Worst Mascot Ever

I loved Tony the Tiger. Love Frosted Flakes. I do love Cheetos, but I will never buy them again because of the creepiest character ever created. Why???

Superbowl Ads (Long Past Due)

So I realize that the Superbowl was a full week ago, which is the single biggest ad day of the year, and I had yet to comment on it. Besides the ads, it was a GREAT game, besides the fact that the Cards lost. I really thought they had it at the end with that 7o yard Fitz sprint.

Back to what really matters, the ads. So looking at the entire game, there were some truly great and truly horrible commercials. Cash for Gold? No place in the Superbowl. Alec Baldwin and Hulu made an impressive entry into the ad world, giving the online TV site a personality and a face.



Another commercial that did creative a lot of buzz, but didn't really deliver with the actual ad was the Miller High Life commercial. About two or so weeks before the game, a commercial for High Life came out with a warehouse worker talking about how all he would need is 1 second during the game to create a great commercial. But after watching the entire game, I did not see the ad until the very end of the fourth quarter. But at the same time, I was thinking about it during the entire game and I just happened to be drinking High Life during the game.



I loved the Bud Light and the Doritos commercials. The Drinkability commercial where the board meeting is going on and the worker suggest not buying But Light and is subsequently thrown out of the window had me in tears I was laughing so hard. And the Doritos commercial where the magic crystal ball is being thrown around did the same thing to me. I think these commercials were the funniest, but the Doritos did not work to create or improve on the image of the brand. Drinkability is an amazing positioning campaign.





I hope Hulu creates more spots on their current positioning. I loved it. Superbowl 43, mild success. I hope I get the chance one day to creative a Superbowl spot.

Back For a New Semester

So I am back again with a new round of classes. This semester I will be participating in Ad Lab, our senior advertising lab. As a class we participate in AAF's National Student Advertising Competition, which draws 120+ teams every year. Ithaca always does really well, its difficult because we are in District 2 which is the toughest District in the country with schools such as Syracuse, NYC, Baruch and approximately 20 other schools in the area.

This year, the client is The Century Council, which are the distilleries against drinking. Ridiculous, I know. And with a smaller client, its a smaller budget of only $10m. But it should be a great semester, as I am in the creative dept and I want to be the Creative Director next year.

So all we have really worked on this far in the creative dept was choosing our agency name, and I think we settled on "Bento", which is a Japanese lunch that includes everything in it. So the idea we are going with is we are bringing everything together. I have a few ideas for the logo, and I'm pretty sure we are just going to go with a text treatment or custom font.

Here's what I have so far.

This will the first post of many for this semester. So enjoy, and as usual, any critiques are welcome.

Yet More Stuff From Brand Design

This final seemed like it was never ending, but I think I got a lot of good material from it. Part of the final was having to design an alternative project, anything I wanted, for the brand. So I decided to design a dive map, because it seemed like a logical direction to go. So here it is, comments are welcome.


Here is another random thing I had to design.

Annual Report Cover

Underwater Business Card

Ok, so for part of my final for my brand design course, we had to redesign the business cards we originally did for our companies. I decided to take a completely different approach with this set, as you can easily tell if you check out my original one done.

The first one shown is the front, with the second being the back. I decided to take a distinctly underwater feel with these, and I really like how they turned out. I feel like they definitely convey what the brand is all about. A vast change from my first set.

History is Happening

I firmly believe that when purchasing cable you should be able to decide what channels you get, and just pay per channel. If I had the option, I would purchase
1) NBC
2) Food Network
3) History Channel
4) Discovery Channel
5) ESPN

When the History Channel first started, it should have been called either the WWII Channel or the Nazi Network. All it aired were documentaries about the Nazi Party in WWII. Extremely entertaining, but a little limited in scope. But in the last few years, the History Channel has released a great number of shows that go all of over the place in terms of how long ago the events happened. So this campaign is my attempt to draw attention that the History Channel is not just airing WWII things, but that history is happening now and you can now check it out on the History Channel.

Wetsuit Design

For our final project for Brand Design, we have been assigned to create an annual report and an alternative design project for our brand. My brand, Atlantis Diving, a custom dive shop, has been a lot of fun to work with this semester. And for the final project I have decided to create the staff wetsuits for our company. My first venture into fashion design.

At this point, I actually would love to be able to design my own wetsuit.