creative

DRIFTLAB presents the re-launch of DRIFTLAB.com, the online hub of the award-winning interactive agency.

Friend of Murketing Rubi McGrory is rounding up foodstuffs “with logos built right in — when you eat the food, you eat the logo.”

This is in connection with an exhibition here in Savannah.

Examples:

Sweet Foods

• M&Ms
• Oreos
• Jelly Belly
• Sweet Tarts
• Lorna Doons

Not sweet Foods

• Carrs crackers
• Goldfish (the food is the logo)
• Chex mix (again, the food is the logo)

More savory examples particularly needed.

Thoughts? Please ask around! Answer below or on Rubi’s blog.

Thank you, brilliant and generous people!

The Humongo crew is headed to Austin, TX for SXSW, the annual music, film and interactive super festival. We'll be attending the geekiest portion of the conference - SXSWinteractive.

Stuck at home? Not to worry. We'll be doing our best to share our experience. And we're also producing a series of videos interviewing interesting people that we believe you might be inspired by.

Check the Brand Flakes for Breakfast SXSW Edition for the latest from all of the Humongo superstars (and friends):


Darryl Ohrt: That's me, the official Prime Minister of Awesome at the world's greatest agency.

Chris Spada: Designer, creator, and now blogger at Humongo. He'll be hitting Austin for the first time. Chris will also be covering the conference at CT's creative powerhouse ConnCreatives.

Kristien Del Ferraro: From our new awesomely cool parent company Source Marketing, Kristien will be sharing her internet genius, and also hitting the geek festival as a first timer.

Ben Kunz: Thought leader, Business Week writer, blogger for Thought Gadgets, and man of brilliance from media buying and strategy firm MediAssociates will be interviewing the internet's brightest people on BrandFlakes video.

Renato Ghio: (Yes, that's a wig.) The master with a HD camera and editing suite in his backpack, he's the man responsible for all of the world-famous PlaidNation tour videos. He'll be producing the best interviews of the smartest people.
So make room for a little bit of Texas!

Creativity Magazine just named their 50 people and companies who they believe have made the biggest impact across creative culture.

While they completely missed out on Humongo and Brand Flakes for Breakfast, we like that they included Lady Gaga, our friends at Ford Motors, our new best brother Alex Bogusky, and a bunch of other agencies that are bigger than us.
You can always Photoshop yourself into the list, and give it to your mom for the fridge.

Since the destruction of books and/or use of books as sort of raw material to build something else, has been a theme of some recent posts, here are some different sorts of visual approaches to the idea of the book:

Via Junk Culture: “The act of hunting for and photographing bound periodicals and journals is fundamental to Mickey Smith’s process. She does not touch, light, or manipulate the books and words – preferring to document them as found in the stacks, created by the librarian, and positioned by the last unknown reader.”

And E has reminded me of this series by Abelardo Morell.

… as well as this one by Victor Shrager.

Finally, while randomly poking around on this a little more I encountered, via this site, the “Sorted Books” project by Nina Katchadourian. “The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom.” To wit:

You probably like reading Wired because it keeps you up on the latest in everything interactive, technology, design and stuff that we generally like to call "yummy."
It's also fun to look back a few years at the stuff our industry pimped, promoted and then threw away. That's the premise of Wired Reread, a blog devoted to scanning old issues of Wired to show dead, funny, or the overall ridiculousness of our industry. Like an ad for Geocities, above. Geocities. Hehe.

I don't know why, but over-sized props thrown into real life always looks interesting.
So when PokerStars.com needed to get the word out about their super large hub of everything poker, they pulled together really large English rugby players, and some extra large cards. Cute. In a rugby player playing poker kind of way.

I've been saying this forever, but Chris Brogan just perfectly summarized what should be the new business card etiquette, everywhere:

Unless you want to do business with me, don’t give me a business card. We both know how to reach each other, so unless one of us asks for one, let’s not hand them out. We tend to give out business cards because we’ve been taught this is what to do. It’s not. It’s the old way. In the old way, we just blast people with messages whenever WE need something. In the new way, you and I should only exchange cards if we’re looking to do future business. Otherwise? We roughly know how to reach each other, don’t we?

Save a card. Save the planet. Rewire the way humans do business.

Seems like common sense, right? Yet how many meetings did you sit through in the last week, where everyone in the meeting did the card exchange? Even though everyone in the meeting is already on the same email thread.
Business cards: only when you absolutely need them. (Pictured above: the single best business card, ever.)

Chrysler is establishing a new Ram brand that focuses exclusively on trucks while re-positioning Dodge as a vehicle-only brand.

Via PSFK: This brief report on the installation of fake storefronts to make downtown Tynesdale look less moribund than it really is. I’ve been trying to find more/better images, but I’m now giving up. My Google-fu and and Flickr-fu are inadequate, I guess; if you can help let me know.

Meanwhile, here’s my idea for the Tynesdale City Council: Make T-shirts advertising these hypothetical businesses. A nice minimalist slate-gray T with the “delicatessen?” on it could be good.

Also: In my last imaginary brand roundup I forgot to include the below development noted by Gladys Santiago:

If you’ve seen the Filet-O-Fish commercial McDonald’s airs for Lent, then you’re familiar with “Frankie the Fish” and his infectious jingle.  Not being one to miss an opportunity to capitalize on kitschy sentimentality, McDonald’s has released a “Frankie the Fish” novelty frame that was obviously inspired by pop culture sensation, Big Mouth Billy Bass.

Here it is:

I guess this isn’t “imaginary,” but it’s pretty meta:

Ad campaign “riffs on” (e.g., swipes) a pop-culture-sensation product of the recent past; converts it into a commercial icon; and then takes it to retail, where the packaging continues to deliver the sell (“give me back that filet-o-fish,” which I gather is what the object actually sings) and in fact to tout the item’s tv-ad  provenance.

That’s $29.98 at Taylor Gifts.

Our friend @scottyhendo and his friends are up to some awesome goodness.

Their company Cause Shift is producing remarkable, innovating thinking for non-profits. They just launched a new campaign We Can End This, a nationwide campaign to end hunger.

They'll also be facilitating a "Cause Lab", to be kicked off at SXSW in a few days, that will pull together some of the industry's brightest people for brainstorming, strategic thinking and conceptualization on how to best make this happen market by market across the country.

Think you can't make a difference? Here's proof that a handful of people can pull together some of the biggest brands and thinkers in the business to make magic happen.

(Oh - and if you're going to SXSW, bring a can of food with you. Or participate in the Cause Lab, and help make change happen.)
Disclosure: We friended Scott on the PlaidNation tour, he's since become a client, but that doesn't change our opinion that this is revolutionary breakthrough work.

We've all heard the buzz about widgets, but the truth is, not many brands have done this well. Worklight is looking to change that.

Check out the widget they produced for Best Western. Guests can get rates, check availability and make reservations without ever leaving Facebook, the blogs or the sites that they're on.
With the Worklight platform, brands can build widgets once (or have their agencies build them :), and Worklight syndicates it out to multiple platforms. Securely. Sounds like a deal. Let's go.

Here's a super awesome case study on how a local burger joint in Milwaukee used Four Square to pack his restaurant with patrons, more than doubling his typical Sunday sales.
That's a 110% increase in business without an agency, without advertising, without super bad tv spots. It's a good day for burgers and fries. From @DJLitten

The sound "shine" corresponds closely to the word "employee" in Japanese. "Grey Shines" is an innovative interactive musical featuring actual employees of GREY

We have some gigantically exciting news to share. The agency formerly known as Plaid has been acquired by Source Marketing (an MDC Partners company) and will now become Humongo.

Humongo?
We feel that this new partnership deserves more than a press release. It's a huge move. A massive combination of creative super power. If awesome were a size XL, it would be Humongo. So as of today, that's the name of the greatest agency in all of the land.

Humongo. Say it out loud, with your arms in the air. Isn't it fun?



We're pretty stoked. We'll now have the resources to grow like never before. We'll have access to affiliate agencies that provide our clients what we can't. Imagine a small digital creative agency with the keys to the big guys. That's Humongo.

Our new parent company Source Marketing brings massive marketing prowess to the table that can only be described as ginormous. Sales funnels? Retail activation? ROI? Want your marketing campaign to pay for itself super fast? They've been doing all of that and more for companies like Bic, Philips, Reckitt Benckiser, Panasonic, Hunter Douglas, HSBC, Intel, Time Warner Cable and others.

We're also a part of the MDC Partners network. That gives Humongo some ginormous company. Agencies like Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal and Partners, Veritas Communications, Vitro Robertson, Mono, Red Scout...and did we mention Crispin, Porter & Bogusky??

There's plenty more on deck to be announced in the coming months. In the meantime, we'll be making our clients huge, building creative campaigns that rock the nation, and generally planning world domination.

Get in on the Humongo action.
Follow us on Twitter. Become our fan on Facebook. Check out the Humongo website. More importantly, take a look at your brand and ask yourself "could I use a little Humongo?"
We're here, ready to make something huge for you.

A bit late on this, but over the weekend Virginia Heffernan’s column was a consideration of physical books by a professed ebook fan. Jumping from Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” which rhapsodizes about the the amassing even of books you never read, she writes:

If he says not reading books can be as sophisticated and European as reading them, I believe him, and I will try to think of my books as Sèvres china. But Sèvres china, if I had any, would be for display on its days off, wouldn’t it? So how do I display or otherwise admire all these books I keep buying for the Kindle?

Unpacking my Kindle library, I click “menu” on my screen and find . . . a list. First, the words “The Happiness Project,” the title of a book by Gretchen Rubin, in stout dark gray lettering, underscored by a lighter, less stout line.

This might be depressing. I can’t tell if I’m supposed to consider this underlined title to be the “book” I ordered from Amazon. Maybe it’s more like a catalog listing. If I click on it, I’ll get to the words in the book. Maybe it’s analogous to a book’s spine.

I want to rhapsodize, as Benjamin does, when he remembers the tactics he employed to acquire the book “Fragmente aus dem Nachlass eines jungen Physikers” (Johann Wilhelm Ritter, 1810) after a Berlin auction. But the only memory I have of purchasing “The Happiness Project” is no memory at all….

Read the rest here. It’s interesting. See also if you missed it the Murketing post on book spines as wallpaper, here.

On a slightly related note, I offered some examples a while back of artists and designers making things out of books in a post on Significant Objects. Two more examples here:  the one above by Paul Octavious, via SwissMiss, and the other by Matej Kren, below, via Book Of Joe.

The awards will be given for writing that demonstrates the greatest evidence of eloquence, analysis, perspective, insight and original thinking to further a public understanding of design in contemporary culture. Writing that advances the visual expression of a design program, argument or thesis is also eligible. Entries may address any design discipline or form, including, but not limited to: architectural, environmental, fashion, graphic, industrial, information, interactive, product and strategic.

More details here. Deadline June 1. Top award $10,000.

$10,000!

The jury is Jessica Helfand, Paola Antonelli, Steven Heller, and … um, me.

Money. How many times have you been out with friends, and you just need some more cash to pick up the next round? And the bar has an ATM, but there's a $7 service fee.

Not to worry. Absolut has you covered, with a branded cash machine that doles out the dough without any service fee. Think people will buy Absolut on the next round?
(More importantly, do all of the girls in Europe wear ginormous belts??)

Your creative brief: show that this BMW Superbike can go from 0 to 60 in 2.9 seconds. How do you do that?
Simple, effective, awesome. From The Denver Egotist.