5 September, 2008 • 11:42 am • POSTED BY tim beitz
Ever drink orange-flavored liquid from a barrel-shaped container made of plastic when you were 12 years old? Hate paying high costs for vogue organic teas? Tired of friends telling you how to live your life? Like popsicles?
There’s been a lot of talk about high fructose corn syrup giving the concoction a bad rap saying it’s causing diabetes and obesity. Much controversy has erupted over these coorelations… and the Corn Refiners Association have decided to fight back.
They’ve created two web sites (SweetSurprise.com & HFCfacts.com) attempting to swing the ambiguity-pendellum their way, but it’s the commercials that really dunk my donuts.
Sorry to disappoint, folks, but your neighbors are not spotting your lawn sign and thinking “You know, I’ve been on the fence about the election. But this name keeps popping up on lawns and bumper stickers. I’m voting for THAT guy.”
More likely they’re thinking one of two things:
“Hmmm. My neighbor appears to be one of the 150 million Americans who support Candidate X. Is ‘Idol’ on tonight?”
The 160over90 Agency Brochure is featured in the new issue of HOW Magazine, the 2008 HOW Self-Promotion Design Annual, winning a Merit award in the Designer Promotions category. Our brochure was one of only 120 pieces featured- scoreeee!
Seems like a decade ago that a friend told me about the impossible-to-find cult documentary “Hands On A Hardbody” about a now-infamous human endurance contest held in 1994 at a Texas Nissan dealership where contestants had to stand with one gloved hand on a truck until only one person is left standing—with the winner receiving the vehicle. As a contestant who misquoted the movie “Highlander” said, “There can only be one.”
The film’s been in my Netflix queue for years with an availability date of “unknown.” In my attempts to track it down, I could only find bootleg VHS copies on ebay and Amazon for upwards of $70. But thanks to link from Waxy.org (and presumably an upload from the film’s director S.R. Bindler), I was finally able to watch the entire film tonight at Google Video, and it was worth the wait.
The movie is an intense study of human will and desire, and it presages the onslaught of reality television. The contest itself is a case study on a viral marketing stunt gone horribly wrong: In a later contest at the same dealership in 2005, a distraught contestant dropped out of the competition after 48 hours, broke into a Kmart across the street, grabbed a gun, and shot himself. Perhaps the recent settlement of the ensuing lawsuit led to the this week’s online rerelease of the film.
Web studios are producing tons of popular web content, and pulling in the big advertisers to back it up (CNN, Puma, Dr. Pepper, Nike, Doritos; to name a few). This recent article in AdvertisingAge shares the top five companies poised to blow up, as named by TVWeek, but it’s the smaller companies named to make it big as they are producing interesting content and aligning with some big advertising partners. This video features one of the more popular programs “ZapRoot” from NextNewNetwork.
On a separate note, this first part of the video is crazy! I have never seen anything like this. Go Swiss! Genetic Algorithms, hmmm? You can view it on the top of the ZapRoot site if the video does not work.
22 August, 2008 • 12:40 pm • POSTED BY Adam Flanagan
I haven’t posted anything recently because things have been busy at the office, but I saw this and just had to put it out there. As a branding agency we’re constantly keeping up on trends, and we’re always trying to figure out how the youth are using the internet. Apparently blogging is so easy now that even kids in middle school are doing it. PSFK via the New York Times, recently listed a few different whippersnappers who are currently blogging about fashion. The most impressive is Style Rookie. A blog by 12-year-old, Tavi, pictured above, who writes a lot about 80’s fashion, which is interesting in itself because she wasn’t even alive a single day of the 80s. She actually has some pretty interesting things to say about fashion for a young kid, but I’m not sure what to think about kids blogging, it’s definitely an interesting phenomenon. I wonder what my childhood would have been like if the internet existed at this level when I was a teenager. I’m more concerned with her obsession with fashion at such a young age. Feel free to weigh in with the comments.
Why yes. Yes we are. Thanks for asking. We’re now interviewing designers and senior (at least two years experience) copywriters. No need for breathless cover letters—we’re far too self-important to read them. Just a PDF or a link to your site sent to careers@160over90.com will do the trick.
If you need slightly more details than that, check it here:
As it seems someone has neglected to delete my publishing ability on the blog (maybe I have been grandfathered in for life?), I figured I would share this link to the blog of infamous Minneapolitan Mike The 2600 King. Described as a collection of design artifacts from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, it’s like the cool oldies station of design blogs. Check it out, check it often. Today’s post on “Eating Weekends” provides some especially tasty illustrations.
Every year a list such as this one surfaces to remind us just how old we are getting (and yes, I realize I am only 26, relatively young), but given it is our job to understand the psyche of 17 and 18 year-olds entering this year’s freshman class, I believe it is necessary.
Beloit College publishes its Mind-Set List to help professors and administrators understand the average incoming freshman’s frame of reference by describing how things have “always been,” or at least how they’ve been for the past 18 years.
If we assume the students in this class were born in 1990, they would have been conceived about the same time as the World Wide Web, taken their first steps as Clarence Thomas took the Supreme Court oath, and had their entire lives to angle for a gig with Teach for America. And the Warsaw Pact— what’s that?
The two men who compile the list—Tom McBride, a professor of English, and Ron Nief, director of public affairs—note that while many things have changed since the Class of 2012 was born, some things seem remarkably similar to the world as it was in 1990: “Rising fuel costs were causing airlines to cut staff and flight schedules; Big 3 car companies were facing declining sales and profits; and a president named Bush was increasing the number of troops in the Middle East in the hopes of securing peace.” Read the list after the jump.
