Market This!

How to know your marketing stunt has gone too far:

Link.

Happy Fourth, everyone!

Here’s hoping you “revolutionize” your industry this year. (Hopefully you won’t need muskets & bayonets.)

Click the pic to the left for a fun video, and thanks to Jib Jab for the fun tool.

- A&B

Listen, if a tortoise can do it…

We’re all going a million miles an hour these days, and many times our friends, family, clients and partners can get lost in the shuffle.

Take a cue from the tortoise in this video. First, slow down. Then, look around.

Notice somebody struggling.

Finally, give them a hand. (Or a head. Whatever they need.) You’ll both have a better day. We guarantee it.

Back in the day (let’s say 2002-ish), in a moment of desperation, I took a gig writing spam at an extremely sketchy company on Long Island. It was a horrible job, but it paid rent in my dingy basement apartment. (Have I mentioned how much I love Vermont?)

In our department there was this 19-year old kid named Jeff, a graphic designer who would come in, knock out his work in about 10 minutes, and spend the rest of the day swilling Starbucks and messing around with his own projects. He was so young and undervalued that he was the only designer there working on a PC laptop instead of a Mac. He was a glorified intern.

I always liked the guy, probably because he used to laugh at all of my jokes, so I kept in touch with him after I got fired from the spam company. (Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t even have the satisfaction of quitting.) Maybe I can get him a job somewhere, I thought.

How charitable of me, right?

It turns out that, uh, he didn’t really need my help. Jeff soon went freelance and started doing some of the most insane 3D work you’ve ever seen. When I needed a designer on something and called to offer him the project, the answer increasingly became, “Man, I’d like to, but I have this deadline for Mountain Dew…”

The lesson? Just because someone is young, or inexperienced, or seems lazy at work doesn’t [necessarily] mean they’re worthless. Like a prodigy in a classroom full of average kids, Jeff was just bored. Little did the spam company know he was using their time (on the clock, of course) to hone his craft – so he could leave them in the dust later on.

So if Jeff has the time (many times he does not) and you can afford him (I certainly can’t), I encourage you to hire him. As you’ll see by his site and the ridiculous 3D demo reel below, that kid I sat next to turned out to be one helluva designer.

Although he still can’t spell for shit – so I have that on him. And in my book, he’ll always be a snot-nosed little punk.

by Nathan Hartswick

“Wow, you’re still in Burlington, huh?”

I still get this question once in awhile from my friends who have been toughing it out in NYC for the last decade, and I can hear the incredulous tone in their voices. Implicitly, they are asking, “Really? What the hell’s in Vermont? Buncha cows?” I think they expected, when I headed back to my home state after five years in the Big Apple, that I’d be back.

But I’ll never live anywhere else. I could write a million words on what I love about this town, but as I was meandering around the Lake Champlain waterfront last night doing a camera test, I realized that the footage does a pretty good job of capturing a small slice of what’s so great about this place. There’s no story; it’s just a little snapshot of the Burlington waterfront for anyone who may be interested in seeing it.

And to my New York friends: there’s room on my couch, if you wanna get outta the city this summer. Just sayin’.

Enjoy…

Music by Umphrey’s McGee. Go buy their album.

I saw two campaigns this morning that made me really stop and think about the future of advertising.

The first was the “I Am the Bag” campaign from Eastpak, brought to me courtesy of Culture Buzz.

The second was the Cheerwine “Bear Dance-off” spot, as seen on AdFreak.

There have always been strange commercials out there, but they are multiplying. Fast. As “social media” becomes “media” (and as newspapers and TV as we know them begin to wane), creating a traditional, narrative campaign for your brand seems about as strategically sound as setting a pile of money on fire.

In fact, you could probably take that same pile of money, set it on fire, film it, and upload it to YouTube with better results.

In order to break through the noise and capture attention across platforms, let’s face it: you’ve got to do something really freaking weird. Nobody’s going to blog about, comment on, forward, re-post or even notice your spot featuring a suburban mom eating yogurt.

And so, as marketers struggle to find the next big absurdist experience that will capture the attention of an overstimulated and ADD-addled populace, the marketing landscape gets saturated with stranger and stranger campaigns.

What are your predictions? At this rate, what are we going to be seeing a year from now?

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IAmtheBag Campaign:

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Cheerwine Spot: