Market This!

Last year the first “Tweetsgiving,” a social media charity drive, raised $11k for a school in Tanzania. This year they’re at it again, and have invited folks to make their own video and tag it with “tweetsgiving.”

We took a couple minutes this morning and recorded one – check it out, make your own, and go donate!

Happy Turkey Day!

We reported awhile back on CBS and Pepsi inserting ads with video and sound into several magazines.

Now Esquire Magazine is trying a similar stunt to merge print and interactive media by launching their “Augmented Reality” issue.

It’s a tough marriage to get right. Esquire is betting that you’ll buy the magazine, download the necessary software, and hold the rag up to your computer to get the two to talk to each other and release extra celebrity content.

And you might. But then you’ll realize they could have stuck a CD-ROM into the magazine in 1999 and achieved the same effect. And you’ll chuck it. Maybe a small percentage of you will subscribe, or be more inclined to buy the magazine in the future. (Maybe.)

So: nifty little campaign to build some buzz around a struggling medium? You bet. Complete reinvention of the global publication model? Probably not.

Via Adverblog.

These Lego-inspired watched from designer Jean-charles De castelbajac are pretty rad.

Maybe it’s just that automatic nostalgia we children of the early 80s have toward anything remotely referencing that time period.

Even so, mom, you can add this to my totally tubular Christmas list this year.

I’ll take one in each color.

Via Cool Hunter.

So Asgood & Better has been cruising along for nearly two years now, providing marketing work that’s as good – and better – than larger-scale agencies without the hefty price tag. This was always our goal, but the friendly, professional brand identity we developed for ourselves and the bright orange ampersand “stamp” of a logo didn’t come about overnight. The process took awhile, and we thought it would be fun to look back at (and share with you) a small slice of it here.

We love the name of our business, and many others have told us they do too. It was intended to be a cheeky antidote to agencies whose name is simply a mashup of their partners’ names. At the beginning, we took that concept quite literally, creating characters called “Asgood” and “Better.” This seemed to call for a “retro” logo style, so that’s where we began.

That led to a “geekier” brand identity (and a redesign of the logo using glasses as the central element), which then gave way to the more toned-down, professional look that you see today. We scrapped the cheeky, “fictional character” approach, and chose a more subtle, friendly one. The logo we created was akin to what you’d see at a high-powered agency, but we used a bright orange color palate and a few twists on the letters to suggest our underlying playfulness.

Below is an initial creative exercise we wrote back then. We hope it amuses you – and please remember this: nothing worth doing comes about quickly or easily. If you need a strong brand identity developed for your organization, we hope you’ll give us a ring, and allow us to help create  an identity you love as much as we love ours.

Enjoy!

In 1967, Clarence Asgood and his partner Roy Better started a marketing operation in the back room of a little print shop in Raleigh, North Carolina. Before long, the business was known its excellent work for such clients as Gee Whiz Reusable Gumballs, Justin Case Insurance Co., and the Ford Edsel.

Asgood was satisfied, but Better was already thinking outside the box – literally.

“Clarence,” he said, “we need fewer walls around here.”

And with that, the story goes, he brought in his own personal pick-axe and began demolishing partitions between employees’ desks, bringing down office walls, and opening things up a bit.

“Not good enough,” he mused. “We’re still trapped in here. We need to be free.”

To Asgood’s surprise, Roy Better demolished the outer walls of the building and exclaimed, “Go! Create in the real world!” as employees of A&B gathered their belongings and scattered into the parking lot.

These days, A&B prides itself on offering the services of an experienced marketing team without the overhead associated with four walls and a roof. So get in touch, and see what freedom from boundaries can do for you.

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Oh, we understand why you would give caffeine to jerky – to ride the seemingly endless wave of popularity in hyper-caffeinated products marketed to “action sports” morons who buy the misconception that caffeine really does = “energy.”

What we don’t understand is why you would give such a product to a jerk (and let’s face it, you know there are going to be a lot of them buying this), because in our experience jerks don’t become any less insufferable when they are hyper.

Or to paraphrase Bill Cosby: “This man said that cocaine ‘enhances your personality.’ And I said ‘yes, but what if you’re an a–hole’?”

What we can say is that the makers of Perky Jerky have a pitch-perfect handle on their brand. It’s aggressive, memorable, cheeky and slick. They’re even trying (and succeeding, it appears) to build an online community around this ridiculous product. It almost makes us want to run out and have a meaningful experience with Perky Jerky that we can document and share with others.

No. Not really.

A portion of the proceeds (though disappointingly, the company doesn’t mention what percentage) are going to a couple great charities. We’re pretty sure there has to be a better way to help kids with disabilities than selling a million bags of caffeinated beef jerky to a bunch of dirt bikers, but hey, at least they’re trying.

And why stop there? Let’s cram some uppers into Cracker Jacks, Cheetos, Oreos and Little Debbie Snack Cakes. All great tasting snacks, but who among us hasn’t eaten them and said, “You know what would make this better? If my heart were beating 300 times a minute while I was eating it.”

And if you haven’t thought that, well…maybe you’re just not a big enough jerk, hmmm?

Via The Mixtress Online.

We just stumbled across this campaign by Vasken USA, intended to warm the hearts of those who see it, and the bodies of those in need of a little physical warmth this winter.