Beyond words.

Diaperdown

That is, sadly, me on the right.
For those who don't know, my friend Mark (Likovsky) promotes a DJ night that occurs regularly each "whenever I fucking feel like it." It usually involves a mix of drunkenly unbeatmatched k-pop, italodisco, and Air Supply B-sides. I've been known to play there at times as well, usually playing the Doublemint Gum jingle on repeat for 45 minutes.

These are the flyers, created by the various advertising douchebags who spin there. I did not make a flyer this month, which is fine, because the talent pool is already perfectly shallow.

More from this month:

(download)

Holy Photoshop, batman!

Check out this demo from the Adobe Photoshop team of some new algorithmic texture analysis technology they're building for CS5. They call it "content aware fill," and it's the most significant breakthrough in retouching tech I've seen in a really, really long time. I wonder if they can do this with camera RAW, given enough octo-mac processing power.

The Tea Party & The Circus

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This video produced by New Left Media, covers the final Tea Party protest of the now-passed health insurance reform bill in Washington D.C. Please note, watching this video may cause outrage, incredulousness, despair, pity, etc.

For real information on how the passage of these new laws will actually affect you and your current healthcare, if applicable, please review the Washington Post's excellent infographic on the subject.

The Banner Ad is Dead. (Well, soon, at least.)

Circulating the internets right now is this video, picked up via planet5d. It's being illustrated as an example of interactive, filmic, "d-print" content for a device such as the iPad for Viv magazine.

What I see here is where advertising is going. Banners suck: we know this. They have abysmal click-through rates, and as awareness media they're even less effective than bus huts. Banners blow. (Seriously, let's stop making them, soon, okay?)

What about print? It's pretty, especially that awesome European stuff you see in all the annuals with a little logo in the corner and one fantastically creative image. Problem is, it doesn't do any heavy lifting. Work that is that pure can't even bear the load of an offer without it being ruined. And in the digital era, the ROI on print is pretty low.

And then there's broadcast. It's really pretty and really engaging, which is good. It's also good and communicating a message in short amount of time, which is also good, because a short amount of time is all you're getting. It's also really fucking expensive and fun to make, which is great—if you work for the agency making it. Not so great for everyone else.

This video, in my mind, represents the beginning of the type of content we're going to start seeing made really soon. 

It will be full-screen content with no limits to what you can do (or spend), like a TV spot. This stuff will be high quality and it's going to look great (especially on those super high resolution small OLED displays we're about to be surrounded with). But at the same time, it's also going to get a lot cheaper to get that quality (my thinking: mostly saved by in-house photographers and retouchers, and the sudden influx of pretty-darn-good new production companies thanks to HD video DSLRs like the Cannon 5D/7D, but that's for another blog post).

This stuff will also be able work like print, which is to say it lets the consumer take as long as they want to engage with it. (This of course means the creative needs to actually be good to keep people from just turning the page, but hey, that's our fucking job, right? Toughen up.)

And of course it's digital, so we can actually do shit.

Yo, automotive clients: want to let users who stare at your print ad in Esquire for a few seconds automatically see it transition into your broadcast sixty, and then let the reader "build their own" right there in the page? No fucking problem. Added a new offer? Update the existing media buys... in real time!  Pharma guys—tired of all of those terms and conditions being tiny type in your print ads? Well let's just put them behind a button. You get the idea.

Get ready, digital creatives. Imagine if every ad you made was an Eyeblaster takeover with a real budget for creative, and instead of making 90 different banners you make 3. Imagine you had some real time to make them right. Imagine if you got the time, the budgets, the quality and the client attention that your above-the-line counterparts do.

I'm pretty sure this is where we are going folks. Just like now we talk about "is this rich media or a 40k?," we're moving into the era of "we need two set-top-box sixties with "click-to-learn-more", one rich digital spread, three still interactive spreads, and one mobile platform app"

And no more fucking banners.