goldengod

Here’s a little something to brighten your day! Looks like Japanese art collective PIKAPIKA’s animated lightpaintings caught the eye of an ad executive stateside. This Sprint commercial is entirely made of lightpainting photos put together to create a stop motion video.

It was filmed over the course of four days and uses no special effects, just flashlights. And if you were wondering, the music from the commercial is ‘Souvenirs’ by Architecture in Helsinki, from their Fingers Crossed album.

There’s also a behind the scenes video of the commercial, to show you how it was made.

Related Posts:

• Animated Long Exposure Lightpaintings
• Top Ten Advertising Tricks Used in Tokyo Subways

Boxed by hawksanddoves

Advertisers are up in arms over the recent decision to ban advertising outdoors in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. For years, advertisers have refused to follow municipal guidelines and are now suffering the consequences.

Tony De Marco has excellent photos of the advertising ban available in his Flickr account. The photos are simple, sparse and I love seeing the rusted out remnants of where ads used to be. Take five minutes and go see what the city looks like underneath the ads.

There are large arguments on either side of the ban, but according to the government, the people have spoken. Advertisers will continue to fight for the ability to advertise, but public opinion seems to be overwhelmingly in favour of the ban.

The law is “a rare victory of the public interest over private, of order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, of cleanliness over trash,” Roberto Pompeu de Toledo, a columnist and author of a history of São Paulo, wrote in the weekly newsmagazine Veja. “For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost.”

(Thanks, Jhayne)

Ads From Apple by kamikura

I’ve been paying more and more attention to the different methods of advertising I see on my daily commute. I admit to being disappointed in the variety of Vancouver transit ads, but PingMag’s collection of ten great advertising tricks used in Tokyo subways is top notch.

Public transit is supersaturated with advertising. In order to stand out, advertisers must really think outside the box. Breaking out of the standard medium of the 2′x4′ ad poster is the easiest way to grab attention and that is reflected in these examples.

Train Jacking (buying the entire advertisement space inside a whole train for a certain period) or Train Wrapping (covering the entire outside of a train) are extremely popular in Tokyo. If you ever found yourself in one of these trains for a few stops only, you will know why people are willing to pay so much at once. An entire train telling you the same thing is impossible not to notice.

Companies such as Bell and Colgate have done station jacking here in Vancouver, completely saturating the Granville Skytrain station with their ads. I haven’t personally seen any full-on train jacking here, though. Some companies will buy the outside of an entire train, but that’s as far as it seems to go.

I admit to being unfamiliar with the concept of “QR codes” mentioned in the article, but from the context it sounds like they’re barcodes that can be scanned by Japanese camera phones. Scanning the QR-code gives you more information on the product and/or takes you to their webpage.

Articles like this cement my belief that the only remaining way to penetrate through to the consumer is clever and original advertising. The Cannes Advertising Film Festival draws crowds all across the world, year after year. Stop and think about that; people are paying money to watch ads. I try to make it every year because the ads shown are that interesting.

Printable Cold Sores is another graffiti project that repurposes and defaces advertising. Their message is similar to that of the Abstractor I blogged about earlier this week; modern advertising is damaging.

The mischief maker behind the curtain at PCS created a set of printable stickers featuring a variety of ugly cold sores. The idea is for you to print them out and stick them on the massive lips of advertising models in your city.

It’s a small way for the average person to fight back against the increasingly unrealistic advertising of the beauty industry. After all, someone’s gotta bring these Photoshopped proto-humans back down to reality.

Nowhere in advertising is the gap between natural beauty and manufactured perfection more apparent than on subway posters. As we wait for transportation, we are unwillingly assaulted by larger-than-life representations of supposedly beautiful salespeople.

The site is still small, but invites you to submit your photos of the stickers in action. The usual disclaimers of illegality and non-responsibility apply. The photos will presumably be posted on the PCS blog at a later date.

I haven’t seen any alternative uses online yet, but I thought of a simple variation. Use the stickers on election posters, make Harper look like he’s been gettin’ passed around. Election posters irritate me more than any eight foot tall Revlon lips ever could.

Related:

• Abstractor - Turn Video Billboards Into Graffiti Art
• The Ad Generator
• “Your Ad Makes Me Sick” at Adverblog

Theresa
by Andrew Ferguson

I’m talking online with a friend the other day and they asked me what I’d been reading lately. So I told him and he was a bit shocked by the list. Apparently, “most people” don’t have five books on the go.

“Most people” are therefore pansies. I, on the other hand, am a voracious reader of the highest non-pansy order. I get frustrated when I run out of ink-splattered tree corpses to cradle in my tiny hands. Some are for entertainment value only, my trashy ‘boy’ fantasy books come to mind, but I always need to be reading.

We’re not going to focus on my trashy fantasy books though. We’re going to look at the ones I’m not embarrassed to admit I own.

Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait: The Art of Celebrity and Editorial Photography by Michael Grecco

This purchase was a recommendation from an off-camera lighting site I enjoy called the Strobist. I hadn’t really heard of Michael Grecco before; I’m shockingly ignorant of who the big players are in the photography world. I spent about twenty minutes browsing his portfolio and that, combined with the Strobist recommendation, sold me on the book.

I bought it right after Christmas and I’ve found myself reading and re-reading it. It’s full of amazing photos, complete with lighting diagrams showing how he achieved the effects. More importantly, he tells us what the proper rules for lighting are, what moods and feelings different combinations convey and why he’s chosen to break those rules to make a photograph feel different and stand out.

BrandJam: Humanizing Brands Through Emotional Design by Marc Gobé

This is an interesting one. It’s not something normally on my radar because it sounds less like my style of interesting non-fiction (Freakonomics, Tipping Point, etc) and more like a textbook.

I was sent a review copy by Allworth Press (thanks, Nana!) and have spent the idle moments of my last two weeks reading it. It’s a lot more interesting than I expected. Marc weaves his experience in the ad world with old-media brand ideals to come up with a new philosophy; one where design is king.

I’m someone who regularly goes to the Cannes Advertising Film Fest but I also ignore most ads I don’t think are well-designed or clever. His philosophy of ‘jazzing up’ brands and making a more emotional connection to the consumer through design makes sense to me. I’ll be posting a full review when I finish the book.

Best Business Practices for Photographers by John Harrington III

I’m barely past the index, but I can already tell that this book is going to be with me for years to come. It covers all aspects of the photography business in a surprising amount of detail. John’s a D.C.-based photojournalist with years of experience and innumerable successes to back him up on the opinions in this book.

I’m hoping to be able to turn my photography into a business at some point, and this book has all the information I need to do it. I just need to get my photography skills to the point where I feel ready to apply it. This was another recommendation from the Strobist.

What’s next on my list:

• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams
• Recommend a book for me before I run out! Fire off an email or leave a quick comment with the title and why you think I should check it out.

Advertising is Graffiti by urban_data

Abstractor is a brilliant piece of guerilla art created by Ji Lee. You can use it to change any television or video billboard from an advertising annoyance into art.

I like this style of anti-advertising graffiti because it creatively repurposes annoying video ads. I’m also a fan of the fact that it can do so without damaging anything.

Because of this, it doesn’t conjure the image of the ‘vandal’ type that we normally associate with graffiti. Instead, it has more of a ‘clever artist’ feel to it. Here’s how it works:

Anyone can easily create an Abstractor by attaching two black boards to any TV screen. These boards cover the screen entirely – except for a small horizontal gap between them – allowing a narrow beam of light to escape from the TV. All TV programs and commercials look beautiful through the Abstractor.

The video of the Abstractor in action really speaks for itself; funktastic afro for the win. Video billboards seem to be a lot more common in NYC than up here in the frozen north.

I poked around online a bit and the ‘horizontal line’ method shown in the video is the most popular one so far. Other people, like Graffiti Research Labs, have come up with their own variants. As pictured above, you can stencil any message into the black boards. It will still cover up the ads and make your message stand out.

Who wants to be the first to Abstractificate the screens at Robson & Granville?

Related:

• The Ad Generator
• Make Magazine article on the Abstractor

In a hilarious turn of events, a prankster in Switzerland convinced a major Swiss newspaper to publish a two-page fake Gucci ad. The ad features a picture of the prankster himself, posing topless with a bottle of Gucci perfume.

Not only did he manage to get his fake Gucci ad published, but he avoided having to pay for it. The prankster arranged for the $50,000 perfume ad bill to be sent directly to Gucci. Swiss police are currently looking for him with the intention of pressing fraud charges.

This also isn’t the first time he’s tried to pull of a major prank:

According to the Zurich-based daily Blick, the man attempted to book concert venues by passing himself off as Puerto Rican singer Chayanne. The paper said it narrowly avoided also being conned, but was tipped of the hoax by record company Sony BMG, which represents Chayanne.

I’m impressed. This man ranks right up there with the ZUG and Improv Everywhere crews as one of my favourite pranksters. Check out the AP coverage for further details.

The Alchemists is an upcoming documentary about five individuals who changed the face of advertising forever. The movie is directed by Doug Pray (”Scratch”, “Infamy”) and for me, that’s all I need to know.

His film Scratch, on the history of hip-hop and turntablism, is one of my favourite documentaries and I don’t even really like hip-hop. That’s how good this man is. This gives me high hopes for what he’ll be doing with this film. The summary sounds like something I definitely want to sink my eyeballs into:

THE ALCHEMISTS is a surprisingly personal exploration of some of the most influential advertising giants of the last century, and the communication they created which rocked our culture. Inspired by the social movements of their time and driven by the need to communicate some greater truth, these artists and writers despised mediocrity and the status quo of the advertising industry and brought a revolutionary spirit to their work.

Josh Spear said it best when he said, “if you only watch one trailer this week– make it this one”. I agree wholeheartedly, hit the link, check it out, and tell me what you think.

The IMDB is telling me I need a Pro account to view any further information on the film, so I’m going to attempt to get in touch with someone at The One Club. With a little luck and some friendly PR people, I’ll have a follow-up post on this in the near future.

(Found via Josh Spear)

Somewhere by Andrew Ferguson

The Ad Generator is an art project created by Alexis Lloyd as a part of her Masters thesis in Fine Arts. By mashing up remixed slogans with images from Flickr, she explores the layers of meaning within modern ads.

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.

I really like the fact that she took it one step further than simple slogan and image mashup by adding an element of randomness. It raises questions about the meaning of language in advertising and sometimes results in some classy Engrish.

How can something that normally seems meaningful appear so nonsensical without proper context? The elements of advertising work together to attack a part of our brain that we ourselves are not fully aware of. New Scientist has an excellent short piece on branding and the brain.

Disagreement by Andrew Ferguson

Tasty brainmeats aside, I can think of at least a couple ways to improve on the ad generator. Even now I want to set it to only choose photos from the first page or two of Flickr’s interestingness search.

This will result in photos that are higher quality and, well, more interesting. Most of the photos that the program selects now are pretty low quality and bad photographs overall, something we don’t generally associate with advertising. Ads should be shiny and beautiful and look like they took forty devout monks eighteen weeks to create using unicorn-hair calligraphy brushes goddamnit!

That’s not to say the ads created by the generator aren’t impressive. Sometimes, the generator is nothing short of genius. The pairing of the phrase “LOVE IS MILK” with a phonecam shot of a bloody tampon is truly a thing of beauty.

teLivEsion by Esther_G

The New York Times recently published an interesting article about targeted advertising being used for television, among other things. The article focuses on recent Wendy’s commercials, which react to events that just happened in college football games. It also explores how households with pets (for example) will be shown more pet-related ads than another household, even if they’re right beside each other.

The first half of the article focuses on new technology that allows television advertisers to film multiple different versions of the same commercial and then choose which will be shown, minutes before the ad would be broadcast. This allows the raccoons in Wendy’s television ads to comment on what has just occurred in the game or show that the viewer’s watching.

The Wendy’s ads will reflect events in the football games, creating what ad executives call a reverse product placement of sorts. Instead of putting Frostys or Wendy’s fries into a TV program, the company will incorporate a show’s content in its commercials.

Unfortunately, it appears that it is being used in addition to in-show product placement, not as a substitute. If it were a replacement, I’d be a lot more enthused about this idea. Product placement in movies or shows has always irked me, since the days of E.T. and his Reese’s Pieces. I feel I should be compensated, with cheaper movie tickets or whatever else, for the fact that I have to sit through an ad that I didn’t know would be forced upon me. It’s like going to see a play and having someone dump a crying baby in your lap halfway through the first act. Who the hell wants to deal with that at all, let alone for free?

Perhaps I come at this from a strange perspective, but I find myself thinking ‘I wonder how this will affect what is shown at the Cannes Advertising Film Festival?’ Will they show the funniest version, or all versions? Will it even catch on enough to have an impact?

Traveling Without Moving
by Fred Armitage

The second half of the article deals with targeted or contextual ads. If you’re not familiar with these, they are what you look at every time you go online. Essentially, if you’re on a website that’s all about ostrich fucking, the ads that will run in the sidebars are probably going to be for other ostrich-fucking related sites. Or supply stores, whatever. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not all that knowledgeable on the mechanics of ornithological intercourse.

For the first time, this technique is possible on televisions. Rather than television advertisers having to stratify their advertising based solely on geographic location, they can vary it based on a database containing highly detailed profiles of the household. I find this stuff fascinating, but it’s also intensely creepy and violating. I can also imagine a lot of awkward situations where your friends come over to watch TV and get a glimpse into your hidden desires.

I find myself no longer treating this endless progress of ads as a force that must be stopped at all costs. Instead, I gaze upon it with a fond but tolerable amusement, like a toddler playing with mommy’s massage wand.