Tag Archives: Ad Agencies

If ad agencies planned a child’s birthday party

Here’s a little bit of satire to spice up your Tuesday. Spotted over on AdFreak, I can’t tell if this video by Toronto-based agency John St. is parodying the agency case study or simplifying it for people who don’t quite get what an ad agency can do. Either way, the video is funny.

Friday Links: Advice for marketers, agencies, and designers

• Agencies need to think like software companies
• It’s October now, time to start thinking Halloween. So I present you Dogs in StarWars costumes
• Dear Marketers: YOU don’t decide what goes viral. Any marketer who asks for a viral anything should, well, they should be flicked in the ear. Hard. (and I only say that because I’ve wasted months of my life in meetings with people who wanted us to create something that would “go viral.”
• Sometimes the commercials are hard to spot. Brand references as jokes on Jay Leno
• MIMA Summit goes gadget happy.
• Pancake making robot!
• How to effectively respond to design criticism (they don’t suggest flicking people in the ear).
• In the interest of fair and balanced linking: 1984 spoof casts Apple as the villain

BooneOakley hacks YouTube

There’s a lot of good things about working around The Nerdery (free crack/energy drinks, four-legged vacuum cleaners, rad people, etc.), but my new favorite perk is learning about the population that lives in
agency world ecosystem.

From my naive vantage point, agencies fit into one of two silos: those that take themselves way too seriously, or those that have a goofy amount of fun with their job and push the interactive agency space into cool places. Guess which one I like working with?

Enter: BooneOakley.

On the scene since 2000, these guys just launched a YouTube site. No, I’m not saying that like “they’re on The Facebook.” They literally launched a YouTube site, powered by YouTube, and getting ALL traffic
redirected from http://www.booneoakley.com.

Here’s the real fun. It’s functional. Fully. Functional. Leveraging embeddable annotations, you can fully navigate through different parts of the site. And you should, especially the bios with the pooping dog.

These guys get it, have fun with their work, are pushing it ahead, and hopefully will return my phone calls. If there’s one thing nerds like, it’s partnering with agencies that get it, have fun, and do innovative
work.

Dig it? Get up in their tweets, or leave them a YouTube message.

Matt Albiniak is a Sr. Account Nerd at Nerdery Interactive Labs. Learn more about him on the Periodic Table of Nerdery.

In case you missed it, a whole lotta links that I haven’t had time to post on Fridays

The Nerdery has been busy, busy, crazy busy lately. So busy, in fact that we’ve had actual content on Fridays instead of the weekly link dump. Now comes a busy meeting Monday, and a perfect time to get rid of these great stories that have been burning a whole in my virtual pocket.

• MinnPost – Here's a niche business: designing fonts:"There's this greater design community with all the ad agencies and design firms downtown, and the natural byproduct are the specialists," Diesel said. "We do look over each others' shoulders, and that's a very unique thing to do."
• News from the Herd: What's all this "branding" stuff about?: “This presentation by Marty Neumeier of San Francisco brand firm Neutron pretty much says it all in 20 minutes. It gives a definition and then provides a blueprint so that you too, by slide 120 or so (don’t worry, it’s one of these one word per slide numbers), will be the market leader in your category!”


• Man Vs Machine: Robot Programmed to Love Traps Woman in Lab, Hugs Her Repeatedly: “The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly. The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji.”


• Registration Open for MN.swf Camp 2009 | blackcj.com
• Finance and Commerce: Ad Agencies, clients catch stimulus fever: “Or so it would seem, given that two Twin Cities marketing firms are already attempting to win new clients by offering their own “stimulus packages.”
• Scanwiches: Don't look at this if you are even remotely hungry. It will only make things worse.
• 10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS | How-To | Smashing Magazine: “Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look for in a CMS?”
• What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? – Stack Overflow:
  
  // Dear maintainer:
  //
  // Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
  // and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
  // please increment the following counter as a warning
  // to the next guy:
  //
  // total_hours_wasted_here = 16
• StepUp Communications | Stuff Graphic Designer’s Like: “6. Black clothes (maybe a cool dark grey at most)”
• 8 Tips to Design a Charity Website | Webdesigner Depot
• 50 Things Every Mac Geek Should Know | Mac|Life: “Like a champion cyclist knows bike parts,a car buff knows model years, and a sports fan knows win-loss records, all Mac geeks worth the title must know these things.”


• From Outcast to Awesome: 17 Famous Nerds Who Paved the Way: “>In a different age, the label Nerd induced visions of tapered, high-water jeans, thick-framed glasses, and preppy, ill-patterned shirts. Oh, the horror! Now, check out the East Village on a typical weekend and what are the most stylish gents donning? Why, tapered jeans, thick-framed glasses, and button-down shirts! My, my, my, how things have changed!”


• USATODAY.com – Psychologists now know what makes people happy: The happiest people surround themselves with family and friends, don't care about keeping up with the Joneses next door, lose themselves in daily activities and, most important, forgive easily.
• Robots – The Big Picture – Boston.com: “Robotic systems continue to evolve, slowly penetrating many areas of our lives, from manufacturing, medicine and remote exploration to entertainment, security and personal assistance. Developers in Japan are currently building robots to assist the elderly, while NASA develops the next generation of space explorers, and artists are exploring new avenues of entertainment. Collected here are a handful of images of our recent robotic past, and perhaps a glimpse into the near future. (32 photos total)”
• 10 Geeky Tricks for Getting Out of Bed in the Morning | Geekdad from Wired.com
• The Cult of Done Manifesto: “Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.”
• 10 Must-Have iPhone Apps for the Adman
• Gaywads, Dorkwads Sign Historic Wad Accord | The Onion – America's Finest News Source: "Now is the time for us to set aside our differences and join together in opposition of our common enemy–the mean, popular kids who have mercilessly inflicted locker-room wedgies upon us since time immemorial."
• Roger Ebert's Journal: Hunt not the snark but the snarker: “What concerns me is that snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, non-conformity and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line.”
• Five Myths about Content Strategy: “Yes, page flows and imagery play a huge part in shaping the online user experience. Without clear navigation and a pleasing page layout, a user's experience could hardly be considered positive. But many site owners fail to see that content plays an equally important role to structure and design in this regard. As Julie Hayden tells us in her piece on A List Apart, language is the ultimate user interface. The tone of a site and the consistency of voice can make or break a user's impression. Language is a very flexible and adaptable tool that should be used to your advantage on your website.”
• Featured Workspace: Land of the Colorful Cubes:”The size of their cube farm is modest, but the personality of it is enormous. Employees at The Balcom Agency would appear to have nearly free reign in customizing their work space. In the work spaces below you'll see everything from vivid color selections to personalized bookcases to curtains and couches and everything in between.”
• 7 Fresh and Simple Ways to Test Cross-Browser Compatibility
• 8 Visual Case Studies of Fun Marketing Materials!
• Death Star, Star Wars, Death Star, Storm Trooper: “It sucks to be a storm trooper with a heart. The Dark Side hasn't been the same since that day.”
• If social media experts aren’t experts only the charlatans will be “experts.”This is a great, great discussion about Social Media Experts, the scourge of Twitter, and how actual experts can take back the word from the charlatans.
• Agency vs freelancer

Profiles in Nerdery: Sarah Hokuf, calls Buffy a nerd, not slain (yet)

• Astrological Sign: Libra – Should I tell you that or shouldn’t I? Hmmm. . .
• Time at the Nerdery: 5 months.
• Area of expertise: Eating. Oh, you mean my skills? Eating. Well in my past life I lived and breathed design, html, zen cart, and Joomla. Now I just talk about those things and you will usually see me in LinkedIn daily.
• When people ask you what you do, how do you respond: Look at my profile in LinkedIn, it says “Director of Nerds.”
• Favorite kinds of projects to work on: By myself, ecommerce. On the Sales side, websites with fun agencies.
• What one thing about The Nerdery surprises people the most when you tell them about it: That we have dogs and beer.
• Seven dream Jeopardy Categories: 1. Name that font 2. Foods around the world 3. Movie Titles 4. Volleyball rules 5. Your cat 6. How many buttons in a jar. 7. Catch Phrase.
• Favorite Fictional Nerd: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Really, she is a nerd.
• According to the Wikipedia entry on Nerd, some nerds show a pronounced interest in subjects which others tend to find dull or complex and difficult to comprehend, or overly mature for their age, especially topics related to science, disambiguation, mathematics and technology. Do you know what disambiguation is: That sentence is too long for my attention span.