First, unlike more typical folks here in the eighth-laziest state in the nation, I don’t watch all that much TV. When I turn the box on, it’s usually to watch a DVD (0ften of TV shows, but is that the same as “watching TV”? I don’t know). And when I actually do surf the broadcast and cable offerings, I have a very itchy finger on the channel-changer, and commercials are occasions for launching another circuit of my options.
So when I actually see an ad that makes me stop and watch it, and want to watch it again, and call family members in to see it — that’s a rare occasion.
There are currently two such ads on the tube these days. One is above, and the other below. Hats off to the ad geniuses who made these; every detail is perfect. I particularly love the conceit of making the Abe Lincoln clip old and scratchy, sort of stretching the facts of history to pretend moving pictures were available in the days of Matthew Brady.
But the Russian mafioso and his miniature giraffe — that’s also to bust a gut over. Who dreamed that up. Who thought of the giraffe, or his goofy paroxyms of joy as he smooches it? It’s so riveting you almost don’t notice the babes next to him, which is amazing.
So hats off to the agencies that I THINK are responsible for these gems: the Martin Agency for the Honest Abe (those guys are awesome — whoever heard of so many totally separate, memorable, highly creative campaigns going on for one client at the same time? And they keep it up year after year), and Grey Advertising for the “Opulence — I has it” advert.
Good stuff, folks. As an aspiring ad man, I will try to emulate your brilliance.
Well, I don’t really know how to put my finger on it; I just found it lacking. As my wife said, if this is an indication of what the new season is going to be like, we’ve waited a long time for nothing good.
I felt George’s pain in the opening scene of Sunday’s episode, however. Don Draper is at lunch with an Ad Age reporter, and our guy’s first line is: “Who is Don Draper?” Don doesn’t know what to say, so he asks how other people responded to such a question. “They say something cute,” our reporter says. “One creative director said he was a lion tamer.”
The Ad Age reporter is taking notes for his story in shorthand. He asks about a Glo-Coat ad that caused “a bit of a squeal,” then says he has enough for his story. “It’s only going to be a few hundred words. The picture may be bigger than the article.” At that point other members of the agency show up, including Roger Sterling, and when the reporter gets up to leave he turns his leg entirely around and explains he lost his real limb in Korea. When he departs, Sterling quips, “They’re so cheap they can’t afford a whole reporter.”
What’s wrong with this picture? No. 1, we never did interviews over lunch; No. 2, we didn’t take notes in shorthand; No. 3 we didn’t ask cute-ass questions; and No. 4, our pictures were never bigger than our stories.
OK, dude; lighten up. It’s a TV show. But yeah, it was lacking.
There was one part I liked. It was when Don Draper makes a pitch to unappreciative clients (or potential clients; I doubt that anything had been signed), and then gets so ticked off at them he storms out of the meeting. Then, when one of his associates follows him out to say something about trying to salvage the situation, Don essentially says Hell, no and marches back in to summarily throw the philistines out of the office.
My wife sort of went, “Whoa!” at such extreme behavior. Which was my cue to say, “That’s essentially what I do at ADCO. That’s my role.”
I can get away with stuff like that now. When I was at the paper, she could see what I did every morning. Now, I can be more mysterious.
I’m just branching out into all sorts of new fields of endeavor sincebecoming a Mad Man and joining ADCO– exploiting latent talents I didn’t even know I had.
Here’s the latest: Hand model. Soon, you might be seeing my hand on a billboard down in the Lowcountry. That’s because we needed background art — of anonymous hands operating office equipment — for a board we were doing for a client. Karen and I ran over to the client’s showroom to shoot it earlier this week, and she shot a bunch of exposures of my hands pretending to push buttons. I shot some of her doing the same, but it was Karen’s camera (a very nice Nikon SLR) and she’ll be picking the image we use, and in my experience, when given a choice, photographers prefer their own work.
So this is my big shot. A number of years ago I pressedThe Stateto include in a billboard campaign several boards highlighting the faces of my associates Cindi Scoppe, Warren Bolton and Claudia Brinson. I thought then that someone in Marketing (The Stateactuallyhada marketing department back then) would say, “We need one of Brad, too!” But they didn’t, drat the luck. So my colleagues got famouser and I didn’t.
But this is my big break. And I’m going to be really careful with my hands. I’m not going tomess them up the way George Costanza didhis. (Yes, now I, too, have “hand,” George!)
And in a way, this kind of notoriety is sweeter than having people know your face. I won’t be pestered for autographs. I’ll be able to sit in a restaurant, for instance, undisturbed and overhear women at an adjoining table:
FIRST WOMAN: Have you seen that wonderful new office equipment ad?
SECOND WOMAN: Those hands! They’re so… so hot!
FIRST WOMAN: Yes! They make me all quivery…
… while I smile enigmatically, perusing the menu.
Just please — don’t hate me because my hands are beautiful.
Yeah, it was great seeing the National Champion Gamecocks baseball team, and Mayor Benjamin, and Richland County Council, and the crowd, and the beautiful weather, etc.
But this was our very favorite float in the parade today. See how Lanier’s clapping?
Where was Brian all Wednesday afternoon? Well, that’s easy — the Gamecocks uber-fan was over at the Colonial Life Arena welcoming the National Champion University of South Carolina baseball team home from Omaha.
While there, he snapped this image of the festivities to share with the rest of us. He’s thoughtful like that. We who were back at the office working appreciate it.
Of course, we’re all taking off to check out the parade on Friday…
Lanier, Lora and Brad went to theMidlands Aviation Summittoday at the convention center, which was the community’s chance to hear airport consultantMichael Boyd of Boyd Group International(above) assessing the state of, and future prospects for, Columbia Metropolitan Airport.
There was a pretty decent turnout of concerned folks. They ran the gamut from professional ecodevo types from the Chamber, the Midlands Alliance and Midlands Authority for Conventions, Sports & Tourism to business travelers with a beef about the cost of parking at CAE.
Some main points from what Mr. Boyd said:
“That scraping sound is not an iceberg.” The fact that Southwest chose Charleston and Greenville and not Columbia is not ahuge deal. Southwest is what it is, and he doesn’t see it as the cure for Columbia’s ills. It’s not “the giant sucking sound.”
While we might have challenges with fares and losing passengers to Charlotte, for business purposes CAE provides what Columbia needs — connections to where business travelers need to be.
Main thing travel into and out of Columbia needs to be is reliable, to not have our flights be among those that get canceled when there’s a rainstorm.
Airlines don’t care about our civic enthusiasm. They don’t want to view cute or pleading videos. Don’t send them the mayor. What they care about is whether they’re going to make any money, because nobody’s taking risks these days.
No, don’t start your own airline. Air South? “We don’t talk about that in polite society.”
What can civic-minded folks who want to see the airport grow as a boost to the local economy DO? Check out the local airport first. Don’t assume it can’t meet your needs. Give it a chance.
We just don’t have enough traffic — enough passengers on big enough airplanes — to bring down fares. When someone pointed out that smaller airports such as Florence and Augusta have lower fares, he said he had no idea why. “I used to be in airline pricing, so I have no understanding of it whatsoever.”
Based on what Mr. Boyd said and a brief conversation with Airport Executive Director Dan Mann after the presentation, the thinking seems to be that Columbia’s best chance for expansion of air service lies with Delta, not USAirways. So our local economic developers in the air transportation field are likely to be looking more to Atlanta, less to Charlotte.
Lanier, Lora and Brad went to theMidlands Aviation Summittoday at the convention center, which was the community’s chance to hear airport consultantMichael Boyd of Boyd Group International(above) assessing the state of, and future prospects for, Columbia Metropolitan Airport.
Finally, we’re going to get our president back! Lanier Jones handed over the gavel of the Columbia Rotary Club Monday to Robin Gorman, thus ending his year as president of South Carolina’s largest such club.
Brian, Lora and Brad were in attendance, as all present celebrated a year of being “the hands of Rotary.” Much applause was accorded to Lanier — and all the others who made it happen — for ending the year with our scholarship and other funds in great shape.
A good time was had by all. Seawell’s was serving baked ham, which is one of the things they do best…
Friday is the long-awaited first day of ConvergeSE 2010, and late Thursday the offices at ADCO were bustling with activity and bristling with T-shirts, decals, magnets, mouse pads and other high-tech paraphernalia.
What’s ConvergeSE? Where have you been?
ConvergeSE 2010 is intended for Web designers and developers, business executives, marketing professionals, content creators and students. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or a newcomer to the Web, you’re sure to discover something that will spark your creativity and get you motivated.
The conference, a southeastwide expansion of last year’s successful ConvergeSC, will feature such speakers as Neil Patel of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, Kevin Hale of Wufoo, Robert Tolar Haining of Condé Nast Digital, Aarron Walter of MailChimp and Brandon Eley of brandoneley.com.
The conference “will take you from front-end design to the development technologies used to build websites and web apps, then also help you learn strategies to sell your services or application as well as build community around it,” says organizer Gene Crawford of unmatchedstyle.com and period-three.com. “It’s that well rounded, multi-disciplinary approach to Converge that makes it a little unique I think. We give each speaker 30 minutes to get their point across and then it’s off to another topic, fast and furious.”
Who should attend ConvergeSE 2010? “Anyone who works with the web or on the web,” said Crawford. Which today means pretty much anybody.
When and Where is it?
Friday, June 25, 8 am-5 pm, Workshop Day
ETV
1041 George Rogers Boulevard
Saturday, June 25, 8 am-5pm, Conference Day
University of south Carolina
Amoco Hall
Swearingen Engineering Center
301 Main Street
And lo! On the long-appointed day, the new iPhones arrived in four nondescript boxes, and all work ceased so that the people might give thanks and sing songs of praise. For the rest of the day, they were as children on Christmas morning.
Navin Johnson wasn’t nearly as excited about having his name in the new phonebook (phonebook! how pathetically last century!) as the four fortunate ones were about the new phones coming.
Above, you see Lora using her old iPhone to take a picture of the box in which her new iPhone came, and below you see her announcing it to the world. Really. You cannot make this stuff up.
Lately on Twitter, I’ve gotten into Retweeting, which is the cheap and easy way to share cool stuff you run into there. For those of you not familiar with it, basically I see a cool thing (or something that MIGHT be cool; sometimes I’m too busy to follow the link myself), click a couple of times, and bada-bing!, I’ve shared it with my 520 followers. WAY better than having to GO to the link, COPY the URL, PASTE it into the form on TinyURL, copy and paste the NEW URL into the Twitter form, and type an explanation of what it leads to.
Way better, especially on the Blackberry, which is the way I look at Twitter the most.
Twitlonger is a decadent indulgence. I have only contempt for those who lack the discipline to say it within 140 characters. Harrumph.
I wrote that because several items I had retweeted this morning were already too long before I tried to send them, so my Blackberry automatically sent them using Twitlonger. But it let me know each time it did so. So I could feel the shame.
So much of the virtue of Twitter is the brevity. It’s a very satisfying medium, partly because of the challenge of expressing an idea fully in 140 characters. As I’ve noted before, it’s like writing haiku (if haiku were a lot less demanding). The discipline is good for the brain, and considerate to one’s audience.
But of course, as with anything that’s demanding and challenging and has a lot of rules (marriage, the Marine Corps, being Catholic, baseball), our lazy, permissive, anything-goes society’s going to come up with a way to cheat and get away with it. Hence Twitlonger, which allows you to break the 140-character rule. Look, if you can’t frickin’ say it in 140 characters, start a blog! Use a different medium.
Instead of sullying one that is pure and good (in the way that Hemingway would say pure and good, in the way that a trout stream is pure and good, etc.). I don’t know about you, but I don’t hold with it.
Come on, people, let’s preserve the unities. Let’s have some respect for the form…
