PIXEL MAVERICK

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.

I am stuck in Seattle thanks to 18 inches of snow dumped in VA last night — so along with two other stranded Martinites we killed some time today by going to see the highly anticipated movie Avatar.

All I can say is WOW.

I have a 5 year old so I see pretty much every animated movie that comes out, but Avatar blows all of them away by a mile.  The level of detail that is captured is amazing …the facial expressions, the eyes, the way the skin wrinkles or compresses/releases when touched, the flutter of a leaf from one of the plants in the Pandora jungles …I knew I was watching animation but seriously it was very hard to tell it apart from reality.

I had an opportunity to read a great article in Wired on one of my many flights this week about how Cameron created his own video/camera technology to be able to shoot this film.  He could look through the camera at the actors wearing the tights and the funny balls all over (like they do for gaming, etc) and not only does he see the actor’s avatar in the lens …he sees the virtual world of Pandora around him/her.  So, instead of simply capturing all the various movements of the character and then letting the programmer animation geeks do all the rest he was able to have the actors perform many of the scenes just like they would if they were shooting a regular film.  This must be one of the core reasons why it all looked so real, because it basically was a real human performing the actions under the watchful direction of Cameron.

“He started by hiring USC linguistic expert Paul Frommer to invent an entirely new language for the Na’vi, the blue-skinned natives of Pandora.”

“With the language established, Cameron set about naming everything on his alien planet. Every animal and plant received Na’vi, Latin, and common names. As if that weren’t enough, Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.”

They could have just stopped at incredible animation and it would have still been great.  But Cameron took this passion to the next level.  He hired linguists to develop the entire langage of Pandora — he hired botonists to create and formally document each and every plant on the ficticious planet.  This entire world is captured in a book that will allow people who loved the movie to explore all the details of Pandora as if they were exploring a real new planet/place.

This movie is a product of passion and it shows in the details.  This movie should win every award possible this year & I hope that Cameron takes this passion a step further and creates Pandora online.  He should create the entire world of Pandora as an online world and make it available to everyone for free.  He could be like Lucas and monetize every last pixel, but I think he could outdo Lucas by making it open to everyone and just making more movies (and a few action figures of course).

Simply amazing.

Great spoof by SNL has created some pretty funny contexual banner placements.

I love the InterWEBs.

And I love people who have the time to put together amazingly cool visual expressions of what would normally look like boring stats.

I found this via Twitter from @BBHLabs >> The Next Web >> but the real thanks goes to whoever OnlineEducation.net is for putting this together.  Love it.

Created by OnlineEducation.net

I did a double-take this morning when I saw a bunch of 300 pound NFL linemen wearing pink cleats, gloves, etc.

Brilliant partnership & execution for Breast Cancer Awareness.  They could have just ran a bunch of awareness TV spots, but how they have integrated it into the game is so much more effective.  They took it even farther and have incorporated a similar approach online to subtly-yet-noticeably integrate pink into all of the NFL online activity as well.

Kudos to the team of people that came up with this approach.  Very nicely done!

Last Friday David Vogeleer (Flash guru extraordinaire here at The Martin Agency) showed some of us a very cool site called Xtra Normal.  It allows non-developers like myself with the tools to put together a short animation skit with no real skills necessary other than being able to type and having an imagination.

That does not mean you can make good content.  Most likely it will suck.  But it is very simple, and a blast to do.  I hope you enjoy my first film released to the public….not bad for 30 minutes and one too many mornings watching Handy Manny with my son.

There is a great report published from Forrester recently (April 27) that goes into depth about the analyst’s educated opinion about where things are going with the social web and how he sees the evolution broken down into stages.

One of the benefits of working at an advertising agency is that we get access to all the Forrester reports and those like it which feeds our hunger for social web geek analysis.  If you are not as fortunate and understandably do not want to fork over $749.00 for this report, but are a fellow web geek and want the low-down then you will like the summary I am pasting below.  The summary was written by Rad Tollet who is a friend and co-worker of mine here at The Martin Agency, and it is much better than any summary I could have written & honestly it is better than all the abstracts of this report that I have seen out there on the interWEBS thus far.  Enjoy!

Overview:

“While brands naturally want to get into the furor of activity [on social networks], the social information about people, their profiles and their friends is locked up in separate networks, frustrating both the consumers who use them and the brands who want to connect with them. But the social web is about to evolve into something much broader than a few social network sites: a consistent backdrop for every online activity.  Portable social IDs and the changes they enable will transform how consumers, brands and social networks interact.”

The report goes onto outline how the social experience has and will evolve:

The Eras:

(I changed the titles of the eras because, frankly, they were boring)

• Chat – This was the early 90s when we all went on AOL to chat with friends.  This laid the foundation of a future social web.
• Play – Today’s networks go beyond “friending” and now support interactive applications that groups of people can interact with.  It’s chatting and entertainment and utility…but it’s still within a walled garden (e.g., Facebook).
• Explore – This is where we are right now and it will have big ramifications in 2009.  Technologies like OpenID and Facebook Connect will let people take their social connections with them.  The boundaries of social networks and traditional websites will blur and every URL will have the potential of being “social”.
• Transparency – In 2010, Forrester estimates that websites (using OpenID) will know your preferences before coming to a site.  This will allow for custom experiences (either with others or by yourself).

The Shift:

In broad strokes, here is how we’re going to shift from the second to the third era:

• Consumers want to share their experiences but can’t connect them across networks.
• Networks realize their reach is limited (they’ve built walled gardens) and want to tear down the boundaries they have with other networks.
  The major networks are building standards to communicate with one another.  They call it the OpenID project.  Google, Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo! are already on board.
• OpenID is now established and is slowly trickling into web experiences outside the walled gardens.

Marketing in the Second Era:

In some instances I can already take my social ID to a third-party website.  For instance, Scrabble has built out their game for the iPhone, and the kicker is who I can play against.  Instead of playing the computer I can use Facebook Connect to invite my friends to play the game wherever they are.  This is a big shift…I’m with my social network but not on Facebook.  You can imagine where we can take our clients from here…

As I see it, the implication is that marketers need to shift from interruption to invitation.  Facebook “aps” are what we did in the second era.  We couldn’t get groups out of the walled garden so we stumbled into it.  Sometimes we were welcomed.  Most of the time we were ignored.

As we shift to the third era we can establish branded sites that incorporate OpenID architecture and transform the experience each user has.  We’ll treat our users not just as individuals but also as groups, and we’ll be able to scale our branded entertainment/utility in a way that invites people to share their experiences with their friends (word of mouth).  In other words, I won’t send a link to a friend with a note to have him “check it out”, I’ll IM him using OpenID with a note that says “I’m here, I’m playing a cool game, and you should join me. Now.”

Marketing in the Third:

We’re already seeing some sites access a user’s portable ID to pre-populate forms.  For instance, in the near future GEICO plans to have a system built out that lets you log into their site with OpenID at which time the rate quote form will be pre-populated with your name, birth date, city, etc…anything you have “exposed” to public domain.  This is scary for some.  Not so for others.

As we’ve seen already, younger demographics (Millennials) have very little concern about privacy with these types of demographic variables, so the opportunity for optimizing eCommerce with OpenID has major implications for our clients.

– Summary by Rad Tollett

If you have chosen a career in advertising, there are several career paths you can take to try and meet your personal and professional goals.  Some like working for small shops, others prefer to work for a large agency that is most likely part of WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, or IPG or some other conglomerate.  I don’t claim to have the perfect advertising career plan, but I do have a strong opinion that a healthy mix of Small + Big agency experience seems to produce the most talented people.

Far too many people that work in advertising have never worked for a small agency and I think that this is a HUGE mistake.  Based on what I have encountered thus far in my advertising career, the majority of the people who have spent their entire career working for a big agency have a big case of tunnel vision with respect to their specific role….account management, project management, producer, etc.  They were dropped into their respective silo their first day of work after college and never peered over their silo to truly understand what the other people on their team had to do in order to perform their duties.  It makes for Account Managers that are professional email forwarders…..Project Managers & Producers that can’t see past the structure of their timeline….and Creatives that don’t understand that their creative baby is part of the comprehensive flow of business operations for the agency.

In short, people who have worked for a small agency at some point in their career are more talented because they are more well rounded.

I definitely did not start out after college with a well thought out career plan for making it in the interactive advertising industry.  I think my plan was more like the mental version of a bar napkin sketch than a true career plan…a great idea that I was really passionate about but really had no clue how to go about achieving at the time.

Looking back, I am extremely lucky that I was a little clueless going in and started out working in small interactive shops over a big traditional agency setting.  I had the opportunity to learn the ropes in a small startup-style environment where you had no choice but to wear many hats and even as a rookie you could witness the impact that your effort had on the bottom line (i.e. in a small shop that means making payroll every two weeks…no pressure).  The experience taught me not only how to be an effective account manager, but I truly understood the role of a project manager, a producer, and even a copywriter when things were tight (…the hat list could include controller, human resources, and janitor among others).  Having this level of understanding of the other roles has been extremely valuable in collaborating with and managing people in these roles.

To make it clear that I am not a crazy person, I know that there are scores of examples of people who never set foot in an agency with billings less than $10 Million per year and are total rock stars that do not fit the stereotype I have described in this post.  I have worked with some of these stars at imc2 and work with some currently at The Martin Agency and they are truly great, but they are the exception to the basis of my argument.

I would advise anyone who is early in their advertising career to consider working at a small agency at least for a few years.  You will be better off for it.  You may even find that you enjoy small shops more, but even if you return to the land of big agency beauracracy you will be better off with the experience and your big agency will benefit from your rounded talents.

This is not innovative stuff here, and BestBuy is HARDLY the first company to do this ….but since this sort of online customer suggestion box is still somehow not standard practice I thought I would call out BestBuy having the sense to implement it as part of their relationship with their customers.  This type of two-way conversation between a brand and the customer should be something that all brands do whether they are B2C or B2B since the customer deserves an equal seat at the table (…psst, hey brand this is especially true since today’s wired customer holds the power and they know it).

Either way, kudos to BestBuy for launching IdeaX as the platform for this conversation with their customers.

I came across this interactive video experience on YouTube this morning via a link from Experience Manifesto blog (a great blog to follow if you don’t already).  As this is the first time I have ever seen a video that prompts you to interact with it, I applaud YouTube (or whoever did this) for the idea of engaging the audience in a deeper experience with the video.

Essentially the normal video (in this case the somewhat annoying but catchy song by Lady Gaga… po po po po po po poker face….ughh dammit now it is stuck in my head) runs, but there is a simple recall quiz embedded into the video that the user can play with.  If you like those types of recall games, then this is definitely a tool that will engage the user in a deeper experience with the video and therefore with the brand.  So, excellent concept on that level.

Where this misses the mark a little bit is on the user experience.  From what I can tell, once the user answers a question the original video is lost and you are automatically switched to another video that has its own recall quiz embedded.  This switch is automatic and the user has no control over it which misses the point entirely.  The user came to the site to watch the video and YouTube enhanced the experience by adding in a recall game….but then kills the experience by taking the user away from the video they wanted to watch in the first place.  Whoops.

**Well, I just found another bad idea with this concept when I tried to post this blog post.  As you can see if you tried to click on the embedded video…I tried to embed the YouTube video in my blog post and it would not let me by request of the original video poster on YouTube.  Why on earth would you NOT want to allow your video to be embedded and distributed beyond the confines of the YouTube site?  Whoops + Dumb!!! Click here to see the video.