas is through the juxtaposition of young and old. The children are “fresh” and “new” ideas that the client doesn’t understand, and when they don’t kill the old man and decide to give him the balloon and turn his hat around, it’s the rehashing of an old idea that worked and trying to make it “fresh” and “new”.
No matter how you interpret the ad, I don’t think it warrants a long rant at how ideas aren’t children, because they were never children figuratively. Mark Wilson says he doesn’t mind the gore, but minds the message, but I think it’s because he took the ad itself too seriously. The ad was making fun of the client/agency relationship and creating hyperbolic moment of when ideas are turned down.
No need for overreacting Mark.
Agency Culture
As a student majoring in Journalism: Advertising with a focus on becoming an Art Director (yay titles!), I’ve always been curious about how I am supposed to find an agency that I can intern at, work at, or work with. Last week I got some very interesting advice from Marcelino Alvarez during our Production Showdown 2012. He said:
“Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” – Marcelino Alvarez
Cascadian Type
The other week I had a very interesting conversation with my roommates about type design. They were all out in our garage playing ping pong, and I walked in on them ranting about different fonts and how we should have our font for our house. We gave our house has the name Cascadian Embassy, and we alway talk about different additions we can make to make our house more special. We’ve talked about a family crest, getting a Cascadian flag, family picture…The list goes on. This also happened to come about the same time I was reading Thinking With Type, and happened to be going over the genesis of type faces.
So, why not our own type face?
What I tried to explain to them was it’s not that simple. Many of the type families that we know and love to use today have spawned over many generations. Their uses have come from very distinct philosophies of design and have specific feelings associated with them. I wish it was easy to create a type face, but it’s not. It’s hard to imagine creating your own without making a statement or drawing upon a specific philosophy to do so.
So they replied to me why do we just make our own font.
Again I wish it was that simple. I wasn’t able to answer that question at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently. They know I love design, I know I love design, so I had to ask myself what would it take to make my own font? We’ve spent a lot of time talking about User Experience, mobile, and web design, and I think it would take really examining the philosophies in this area and finding something that’s missing or working with something that already exists. Maybe in the near future I can sit down and really take a look at what makes a good web or mobile font, and find a way to make it even more accessible or enjoyable for the user. And maybe I can call it Cascadian Type.
#prodshow2012
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of witnessing a great spectacle with three top of the line Executive Producers, each with unique backgrounds and advice to share. Dave Ewald brought down Ann-Marie Harbour from W+K, Marcelino Alvarez from Uncorked Studios, and Jeremy Adirim from GSP.
The quote below particularly stuck with me:
“Who are we talking to?”
“What’s the point?”
“What happens if we are actually successful?”
These types of questions create thinking that either defends or defeats an idea or concept. – Jeremy Adirim (Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners)
As creative people and problem solvers we constantly need to be challenged in a good way. The questions above might seem harsh or maybe a bit rough, but as Jeremy said they create thinking that will either lead to the glory or fall of an idea or concept. A good creative, as highlighted by Jeremy, is someone who can answer those questions and, I can imagine, with confidence and direction. If people aren’t challenged on their ideas or concepts then something mediocre will pass through the filter.
Category Disruption
I had the pleasure of meeting Jack Peterson, the President of Sandstrom Parnters, last December over my winter break. Sandstrom Partners is a strategic brand design firm that strongly believes in creating thought-leading brands that need a new audience, disrupt the category they are in, and/or capitalize on emerging trends. Their approach changes from brand to brand, but “always involves telling a compelling story and then making sure that story is conveyed in every piece of communication: from the name to the packaging to the point of sale to the web to the advertising. To accomplish this, we create brand identity systems, package design, strategy, research, environments, websites, and party hats.”
How they go about accomplishing the process of creating a thought-leading brand was what lead me to them in the first place. Their design approach, style, and feel screams awesomeness. I’m going to briefly talk about how Sandstrom Partners was able to create a thought-leading brand in Steven Smith Tea through category disruption.
One aspect of a thought-leading brand, as defined by Jack, is one that can break through the category it is in. Steven Smith wanted Sandstrom Partners to do for him what they originally did for Tazo Tea (which originally owned by Steven Smith). Jack also mentioned that at Sandstrom Partners they reserve the right to turn down brands that just want the same shit as everyone else. Luckily for Smith, their previous relationship lead Jack to reconcile his request for a redone Tazo Tea and create something new.
So here are some brief steps outlined from my hour and a half chat with Jack:
- Research the market: For Steven Smith Tea, they decided to research the tea market. They found that the market was already extremely saturated with various tea brands. They looked at a wide range of grocery stores in Portland. Going from Albertsons to Whole Foods. The reason they researched the market was to find some sort of insight. To create a thought-leading brand through category disruption you have to find an insight that will allow the brand to break the category it is in and emerge as the choice for the consumer or target audience.
- Insight: The insight that Jack and Sandstrom Partners made was that they found no brand trying to set itself apart as the “premium” choice for tea drinkers. A common thread through most of the tea brands already on the market was that they were good or pretty good or even really good, but no brand wanted to call itself the best. This was the insight they needed. Once they had the insight they needed, they were able to come up with strategy and tactics to solve the problem. And the problem was Steven Smith Tea had to convince consumers it was the best.
- Execution: With the insight that they could create a thought-leading brand by creating a brand that could call itself the best and premium choice for tea drinkers, it was time for execution. I’m not going to go into heavy lengths about the execution, but what I will say is that it centered around user experience. Every aspect of the product is premium. The price is well above other tea brands, the bags are made of silk, the box is wide instead of narrow on the shelf, its minimalistic in design, as well as easy to understand and remember. If you want to call yourself the best it takes more than just being overpriced, it takes a premium experience from the consumer.
Here are some photos of Steven Smith Tea:
