Tag Archives: print advertising

Friday Links: Tech insurgents & the myth of the fake geek girl

• From The Atlantic: When the Nerds Go Marching In, on how nerdpower worked on Obama’s successful re-election campaign.
• Betabeat’s 2012 tech insurgents.
• Geek masculinity & the myth of the fake geek girl.
• Eleven weirdly spelled words & how they got that way.
• The Oatmeal’s thoughts & musings on making things for the web. Sad & true and it’s The Oatmeal so if you have delicate sensibilities, skip it.
• 10 games Pong is better than.
• Marc Cuban says Facebook is driving way brands starting with his.
• Nine best minimalist print ads.
• Rock Me Archimedes, a cleverly named, smartly packaged board game.
• What stunningly beautiful nerdery is this? An R2D2 engagement ring.
• For nerds who like to collect random trivia: How mint became the default flavor for dental hygiene.

Here there be animated unicorns flying through space

This is just a hint of what you’ll find over at the Minneapolis Egoist. The urge to steal their thunder is unbearable. But since they were kind enough to post a sneak peak of our awesome ad soon to be running in City Pages, we figure it’d be much kinder to link you over there to take a look. When you’re done, come back here and apply for an awesome job.

Back when propellerheads built Internet Web Sites.

While scrolling through this gallery of 85 vintage computer ads. I wasn’t struck by the odd celebrity endorsements (who decided wrestler King Kong Bundy, Bill Cosy, or Dom Deluise appealed to computer users?), as much as the jargon on this ad. Propellerhead? It took me much longer than I care to admit to make the connection to those old beanies. We can all agree that nerd sounds much better than propellerhead, right?

The New Hacker’s Dictionary confirms that indeed, hackers were sometimes called propellerheads. Who knew?

Ads that drove people to the Web

Today Ad Age has a slide show featuring the 10 print ads that were most effective in driving readers to the Web. The ads are for everything from Acura to Career Builder and don’t seem to have much in common as far as the creative goes. It makes you wonder what it is that drives those magazine readers to the Web. The captions that accompany the slides make some guesses (i.e. a lot of survey respondents found green pleasing the eye), but nothing concrete.

It leads one to believe that it’s still just a crapshoot and that the audience for some ads are just more apt to head to the Web after reading something in print. MRI Starch supports this assumption by saying they’ve found that readers of car magazines are more likely to visit company Web sites than readers of any other type of magazine.

p.s. if you have trouble finding out how to launch the slide show like I did, just click the picture of the car.