July 23, 2010 • 2:18 pm • POSTED BY Brian Tennyson
Congratulations, you have successfully produced the worlds most annoying ads. These offend me not only as a person in the field of advertising, but as a human being with moderate intelligence.
I am talking about the new ads for Quizno’s. If you haven’t seen them, turn down your volume, cover your eyes, and press play below.
We spend a good deal of time and effort here coming up with campaigns that are (1) based in truth, (2) relevant to the audience, and (3) accomplish measurable goals. Even with those logical rules, a majority of our ideas get shot down for one reason or another. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when this was presented to hear the reaction from Mr. Quizno. I imagine it was something along the lines of “I like the concept in which you include the most annoying audio track ever with visuals that look like a nightmare I had when I was 8. I think this will sell a ton of sandwiches.”
The only thing that would be more annoying about them is when they make it to the web. Where is that close button?
I am a skeptic of pennies to begin with (I’ve been know to throw them away when they get too jangly in my pocket), but yesterday I was surprised to notice the sudden appearance of an entirely new penny design. Naturally, I consulted the internet. Turns out that starting in February 2010, the Department of Treasury began minting pennies with new tails-side design that features an image of the union shield, which is “emblematic of President Lincoln’s preservation of the United States of America as a single and united country”. This is the third redesign of the tails-side of our penny–first was the wheat penny from 1909-1958, then the Lincoln memorial design from 1959-2008, and now this. As long as it doesn’t affect my pressed penny collection, I think I’ll be all right.
The appearance of miraculous images is no longer just for the Catholics. For all you Rastafarians out there, it appears Jah works in mysterious ways, too.
Check out this picture my sister took of my brother down the beach. Look at the wood by his feet. Can you see the image of the Non-Virgin Bob Marley?
The Web’s all abuzz over this new iPhone spot, how it’s a real tearjerker and all. It leaves me a little cold, however. And the video resolution of FaceTime is not what Jobs promised. Fail.
As a Clevelander living away from home, news like that of LeBron leaving town may hurt, but not as deep as the news that Cleveland’s own Harvey Pekar passed away yesterday. I was prepared to write some heartfelt account of what Harvey meant to me and to my city, until I found this post from Anthony Bourdain. It’s brilliant. Enough said. I hope your heart will be as touched as mine was. Oh— and the image is from a school project of mine from Kent State that has never seen the light of day, until now. I felt it was appropriate.
For the visually and verbally inclined, the word “data” is a foreign if not daunting one. But a visit to the blog FlowingData, in which UCLA graduate student Nathan Yau culls displays of data from all over the internet, may leave you much more at peace with number crunching.
Most exciting are Yau’s posts on infographics that show what raw data can only imply. This elevation map of San Francisco’s prostitution arrests, for example, builds hills and even mountains in the areas of the city where the most arrests take place. The map’s designer, Doug McCune, points out the shadows formed by these peaks, which imply that this issue reaches far further than the crime itself.
If admiring the work of others weren’t enough, Yau has created your.flowingdata.com, which allows users to track data on themselves via Twitter. The program takes the information you tweet, from what you eat to when you go to sleep, and creates beautifully clean word clouds, maps, or time series graphics. Maybe statisticians are aesthetes just like you and me after all.
