Boston Sports

I am not a huge Phillies fan, and in light of them playing the Rays (not a fan either), I am going to congratulate the Red Sox for winning two World Series in the last few years. At the same time, good job to the Celtics for winning the NBA Championship last year and to the Pats for just being generally awesome. Good job Boston sports at being the most dominant city in American professional sports in the current age.

Package Design

I have realized that one of my guilty pleasures is package design, and in terms of drinks and alcohol, bottle design. I believe it has the most impact on a purchase because it is the last thing you see before you decide to put it in your basket, or cart, or whatever you may have.

Alcohol bottles, whether wine, beer or liquor, always seem to be the most eye catching. Color, shape and typography all lend themselves to creating these fantastic bottles. Half the reason I purchase any alcohol bottle over another is due to the bottle and packaging.

There is a reason that brands put a lot of money into making sure that these bottles look fantastic, because they can turn a customer off with bad packaging just as easily as they can turn one on with good. When I see a poorly designed package or bottle, I immediately either think poorly of the brand, or will never even consider buying the product.

When looking at this bottle, which is not rubbing alcohol, but a brand of vodka, I think about what kind of brand they are. It is not eye catching, and if anything, it makes you think of a medication bottle. I am personally a fan of very slim, simplistic designs. Anyone could tell this by looking at my bottle collection. Below are some more bottles that I enjoy looking at. Enjoy.

Man Scented Candles

Last year I did a campaign for a fake company called Mandles, which is manly scented candles for men and perhaps the craziest creative concept that I ever put to ink. My attempt was to create a little bit of driving force to purchase because I believed this was such a novelty product. So I created a two sided ad campaign where the dotted line is perforated to create a coupon to create that driving force, as well as a sort of viral aspect to it because people can pop them out and either collect them or trade them.







Modernista! Here is the craziest idea I've ever done for the creative intern application.

Leaving Your Mark

Last year while on the e-board for AAF, I headed a campaign for Imprint Magazine. Imprint is a Ithaca College funded magazine that attempts to keep itself distanced from the school and just cover college issues. They were tired of the boring, static brand that they had inherited from the previous generation and wanted a clean start. So we decided to design something fun for them, that could be seen all over campus. And here is what we came up with.

Leaving your mark. That is what imprint was all about. They didn't just cover stories, they lived them. And wherever they went, they left their mark so you could tell where they had been. All of these are 5"x5" window clings that were put around campus.

WPP Hiring Freeze

So last week the holding group WPP ordered a hiring freeze for all of their agencies including JWT, Ogilvy, Y&R and Grey. These are four of the largest global ad agencies and this kind of frightens me a little. I understand that with the current crisis that all costs need to be kept at a minimum, but I believe that if you are not cycling in new staff than an agency will get stale. And where does this leave the new era of ad workers (i.e. me)? I know that smaller agencies will continue to hire and that if I search hard enough I will find something, but this is just not a good feeling with the real world so close.

Philips Universal Remote

I recently bought a universal remote because I had three things running and no remote to control them. This got really annoying when trying to access alternate features of DVDs. So last night I was fed up, and at 11pm or so I drove out to my local Wal-Mart. I of course bought the cheapest one, at a whopping $7.95. It was glow in the dark, it controlled TV, games and DVD and that was all that I needed. So I brought it home, immediate realizing that I didn't have AAA batteries. But after begging certain friends I got the batteries and started trying to program the remote. Now to program the remote to the TV was easy, I didn't actually have to do anything. But getting the remote to work with the DVD player was beyond difficult.

I tried all of the regular codes that are supposed to work for a certain brand, but my TV, being approximately 75 thousand years old, didn't work with any of them. So they then suggested (they being the manual that came with the remote) that I should click setup, and then on Ch+ about 300 times, because that's how many codes there were.

So when I finally stumbled on the right channel, I realized why the punching in of the codes didn't work. When I hit 6, my TV thinks I'm hitting play. With 2, it thinks 1/2 speed playing. Every button minus 3 on my remote actually did something else. Some buttons did absolutely nothing, but some did complete opposite things.

So I am back at square one, where I can hit "6" to play, but I still can't click left, down, right, or up. I don't know if talking to someone at Wal-Mart would do anything, but this remote is one of the most confused piece of electronics I've ever dealt with.

Obama's Comedic Counterpart

While flying back and forth to NH for fall break I bought two copies of Rolling Stone and was actually pleased with the level of good advertising in it. They were funny, well placed and vastly outnumbered the bad ones. But there was one that particularly caught my interested.

This was on one page.


Which was directly followed by this on the next page.

These were outrageously simple, but they stuck out the most to me in the entire magazine, which included ads from Old Spice, Absolute, Orbit Gum and Trojan Condoms. Bravo to whatever AD & CW team thought up these.

Adverteasing

The game of slogans, commercials and jingles. 1980s.



Fantastically difficult game, but no one ever wants to play.

Meghan McCain

'Live Free or Die' is the NH state motto. And Meghan McCain, while visiting Nashua said that if her dad won NH in the November election than she would get the state motto tattooed on her somewhere. Great McCain election tactic? Or great marketing for NH?

May I suggest?

Obama and McCain's Last Debate

Last night on Wednesday night, Obama and McCain squared off in their third, and final debate at Hofstra University. I won't hide my enthusiasm and support for the Obama campaign, but this campaign was pretty much the same old thing. Obama is ahead in polls in the national setting and all of the swing states, so he played it safe. While McCain, behind in all of the polls went on the attack the entire time. The most interesting discussion was on negative campaigning.



McCain claims Obama is running the most negative campaign in history, while Obama claims 100% of McCain's ads are negative.

Both are wrong.

McCain has run positive ads in the past, but as of now all of his ads that are running are negative. Overall, about 71% of his ads have been negative in nature.

Obama has a lot more money at his disposal so a lot more ads are coming from the Obama camp. But at this point, only 63% of his ads have been negative.

I have never once seen a negative ad in my life and then thought better of the candidate sponsoring it. Shape up guys. I expect more from Obama, as I am voting for him. I realize my bias, and will at no point attempt to cover it up.

Risk. A World of its Own.

I did a campaign last year for class and have been battling myself over whether this print campaign has any real promise or if it is just very...student work. I tried to give Risk a new look with males 18-24 by showing the energy and passion that goes into Risk when you play. It is not just a board game, but it is its own world. I showed this to an AD at Saatchi and Saatchi and he sent me a link to the award winning campaign for Risk that had the invaders occupying a major landmark of another country. Fantastic idea.

Any and all comments are welcome. In my opinion, the visual stand out a lot, especially when compared to a lot of other ads. But I am just not sure about them, whether they would be looked at as purely student work or not. Now I need to stop procrastinating and study for the remainder of my midterms, which include: Principles of Marketing, Brand Design and 20th Century American Drama.

Discovering the Undiscovered

So I think I have finally finished my campaign for Atlantis Diving. Well, as much as I will ever consider it finished, I will always find flaws in my own work that need to be corrected. But here are all three, tell me what you all think. Any and all comments are welcome.

Just for class purposes I have to do a different layout on the moon piece, but I think the campaign is at a good point at this time. I do want to keep working on it and updating it so it will be good enough to go in my book eventually.

Portfolio School/Post-grad ideas

Yesterday I got a rather hefty package from the Chicago Portfolio School in the mail. It had information from the school, a blue Sharpie with the school logo on it and an issue of the Chicago Reader, a free weekly newspaper in Chicago. This is a great way to get students interested in your school. I requested info from five portfolio schools in total and this was by far the most elaborate setup that was sent to me. The other schools included Brandcenter, Miami Ad School, Brainco and the Portfolio Center. Although I recieved really well put together brochures from Brandcenter and the Portfolio Center, the Chicago Portfolio School got me extremely excited about the prospect of portfolio school. I was actually looking up apartments in Chicago and was really pleased to discover that Chicago apartments are far cheaper than those in Boston or NYC (sidenote: Why are there no portfolio schools in Boston?).

So back to the main point of this post...With all of the work and portfolio building I am doing before graduating here at Ithaca, will I still need to go to portfolio school to get a job as a junior art director? I look at the books of students who are just graduating from portfolio school, and I can't really measure myself against them. I see some good work and I see some bad work. I am working hard right now on not only coming up with a bunch of new campaigns, but working with my professors and other creative students to make sure my work is worthy of going in my book. I have two campaigns in there already, but throughout the next three semester I should work on at least four or five more campaigns in class alone that will worthy of going in my book. However, this still bring me to my question of whether this will be good enough to be able to make it into advertising without having to shell out another $15-40k in school fees.

After talking with my creative professor, I have started searching for a summer internship for summer '09. I have already been in contact with Modernista! in Boston and have sent out several other e-mails to agencies such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Strawberry Frog, Cowboy and Wieden Kennedy. My professor told me that getting an internship would be the most important thing (besides a solid book) that would get me a job as a Junior AD. Hopefully this will all pan out and I will be able to get an internship, do some great work and after graduation get into the industry.

Dying to be Thin

Sophomore year I did advertising for a theatre performance titles 'Dying to be Thin'. This was a one woman show about a woman suffering from bulimia and was a very moving show. It also happened to be directed by my girlfriend. When I did this show, I sort of took a different approach to the conventional theatre poster and created a campaign for it. I took lines out of the show and gave them characters. Seven in all. All of them had different themes and feelings, characters that were prevalent in the scene I had chosen. I wanted people to see all of the different emotions that afflictions like bulimia could have on a person. Although it was a one woman show, I created some of the characters as men so as to reach a broader audience. I don't know if I could ever put these in my portfolio being as they are not typical ad pieces, but I really like the idea I had and we attracted 320 people to two performances with maximum space of 400 total. This was for a performance associated with no theatre group on campus. We actually out earned all of the other student theatre groups who usually ran for three or four performances.

Any comments are welcome on these.

Dow -679 Points???

WOW

The though of being able to get loans for school next year is becoming slimmer and slimmer. I mean, honestly, a degree means extremely little going into the industry I'm going into, but a college degree has always been a benchmark for what I need to be successful in life sort of. And next year I will be taking some amazing classes to help my portfolio. So I need to start working on a way to make sure I can get my loans for next year. Anyone reading who wants to co-sign a loan for me...might be my only option.

My Work and the Mi'kmaq Nation

There are a bunch of things I love about Ithaca, but this is one of its huge faults. Ithaca is not a school for creatives in advertising. It's fantastic for the business of advertising, PR and marketing, but it does not have the classes or facilities designed to help students who want to go into creative. So I have sort of taken it upon myself to take as many design classes as I can, even repeating a few where I get to create campaigns, as well as designing my own senior workshop for creative portfolio development. So I have worked on a few campaigns for brands thus far, including: Fresca, the NFL, Risk, Mandles (fake candle for men), Atlantis Diving (fake custom scuba shop), and a few random pieces here and there. I'm going to put up one piece from my NFL campaign and my Atlantis Diving campaign here and any comments are welcome. I'm not going to explain them because that kind of defeats the point. An ad should be able to be understood by just looking at it. If it needs to be explained, its not good.

NFL


Atlantis Diving


Also, on a random note, I talked to my grandmother because I have been curious about my heritage. I'm taking a native nations class that deals a lot with various nations, predominantly the Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Nation. But my grandmother informed me I do have a little native heritage on her side from Maine and Nova Scotia. I talked with my professor and learned that that is 95% certain the Mi'kmaq. I think that is so cool, but I just want to learn more about it and I don't know how to go about it. I can look up their history all I want and it's easy, but finding out what they are up to now I think would be extremely interesting.

First Blog

Hey,

so I thought I would give this a shot for a few reasons.
1) Don't see lots of family for long periods of time and this will give them something to read if they care to read.
2) There are a bunch of things I see around town and online that I feel like I should tell someone, and there are not always people around.

So at this point a week ago I started tearing ads out of magazines and putting them up on my wall. I read through a 200pg copy of G.Q. and although half of the magazine was ads, I found about four ads that I actually liked. There is a somewhat new campaign for Old Spice that came out by Wieden+Kennedy, which was a surprise because Saatchi and Saatchi usually handles Proctor and Gamble accounts. I especially love the campaign because a commercial and and a print ad featured Nell Patrick Harris...aka Barney from How I Met Your Mother and Dr. Horrible.








So I will try and update this with my own work, as well as my general ideas on politics, advertising and life.