PIXEL MAVERICK

This is hands down the best non-lyrics performance EVER!

(Laaaaaaaa-la-la-Laaaaaaaaaaaaa).

This guy is actually a triple threat if you can stop laughing long enough to pay attention:

• Amazing voice & lyrical master
• Strong dance moves
• His hair alone deserves some credit for the performance

It is doubtful that this video will ever make it all the way to Rick Roll infamy, but it is clearly on the rise.  My brother found this gem yesterday and sent me the link.  At the time it was at around 1,000 views and now it is at 22,000.

Absolutely the funniest parody video I have seen in awhile.

There are a couple things that make this even funnier …

1. That even though this is a joke, nearly everything he says is 100% true
2. The more this video goes viral, the more money Google makes

So, the joke is on you suckers …index that …Google teleport now.

Thanks to Reddit the other day I discovered this incredible website Fools House (FoolsTown.com) that displays the work of a pixel artist.  Thanks Redditors for voting it up into view.

I know absolutely nothing about the artist, and the Contact form only opens up your email browser so the “who” behind this beautiful work remains a mystery.  If I had to guess, he/ she is a graphic artist that works for a game designer/ developer company (or he/ she should be).  If not a gaming designer, perhaps a character designer for animated movies.

Whoever the artist is, thank you for creating such a beautiful website and intricately designed characters.  Really amazing work.

Here are some of The Fool’s creative characters.

The bookworm is my personal favorite.

According to RRW we are within 5 years of having the cool tricks of Minority Report right in our own living rooms.

You know which scene I am talking about.  Tom Cruise is flipping and waving all sorts of holographic folders around the room to navigate through a complex system & get the data he needs.

According to one of my favorite blogs, Read Write Web, I will be able to flip important data folders all over my living room before I am 40.  Hell Yes!! To back up their claim they showed this badass video of a company called Oblong Industries showing some of the gestural interface tricks they have already developed.  Since this video is already 1 year old I am guessing they have even cooler stuff today.

I just want to make sure that between big arm swooshes & wrist flips of highly sensitive work data from my lounge chair …that I don’t have bulky Nerd Mittens on leaving me unable to nimbly navigate a Smartphone or a bag of Cheetos.

I will take the cool half-gloves that Tom had and we will be all good thank you very much.

Every brand is trying to figure out Social Media right now, there are thousands of snake oil social media gurus popping up all over the place …as such there is no lack for presentations on Social Media out there on the Interwebs right now.

So, it makes it all the better when you stumble across a SMEDIA presentation that is from a brand (not a guru) that is spectacular in its simplicity.  Really wonderful presentation from Coke that I thought I would share.  In this case I “stumbled” across it on one of my favorite blogs to follow called Digital Buzz Blog — you should check them out if you do not already follow them.

I just saw an HILARIOUS new spot for Tums.

Ok, so there is a a guy at a tailgate party and he is eating a hot-wing, …well he is trying to eat a hot-wing before the hot-wing starts assaulting him with several bitch slaps to the facial region.  I think there is even another spot where a taco is giving someone a beat-down, ha ha.

No, really I swear it is funny — I am just not doing it justice with my storytelling.  Hold on a second and let me show you the commercial on YouTube.

…Well??  Hold on let me search again, I swear it is hilarious.  WTF?  Where is the commercial?

Way to go Tums, you missed a big opportunity for people to interact with your brand & with others by commenting.  You haven’t had a good commercial in years and when you finally do you fail to capitalize on it beyond the 30 second spot.  Whoops!

According to BrandWeek, the spot comes from Grey, NY …so I guess they share the blame for the missed opportunity.  Way to go Ad Agency.

Apparently I am not the only one who thought the new spot was great and wanted to share it.  One google search and I found that someone else was looking for the video too.

I love the answer this person got too, ha.  So, if someone took the time to ask about it on Yahoo Answers, my assumption is that there are probably several ad geeks and bloggers that wanted to post the video and say congratulations to Tums for a great spot.  Whoops again.

I recently wrote the following piece for Ploked as a guest writer.  You can find the original post on Ploked here & if you enjoy reading about social media topics, you should check Ploked out and follow it regularly.

The Request

If you work in advertising or PR, you have probably heard one of your clients fumble out a request statement regarding this title at some point during the last couple of years. If I had to guess, your marketing client (or his/her CEO boss) recently read an article about how social media is changing the game and how brands need to join today or die tomorrow.

The Response

Upon hearing this request, you paused for a second out of fear that your inner laughter might slip out…then you responded with a confident “We can do it! We’ll get back to you with a SMEDIA plan next week that will blow you away,“ or something to that effect.

The Boozy Laughter

You and your colleagues left the meeting and headed to the hotel bar (this fictitious meeting is out of town, by the way) where you all had a good laugh about what just happened — oh, those silly clients, ha ha. You expense the tab several drinks later to your client, and hit the sack.

The Reality

When you woke up the next morning, the reality of it hit you. “Shit! How the heck do we create a SMEDIA plan?”

The Guidelines

Not that I have ever found myself in this position, mind you (pause…), but I have found that the following simple guidelines are helpful to overcoming your “Oh, shit!” dilemma about developing a sound SMEDIA plan for a brand:

1) Answer the Obvious First – Before you waste a week, make sure you ask yourself whether the brand should even be doing anything in social media. Unless the brand is Depends, the answer is probably yes.

2) Establish a Brand Voice – When you get back to your agency, go find the planner and the copywriter for the brand and tell them to personify the brand (you should have already done this anyway, slacker). What would this brand sound like if it were having a conversation with someone? Write a statement of voice and several scenarios on how your brand (he or she) would respond to hypothetical “what ifs” to establish a platform.

3) Go Find Your Audience – Guess what? Your brand’s target audience is already heavily addicted to social media. Do some digging and figure out what their online social habits are. If you are lazy, Facebook is probably a safe guess, but after that, it gets tricky; you can’t just make assumptions about Twitter, Foursquare (no, not the game from school), or blogs.

4) Know Your Social Circle – There is nothing worse than a brand that hops into Facebook or Twitter and clearly does not get it (“Hello Facebookers — be my friend? Buy my crap now?”). Chances are that you yourself are a heavy social media user, so take off your advertising goon hat for a second and think like you do when you’re not working. What features do you use, what do you ignore, what makes you instantly think lame!, and what habits have you formed?

5) Be able to Answer the “Why Should I Care?” Question – Your brand probably already has some sort of Value Proposition that has been analyzed and presented in no less than 20 presentation decks at your disposal. That’s great. Now go find the one slide that from all that BS that will provide you some insight into why a person would want to follow or have a conversation with your brand in a social setting.  Is it because your brand is cool and they want to be cool, too? Is your brand controversial or related to something that spurs conversation or debate? Do people want to stay updated on the latest news OR just be connected in order to get discounts? All of these are good reasons for why they should care, and you need to pinpoint the “WSIC” for your brand.

6) Call Legal and Set Some Protocols — Chances are your client’s legal department is not prepared for how to handle the lack of control that goes along with social media. Their immediate response will be to try and roadblock everything into a tiny space between Weak & Boring. Get your marketing client to help you fight this fight, but understand where the legal department’s fear is coming from. They don’t want a fiasco à la Domino’s Pizza to happen to them. Work with them to prepare some pre-set rules and an escalation plan with assigned stakeholders for how to identify and deal with a crisis.

7) Make a Splash and Learn as You Go – You will need to have some sort of acquisition strategy for your entry into your selected social media environments. A contest, or an awareness campaign of some sort, are the usual suspects here depending on your brand. Leverage the analytic information that Facebook offers for free (and, eventually, academic data) about this to find out what other brands have done successfully. After you get your brand’s social media campaign kicked off, be prepared to continually monitor/learn/change in order to engage your audience. Go ahead and set your client’s expectations on this ongoing evolution as well and save yourself the future grief. Social media engagement is a relationship that takes time, not a 30 second spot one night stand.

Wrap it Up and Bring it to the Client

After spending a week or two going through the guidelines listed above, you should have a good base of information to prepare a plan. This part should be easy since creating pretty presentation decks is something even out-of-touch agencies do well. The good news is that this deck will finally have a solid social media strategy as the foundation.

Wrap up all of the aforementioned details, take it to the client, pitch it, and win it!  Then it’s back to the hotel for more drinks and laughter.

This video has gotten a lot of mentions in blogs this week, and now I see why.  All I can say is “WOW!”.

If you can watch this spot and not get a lump in your throat or feel any emotion, …then you are a cold heartless robot and you really don’t need to wear a seatbelt anyway.

The related Tank Bunnies video game apparently hit a few snags and is still in beta…

Recently a friend of mine asked me to provide some answers & advice to her niece who is an undergrad considering a career in advertising.

I said “Sure!” of course, and shortly thereafter I received a nice email from “The Niece”.  Apparently, The Niece is a sophomore in college currently and she is studying journalism as a fast track pathway to a career in advertising.  She seems to have it all quite a bit more figured out than I did when I was a sophomore in college.  In fact, The Niece already has some career related options lined up for this summer that she is debating …either intern for an agency in London OR go on a class field trip to Cannes Festival.

At this point my “summer options” jealousy has kicked in and I am pretty sure that I hate The Niece …also I developed a working theory that she is mixed up in some sort of hush-hush co-ed scandal.

After getting over the internship envy and dismissing her alleged co-ed scandal, I looked over The Niece’s list of questions and prepared an email response and hoped that it will be helpful to her.

As I looked over my response before I hit SEND I realized that some of this information would be helpful to anyone who is thinking about pursuing a career in Advertising.

Here is what I wrote:

Hello ["The Niece"],

First, congratulations on your difficult summer options.  Between Cannes or London …those are both excellent work experience options.  I would need to know more about the London option in order to truly compare it against Cannes and make a recommendation.  Assuming your London option is to work as an intern at a quality agency/ shop >> my gut tells me that this would be the most helpful experience to your future.  The Cannes thing will be an excellent opportunity to network and make contacts, but you will work your butt off and learn as an intern dropped into the mix of the normal agency operations.

Now, to answer your list of questions:

How did I get started in Advertising? By accident.  I got out of college (undergrad) with a lot of ambition, but no clue about what I really wanted to do for a career.  I graduated right in the middle of all the dot.Com craziness and worked at a startup.  At this startup I was in sort of a hybrid sales & marketing role, and I quickly discovered that I loved two things; The Internet and Marketing/ Advertising.  After that startup flopped along with most of the dot.coms of that time I worked and held leadership positions at a couple different smaller agencies (web design agencies) for several years before joining a large digital agency in Dallas.  During this time I also went to grad school and earned an MBA which has been helpful in my career advancement.  After a couple years at the large digital agency I left and joined my current agency, The Martin Agency (traditional agency), and am helping them build their digital capabilities & integrating digital better into their work for clients.

What do I enjoy about The Martin Agency? The people & the brands.  I have an opportunity to work with some of the biggest brands out there, and do so while standing side-by-side with some of the most talented and humble people in the advertising industry.  There are several really great ad agencies out there today (Goodby, Crispin, R/GA, W+K…to name just a few) but The Martin Agency is a little different than all of them.  Maybe it is because they are all based in the big cities of NYC, LA, SF and we are in Richmond, VA, but the culture here is quite a bit different than many of the agencies out there today.  People come here because we are one of the best agencies forsure, but unlike everywhere else where the tenure shelf life is like 2 years …most people here at Martin stay for 7 – 10 years or even (gasp) longer.

My advice for you as you enter this industry. I am not sure which part of advertising you are pursuing a career in …copywriter, art director/ creative, producer, or account person …so there are definitely tweaks on my advice to be appropriate for each.  That said, I would advise that you follow the guidelines that I have listed below (no particular order):

• Understand Digital & Social for Advertising: Do not, I repeat do not try and come into advertising with only print or TV skills.  You will be lucky to find a job and if you do you will be asked to do digital work anyway and will get fired if you cannot hang.  So, while I do think you need to understand print, TV, outdoor, etc as part of your base of marketing understanding ….if you would like to start off on in this industry on the right foot then you should position yourself closer to the digital side.  By position, I mean know it inside and out as a marketer & also as a consumer/ user of digital media and social media.  For today, and for how things will be in the future this is probably my most important point to you.
• Go to Grad School or Advanced Degree: Depending on which (creative, account, etc) applies to you I would advise that you get a graduate or advanced degree at some point in your career.  My personal opinion is that you are better off going to work at an agency straight out of undergrad, then going back before you are 30 to get a grad degree …but I know that some advertising-specific advanced programs piggyback right ontop of undergrad so if you have that option I would take it then.  Either way, a graduate degree will set you apart from 95% of the rest of your peers that stop after undergrad.
• Experience a Nice Mix of Big & Small Agencies: People who have only worked at big agencies grow up in their career cacooned in their own silo area (creative, account) and clueless about most everything else.  On the flipside, people who only work at small agencies never know what it is like to deal with the good and bad of large agency operations, nor do they ever gain adequate experience with major brands and multi-department clients.  My advice is to not be afraid to spend a nice mix of small and big agency in your career ultimately ending up in the setting that fits you best.  Either way, you will better off if you get experience from both vantage points.
• Try on Different Hats: This sort of goes with the Big Agency vs Small Agency thing.  Most people who only work in big shops get blinders on with their specific role.  Bad idea to have blinders.  Find out what other people on your teams do …understand their role & the knowledge they have to have.  Occasionally you should work on some projects where you take on a role that is a bit outside your skillet so you can learn it and be more rounded.
• Join Local Advertising Networks/ Groups: It will pay off to know people outside of your own company & personal connections.  Find a couple things related to advertising that you are REALLY passionate about (social media, word-of-mouth advertising, ad club, whatever) and look for local networks, clubs, and/ or groups that meet regularly.  Join a couple of these and be active in it.  Don’t just go, but be active and sit on the board and be on committees, etc.  You will find entirely new opportunities and paths that you would have missed this way.

None of this advice is earth shattering new information, but I think it is solid direction for anyone who is thinking about starting a career in Advertising today so I thought I would share it.

I would love to hear from anyone who follows this blog about what you think about my list of advice for Ad Newbies …make comments on my recommendations, disagree with me and tell me why, add some recommendations of your own.

As for The Niece, …I expect to hear from her in about 10 years when she is kicking ass and taking names in what will undoubtedly be a VERY different Advertising industry (proof that a nasty college scandal can be overcome).