The position requires a highly motivated individual who can provide support for the production team utilizing InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and sometimes by sending an email or two. Yes, strong graphic design and typography skills are required. The right candidate will be personable, enthusiastic, work well in a team environment, and be ready to switch gears at any moment. You’ll be creating print ready documents, layouts, comps, managing assets/archiving, scanning and typesetting. Working alongside designers will teach you about the creation of brand concepts, and leaving your Facebook page open will teach you the basics of public relations.
Sound fun? Check out our jobs page over here, and send us an application. Curious about what separates production and design? Add a comment below, and I’ll happily answer your questions.
Interesting art series done by Milan based collective Carnovsky. The RGB work is a series of wallpapers that surprisingly mutate and interact with different chromatic stimulus. Find more images on their website.
As a firm believer that weathermen are voodoo shamans and shysters, I’ve developed my own ways of determining the weather. If at anytime you notice that it’s especially cold, know there will be a freakish run of warm weather in the future. And vice-versa, as any warm-blooded pessimist/realist should do, be wary of when the days are a bit too fine.
I’ve done alright cutting the likes of John Bolaris out of my life, but it gets to be more than an amateur weatherman’s job when life starts mimicking the weather. What do I mean about that? Well, imaginary narrative in my head, let me explain.
You see, I equate cold, nasty weather to the serious events in the world, and as the scraped-up undercarriage of my car can attest, the year started off with a blizzard. A mere week in to the New Year and we had the attempted assassination of a congresswoman, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Since then, we’ve had the floods in Brazil and the violent uprising in Egypt. It was almost enough to make a young man start asking questions. But before too much of young America could become informed, here came a rush of tiger’s blood to the head.
And with a couple of enlightening interviews about the effects of Bi-Winning Disorder and the intricacies off F-18 ordinances, Charlie Sheen had arrived. He was a brilliant ray of pure, unadulterated train wreck sunshine. Right when the world was becoming a bit too cold, here Charlie came to show us that while life may not be fair, it does throw you a nice warm bone every once in a while. The man deserves a Nobel Peace Prize… or at least a bunch of retweets.
But like any stretch of nice weather, all things horribly entertaining must come to an end. (Except for Jersey Shore, knock on wood.) It was nice that we got to wear t-shirts for a couple days and gleefully bask in the warmth of ignorance, but like I said, the bad weather is always sure to follow.
And it did in a major way, shaking the Earth under Japan, throwing up numbers on the Richter Scale that you see at a Blake Griffin dunk contests; 9.0. Surely enough to win our attention for the immediate future. And it only got worse, it only got colder. Nuclear power plant crisis and earthquake? It was a joint venture of evil, the type of association you only think about in hypothetical conversations, like what if Megatron and Cobra Commander joined forces?
But a mere week after the Earthquake in Japan hit, it was ousted as the ‘most googled’ search phrase. By which profound social issue, you may ask? Libya, perhaps? Mommar Gadhafi? The AT&T/T-Mobile merger?
How about Rebecca Black, the YouTube sensation responsible for the publically labeled “worst song ever.” With a cool 90,000,000 hits on YouTube by this point, her song Friday made her temporary Queen of the Search, which usually coincides with the title temporary Queen of Public Ire. We-we-we so excited, we so excited.
[Side Note: Of all the dub-step, death metal versions of Friday, there are two worth watching: “Bob Dylan sings Friday” and her acoustic, live performance on Good Morning America where she forgets the lyric “Today is Friday.”]
Hopefully by now you’ve gotten a picture of what I’m talking about; that life and nature seem to be stuck in this strange pattern, a back-and-forth exchange designed to keep us from dwelling on one thing too long. It’s April now, and last week we had snow, and next week it’s going to be 85. There was an earthquake in Myanmar, another in Japan, and Libya looks just as bad. The word clockwork comes to mind.
“Sometimes you’re flush and sometimes you’re bust, and when you’re up, it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down, you never think you’ll be up again. But life goes on.” – Johnny Depp in Blow
Anyone in the agency business for more than a few minutes has heard or uttered the phrase “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” at least once. This gem, from non-ad-guy Charles Caleb Colton is right up there on the agency dogma list with “Everything good has been done before.” (a variant of Goethe’s “Everything has been done before, the problem is to think of it again.” ) and “There are no original ideas left.” (a variant of Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s “There are no original ideas. There are only original people.”). Now I could go on and on about the irony of ad people bastardizing and co-opting original quotes for their own purposes, but thats a blog post for another day. Or is it?
The fact is that these euphemisms are usually uttered and heard reactively, when agencies realize that a piece of work is either derivative (adding “Oh shit.”), or has been copied (“Those f*&%*# bastards.”). In the great Greek mythology that is advertising, this is surely our Sword of Damocles. Because there is a lot of really great original work out there that inspires us both consciously and subconsciously on a daily basis.
So when we launched a campaign back in 2007 for a small, private liberal arts university in Northeastern Pennsylvania with a concept that was so simple in its brilliance (using mass media to communicate with single person, thereby communicating with the masses), we were sure it had been done before. We just couldn’t find any examples. So we did it. And then people discovered it. And The New York Times wrote about it. And after a while we realized maybe we had done something truly original (and great). And then we went back to work, figuring what else we could do.
Now since “We all live in glass houses.” (Billy Joel), this post is not to throw stones. Except at the ad media, which could have done just a little bit of homework… or a simple Google query… and at least noted our original approach. At least one blogger did. In fact, we have a lot of respect for the agencies that are responsible for the campaigns above and have certainly been inspired by their work along the way. And whether they were inspired by our work or not, they both took a concept initially applied to a small liberal arts college and turned it and scaled it really well for national brands. Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency responsible for the Dominos campaign, actually did do a personalized billboard campaign for new Mini owners sometime back in 2007 right about when our Wilkes campaign launched, though it required little information or insight about the drivers, as it cleverly used embedded RFID technology to throw them big LED shout-outs.
Its really just to point out to anyone reading this blog that there are still simple, original, beautiful ideas left. For big brands and little brands alike. And where Ms. Harrison is correct is that they don’t just come from a certain name or a zip code. You need just need the right people. Because its not just about the idea, but also the gobs of talent, intelligence, rigor and fortitude (like the ability to explain to a high school principle that flying a banner over a high school graduation will not evoke the second coming of 9/11 in Hazelton, PA) required to make the idea reality. It takes people like Jim, Steve, Brendan, Ro, Tim, Leslie and especially a guy at Wilkes named Jack.
And for the copycats, if you are out there, “To thine own self be true.” (You can quote me on that)
March 30, 2011 • 10:59 am • POSTED BY David Burden
We all know the branding world is rife with jargon, so we all become desensitized to the overused adspeak and words like “integrate”, “curate” and “lexicon” become part of the everyday… well… lexicon. But every once in a while certain individuals take the bullshit to a whole new level. Witness these two examples, first from one Ben Silverman, founder of branded content company Electus (counted among Adweek’s 2010 Media Agencies of the Year…for what I am still not quite sure) who is also partly responsible for the terrible 2003 over branded reality series “The Restaurant” and temporarily bringing Knight Rider and American Gladiators back to NBC. The second is from Jeff Rosenthal, founder of the Summit Series, part TED Talk part luxury getaway, blending innovation, relaxation, extreme sports and activism. This year’s event will be hosted on an ocean liner and include conferences, shark tagging and kiteboarding (note: carbon credits will be purchased to offset the ocean liner’s fuel emissions. Phew. We can all breathe easier now.)
“As a history buff and extensive traveler luckily still in the ‘demo,’ I try and anticipate and build trends to drive tipping points,” says Silverman, the former head of NBC’s entertainment division. “I like to change it up and integrate all of these learnings: From my work bringing back the single-camera comedy and mockumentary style after seeing the oversaturation of reality—for which I’m partly to blame—to the creation of The Tudors when everyone had turned their back on the historical drama genre, to business models from format distribution to digital content and programming with advertiser insight. The best is the combination of the avant garde and the accessible.” (Adweek, Dec 19, 2010)
“We’re a Large Hadron Collider for people of our generation,” says Jeff Rosenthal, Summit at Sea cofounder. “We help the most epic people in the world do more epic shit. It’s all work and all play, 24/7,” Rosenthal says. “When you have lucid-dreaming gurus and past presidents doing things they’ve never done before, it leads to crowd-accelerated innovation for everyone involved. Our goal is to catalyze as much change in the world as possible by connecting dreamers and doers.” (Fast Company, April 2011)
There are nearly 500,000 Michigan State Spartans around the globe. That’s a hair more than the population of Kansas City, and a shade less than Atlanta (must be all those real housewives).
Those Spartans have a huge impact on all seven continents, as they not only have the intellectual firepower of one of the best universities in the country, they also have an ingrained Midwestern work ethic that works tirelessly to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.
So how can you show the combined impact of almost half a million hardworking people all around the world in 30 seconds? We focused on that hands-on approach.
This spot debuted this past weekend on ESPN, and that was possible because of a great crew and client:
Agency peeps:
CCO: Darryl Cilli
ECD: Jim Walls
Director of Client Services: David Burden
CD: Brendan Quinn
Art Director: Dan Blackman
Copywriters: Kyle Arango, Brad Failor
AE: Ryan Brown
Director of Production: Rosemary Fahmie
Like the Spartans themselves, we worked damn hard on the spot–and like the Spartans, we had a little fun along the way. Take a look at some outtakes from the shoot over on the 160over90 facebook page (which, by the way, you should join).
