• Work Submission: DDB New York Campaigns for The Art Directors Club 91st Annual Awards With Rami Niemi and Lewis Black

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    Advertising isn’t easy. There are many obstacles to creating great work that resonates with consumers while maintaining creative integrity. Especially when you can't even drink in most offices nowadays. And all of these analytics are a pain in the ass.

    This is the idea (except the alcohol and analytics part) behind DDB New York’s campaign for The Art Directors Club 91st Annual Awards call for Entries Campaign.

    The campaign encourages creatives to “Keep Fighting the Good Fight,” despite obstacles to creating great work. This campaign launched online at www.adcawards.org and through a global print mailing on November 1. DDB worked with Finnish illustrator Rami Niemi to design artwork for nine CFE posters and postcards showing humorous situations in modern day advertising that illustrate the impediments to and challenges of conceiving of innovative and creative work.

    DDB also got comedian and angry, angry man Lewis Black to work on the project. Black contributes an original rant recorded for the campaign in which he angrily vents about the pressures of the advertising industry, deciding it’s all worth it for a shiny little object. “Keep fighting the good fight,” he concludes, “or go fuck yourself.”

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  • Cinearc Creative Wants a Project Manager

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    Cinearc Creative Agency is looking for a freelance digital media project manager to handle several web, print, 3d, and or motion projects for marketing and advertising purposes.

    If you're well-equipped to multi-task, speak with clients (we assume this means articulately) and be resourceful, this job could be great. You should also have at least two years of prior experience at a larger agency. The position is in Denver, Colorado, but telecommuting is okay. Find out how to apply and read the full job posting here.

  • Progressive Launches New Website + Video to Show Fans How to 'Dress Like Flo' this Halloween

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    Arnold Worldwide has found a way to make insurance loveable, and it's working! She's perky, she's helpful, and everyone wants her as their friend. People feel such a kinship with Flo the Progressive girl that they want to be her. She's not exactly a Halloween classic, given her simple costume and human qualities, but going Flo is a good last-minute idea. Then you can trick the doorbell ringers into buying insurance and make some Halloween money! Just kidding...but do check out Arnold's pitch below:

    Just in time for Halloween, Progressive has teamed up with Boston-based advertising agency Arnold Worldwide to introduce a step-by-step guide on how consumers searching for the perfect costume this year, can dress up as one of their favorite icons -- best known to her legion of fans as "Flo.”

    Earlier this year, Entertainment Weekly readers named Progressive’s perky pitchwoman the No. 1 Advertising Icon of All Time. An impressive feat, considering she beat out contenders such as the Pillsbury Doughboy, Tony the Tiger, Keebler Elves and the Coca-Cola Polar Bears. Additionally, Flo’s Facebook page currently has more than 3 million fans, and her #dresslikeflo hashtag is currently buzzing on Twitter.

    Arnold created the content for the ‘Dress Like Flo’ website. The website and this video offer a how-to on recreating Flo’s look with 10 accessories. Or, those interested can simply purchase the official costume from Amazon.com.

  • Good Shirts Collection Sales Help UNICEF Aid Children in the Horn of Africa

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    Good Shirts for the Horn of Africa from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

    BBH NY, UNICEF and Threadless have banded together to create a line of “Good Shirts.” Each T-shirt's cost directly corresponds to the aid item pictured on the T-shirt. 100% of the purchase price of the shirt will go towards helping people of the drought affected areas in the Horn of Africa.

    “If you buy a Good Shirt, you’re buying good karma,” says designer Justin Gignac, one half of a couple who designs shirts that sell for the value of the item they depict (for example, a “Gold Aviators” t-shirt sells for $243.84, while a “Good Luck” T is free). Good Shirts makes their concept charitable.

    The purchase of one mosquito shirt corresponds to the price of three insecticide-treated mosquito nets (18.57), while the priciest donation is equivalent to a cargo plane T (plus a real cargo plane for UNICEF--$300,000). In-between T’s include those featuring energy biscuits ($49.96) and a community water pump ($500.00). All proceeds will go to the US fund for UNICEF's relief efforts in the Horn of Africa.

    "We believe people are generally altruistic, but giving people a badge for being altruistic certainly doesn't hurt," said Ari Weiss, Executive Creative Director at BBH NY. "We're literally letting people wear their donation as a source of pride and as a means to spread the word. If friends get a little competitive over who's being more altruistic, all the better."

    Hopefully this will attract rich creative types and smaller-scale do-gooders alike as there's an option for everyone. Let’s call this project one for Grown-Up Girl Scouts. Earn your badges, beat your friends, talk about your charitable tendencies around the campfire and revel in the positive karma. Start your campaign by spreading the word with the #GoodShirts hashtag. Then buy your first cargo plane.

  • Street Fight Summit Opens with a New Vision of Search

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    The first annual Street Fight Summit got underway today in Soho, and no, there weren’t any panels battling to the death in an alleyway, but there were the brightest minds in a confusing, exciting field that will undoubtedly make some smart people a ton of money: Hyperlocal.

    The morning’s keynote brought a fresh vision of the future. It came from Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi, who’s trying to usher in the era of LSO the way Google ushered in the era of SEO. LSO stands for Location-Search Optimization, which you probably didn’t know because Shirazi made up the term fairly recently. Shirazi’s argument was compelling; we’ve seen the evolution of search from directories to SEO to SMO (Social Media Optimization), and LSO is next. I agree that internet traffic will be dominated by mobile within 10-15 years; I just don’t know if people will be largely browsing based on location, although it’s a distinct possibility. Basically, Fwix is looking to become the super-Google for where you are at any given moment. How will people location search, you might ask? Well it seems Fwix will be feeding their location-based content to location-based apps. Fwix also offers LSO optimization for free through easy DIY steps, relying on data to reap in the dough.

    For content sites, it doesn’t seem like there’s any reason to not optimize for Location Search—it’s like entering a free lottery. SEO probably seemed strange and confusing once, too. Shirazi left everyone in an interesting state: confused, intrigued, and texting subordinates to research LSO ASAP.

  • The Ego Interview: Antfood’s Wilson Brown on Building Creative Sound

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    Antfood's Williamsburg office clearly houses four of the coolest kids in town. Wilson Brown, Sean McGovern, Spencer Casey and Pedro Botsaris work (accessible via freight elevator) comfortably in a former bookbinding factory also home to a Hasidic bakery (free Christmas cookies, weirdly) and two circus studios. Defined simply as a “creative audio studio,” Antfood creates ad music for giants like Google, the American Cancer Society and Hennessy. They make their own instruments and throw a good rooftop party, the rare combination of down-to-earth and wildly successful. This year, Creative Director/Partner Wilson Brown won the Art Director’s Club Young Guns 9 award for, among other accolades, “convention shattering.” We spoke on cross-cultural music making, innovation, and selling out.

    Ella Riley Adams: First off, why the name Antfood?

    Wilson Brown: We should have a better answer for this. I don’t know...we’ve always liked it. it’s somewhat endearing and, I think, memorable. It kind of seems, for at least the aesthetic of the work that we do it seems to fit to some degree.

    We’ve had people who wanted to do sales or executive producer type position come in and give us this pitch of what Antfood means to them. I’ve never liked those made-up stories. I don’t have any made-up stories.

    ERA: You’ve lived in Sao Paolo and New York; how do you think each place influences your sound?

    WB: I think that I’ve come to a place where I’m utilizing influences from all over the world and different types of music that I listen to or perform or play. Here we curate a lot of different instruments and build our own instruments too. I think one of the things that we do well as a studio is to take accessible forms of music and use a variety of different instruments form around the world. We’re scoring a short film now and we’re doing this kind of cheesy bossa-nova-y style music, but with old drum machines from electric organs and all these analog synths — so we’re taking our North American influence and juxtaposing that back on a South American style. It’s definitely good to have both.

    ERA: What kinds of instruments do you build?

    WB: We’ve built acoustic instruments but the large majority of them have been synthesizers. Sometimes they’re just fun little boxes that you can make crazy sounds with and then sometimes they’re actually either replicas or emulations of older equipment that either isn’t available or is prohibitively expensive because of the heritage, I guess. Imagine like Antiques Roadshow or something. And you don’t actually want it for the value of it, you just want it to play with so you can just rebuild it yourself.

    We build a lot of our rack equipment too, like our audio processing equipment, so we can kind of find...I mean that’s a little more academic but I just wrote a contribution to this book on creative block and one of my points is that when you build your own tools you have much more control of your craft, and there’s something artistic and creative about actually making the tools rather than just buying everything.

    ERA: So what would you say Antfood does better than anyone else?

    WB: I think what we do better than any of our other competitors, that I’m aware of at least, is that we create sound for interactive advertising and experiential advertising. To be more specific about that, I think that we have both a technical ability and a creative vision that exists beyond a thirty-second spot.

    I think what we do particularly well in terms of format is creating experiences where there are either multiple layers or multiple dimensions and there’s some kind of interactive narrative, based on the audience or the user. They can experience the audio product in different ways depending on how they navigate through a website or if it’s an interactive installation, or some type of multi-dimension video project where it’s like you either choose your own adventure or do something that influences something else. So I guess new media, advertising for new media, in the realm of new media.

    ERA: Do you think selling out is dead?

    WB: No, I don’t think so. I just turned thirty so I was in middle school in the early 90s when grunge was coming out and there was all this super kind of angsty music that if you just read the lyrics on paper like you would never see a song like that today. I think maybe it was just my naivete and my youth but I thought that there was this horrible idea of selling out.

    Now it’s funny because we primarily make music for ads, but I think the majority of the world doesn’t view what I do as selling out any more than a band would. The majority of cool bands even, their biggest win could be placement of a track in whatever; a TV spot or a big film. Which is indicative [of a shift]. I think selling out is much more accepted today and there’s less judgement towards the notion of selling out. But I wouldn’t say that it’s dead.

    I think that it’s very easy to sell out and it’s a very individual concept. If you make a record and your dream is to get one of those tracks in an AT&T spot and you achieve that, you aren’t selling out if that was your goal; but I think the minute you start sacrificing your own creative ability for profit or for exposure or for whatever, than that’s still selling out and people do that every day. But sometimes people are business first and artists second, which is fine too.

    ERA: What advice would you give young musicians and producers looking to get into the ad game?

    WB: I think that the most important thing is to work so much and work so hard and create — not only be extremely prolific in terms of what you’re interested in doing, but also take risks and try to generate creative work outside of your comfort zone. In my vision of what we all do around here, there are two sides: there’s a technical ability side, and then there’s a creative side. Different types of people have different balances of those strengths. But no matter what your natural abilities are, the only way you can get better is if you do a lot of work. You’re going to get more technically proficient, which, actually, I believe leads into becoming creatively proficient. If you want to succeed in our industry you need to be very flexible and very competent in a lot of different styles under an extremely short deadline, with often very difficult clients who don’t have respect for the creative process [laughs].

    ERA: Last question: What is the most offensive or unusable idea you’ve ever come up with?

    WB: I think somebody actually did this but it wasn’t the same. It was a yogurt commercial in which the message was like anti-Osteoporosis, and it had used the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the planes hitting the two towers to illustrate...I don’t even remember what the tagline was, but the gist of it was that you can only protect what’s inside of you or something, so you should eat this yogurt so your bones are stronger than the World Trade Center, which gets knocked over by planes. The music direction was something along the lines of ‘Everybody Hurts’ by R.E.M. I liked the boldness of it, but it would not fly.

  • Grading the GOP Candidates' Twitter Campaigns

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    MITT ROMNEY (@MittRomney)

    Followers: 145,400

    Sample Tweet: .@BarackObama’s Magical Misery Tour chugs along. Reject his failed leadership & get your limited edition hat

    Grade: B+

    Comments: Romney (meaning the social media manager on his campaign team) would benefit from tweeting more often—doesn’t the front-running candidate have more than 1.5 tweets to broadcast each day? But his tweets are concise and substantive, and who doesn’t like free hats? He also tweets directly at Bam-Bam, which indicates that he has some social media balls. Nice use of the period before the @ sign, too.

    HERMAN CAIN (@thehermancain)

    Followers: 136,579

    Sample Tweet: #FiveDollarFridays for @THEHermanCain Plz donate/RT tinyurl.com/5rvj795 #Momentum #Cain2012 #tcot

    Grade: C-

    Comments: Cain tweets frequently, but they’re all about how much his campaign is kicking ass. If I’m checking out his Twitter, I probably want to learn something about the candidate, not be hit up for #FiveDollarFridays, which I can only assume gets me 2 medium pizzas and a 2 liter bottle of Coke for $5. He also uses made-up hash tags like an 8-year-old with bad ADD.

    MICHELLE BACHMANN (teambachmann)

    Followers: 32,605

    Grade: D

    Comments: I prefer spoof accounts like @Bachmann2012, and @TeamBachmann doesn’t even pretend to be tweeted by Michelle Bachmann. Is she too busy getting her ass kicked by Herman Cain to treat us with 140 characters of sheer insanity? The #Michelle hash tag is an utter failure.

    Rick Perry (@GovernorPerry, @TeamRickPerry)

    Followers: 98,894; 21,831

    Grade: A-

    Comments: @GovernorPerry, Rick’s personal account, is a fantastic cocktail of Ranger’s fandom and pheasant hunting. He needs to bring out this side at the debates. Other candidates, take note. @TeamRickPerry makes good use of the retweet, making it much less masturbatory than the other candidates’ accounts.

    RON PAUL (@RonPaul)

    Followers: 89,358

    Grade: C+

    Comments: Directs to content about how awesome Ron Paul is, but they’re mostly from Jack Hunter. The brazen Paul, with his appealing, somewhat insane ideas, would be an amazing voice on Twitter. What does his campaign have to lose by letting him loose? He’d use the @ sign to attack 24/7.

  • Cracked.com's Readers' "Ads for the Worst Things Ever"

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    Some of the design is pretty ugly, but these are pretty great. Check it out.

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