Some great inspiration, found on the ‘advertising’ tag here on Tumbr. It’s so cool to see interesting uses of billboards – real head-turning stuff.

However, to all of the other advertisers out there, be a little careful with the head-turning factor – people are trying to drive cars, y’know.

(Source: )

Over on the ‘Ask Us Anything’ feature we run on the Chemistry Facebook page, somebody asked us about the top 10 movies about advertising. We took a poll around the office and scraped together our favorite movies about our favorite industry.

We actually had to scratch together this list, considering how few movies there are about advertising, and how few of them actually would actually qualify under what any normal human would call ‘best.’

But, we tried anyway. And here it is, in no particular order:

1. Crazy People - (1990) - There’s something to be said about this movie that can’t rightly be articulated. The movie is about an ad exec that essentially loses his marbles and, in a cut-and-run kind of situation, pitches a bunch of ideas that are strangely honest. It’s chock-full of inside jokes for advertising types and non-advertising-types alike.
   
   
2. Nothing In Common – (1986) – A movie starring a young Tom Hanks that revolves around a frustrated ad executive trying to deal with his stodgy father. Tons of great humor in here interspersed with rainclouds of pain and anguish.
   
   
3. Sweet November – (2001) – Keanu Reeves. What else can one say?
   
   
4. What Women Want – (2000) – This movie, starring a younger and less deranged Mel Gibson, told the tale of an advertiser who can suddenly hear any woman’s internal dialogue. It’s not a terrible picture, but it’s worth it to see Gibson’s pitch to Nike. As the legend goes, the producers of the movie actually hired Wieden + Kennedy to do a real spec ad for the movie. That extra mile is a breath of fresh air in this category.
   
   
5. Mr. Mom – (1983) – Besides the fact that Michael Keaton is a native son of Pittsburgh, Mr. Mom really stands up on its own. Not to be confused with the movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming the first pregnant man, Mr. Mom follows an advertiser as he has to suddenly take care of his kids. I mean, come on – it’s Michael Keaton.
   
   
6. North by Northwest – (1959) – Although it’s not necessarily about advertising, it’s fun to imagine otherwise. This classic Hitchcock movie follows an advertiser as he gets mistaken for a spy and spends his days running for his life.
   
   
7. Boomerang – (1992) – Eddie Murphy. Advertising. Two great tastes that taste great together.
   
   
8. Kramer Vs. Kramer - (1979) – This delightful movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep follows a divorced advertiser as he fights to keep custody of his kiddo and keep his career afloat. A real tear-jerker, but, you get to see Meryl Streep before she looked like a roadmap.
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9. How to Get Ahead In Advertising – (1989) – A classic movie about advertising that follows an ad exec struggling to come up with a way to sell pimple cream. The guy stresses and stresses until he makes this crazy little bulge pop out of his shoulder. I guarantee that you have probably seen this parodied multiple times already.
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10. Putney Swope – (1969) – At the suggestion of this list, we threw this one onto here. It’s not often that you see any movies that highlight the world of a black advertising agency, so it’s a fascinating watch.

So, if you’re bored on a Saturday night, here are some suggestions to study up!

This is a pretty sweet campaign coming out of New York. BBDO New York is running this billboard that illustrates Derek Jeter having his face shaved over the course of several days. It’s a pretty clever implementation that just shows that no medium is dead – it’s only waiting to be watered by good ideas.

Throw this one on the ‘inspiration’ pile.

julienki:

Best Advertising Technique Ever !

Well, it’s pretty interesting at least. Copyranter is less than enthused.

What do you think? Drop us a comment.

If you have yet to begin reading it, Chemistry has a little side-project that allows anybody to anonymously ask us anything. No matter what the question may be, we’ll do our best to answer it as truthfully and as completely as possible. If the facts we’re looking for simply don’t exist, we’ll make them up. We will stop at nothing to alleviate mild curiosity.

Normally, this feature exists on our Facebook page – but I felt that this question was too pressing to just leave there.

The question we were asked: How many pieces of Bacon would it take to kill an average sized man?

Our answer: Okay, so, we have to be a little honest before we continue, here – we only have cursory knowledge of psychology and gastronomy. However, with a couple of quick gleans and a determined commitment to our intuition, we’ll answer this pressing question.

To begin tackling this, one has to first figure out where to start. The reigning question is, what compound of bacon is most likely to kill an average-sized man?

Iron is one of bacon’s core components, but interestingly, it contains relatively little of it in each serving. Everything else isn’t concentrated in amounts that are capable of killing you.

We have to examine what bacon has in spades: sodium.

The human body is typically pretty efficient at purging and processing sodium, but when suddenly tasked with dealing with a great deal of it at once, it gets problematic.

The common serving of bacon is 2 slices, at roughly 28g each. Assuming that you bake your death-strips (for sake of removing the ‘oil content’ variable), a typical serving would consist of 1262mg of sodium.

We were told that it would take in the upwards of 40 teaspoon of sodium to disable the average man. Rough calculations indicate that 5 grams would fit into a single teaspoon, bringing us to a grand total of 200g of sodium needed to take down a voracious bacon eater.

After some simple algebra, we arrive at a grand total of 317 slices of bacon.

So, it appears that, in order to kill the average-sized man on the spot, he would need to consume over 8,876 grams of bacon in one sitting.

That’s just a little bit over 19 pounds.

Feel free to check our math on this one. We calculated and tabulated to the best of our ability, but, even amateur researchers can be wrong!

(Source: wiretap)

Speaking of QR Codes, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City recently unveiled a new plan today that incorporates QR codes into building permits. A passing New Yorker will be able to scan it, follow a link and learn more about what’s getting built, when the hearing is and have the easy ability to voice concerns.

If you ever doubted the viability of the QR code in the United States, this could very well be a tipping point!

(Source: Mashable)

Who could forget the abysmal Gap logo fiasco a little while ago? AdWeek takes a pretty funny look backwards at 30 of biggest logo redesigns in the past good while. You may look at this list and see some logos you like and some you don’t like, but everyone will at least go home otherwise feeling a little sticky and a little bit better.

QR codes.

They’re the center of a lot of hype in the industry right now, and for good reason – they’re a fantastic bridge between physical media and mobile media. They’ve been super active in southeast Asia for ages now, but finally, they’ve begun to bleed over into the United States by way of smart phones and ubiquitous phone cameras.

For the uninitiated, what is a QR code? Well, come back to a bar code – it’s one-dimensional series of lines that, when interpreted, deliver a specific string of numbers. QR codes are an evolution of barcodes – they’re two dimensional, and as such, can hold more information. You can embed links, text, geographic coordinates, data and any other wizardry you can manage to wrap into plain text.

However, how useful are they? Not quite, but they’re getting there. If you’ve yet to really make the jump into the world of QR codes, now’s the time to truly explore them. Whip out your smart phone, grab a QR reader app (search your app store for ‘QR reader’ – one will undoubtedly come up) and keep your eye out.

Protip: scan the one directly above this post.

This one is just weird – Dell was attempting to put together an in-house promotion for the release of their new tablet and accidentally made their entire office go on lockdown.

Worse yet, the organizers of the stunt were arrested on misdemeanor charges.

Read on for the whole story on what they managed to do.