And How Social Media May Save It

By: Michael Learmonth – January 30, 2012

When Ridley Scott created Apple’s iconic “1984,” the company’s board didn’t want it to air. Newly hired CEO John Sculley, veteran of many a Super Bowl ad as CEO of Pepsi-Cola Co., agreed with the consensus: It’s a waste to run an ad that doesn’t even show the product.

Apple ended up selling off some of its planned Super Bowl ad time and ran “1984″ in the 60-second slot it couldn’t unload. The rest, as they say, is history. The Macintosh did change the world as Steve Jobs said it would, and Apple is the most valuable company on the planet.

USA Today is marrying its Super Bowl panel with Facebook feedback.

The commercial also ushered in an era in Super Bowl advertising that we still inhabit: the ad as entertainment. That we expect ads during the Super Bowl to be as entertaining as the game itself can largely be traced back to “1984.” But if that were the end of the story, we’d all still be watching high-concept minimovies directed by auteurs that made us think or feel different.

But that didn’t happen, unless you define “feeling” as what it would be like to get served a beer by a dog or be hazed by chimps in a board meeting. Along the way, the Super Bowl got hijacked by D-list celebrities, talking animals and cheap gags — anything for a chuckle — and that trend can be traced to one thing: USA Today’s Ad Meter.

In 1989, just a few years after “1984,” the national newspaper introduced a revolutionary concept — and a marketing masterstroke. Take a small panel of people, isolate them in a room with a meter and tell them to constantly turn a dial rating what they’re seeing on a scale from one to 10.

The ratings, which came out Monday morning in the paper, became the most immediate and public scorecard for who “won” the Super Bowl, setting the agenda for the media of the day, morning shows and other newspapers.

“That’s the way it was, 100%. I can’t tell you how many times an advertiser has told me, ‘You’ve gotta hit the top 10, you’ve gotta hit the top 10, you’ve gotta hit the top 10,’” said Bryan Buckley, who’s directed 42 Super Bowl ads since 1999.

With so much at stake, to please the clients and bolster their own resumes, directors started creating ads for the panel — the media equivalent of teaching for the test. How do you get people to have an immediate, positive reaction to something they’re seeing? Certainly don’t show them a narrative. Make them laugh.

“It better be something that rings some bells or gets measured on the USA Today Richter Scale,” said TBWA/MediaArts Chairman Lee Clow. But the creator of “1984″ also believes it means fewer ads like that one have been made. “It’s a big challenge to spend $3 million on the time and then a million on the spot. It’s kinda difficult to then come in 19th on the USA Today ‘How’d you like our spot?’ scale.”

Not just difficult, but dangerous. In 2007, CareerBuilder famously put its business up for review the day after the Super Bowl when its Big Game ad did not crack the Ad Meter’s top 10. Cramer-Krasselt promptly resigned the account in protest. (It’s worth noting that the spot, for the first time in two years, did not feature the CareerBuilder chimps, but instead was a high- concept spot set in a jungle.)

One reason the USA Today Ad Meter remained the arbiter for so long is that the decision to advertise in the Super Bowl is the most expensive dice-roll of the year.

“Each year we agonize over whether to be in the Super Bowl; it’s $100,000 a second,” said E-Trade CMO Nicholas Utton. “Most CMOs know you don’t want to be in the bottom of the list because some people consider it to be the definitive methodology.”

There are no words to express how much glee the new Pantone Visa credit cards bring. Okay, Okay …it’s absurd (and potentially very dangerous) to get giddy over what may be  seen as the most audacious kind of marketing, on the very icon of consumerism.  But… like you don’t use a credit card

Read more at Design Milk:  http://design-milk.com/pantone-visa-card/#ixzz1kO53Y7cS

We’ve Arrived!

Welcome to the inaugural Core77 Design Awards! For the past 16 years we’ve been celebrating outstanding design and designers across a wide array of disciplines. Now we’re proud to provide a global platform that honors the very brightest, boldest and most impactful work on an annual basis. We hope to set new standards for design awards by leveraging online scale, increasing transparency and decreasing plane fuel. We’re opening the field to 15 categories, recognizing the emerging disciplines of Design for Social Impact, Design Education Initiatives, DIY and our intriguing “Never Saw the Light of Day.” The submission process is online and allows designers the opportunity to show off their pitching skills by uploading a 2-minute-30-second video as part of their entry (it’s optional but advisable).

Our jury system also gives the judging process a new twist. Rather than put each jury member on a plane and fly them to one location, we have selected a head judge for each of the categories (we call them “Jury Captains”). Based in different cities around the world, each captain will select four local experts (within train, bike or jogging distance) to join them in the evaluation process as a unified jury team. Not only that, these teams of jurors will reveal their winning choices via live web broadcasts. With jury teams in time zones as diverse as London, Tokyo, Sydney and Ahmenabad, we’re looking forward to announcement parties at all hours of the day and night.

Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the… Shorty Awards – The New York Times

Time for the 4th Annual Shorty Awards!

What do Conan O’Brien, Cory Booker, Sesame Street’s Grover, Suze Orman, Ted Leo, Neil Patrick Harris and NASA have in common? Besides being awesome, they’re all Shorty Award winners.

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media, recognizing the people and organizations producing real-time short form content on across Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Foursquare, and the rest of the social Web.

Every year, millions of people visit the Shorty Awards site to tweet nominations for their favorite social media content creators. All those tweets culminate in a highly anticipated awards ceremony that celebrates the winners in dozens of featured categories, as well as thousands of crowd-sourced community ones. For the second time, the Shorty Awards will also honor the industry’s best agencies, brands, and social media professionals.

About the Process

The public is invited to nominate social media users for excellence over the past year. Each award recognizes a content creator’s entire body of work, not just an individual tweet or post. Nominations are made by tweeting or through ShortyAwards.com.    

With an agenda to inspire and innovate, this year’s theme: Trailblazers and Trendspotters features a medley of 12 internationally acclaimed interior designers, architects, manufacturers, retailers, critics, curators, and industry leaders who will speak on what they look for when they design, create, manufacture, collect or commission contemporary design.

More information about this year’s speaker roster which includes visionaries Amy Lau, Karim Rashid, Chee Perlman, John Edelman & Stephen Burks among others, please visit: http://conversationsindesign.com/

Check out the latest work of globally prolific architect Juergen Mayer H. with whom our Agency worked on the ‘Berlin Happens’ traveling exhibit series in 2011, exciting to learn what 2012 will present with this dynamic firm that created “Metropol Parasol.” Learn more about ongoing projects in Spain, Georgia, Armenia, Germany and North America by visiting www.jmayerh.de                                                                     

Linda O’Keefe’s new BRILLIANT IN WHITE features select Gotham Public Relations Clients including the iconic Jennifer Post – who again this year is heralded among ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST TOP 100 Architects and Designers

NEW YORK – DECEMBER 2011 – Hudson Furniture Collection and Barlas Baylar, based in New York, is pleased to announce an unprecedented fashion-design creative partnership with the house of Alexander McQueen, located in London.

Innovative, new design collections will be exhibited by both talents for the very first time, including a McQueen couture gown and sculptural furniture creations by Hudson’s principal designer Barlas Baylar. 

This Alexander McQueen-Barlas Baylar creative partnership will debut at a jointly designed and exhibited capsule collection of one-of-a-kind couture fashion and architectural design, to be shown at a by-invitation-only event. This is the very first time the McQueen company has pursued such an endeavor within the architectural design industry. 

On Tuesday, December 6, 2011 in New York City from 6:00 to 9:00 PM, the two houses will together unveil brand new designs inside the Alexander McQueen showroom and contiguous Hudson Furniture showroom, featuring dramatic mannequins and larger than life furniture and sculptural designs.

Within his evolving design aesthetic, Baylar takes his unique vision into new territory, exploring the depths of new materials, forms and artful shapes. A sense of sophisticated whimsy informs these new collectible pieces, largely although not exclusively black in color.

“I am personally traversing new territory, working in a way that is highly desirable to me as a designer, an affinity that the creative directors at Alexander McQueen immediately recognized and perceived as being in tandem with how their new collection will be perceived around the world,” said Barlas Baylar, Principal and Founder at Hudson Furniture Collection.

While he is well known for use of reclaimed and refined outsized wood, metals and carbo fiber as his palette and design medium, Baylar is now taking this sensibility into a futuristic realm with a new capsule collection of entirely new shapes. Materials and forms are explored in a dramatically scaled lacquer and brass armoire, edgy geometric sculpture in nickel, and a pristinely surreal, chair as art, among other sensually exciting creations.

Hudson Furniture Collection under Barlas Baylar’s creative direction has become a destination design company, identifying concepts and aesthetics that have been embraced as modern collectibles. For the first time, Hudson explores one-of-a-kind design, and this like-mindedness of purposeful fantasy, within the Alexander McQueen creative partnership.

[PRESS OR A&D CREDENTIALS REQUIRED FOR DESIGNER INTERVIEW & EVENT INVITATION]