Who knew that paper clips and staples could teach such smart life lessons? Everyday objects you might find at your desk are the stars in Hints for Better Living, a short film by Los Angeles-based designer Mike Afsa, who also does work for companies like Chiat\Day and Quiksilver.
This is the second film by Afsa (see the first one here), who had a habit of playing with office supplies at his desk. He realized that the tools he used for graphic design could be used to spread a positive message. He created mini-PSAs inspired by the tools themselves: simple, playful and humorous. "Some of the ones I like most happened more spontaneously by restricting myself to a few random objects in front me and playing with them to make a simple problem and solution," he tells us. "The unexpected outcomes were rewarding and I felt like this way of working was staying true to the message." The soundtrack comes from Afsa's own recordings and the music of Lullatone.
A little over a month after the half-mile high tower opened in Dubai (and exactly a month since a pair went base-jumping from the top) the Burj Khalifa is closed for business--at least temporarily. The owners of the world's tallest structure, Emaar Properties, released a statement claiming "unexpected high
traffic" as well as "electrical problems" prompted the closure. Construction workers at the base, however, were unaware of any issues, and it was unsure whether elevators were effected.
Only the observation deck had been operational so far--a ride to the top cost $27. Question is, how long before debilitating problems for the Burj make it an inescapable symbol of an over-inflated development. The tower's 12,000 residential and office tenants, due to start moving in this month, were to represent a new hope for the slumping Dubai economy. But they, presumably, aren't too keen on taking the stairs.
If we had to pick one winner from last night's game it would have to be the Saints, of course. But who won when it came to the $175 million ad game? With 62 Super Bowl spots valued at about $2.8 million each (and that's just for the media buy), here are the five other winners and losers when it came to getting their advertising dollars' worth...or not.
WINNERS
Google. This ridiculously simple, heartwarming concept--part of Google's Search Stories--that chronicled a long-distance relationship through a series of search-field entries had Super Bowl parties going "awwwww" all across the country. This ad probably cost nothing to produce, and wasn't even exclusive to the Super Bowl (Eric Schmidt explains further here), yet the ad's visual impact was so effective it had already spawned a worthy parody that started to appear yesterday afternoon. Google wins big...and they don't even need to advertise.
Snickers. Huge laughs echoed in every bar in America when octogenarian Betty White got tackled in the name of Snickers. The revitalizing effects of the candy bar were front and center in the spot and, really, how could you not giggle a little when you saw Abe Vigoda down on the muddy, muddy ground. Pushing old people has never been so funny!
Doritos. A crowd-sourced mentality proved to be smart for the chips, with a handful of really funny ads named Crash the Super Bowl that were created by its fans. A win for Doritos. But what does this say about advertising when the fans are funnier than the big-time agencies?
Letterman (and Leno). Does this signify a happy ending to the late night wars? The surprise entry, which was a reprise of this spot poking fun at Letterman's famous standoff with Oprah, had crowds asking each other, "Did you see that?" The New York Times has the story about how Letterman dreamed up the spot, and snuck a cooperative Leno into his studio to film it.
Pepsi. No, you didn't see them advertise at last night's game, but you've likely been hearing plenty about their socially-conscious social media campaignRefresh Everything, which takes what would have been their Super Bowl budget and gives it away to worthy causes. Their $20 million gamble seems to have paid off, even if the creative origins of their ad campaign are murky.
LOSERS
Audi. Plenty of pre-buzz swirled around their "Green Police" spots (well, mostly because people said the name was too close to a Nazi special-forces unit) but they turned out to be pretty funny ads for the A3 TDI commenting on our eco-mania. Too bad a lot of greenies out there were seriously offended by Audi's audacity to poke fun at their movement. Somebody call the Green Police!
Boost Mobile. A fantastic concept--a remake of the Super Bowl
Shuffle 25 years later--a great cast--most of the original Chicago
Bears--and two star directors--Tim & Eric, of Awesome Show fame.
The music video is highly entertaining when viewed in its entirety online but the production
didn't play in 30-second cuts. Plus, no one could remember what the spot
was even advertising.
Focus on the Family. After all the over-reaction about CBS allowing an
issue-oriented ad, these supposed anti-abortion spots featuring Tim
Tebow and
his mother were so puzzlingly non-message that it's almost like Focus on
the Family didn't get its money's worth. The
word "abortion" was never uttered, and the dialogue was so vague that anyone
who didn't know the story behind the spot would have watched completely oblivious until the next Doritos spot.
Vizio. The HDTV manufacturer spent a bucketload on the Super Bowl this year, with an expensive ad directed by Wally Pfister and featuring Beyoncé and Internet star David Goes to the Dentist, plus some snazzy overhead cam the sportscasters kept calling out by name, plus the pre-game show sponsorship to hype its Internet-enabled HDTV system. Did all that really make any difference?
Budweiser. The fratty, unfunny ads from the beermaker were called out as misogynistic by more than one critic, and those Clydesdales have got to be about ready to go to horse heaven. This whole genre seemed tired and sad compared to other advertisers. Maybe next year Budweiser can follow Pepsi's lead and give away its budget? Please?
Hi, Mom! It has been brought to our attention that you're an avid reader of Fast Company. First and foremost we want to say welcome, and thanks! Mothers of prominent advertising figures is a niche readership we've long coveted--not for nothing, the moms of Wieden + Kennedy's creatives are big fans, too--so we're honestly thrilled to have you on board.
According to Alex, you read Fast Company more than you read his own blog (hyperbole, surely), and we find it especially sweet that you keep up with your son's career so closely that you actually sense when he might be getting in over his head (with you as support, any wonder he's risen to the top). After reading our piece about Alex's new job as Chief Creative Insurgent of MDC Partners, CP+B's parent company, for example, you asked him how he planned to oversee MDC's 32 agencies. And he told you not to believe everything you read on the Internet.
We'll admit, we didn't know exactly what being a "Chief Creative Insurgent" of MDC was--the only other "insurgents" we can think of are a group of people doing particularly awful stuff in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we were pretty sure that wasn't what your son was up to. But MDC did tell us this: "In his new role, MDC Partners will be able to leverage Alex's creative vision, marketing and branding expertise, and social media insights across the entire MDC Partners network."
Well, we're glad that you brought this up because now we--and you--know from Alex's public letter to his MDC colleagues that "creative insurgent" does not equal "creative director," instead, he'll be someone who "challenges the status quo" at MDC, questioning "the very definition of marking and communications and corporate structure." Since you were the authority figure whose status quo was probably the first to be challenged by Alex, maybe you can tell us how good he'll be at that.
We can't say we understand exactly what Alex will be doing in his new job (something about gorillas and writing a book?), but luckily, we've got a great opportunity to straighten this whole thing out. If you want to learn more about what your son's up to, we suggest attending our Innovation Uncensored Conference on April 21, where Alex will one of our keynote speakers. It's going to be an exciting day put together by your favorite publication. We'd gladly save you a front row seat, and you can ask all the questions during the Q&A that you want.
Oh! And if you want to order any more copies of your son on the cover of our magazine, we think they'd make great Valentine's Day gifts for the family. Maybe you can even get Alex to autograph them!
This exclusive peek of Dr Pepper's first-ever Super Bowl spot features the painted faces of rock band Kiss as well as their diminutive doppelgangers, MiniKiss. Agency Deutsch wanted to emphasize Dr Pepper's "little kiss" of cherry. According to Dr Pepper, the bands have met before, but this was their first official performance.
Look for the full spot at the two-minute warning, just before halftime.
It's Groundhog Day, and you know what that means: No more holidays left between now and Black Sunday (also known as Valentine's Day). Instead of cavity-causing confections, why not give that special someone your best idea for redesigning the holiday from hell? You'll remember a few weeks back I helped Kurt Andersen launch the Redesign Valentine's Day Challenge at Studio 360. The deadline to submit your idea is midnight on Saturday, February 7, so upload your redesign to the Flickr group and you might be mentioned on a special Valentine's weekend Studio 360 show!
Last week, we got a peek at some of the first entries. This week, husband-and-wife design team Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio chime in about the assignment, and a very special celebrity judge has joined the team: Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love and Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. And now, a few more of our favorites:
An inspired idea from jgluzifer: "Imagine xmas without the consumerist burden of resuscitating a flagging
economy, Thanksgiving without the surfeit, New Years where our
resolutions aren't solely for self-improvement but are pledged to one
another. A holiday to celebrate all the modes of love, familial and
romantic, a day for charity and forgiveness, selfless love, maybe even
commiseration between curmudgeons and misanthropes. IOU ten hours of
service to a non-profit of your choice. IOU more QT. IOU an
explanation. IOU what you want the way you want it. IOU my life my
devotion. IOU lunch/a bitching session. IOU a better world."
alyxlovesjellyfishsays: "And you thought Romeo and Juliet had it rough." My heart burns just thinking about it.
Appropriate for these times. palmersandralee repurposed Chris Rubino's recent New York Times op-ed artwork.
More concepts of everyday love, here, "love amongst the flotsam & jetsam of life..." by +Hybridesign+.
Thoughts on what else we might try loving this holiday, by iwipup.
A few ideas were submitted without visuals, and these concepts are just begging to be illustrated.
chris paige says: "Let's return Valentine's Day to the spirit of agape and grace. Instead
of sending pink valentines, practice a few acts of random kindness, for
family, friends, or strangers. Whether it's refilling the office coffee
pot, giving someone in your family a foot rub, handing a stranger a
quarter for the parking meter, smiling at a passer-by, or sending a
care package to a soldier in Afghanistan, we could practice kindness
regardless of our age, race, creed, or sociability."
LHLANI agrees: "Why not change the day so it has meaning for everyone by making
it a day about caring for others. You'd still express your love for
your significant other, but you'd also show you care for people who are
not necessarily your lovers. The phrase I CARE or an I with a slash O
through it to indicate not I might be the symbol since the holiday is
not about you. The gestures would be simple. In addition to giving
candy and flowers, one could call an old friend, give to charity, share
cookies with coworkers, or simply be nice to people. Perhaps people
could work at a food bank serving food appropriate to the season."
Designers, you have until midnight on Saturday, February 7 to submit, so upload your idea soon!
Super Bowl Sunday should be a time for us to put aside our political differences and let our country only be divided by one simple issue: Saints or Colts. Not according to CBS. The network announced a few weeks ago that it would reverse its earlier policy and allow advocacy ads to air during the game, starting with Heisman-winning Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow's ad for the Christian pro-life group Focus on the Family. The ad reportedly features Tebow with his mother, talking about how she ignored medical advice to have an abortion while pregnant with him in the Philippines.
Eyebrows were raised, but they were raised even higher late last week when CBS rejected an ad for gay dating site ManCrunch. CBS claimed that the ManCrunch spot is "not within the network's Broadcast Standards for Super Bowl Sunday." It's not a well-produced ad--in fact, it's probably best for all parties involved if it doesn't air--but judge for yourself if you find it inappropriate for the Super Bowl.
To complicate matters--and raise sentiment that the network is anti-gay--CBS also denied another ad for Super Bowl regular GoDaddy.com featuring the overly-effeminate ex-NFL player "Lola."
GoDaddy.com has never claimed to be an arbiter of
good taste, but in this case, its strategy might be a bit more transparent: "Banned ads" often generate more PR buzz
than the actual ads (think PETA's almost-naked vegans from last year, and CareerBuilder's fart-lighting spot this year). The real problem with CBS rejecting the ManCrunch and GoDaddy ads is the prevalence of anti-gay humor that naturally flows through the testosterone-fest like Bud Light. For example, this Snickers ad featuring two men "accidentally" kissing:
Bad taste? Double standard? Or are some "issues" more appropriate to address during a football game than others?
The storyline is almost Tarantinian. An evil empire enslaves two flashy, fiercely-independent brothers, and then leaves them to die, while the virtuous duo ironically attempts to buy back their own identity (Miramax, a portmanteau of their own parents' names, Miriam and Max!) as well as the lifetime of groundbreaking work they helped to create.
Like so many Tarantino films, this story also ends sad and bloody. The Weinstein Company, forged in Miramax's ashes by those fiercely independent brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, reportedly began laying off staff on Friday.
The layoffs come hot on the heels of the news that Miramax--responsible for a wide swath of cinematic history, from Pulp Fiction and The Crying Game, to Good Will Hunting and Swingers, to Chicago and Gangs of New York--will be absorbed into Walt Disney Studios, leaving its 80 employees in Los Angeles and New York to search for a script with a happier ending. Such a fate seemed unavoidable after the company Disney bought the company in 1993 and, according to a former Miramax employee who requested anonymity, sucked the spirit right out of it. Michael Eisner was no fan of the brothers, the source tells FastCompany.com. Nor did Disney enjoy the meaty blend of violence, sex, and politics delivered by directors like Michael Moore, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez--clearly they didn't fit the Disney roster.
"Disney wanted to greatly cut our marketing budget and were not entirely supportive of the movies we were releasing," the employee tells FastCompany.com. Employees got a Disney handbook, informing them about proper ethics for Disney "cast members."
"At the end, it ended up just being a 'who had a bigger penis' kind of thing," says the source. "And finally Harvey and Bob said 'Enough. You know what? At the end of the day, we just want to make movies, and we aren't going to be compromised artistically.'" They left their name, a catalog they had worked over a lifetime to acquire, produce and release, and started their own company, the Weinstein Company, in 2005.
As a business innovation, there's no doubt about Miramax's legacy, as
it spawned some inspired competition when studios opened their own arthouse departments like Sony Classics, Warner Independent, and
Universal's Focus Films. But Miramax itself would only have been able to survive--and grow--with the Mouse's cash. "Miramax started as a small company that acquired movies like Clerks and The Crying Game," the source says. "It turned into a mini-major studio that produced titles like Chicago, Gangs of New York, and Kill Bill. This wouldn't have been possible without the financial backing from a larger corporation."
Case in point: The Weinstein Company, which hired a financial adviser to restructure the company in 2009. When Inglorious Basterds was released it came with a whispered ultimatum that if it didn't do box office gold, the Weinsteins would be out of business (it did, but that hasn't seemed to help enough).
Miramax's demise means six films in production may be scuttled, the most anxiously-anticipated being The Tempest, a Julie Taymor-directed picture on which filming is not yet complete. As for the rest of the films in Miramax's archive, it is uncertain whether or not Disney will try to offload them--or if Harvey and Bob can buy their archive back. "I'm sure that is already in the works," says the source before the layoffs began Friday.
Audiences on the hunt for original approaches to cinema are the real losers here, says the source, since Miramax's legendary commitment to arthouse will wither within Disney's walls. In 2008, studios Paramount and Warner Brothers closed their arthouse divisions, which doesn't bode well.
But that spirit lives on in the Weinsteins--provided they, too, can stay afloat. "I don't think that Harvey and Bob would ever go down without a fight," says our source. "Their goal is to do what they have always done: bring the arthouse movie that was once seen by a select few in cosmopolitan areas to a level where it is readily available to everyone, even in small town America." The source tells FastCompany.com about meeting a gay man from a rural area who said he wished he would have been able to see The Crying Game growing up. "He really had no outlet to express himself or know that there were others like him," the source says. "Miramax's films made people like that know it was okay to be that way. It gave them more confidence and made their experience growing up a little easier."
The Princess and the Frog probably wouldn't cut it.
Of all the names that Apple had reportedly secured--Apple Tablet, iTablet, Magic Slate, iSlate--I think it's safe to say that no one truly believed that Apple would name their newest product the iPad. Especially women.
"So will the 64GB one be called the Maxi-Pad?"
"I'm holding out for the iRag."
Seconds after the name was announced social networks lit up with not-so-fresh one-liners from both men and women (a CNBC anchor mentioned her very candid thoughts on-air). About an hour after the announcement #iTampon was a trending topic on Twitter.
But it was the females in the crowd who read more into Apple's menstrual pun. They seemed to think Apple's name was indicative of a male-helmed team oblivious to the fact that they were pushing an insensitively-named product. "Surely no women were involved in naming it the iPad" was a widely-reTweeted sentiment. Another: "iPad: Proof not enough women work in the Apple Naming Department."
Another call issued from the Twitterverse begged Jobs and Apple to
direct all the newfound attention to sanitary napkins towards initiatives like a UNICEF program which provides affordable menstruation products to women in developing nations. Kimberly-Clark is currently delivering feminine hygiene products to Haiti.
If Apple really wanted to tap the female market they should have taken a cue from this MadTV spot from 2007 which predicted some other extremely useful features not offered on today's debut:
Does Jobs' iPad have a vaginal firewall? I think not.
The ad industry--and Apple--mourned the loss of one of its legends this week as Guy Day, co-founder of Chiat\Day, died at age 79. Day founded his groundbreaking agency with Jay Chiat in 1968, which put Los Angeles on the ad-map and went on to become one of the most influential creative shops on the planet (Chiat died in 2002). Chiat\Day's clients over the years have included Honda, Nike, Pizza Hut, Pepsi, and perhaps most famously, Apple, for whom they created this spot aired in, well, 1984:
Directed by Ridley Scott, who had just directed Blade Runner, the ad introducing the Macintosh computer aired in the third quarter of the Super Bowl. The cinematic-quality production--not to mention its Orwellian theme in a sea of Budweiser Clydesdale ads--instantly transformed the annual sports broadcast into an ad-driven event that it is today. The ad was only aired one more time, in a small market, to make it eligible for award shows. A far cry from those PC/Mac ads, no?
Another Apple Super Bowl ad aired in 1999, this time using 2001's HAL as a spokesmodel. In his creepy monotone he preyed upon our worst turn-of-the-millennium fears and touted Apple's ability to avoid the Y2K "bug." This one was, um, not as successful.
Chiat\Day also inhabited an early office designed by Frank Gehry which featured a revolutionary way of working (and a giant pair of binoculars by artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen). In this "virtual office," employees did not have designated desks, instead they used portable computers (PowerBooks, of course) and flexible workspaces to move around the building depending on their creative and administrative needs. Sounds pretty normal to us now, but the folks weren't ready for it at the time: Chiat\Day moved out in 1999.
