pov: a chemistry blog

Shaken, Not Stirred.

meredithblakeatchem — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 18:09:49 -0400

Friends, fans, clients and slightly creepy internet stalkers: we have (re)arrived! During the past few months we’ve been strategically silent on this blog as we focused our attention on bigger things - like moving offices and expanding our agency.

But fear not. We have returned and in a way which we hope will reign most triumphant.

We’ve recently nominated ourselves (we’re flattered, really) to be part of the Business Times’ Social Madness Challenge. And while fishing for votes is fun, we’re not really the anglin’ type. So we decided to take this challenge and use it as less of a game we want to win and more of a motivator to practice what we preach to clients of all shapes and sizes and reenter the social media world with a bang.

Or a buzz…

To kick things off, we’re hosting an event. A mixer. It’s time we marketing folk came together as one and talked, in a candid way, about how social media can and should be integrated into how we do business. It’s not the same for everyone, nor should it be. We’re on a mission to bring brilliant minds together to talk shop (and drink). And if you’re reading this, you’re invited. So come one, come all, enjoy the free drinks and food and join us in our quest to shed light on how social media can better your business.

If you decide to join (and while you’re there), we encourage you to tweet about the event using the hashtag #SocialMix and our handle @VisitTheLab.

See you there!

Shaken, Not Stirred.

meredithblakeatchem — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 18:09:05 -0400

But fear not. We have returned and in a way which we hope will reign most triumphant.

Or a buzz…

If you decide to join (and while you’re there), we encourage you to tweet about the event using the hashtag #SocialMix and our handle @VisitTheLab.

See you there!

Some great inspiration, found on the ‘advertising’...

msprout — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 10:39:10 -0500

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.

The Top 10 Movies About Advertising

msprout — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 15:31:00 -0500

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:

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.
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.
Sweet November – (2001) – Keanu Reeves. What else can one say?
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.
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.
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.
Boomerang – (1992) – Eddie Murphy. Advertising. Two great tastes that taste great together.
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.
.
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.
.
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...

msprout — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:54:01 -0500

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,...

msprout — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 13:25:54 -0500

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.

A Surprising Question of the Day

msprout — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:11:00 -0500

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!

Photo

msprout — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:02:25 -0500

Speaking of QR Codes, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City recently...

msprout — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 15:52:00 -0500

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!

A Look at 30 Other Corporate Logo Redesigns

msprout — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 14:45:00 -0500

A Look at 30 Other Corporate Logo Redesigns:

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...

msprout — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:33:54 -0500

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.

Dell Promotional Stunt Goes Terribly Wrong

msprout — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:51:43 -0500

Dell Promotional Stunt Goes Terribly Wrong:

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.

The only Super Bowl recap you'll ever need

msprout — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:22:30 -0500

The only Super Bowl recap you'll ever need:

Here’s a great recap of the Super Bowl from Make The Logo Bigger. Some good analysis on what was one of the biggest and strangest Super Bowls yet.

The Little Idea that Could

chuckbarkey — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 13:25:30 -0500

Recently, fashion designer Kenneth Cole posted the following tweet:

Exhibit A:

It was insensitive and tasteless. It was received VERY poorly to say the least. And it made me realize something. …When it comes to marketing, it’s a lot easier for a really bad idea to see the light of day than it is for a really good idea.

In today’s world of instant communication, instant messaging and instant gratification, all it takes for a bad idea to reach the masses seems to be a three martini lunch, a lapse in better judgment and a smart phone. (See exhibit A.) I have no idea if Kenneth Cole was drinking, and I’m not even sure if the tweet was actually written by him. All I know is that Kenneth Cole shareholders are probably experiencing instant regret today.

Now to be clear, I’m not bashing social media’s place and future in world of marketing. For every misstep like the Kenneth Cole Cairo Tweet, there are million examples of how Facebook and Twitter are redefining the way brands responsibly communicate with their customers with positive outcomes.

I’m simply using the incident to highlight something that we as creatives sometimes fail to appreciate in our business – the resiliency and survival of a good idea. Assuming we as writers and art directors happen to stumble upon the proverbial “homerun” idea while we’re tucked away in some back corner breakaway room or the local coffee house, let’s take a look at the minefield this homerun idea must navigate before it reaches the eyes and ears of a consumer.

First, our creative partner needs to buy into the idea and hopefully recognize the sheer genius of the right side of our brain. This is especially important in the case of writers, since those damn art directors sometime wield the power to decide what ideas get laid out and what doesn’t. (That reminds me, I HAVE to learn InDesign soon.) After that, the idea needs to run the gauntlet internally throughout the agency. Depending on the size of said agency, this may include selling the concept to an associate creative director, group creative director and chief creative officer. And that’s just to make it out of the creative department. After that, the idea is presented to and hopefully loved by the account team, account planners and strategists.

That was just the warm up. Now the fun begins. Assuming everyone in the agency loves your idea, we begin the task of selling the concept to the client. The thing about clients is that they’re like fingerprints – no two are the same. Presenting good ideas to clients is an art form. One that I have come to deeply appreciate over the course of a 14-year career.

Let’s assume the brand managers, chief marketing officer and CEO all lose their voices cheering for said homerun idea. It still needs to be executed and executed well. The world is littered with skeletons of pencil-worthy ideas that simply keeled over and died because of poor execution.

It’s quite a journey that a poor, innocent naïve idea takes in its quest to become “real.” With that in mind, let’s all take a minute this Sunday, when we see that one Super Bowl spot that blows our mind, to appreciate the treacherous course that the idea conquered in order for us to experience it. And to also never forget to appreciate, recognize and thank the creative partners, creative directors, account managers, clients, producers, directors, editors, media buyers and bartenders that all helped shepherd our genius yet helpless and vulnerable ideas to fruition. …Instead of stomping on it like a cockroach.

(Go Steelers!)

Chuck Barkey is the Senior Copywriter at Chemistry, has 14 years experience in advertising, and will be late to work on Monday if the Steelers win their 7^th Super Bowl title.

The Big Game is coming up, and since Chemistry is situated...

msprout — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 11:39:00 -0500

The Big Game is coming up, and since Chemistry is situated smack-dab in the epicenter of Steeler Nation, we’re positively atwitter with excitement. Doubly so because we’re advertisers, and this Super Bowl contains two of our favorite things: ads and Steelers Total War.

When I was catching up on AgencySpy this morning, I noticed that Crispin Porter + Bogusky started trickling out photos from an on-set shoot of a Super Bowl commercial starring Ozzy Ozbourne and Justin Beiber. Seems interesting, right? Well, that’s the thing – can you hype up a commercial? What does it do?

A comment left by a user raises a good point:

generating buzz for a commercial seems like a bad move - now it’s gotta live up to the hype it created for itself, which is a lot tougher than simply being a funny spot.

Perhaps that’s what is so strange about Super Bowl commercials - the spend associated with them make the production team feel more like blockbuster film producers. They’ve got expensive actors, monstrous special effects, champion production values and are representing humongous brands; it seems logical to want to hype up something like that.

But, suppose that the hype takes off and the ad isn’t funny, memorable or even really well put together – if the spot stinks, that can really bring people’s opinions of the brand down.

Seems like quite a gamble. I guess that’s what makes this thing so exhilarating!

Remember the ads in comic books? Well, they’re back! Join...

msprout — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:02:56 -0500

Remember the ads in comic books? Well, they’re back!

Join today!

Have you ever heard of Dead Space? For those that haven’t,...

msprout — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:18:00 -0500

Have you ever heard of Dead Space? For those that haven’t, Dead Space is a multi-platform video game that made its way through the popularity circuit a few years ago to the mark of great success. It’s violent, cerebral, aggressive, and best of all, a blast to play. Its original marketing wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary for the video game market – focused PR efforts, gaming magazines, TV and print ads, in-store stand-ups and the occasional blog outreach effort.

However, with the sequel peeking over the horizon, Electronic Arts (Dead Space’s publisher) decided to take a new approach to marketing the game - one that tries to tap the 15-year-old in all of us by presuming that, if our mothers hate it, it must be cool. So, the marketing team sat a group of mothers down in a room and showed them footage of the game - and their reactions are fairly predictable. Disgust, disdain and scorn were all on the menu, so, it must be a pretty cool game.

We’re seeing EA encourage the use of the hash tag #mymomhatesdeadspace2 and the use of video footage to record parents’ reactions to the game.

Ah, an appeal to the rebellious spirit in all of us. Innovative!

More videos at their campaign site: YourMomHatesThis.com

(More Information)

AdAge: "Happy 40th Birthday to Intel's 4004, the Chip That Made the World Digital"

msprout — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:19:33 -0500

AdAge: "Happy 40th Birthday to Intel's 4004, the Chip That Made the World Digital":

It’s hard to believe that one of the early chips that kicked off one of the most prosperous industrial revolutions in the history of humanity is only – surprise surprise – 40 years old. For all of the talk and action within our industry about how quickly the world is changing, this article from Advertising Age sure does put this whole digital thing in perspective.

Take a moment to read it - you won’t regret it.

This is a particularly cool video that was brought to our...

msprout — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:49:37 -0500

This is a particularly cool video that was brought to our attention by way of AgencySpy. Audi Japan, celebrating the popularity of the QR code in the Land of the Rising Sun, organized what is claimed to be the largest QR code ever devised.

Whether that claim is true or false, one can only appreciate the scale of this production. Getting so many people to accurately form such a complicated pattern is impressive!

(By the way, if you scan your computer monitor, you’ll get redirected to http://audi.jp/qr)

Yahoo Could Have Bought Facebook For 2% Of Today's Valuation

msprout — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 16:49:00 -0500

Yahoo Could Have Bought Facebook For 2% Of Today's Valuation:

A fascinating and sobering look at how quickly things change in the digital world. With the news that Facebook is currently estimated at $50 billion dollars, this comes as an eye-opener.