Somewhere out there

Somewhere out there, beneath the blanket of the dark night, someone else is looking at the same city that I see and wondering if they will ever find “it.” Will they ever find their one true love? Will they ever find a job that will provide them with what they need? Will they find a set of friends to share laughs and tears with? Will they be accepted into a good school? Will they get that promotion they so deeply desire? Will their loved one make it through the night? Will that special someone call? And here I am, wondering about those who wonder. I wish I could spend the day in someone else’s head. There are some that I think would be more interesting then others but mostly I would want to get far away from my own head and see how other people’s thoughts really work and if mine are abnormal. It is funny because even the one or two people who I am closest with really have no idea what goes on in my head. They have perhaps scratched the surface but really do not know the depths of my emotions and the intensity of my feelings. I feel overwhelmed yet underwhelmed at many things, and wonder about how I perceive love and happiness. I think that I could write for a thousand years and still not be able to convey my teeming thoughts. Hah. Who would care? Maybe someone would care, someone out there who thinks the way that I think, and wonders what I wonder. Perhaps. But perhaps, the pursuit of “it” leads to an endless journey, because the journey is what counts, and once you finally get there, you realize that there is no “there” there.

work work work… all I ever do around here is work

The corporate life is…. so entirely corporate. It seems to suck creativity and imagination as if it were a galaxy sized hoover vacuum or a life sized hooker. The constant berating from the boss, the ultimate judgment from peers, and the harsh criticisms of mass emails sent to god knows who. The constant desire to perform, the necessity to do quality work for the company who I read about in the newspaper every single day but who knows not my name nor my face. The barren landscape of the corporate world is so alive and teeming with such performers, actors, and affiliates, and it is a greased up machine that has a life of its own and can destroy the heart of the weak or the strong. I hope to show this universe that I can face this machine and prove to it that I am prepared and that I am up for the challenge. I will protect my creativity at all costs, even if I have to bury it away deep inside myself so that it cannot be taken from me. It is necessary for me to go through the motions that the corporation deems appropriate and make it through the ultimate endurance test of my life. The only hope that I have, once again, is that someday someone will see how much I care.

 

BUT for now…. FUCK I am frustrated with this entity and existence. Please let me make it out alive.

 

say

I want to say something interesting. I want to say something funny and thought provoking and intellectual. I want to say something that will convey to others the idea that I am an individual, I am brilliantly unique. With the narrow set of letters and prescribed words that I am given I feel limited. The  expression of ones soul, the entirety of ones being laid out on a piece of paper or a computer screen, displayed for the perusal of the people. The impossibility that I can express myself given these limitations is imminent. The improbability of anyone taking the time to contemplate, or much less understand the meaning is so excruciatingly low that I almost find it hard to understand the convictions of some who continuously express the depths of their thoughts.  Yet I write. Yet I post. Yet I continue to try to show my deep, dark, troubled, and inspired contemplations on a page which few will ever see.

And This

I couldn’t believe my eyes while I was watching this. Is it real? I don’t know. You tell me.

Y&Ragain

I hate to admit this, but I haven’t really looked extensively at the work done by Y&R before. I have gone through so many of their videos and images, and honestly their work is brilliant. It is so consistently artistic and thought provoking and like I said before, always very much on strategy. But the part that gets me is really the artistic aspect. When I was entering high school in the IB program, I had to be interviewed by a panel. They asked me what I wanted to do with my life, and I told them that I wanted to be a composer. But not any old composer, I wanted to create my own genre of music involving string instruments and heavy electronic drum beats. I used to create such music on my electric piano. But beyond just composing music, I wanted to compose images to go along with that music. My inspiration was that screensaver with the gyrating lines. I used to be entranced by those lines, and was frustrated that there was no music to go along with them.

The work done by Y&R brings tears to my eyes because their ads are what I was imagining when I was 13 years old. I have gotten so lost and confused in the world of academia that I almost forgot what really inspires emotion in my heart and in my mind. Here is one of the commercials that really struck me:

It is exactly what I was imagingin when I played with my dolls, my characters, barbies, paper dolls, beanie babies, tinker toys, polly pockets, legos, pogs, etc. I am in awe of Y&R.

Young & Rubicam

with a fresh and dark twist on Cinderella, Young & Rubicam came up with a great story line for a commercial. So many commercials these days are just gimmicks, trying to be funny and memorable but backed with no strategy. Young & Rubicam seems to understand that an integral piece of an ad IS the strategy behind it. It is apparent that the agency, as opposed to the clients they work with, come up with the strategies because every single camapign put out by Y&R has a great strategy. Not all clients present their creative agencies with cohesive strategies to work with, so this step is up to the account managers at the agency. So without further adieu…

The strategy behind this ad is as follows:

Target Market: Women ages 20-35, affluent, image conscious

Benefit: Your hair will get you noticed

Support: Fast beautiful styling

Brand Character: Sassy, sexy, unattainable, rich

Focus of Sale: Sassy, sexy, unattainable, rich

I like how the entire strategy is conveyed without words, barely any copy words, and extremely striking visuals.

Copy: You can do anything with your hair

Nike Grid

Yet another awesome even put on by Wieden & Kennedy! They challenged joggers and runners to run to certain phone booths around town, dial a number and enter their individual identifier, and then were sent from that phone booth to another phone booth! There was even a competition between boys and girls!

This kind of event would definitly motivate me to run more. If you have the feeling that someone somewhere is watching you and keeping tabs on how much and how fast you run, you will inevitably go faster. And challenging people do DO more and RUN more and BE healthier is what Nike is all about! Right on, W&K.

awesome sites… again!!

I like this one because I hate the whole apologizing process, hey i’m sorry, schmeh i don’t forgive you, rumble rumble rumble, pout pout pout, beg for forgiveness, finally come around. So hopefully this letter can circumvent all that dumb crap and get to the finally come around part!

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2bZLz4/swissmiss.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/18/picture_11.png

cool stuff

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1w8JSm/www.pilothandwriting.com/en/

 

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/34m3D4/current.com/technology/92490834_8-month-old-deaf-baby-s-reaction-to-cochlear-implant-being-activated.htm

 

They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? – Jeanette Winterson

 

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2napwi/www.visualnews.com/2010/12/20/snowflakes-up-close-a-small-fragile-world/

 

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1VKR9D/from-a-fatty-to-fit.blogspot.com/

Strategic Analysis of Baby Carrot ads

Yes, I too have fallen victim to the recent ads for baby carrots. The ads reminded me how fun and easy it is to eat baby carrots, how healthy they are, and how cool I look eating them. Actually that’s not true. I started eating baby carrots because the ads are done by Crispin Porter and I thought it was funny that such a notorious ad agency is doing a campaign for BABY CARROTS! hah. So I thought to myself, I am not the typical consumer. I may not even be the target market for baby carrots, but who is? So I decided to do a strategic analysis of the baby carrot ad campaign. Undoubtedly this post will top the charts for the most popular and widely read blog articles of 2011, probably of the decade or century (just so long as nobody writes an article strategically analyzing the recent Kay Jeweler ads, phew that would be mind blowing).

So we all know that CP creates ad campaigns that generate buzz around products, and attract attention to social media campaigns. Refer to the Burger King “King” stunt for proof of this fact. Everyone knows about the King, people dress up as the King for Halloween, and post sightings of he King on their Twitter accounts. But the real question is, did the King drive sales for Burger King, or were their advertising dollars wasted, the ad impressions not being an indication of people switching brands? The existence of the King did not give consumers insight into a benefit of switching brands from McDonalds or Wendy’s to Burger King.

The consumer behavior objective for Baby Carrots is to get snackers to switch from salty snacks and other unhealthy options to Baby Carrots. Focus: Getting people to SWITCH brands.

The Baby Carrot ads are targeted at unhealthy snackers. These are the people that eat out of the vending machine when they get hungry and chomp mindlessly on Doritos or Pop Tarts. When they go grocery shopping they plan ahead for this mindless snacking and buy chips and candy so they’ll have something on hand when the cravings strike.

“Easy as junk” (created by me just now, but patent pending so don’t even think about it)  is the benefit that Baby Carrots provide to the target market. I’d say that the number one focus is “EASY.” Baby Carrots are just as easy to mindlessly consume as Doritos. I believe that this is the focus due to the placement of baby carrot vending machines in High Schools accompanied by the tag line, “Eat em like junk food” –>

The support behind this reason is a little bit hard to come by in the advertising and marketing efforts because they have to create the actual support, as it does not exist inherently in the product. Carrots are not as abundantly available for snacking as Cheetos and Twizzlers. Putting the vending machines in schools provides a REASON why it’s just as easy to eat baby carrots. Additional support may be, “They’re small and crunchy,” “They come in a lil bag,” or, “They’re brightly colored.”

The key copy words in the campaign are “Eat em like Junk Food,” from the vending machine body, and “Munchies.”

The dramatization of the benefit is the packaging of the baby carrots. They are packaged in bags that look like Gushers bags, donut bags, and Dorito bags.

I find the execution to be interesting, as it is focused on one single minded idea of baby carrots being as easy as junk food. Everything from the “Chip and Abdul” ads to the vending machines radiates this campaign idea. The vending machine definitely adds credibility and strength to the promise (aka the brand benefit).

I think support for the benefit is lacking. If baby carrots are not available in all of the places that junk food are, the benefit is not true. Sure, if there were vending machines EVERYWHERE that provided baby carrots then it would be, but what about the school cafeteria, my campus grill (definitely does not have baby carrots, I checked) etc. The campaign does not pull through on the support, and I think that because of this, the customers will not relate to the advertising and profits for baby carrot farmers will not increase.

I think that if the campaign focused less on the availability of baby carrots in relation to junk food, it may be more effective. It could focus on how fun it is to eat baby carrots, or even the fact that they don’t have to be refrigerated so you can throw them in your purse or backpack and snack on them later!

So once again, a funny and clever ad campaign that may not be successful regardless of the amount of attention and buzz that it generates. It does not provide support for the consumer benefit and give consumers a real reason to switch from salty snacks to carrots.

PS it would be easy to say, oh hey, they should have focused on the health benefits of baby carrots, but the TM of people approximately ages 13-18 do not like people telling them what they should and should not eat and tend to not be very focused on health.

 

If I had a company, my goal would be to drive sales, not to generate buzz. But I guess that’s just me.