Bad Banana went leafing through a 1923 yearbook from UC Berkeley, thanks to the digital offerings of Learning to Share. I'm glad he did, because it's startling (and instructive) to see just how different the world was 85 years ago. It's not just media that's changed, but culture itself. Can you imagine a Berkeley man in 1923 wearing Crocs to class? Going to college was a serious endeavor back then. It required shoes …
Kia Decides There’s Just Nothing Funny About Millard Fillmore
Boy, is this a weird story. After two major Kia executives depart comes a possible reason for their departures, from Ad Age: The 13th U.S. president was central to Kia's upcoming "Unheard of President's Day Sale," honoring, in tongue-in-cheek fashion, the first commander in chief to have running water in the White House. The punchline of new TV ads promoting the sale is a soap-on-a-rope bust of President Fillmore; …
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Chasing A Moving Target
If you watched any of last night's election coverage, you've probably figured out that voters are completely unpredictable. And beyond that, this year the conventional wisdom regarding race, gender, age, and religion just can't be applied to this election cycle. Since voters are consumers, and ad agencies are in the business of trying to figure out what our target audiences want, I decided to take a closer look at …
A Super Lesson, Revisited
Once again, we are headed toward Super Bowl Sunday. And once again, the two head coaches of the Giants and Patriots, who are leading their teams to the NFL's premier contest, have themselves never played a day of professional football. Is there a lesson in the advertising industry can learn from this? I think so. I first wrote about this in a Talent Zoo column from 2004. I got some nice compliments on it, so I …
Quick, Find The Proofreader
Ad Age readers were quick to spot the typo in the next-to-last line of Fallon's new ad for TheLadders.com: Look, typos happen. Very often, the fast nature of advertising, particularly online, leads to slips like this. No one's perfect, least of all me. But when you're sending out copies of a new ad for PR purposes, it doesn't look so good. …
Who Needs Creative Arts When There’s So Much Data Available?
The Kaiser is lamenting the state of creative affairs today. If you work in the creative department of an advertising agency in 2008 you will be hard pushed to find either a member of your team who can remember the old process or somebody who can handle a pencil and can draw - but I bet everyone is pretty savvy with a Mac, Photoshop, Quark and InDesign. Suddenly everyone with a computer, a mouse and a piece of …
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