For the next month I’ll be sharing some of my favorites that made this year so grrrrrrrrrrrr8. Today I’m talking blogs. We love them. We read them. You’re reading one now. Here are some of the best this year.
Note: For the intellectual sort of blog reading look to Shepelavy.
Top 10 after the jump…
This past weekend I saw the new James Bond film, Quantum of Solace. The movie was absolutely breathtaking, from the opening credits to the stuntwork to cinematography to the locations, including the Floating Stage at the Bregenz, Austria Festival House and the actual Palio di Siena bareback horse race in Italy. The franchise took a first quantum leap forward with 2006’s Casino Royale, introducing Daniel Craig as the brooding, vengeful, ripped Bond who actually bleeds, amazing stunt sequences based on French Parkour Gymnastics and a ultra cool theme song by the guy from Soundgarden and Audioslave (wisely, the only holdover from the previous films was dame Judi Dench as M, or “Mum”). Quantum of Solace is yet another step, perhaps most notably for the aforementioned credits and title designs, created by a Kansas City firm called MK12 (MK12 previously worked with Quantum director Marc Foster on The Kite Runner). The theme song, “Another Way To Die”, a collaboration between Jack White and Alicia Keys, is also probably the best theme song since “Nobody Does It Better” or “Live and Let Die”. Its amazing how the world’s longest running film franchise has been almost completely reinvented, dispatching the silly clichés, innuendo and product placement – Bond had recently taken to drinking Smirnoff and driving a BMW (?!) instead of the trademark Aston Martin – and attracting a whole new female audience without alienating its core male base. This is more than an example of making a brand current, but about and trimming away the lazy fat that had sustained it for decades to reveal the lean, ripped form that made it successful in the first place.
Mr. A MEET Downtown Streets.
I recently stumbled upon this archive of moving images. It is quite lovely. I have been going through a bunch of government sponsored instructional videos and came across “Pedestrian Crossing” put together by British Government Public Information Films. Its of Mr. A, ” a perfectly straight-forward kind of person” who learns how to cross a street. Quite simple but over the top in every way. I liked it. I thought you would too…
I’ll be in Minneap hanging with my mom and friends. Even bought a Thanksgiving blazer.
Hope your Turkey Day is a great one, everybody.
Just stumbled upon this really fun Ikea site. Upload your own music, then switch between rooms and watch these people dance. Nothing like watching wrestlers get down to Blondie.
What are they selling again?
The NY Times a venerable newspaper that I recently became addicted to – so much that I have recently started receiving a home delivery of the newspaper so that I can read it with my morning coffee & thereby enter into the adult world that my parents have long inhabited.
As an agency, we have considered it quite a coup when our clients & our work appear in the NY Times. Today, I was browsing the NY Times site, and came across an article that was a must read for me, “Puppies Power a Web Video Start Up.” Yes, that’s right puppies. And no, they are not on treadmills powering this start-up. Instead, it is live streaming video of what puppies do all day, which is pretty much sleep. And this has drawn over 4 million views last week with a total of nearly 4 million hours of live feed being streamed.
Now I love dogs and really, who doesn’t love puppies? So I checked out the live feed, with the intention of just checking it out, to see the cuteness and move on. 15 minutes later, I came out of my cuteness-induced trance to realize that these puppies are addicting!
So these puppies have made it, and I think this could be a new marketing technique. We should start a feed of some puppies, throw in a client product with them, and bam, 4 million viewers watching for 4 million hours and a mention in the NY Times. Genius.
