The inside my future dream home
Who knows if I’ll ever be rich enough to justify Kelly Wearstler as my interior designer. However I hope one day I have a nice house with a nice coffee table so I can buy all her books! She’s found that perfect balance between modernism and antiquity which I love. I also admire that she’s bounced back from the horrific 90s Playboy photos to become what ever the classy word for “milf” is.
My favourite presents
It was my birthday this week, which is great because I love presents!
The best one I ever got was a Apple PPC on my eleventh birthday. My dad always gets me nerdy gifts like the entire collection of Star Trek films, hardrives and jewelry made out of computer chips.
My BF also has a fondness for giving me jewelry, including a new charm for my charm bracelet every birthday. But being a geek the favourite pieces he’s got me are these necklaces.
A Survival of the Hippest custom rose gold twitter necklace and a Swarovski Active Crystals USB necklace. Beautiful as well as practical, so much win.
This year’s bounty included some awesome books, a handknitted scarf, wine and a Crumple Map of London. Would have been more useful before the invention of Google Maps, but still what a brilliant idea. A map that you never have to worry about how to fold.
I had a splendid birthday day starting with breakfast at my favourite Ponsonby cafe, Bambina. A good day in the office with cake, flowers and a nice lunch. And then the meeting friends at the Comedy Festival to see Matt Mulholland who was hilarious! Finished off with a pleasant dinner in town.
The chalkboard mural at RMHA
ASB who are a major sponsor of Auckland’s children hospital were tasked with making the sterile new kitchen child friendly. Instead of putting up something for the kids to look at we gave them something to interact with. Maria Ward found a supplier of yellow chalkpaint and designed a futuristic city. We commissioned future famous artist Denise Fort to draw puzzles and games which made up the landscape.
The artwork was signed by Mayor of Auckland Len Brown and Ronald McDonald himself. The kids love being able to draw all over the walls and after a week the mural is already covered in chalk.
Am I the only person who cries during a good ad?
Google and BBH always manage to produce astounding work. I don’t know what it is about these latest TVCs that makes me get a little teary. Parenthood and homophobic bullying are not even topics I can relate to. I’ll put it down to a true stories told well, and the piano music.
Does anyone else choke up during these or other ads? I should note that I don’t well up during movies or TV shows, not even the Titanic. Which may go to prove that the best writers make ads not art.
The truth about online advertising
I must say that I do love the shopping websites which target you after you visit. So that dress you almost bought then follows you around the internet.
If you’re one of 0.08% of the population who love banners and haven’t seen them already; moat.com and bannerblog.com.au are good.
What a scene of Shakespeare looks like in a URL
Hashify is the amazing way to store content in a URL, built by my friend David Chambers (who taught me PHP and therefore can be credited with anything that works on this site). Less than a day after officially launching the site has been picked up by Hackernews and the internet has gone crazy for it. So much so that he exceeded the bit.ly API cap. Apparently someone copied a novel in Hashify, but I could only be bothered formatting my favourite part of Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is what it looks like in a URL (shortened so your browser can handle it) http://bit.ly/ictNA0 >
One of my favourite things about the internet is that clever people can gain overnight success without any help from “the man”. Well done David!
My very first website (works best in Netscape Navigator)
For awhile now I’ve been thinking about a major CSS change to this site to clear out unneeded lines of code. It’s a work in progress so don’t mind the construction.
I’ve been clearing out a lot of things lately. Including boxes and boxes of stuff left at my parent’s houses when I moved to Sydney. Most of it has gone to the bin, charity or friends, but some stuff which was unused or too good to throw out is on TradeMe. Including my childhood computer (which was recently replaced). I deleted a lot of files which I could not open without Claris Works. However I managed to save and ressurect the very first website I ever built!
My BFF Colette and I have one main thing in common: our dad’s are mega apple fanboy nerds. They are also friends, so when we were about 10 years old they taught us how code HTML. We spent several Saturdays (alternating who’s house we would go to) coding a website which never went online. Until now. Some of the files are missing so you can’t click the blue or purple faces, but please have a good laugh at my expense:
Colette will probably (and rightfully) kill me when she sees this, so in her defense I will mention that she now works on a very good looking website writing reviews of Eastern European films. Check it out at eefb.org >
PS. Apologies for not sending out any “this week on the internet” emails lately. I’m working on a better way of doing it. In the meantime you can subscribe to my instapaper account where I bookmark some OK links. Just add this to your RSS reader: http://www.instapaper.com/rss/1296971/AN6k2eFOC7AKHHIVyyRBzIwbro
A guide to what my tattoos “mean”
I have two tattoos, and in the words of my friend Kimmy “sometimes I wish they could hold a conversation themselves”. There is a misconception that people get tattoos because they want you to ask about them. In most cases this simply isn’t true.
My first and smallest tattoo was done by an acquaintance who was just starting out. I actually really like the uneven lines and smudges. They give it character, make it funny. It does have a lot of “deeper meaning” but frankly that’s not the business of passers by.
Some of my friends who do know the meaning think it’s pathetic. So they gave me a tattoo voucher for my birthday in the hope I’d cover it up. Instead I booked an appointment with Rose Hardy on valentines day 08 and got the thing on my ankle.
Knowing I would get plenty of questions I decided to get the meaning tattooed in a banner “annunciation” so people wouldn’t have to ask. I didn’t think it through very well, apparently not everyone has studied art history so I end up with even more questions. The picture depicts Mary and Gabriel, but is actually based of one of my favourite paintings, “Lamia” by John W. Waterhouse which is owned by the Auckland Art Gallery.
My boyfriend hopes that one day I’ll get them removed, and maybe I will when I’m old and rich. I don’t understand why you’d get a tattoo on your back or somewhere else you’ll never see it. I can admire mine and yet with a pair of stocking and a wristwatch I can cover them up. Fortunately in my line of work ink is usually alright, they add to the “creative” image.
Ps. Someone who used to do marketing for Bendon told me the DimitySO girls all had blogs, so I looked up Drea Morsby, and turns out she wrote a similar post >
Best April Fools Pranks
I was gutted when I found out Newton’s Virus wouldn’t work on any of the laptops in our office (hopefully they’ll bring out an update soon), because this art virus would have made a great prank:
Instead I went into one of my workmates computers and added some things to their autocorrect. They haven’t discovered it yet, but next time they write an email with “what the fuck” it will be automatically corrected to “what the fudge”. It’s quite polite really.
With 12oclock just passed that’s it for my pranks. I’m looking forward to seeing what the big American companies do later today. In the meantime here are some of the better ones to come out so far:
Artline Tweeter 140 – a pen that tweets as you write
Kirspy Kreme put out a career ad looking for a new donut hole puncher
Pirate Bay saw an eBay auction for the site itself and are now The Pirat eBay
Turns out Australia is going to host the 2022 World Cup after all
Someone is getting their eight year old kid tattooed in order to win tickets to Chris Brown
$10 for a 2 hour dolphin harness ride around Auckland
Google realises it’s own service Places is a content farm and has omitted it from search results.
Apple store to open in NZ <- for international readers this is DEFINITELY a joke (hat tip @LukeChandler)
Sunglasses that will block out all ads
Seen anything else good?
Why I love Lady Gaga
When I first heard Lady Gaga (the disco stick song) I wasn’t a fan, to say the least. I hate most current “mainstream” music, with the exception of my home girl Beyonce. So the Telephone video was my first proper introduction to Gaga. And I’ll admit I had it on repeat for days. I was hooked.
Watching the “Google goes Gaga” interview today I realised just how much there is to love about her.
Firstly her respect for the people that work at Google. While most people think they’re all nerds, Gaga actually fits right in she has close friends that work there. You can tell she loves the interweb and is more intellectual than most pop stars. She really is just like me.
It’s that notion of being a “real person” which is central to her fame. Sure she makes mistakes, but for the most part she’s honest and raw with the people who interview her. It’s intriguing getting to know the human being beneath all the regala.
Gaga comes across as incredibly positive and deeply religious. According to some very good debaters it’s because she’s a puppet for the illuminati. More likely it’s the best way to deal with fans who treat her like a God when she preaches. Her message: she’s just like the rest of us and if we work hard enough we can be just like her.
I hope by the time I’m Gaga’s age I’ve been nominated for half the amount of awards she’s won (although mine will be advertising not music).
In the Google interview she calls Rebecca Black a genius for using Youtube as a means to gain fame. It’s true Stefani Germanotta could have been another talented NYC piano player like Regina Spektor (who’s music I like a lot better), but instead she became a performance artist. And a bloody good one.
Enjoy the interview as Lady Gaga awkwardly spends an hour readjusting her short dress so her black undies don’t get in frame:
Practice makes perfect (art direction)
Joelapompe is a fantastic website which points out ads which look suspiciously like ones from award annuals past. The interesting this is the copy cats are often produced to a much higher quality. As with everything practice makes perfect. I guess that’s why you always come up with the perfect layout right after a scamp has been sent to the designer.
LEFT: Swear “2 feet are not enough” from Mellors Reay & Partners (2007).
RIGHT: VOG Socks “on the web” from TBWA Istanbul (2010).
Ok ok we exploited hipsters in this ad, and freegans.
Well I owe @alexjcampbell an apology after I said hipsters are redundant in advertising. I’ve succumb to the peer pressure and there is a hipster in this ad.
Although it’s not just an ad it’s a piece of art by Tane Williams and it’s up for grabs (click here to enter the draw to win it). The best thing about it is he’ll get rid of all that yellow banky stuff in the middle and draw your own profile picture in there. In the mean time if you recognise a few of your mates you can upload the picture and tag them in it on Facies. I think it’s a pretty sweet prize, but of course I’m biased. You can see what Tane has done with the rest of the ASB tertiary campaign on Corey Chalmer’s Beeplog.
Grand town plans which never happened
There was no post last week because it felt inappropriate with everything going on in the news. The focus is now turning from rescue to cleaning up and rebuilding. There is a great opportunity to build a modern city which can bring NZ up to first world standards. Let’s hope young and talented town planners and architects have a say in the future of Christchurch.
Hopefully it doesn’t turn out like some of the following grand plans which never came to be (or even worse another city like Auckland).
Volkshalle was one of Adolf Hitler’s failed plans. It was going to be a giant dome inspired by Hadrian’s Pantheon. If built it would have been big enough to fit St Peter’s Basilica comfortably inside it.
EUR was another WWII plan which had a little more success. Mosillini originally saw a city which stretched from Berlin to Pompeii made entirely out of white marble. He only finished a small suburb in Rome before he was executed for war crimes. That suburb, EUR, is incredible and I highly recommend you go visit the vast white buildings next time you’re in Italy (Hat Tip: Sophie Sockchan).
X Seed 4000 was planned in Japan although it was never going to be built. At 4,000 miles high it would have been the world’s tallest building, although really it’s more of a shell in which an entire city would fit.
Tatlin’s Tower could have been the world’s biggest clock situated in Moscow. The structure which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower was going to be made of interlooping cylinders. The biggest one would hold conference centers and spin entirely every year, the next biggest would make a full turn each month and so forth.
Chinese ghost cities are an actual thing. With the insane about of production happening in China a bunch of cities have been built in rural areas. Some of them are fully equipped with giant public buildings like art galleries. Unfortunately the people buying these houses are not moving in so there are up to 64 million deserted houses in these abandoned cities.
Reward your curiosity
If you’ve ever been curious about the original recipe for Coca Cola I’m sure this week has been a delight for you. Whether or not the recipe uncovered by This American Life is the real deal people seemed pretty excited about it.
I can’t help but love the Coke brand and everything they’ve managed to achieve. I mean Nestle, one of the world’s largest companies barely has a hold on Easter and yet Coke INVENTED Christmas as we know it. A celebration which has nothing to do with sugary water and for a lot of people doesn’t have much to do with “happiness” either.
What a great proposition for your brand though; happiness. In blind taste tests people often prefer the taste of Pepsi, but Coke is said to “taste like childhood”. They say the best thing about nostalgia is we only remember the best things.
There is really no competition between the two companies (at least in this part of the world). Everywhere I’ve worked has had a fridge stocked with Coca Cola products, including an agency who had Pepsi as a major client. (To be fair this was inside the giant Publicis building).
So what are my favourite Coca Cola ads?
1. The happiness machine was brilliance (if you haven’t seen it do watch).
2. I also loved the use of Facebook at Israel’s Coca Cola Village allowing teenagers to “like” things in the real world.
3. Being a huge fan of Mel Ramos I always hoped a brand would borrow his artwork. Which Publicis Mojo NZ did in 2007
Probably my favourite outdoor campaign ever was also done in NZ. I can’t find images of it anywhere (please send them to me if you have some!). For a couple of weeks there were billboards all around the country with riddles on them. Cream writing on a red background. The brand seemed like Coke, but the lack of white made me unsure. I was incredibly curious about what these billboards could be advertising.
A few weeks later they were replaced with the line “Reward your curiosity” and a Vanilla Coke pack shot. I was in Wellington when I first saw this billboard and I stopped at the first diary I could find to buy a Vanilla Coke.
Being Peggy Olsen
Disclosure: In the agency I work for men dominate the kitchen. It’s not a gender thing, they’re just better cooks. I’m not and never have been employed by a sexist creative director, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t met them.
Sorry to bring this up and make a whole bunch of you go to all the effort of finding the unsubcribe button in your RSS readers, but the gender issue needs to be raised. And yes, in advertising “gender” is still an issue.
They say for every woman in a leadership role there are five men. (Fair enough many women, if given the option, choose to look after their children full time.) But in advertising only 3% of creative directors are female!
There are a few theories on why this is. Women aren’t funny enough. Their egos aren’t big enough. They don’t work hard enough. They don’t ask for promotions. They don’t fit in with the culture. They complain too much about the lack of women in the industry…
I recently heard the worst excuse ever.
“It’s hard for me to accept that gender still matters today. Our limitations is [sic] the problem.”
That tweet synopsized a “women in the industry” discussion on Twitter. I’m disappointed we haven’t grown out of victim blame. However she does raise the question, is it belittling to talk about woman in advertising as a minority? Do we need female only… stuff?
I wouldn’t want to work in any segregated environment, even one that empowers a cause I believe in (tampon ads should be written by woman FULL STOP). And I hope I never make any career decision because of my gender, but it is useful for me to know which Creative Directors won’t give me the time of day because they see a vagina as an infliction. Perhaps rather than having girl only agencies, events and awards we should just have a social network calling out chauvinists in the industry.
Valentines art
I <3 Valentine’s Day. I have many fond memories of having “romantic” dinners with my friends, making anonymous cards, eating heart shaped cookies when I was little and in more recent years all the pretty coloured flowers.
With only a couple of weeks to go the internet is filling up with geeky V Day art. My favourites are this custom print by Rifle Paper and this pink print by Susan Kare who designed the smiling mac icon.
But what would really make my day would be getting an ecard from someone on my Top Five. Can you see any patterns in my list?
1. Topher Brink from the Dollhouse >
2. Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory >
3. Codex from The Guild >
4. Sherlock Holmes from the BBC series >
5. Will Travers from Rubicon >
The clever folk at Amnesia
I try not to make a habit of blogging about things which have been thrashed in the blogesphere, but these folk deserve another social media point.
Surface Tables are pretty neat to begin, but this technology which allows you to seamlessly transfer content from the table to your mobile device is incredible. It’s a shame that the only place I would know where to find a Surface Table is in the Amnesia offices themselves.
In fact most people I have talked to are amazed that I’ve actually played with one, because they are so obscure in this part of the world. I’m certainly looking forward to the hardware becoming cheaper and more readily available so Amnesia Connect can be used.
Amnesia Connect from Amnesia Razorfish on Vimeo.
Speaking of my time at Amnesia. One time the art director who sat next to me had some woman’s togs on his desk. I asked what they were for and he said he was going to a photo shoot after work. I thought he was a bit weird.
Fast forward a few months and it turns out they weren’t just some random prop, but actually togs he’d designed for the launch of his label We Are Handsome. Tyra Banks freaking loves them and even Rhianna has a pair! I feel a great sense of pride knowing Jeremy and seeing how well the brand is going!
What a talented bunch of people (<3 to the social meda "ninjas" too).
PS. I should add to the list this article by Karalee about the dire need for reform in mental health treatment. It’s discussion like this which instigates change.
This week on the interwebs
Some of my workmates have been signed up (against their will) to a semi regular email about the best things on the interweb. It’s kind of a checklist of things you don’t need to show me because I’ve already seen it a month ago.
If you’d like to receive these weekly emails you can subscribe by leaving a comment below or by emailing:
I promise the content will always be amusing and never be the same stuff which is on my blog/ twitter feeds.
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Carmonica/ Harmonicar/ Harminica
These kids I work with created a moving pun. Jono (in the stripes) and Jack (in the blue) thought up the “car covered in harmonicas” idea and did not struggle to find eager creative directors wanting to make it for their clients. In the end Mini Cooper got to make it.
While I agree with David Farrier’s sentiment that it’s a bit annoying after five minutes I do commend the boys on getting yet another one of their ads on 3news! You can see the review here >
Now do Mini Cooper want to make my idea?
So this is the new year. And i don’t feel any different.
The above illustration says what we’re all thinking. 2011 had better be an improvement on the year we’ve just had.
If the JWT trend forecast is anything to go by you’d better not get your hopes up. The forecast includes Chernobyl tourism (I told you so) and the rise of Detroit. Detroit is already trending with lots of people currently talking about the abandoned houses which I’ve been contemplating buying for the past year. Probably a good thing I didn’t as the city will soon be over run with hipsters. If you can’t be bothered reading the whole report here’s the animated “highlights”:
And on a brighter not this spaghetti ad really boils my intrest.
Merry Christmas
I can’t believe Christmas isn’t over yet. I’ve been working on it since November, the perils of being a junior in an ad agency I guess.
My first Christmas project was the ASB Santa Parade float for which I wanted to create a Rube Goldberg machine. Kids on a seesaw flip a hairdryer switch on and off which blows wind into a trumpet which plays music.
(Drawn by Russell Chambers).
Unfortunately we lacked money, time and OSH regulated safety features so the float ended up looking a bit different. However the kids loved it and everyone was impressed with what Three Sixty managed to pull off in 4 days. I was at their warehouse at 9pm on the night before the parade putting on the finishing touches (a black and gold Christmas tree) and then ended up in the car which pulled the float down Queen St.
The music in that video is Holy Night played by Alaska. You can download that and a bunch more Christmas songs by kiwi artists here >
Speaking of kiwi artists, for the ASB Christmas cards we worked with three talented ladies to create unique kiwi images. (Click to go through to their websites).
At first I was mind boggled trying to think of things which were yellow and Christmasy (cellotape, panatone, franklin rd), but black on yellow actually works so well for NZ Christmas. In a sea of green and red these will certainly be standing out on people’s mantlepieces.
As for my personal Christmas colours, this year I wrapped presents in tiffany blue with gold ribbons and used Lotto scratchy cards as the gift tags.
Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année!
A present for you
If you’ve heard of the Five Love Languages you may be interested to know mine is gift giving. I don’t whine about how “I don’t feel loved unless I get a present every day”, I just genuinely enjoy receiving well thought out gifts. Which is probably why Poppy is one of my best friends. I think I’m pretty good at picking out presents too.
And what have I got for you, a pretentious blog reader?
A calendar filled with the kinds of pictures you’ll find here. While I have no authority to reproduce these images, almost all of them I have paid for in some form through posrcards, tshirts, gallery admissions and prints so feel good about putting them on your wall.
And for those of of you feeling the pressure to get me something good, don’t bother using the Twitter Gift Guide. I will tell you what I want baby Jesus to bring: a car, a rose gold twitter necklace, some nice 8.5″x10″ and 14″x11″ frames, JPG’s Classique Summer and enough Lindt chocolate for me to rank in the agency’s “Biggest Winner” competition. Thanks!
BMW literally fuck with people’s minds in new ad
Amaze. Cool that they found two people in the audience who weren’t bothered about being mind controlled to interview afterwards.
Lost (a mobile ad-venture)
To promote ASB’s mobile banking we created an immersive film which could only be viewed on mobile devices in the location where it was filmed. The story followed a hapless film maker (@AlpacAndy on Twitter) and for one day users could follow Andy around Auckland city helping him look for his lost iPad.
We also put the story online, with a twist. You could only watch each episode after answering a question related to location where it was filmed.
Weird Weekends
My weekends have been kind of weird lately. I was in/at the Santa Parade last weekend and today I’ve been running a for #ASBLost.
In the limited down time I’ve had over the past few weeks I’ve been watching Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends (which are a lot more bizarre than mine). While the people he interviews are interesting enough to make the show watchable I really like what Louis brings to the episodes. In particular how he gets involved in all the sub cultures despite most of them being quite different ends of the spectrum. I wonder if he would have been allowed onto Christian TV if they knew he also starred in gay porno?