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We previously mentioned that the Rise of the Donald Trump Show had inspired some creative responses, such as a great redesign of his logo. Another benefit of the rise of the Trump has been the corresponding rise of increasingly hilarious political cartoons. Here are some of our favourites:
Edit: Looking back from 2016
Wow. At this point in time in April 2016, satire’s actually competing neck to neck with the actual Trump campaign. Where do we even start? Satire wise, perhaps the most involved effort has to do with Funny or Die’s online faux biopic “The Art of the Deal“, starring Johnny Depp. Via Rolling Stone:
“Thought to be lost in the Cybill Shepherd blouse fire of ’89, The Art of the Deal was a TV movie based on the best-selling Donald Trump autobiography of the same name. In fact, it was written, directed and starred Donald Trump himself,” filmmaker Ron Howard, who serves as the feature’s narrator, jokingly tells the audience. “But The Art of the Deal was almost never seen; it was preempted by Monday Night Football in 1988… Trump was furious, and vowed never to air his masterpiece. It disappeared for decades, before it turned up at a yard sale in Phoenix, Arizona.”
Good morning Monday! Here’s a 1968 short film by legendary designer Saul Bass, ‘Why Man Creates’, for some start of the week inspiration. 🙂 Via OpenCulture:
An eight-part meditation on the nature of creativity, the film mixes animation and live action, using Bass’ advanced repertoire of optical techniques, to look at the issues surrounding how and why humans have, throughout the history of civilization, kept on making things. It begins with early hunters felling a beast and making a cave painting out of it. From that cave rises a tower built out of every major phase of human civilization: the wheel near the bottom, the pyramids somewhat higher up, the literal darkness of the Dark Ages as the camera rises higher still, ultimately capped by a heap of planes, trains, and automobiles. One wonders how Bass might, in an update, have stacked his representation of the internet atop of all this, but the sequence’s datedness costs it none of its virtuosity.
Saul Bass
Saul Bass is best known for his work for filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, and was particularly known for his title sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm, so visually iconic that it continues to inspire creative work today.
An afternoon out with an AT-AT. Happy weekend everybody! Directed and made by French Canadian autodidact filmmaker Patrick Boivin, who specialises in live action and stop motion animation, the clip has racked up over 100,000 views since it was first posted. As the director mentioned, “When I was a kid, there are two things I wanted badly and never got: A real dog and a Kenner AT-AT Walker.”
Making Of video:
About the Director
Based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in addition to directing, Patrick is often involved in the lighting, editing, animation, special effects and even music in his films. His short film Ça pis tout l’reste (That, and everything else) was chosen by Quebec Gold as one of the top 10 short films from Quebec in 2008. Boivin was one of the group of nine “autodidact” writers who produced an experimental television series “Phylactere Cola” for Canadian television that aired in 2002-2003, who were all cartoonists who had met years earlier and produced over 400 sketches. His films have been featured at many international film festivals around the world, including the Montreal World Film Festival, the Commonwealth Film Festival (UK), and the Festival de Namur (Belgium). Other viral films he has made include Iron Baby and Dragon Baby.
The future of immersive gaming is in North Melbourne, with Zero Latency. Using motion tracking and the Oculus Rift DK2, Zero Latency occupies a 450 square metre warehouse, that they’ve turned into a full virtual reality, zombie-fighting experience that supports 6 players simultaneously. Full review here. Some friends of mine have tried it and loved it, though one mentioned that the VR headsets aren’t friendly to people who wear spectacles, so watch out for that.
Via Gizmodo:
My hands are sweaty. The gun I’m holding is heavy. I’m stressed already. I feel like I’ve been running for hours. “Where are they?” “I don’t know. Why is it so quiet in here?” The dark room we’re in is deathly silent, eerily still and incredibly dark. The flashlights mounted on our rifles barely light up the end of the hall we’re walking towards, inching forward and stepping around the floor-to-ceiling shelves that throw shadows up against the walls and continue to frighten the hell out of us.
Nothing actually happens. We make it through the room without incident, but that doesn’t make it any less upsetting. It’s not quiet for long. There’s another, definitely zombie-filled room right in front of us. This is Zero Latency, a full-motion virtual reality space in Melbourne, and it’s awesome.
Below I touch on the types of organizations which can buy for you and how to deal with them. If you’re not sure still, call us at Starship (03 9428 4411) and we’ll try to help.
Who can buy TV for you? – Suppliers
Before we start – philosophy – the thing to remember about buying TV is it’s not like buying a house, where you have to show you can afford it, or buying a shot-gun where you have to prove you have a need, ie foxes, and you’re unlikely to kill anybody. In buying TV air space, there are absolutely no rules.
There are three main groups you can deal with in any TV purchasing negotiation. No-one can guarantee you better deals.
TV Stations/ Groups
The stations themselves have large teams of sales reps talking to people like you all the time.
They divide their sales team into two key groups. Agency and Direct. Agency reps are trained to give lots of lurverly theoretical ‘research’ stats to young agency staff. So they sound great, but can’t do much of a deal. (And the chances are your agency will only be repeating what they say/deliver.)
Direct reps are trained to get the most for spots no-one else has pre-booked, which is often quite a swathe of time slots, so they are better at doing deals. If you’re from a bigger company, you’ll find in most cases they’ll try to fob you off to an ad agency or buying group, cause the money side is handled more easily, and they are looking after their mates.
You can always insist on dealing direct and many do.
Media Buying Agencies/Large Ad agencies
Set up to take a slice (1-10%+), depending upon their relationship with the creative agency or client direct) the media buying agencies claim they can get you the best deals because they are the biggest in the world or South Eastern Australia or whatever. They can’t do the best deals. Because if they did, with their percentage of the total buy, the TV stations would go broke.
So the deals they do are almost always the ones with more fat in them than what you can do direct. You are buying the right shows, but you could be paying 20-50% more than you have to for that particular show.
Smaller Ad Agencies
Smaller, ‘creative’ agencies often buy under the umbrella of the big media buying houses, claiming they are focusing on their own particular expertise and allowing the professionals to do their part. The fact is juniors usually do the work in the big media buying groups, so there’s stuff all professionalism and the best deals go to those who own the media buying houses (share holders often being the big ad agencies). It’s nice for the smaller agencies to have someone else carry the credit risk. And if your relationship with a creative group is helped by them getting a little slice, fine.
Direct Buyers/Buy Direct
You can deal direct with any of the TV stations and get good deals. You can also bandy together with a few mates and buy in bulk. Remember, there are no rules.
How the purchase process works
You should decide who your core target market is by demographic (age, income, sex etc) and psychographic (attitudes, personality, values etc.) and even time of day viewing (Business people often watch late night. Families with young kids may often be watching TV at 700 am, but don’t expect to see those show up on a ratings analysis).
You may write it up as a brief with timings, flighting, budgets, what you want to achieve etc. and have it ready to email. Then ring the agency or station rep and go over it. Ask them to respond with their proposed buy. You’ll get that back within 24-36 hours. There will be things you don’t agree with etc., so you might repeat the process a few times. You eventually agree on a buy. They send you a final which you sign off. They do a credit check and off you go. They advise you about 24 hours before hand exactly when your ads will appear and if you want a list, that can be provided afterwards for your records. You’ll get 45 days or so to pay the bill, but contrary to everything you hear, this can also be flexible.
If you want to know what things should cost, or more of an idea how it works from the inside, give us a call us at Starship and ask for Ebba, she’s the tall, very good looking blonde ex-media rep who knows everybody who matters. Or call and ask for Geoffrey, who’s short, balding, knows no-body, but writes these blogs when he’s bored.
Ever wondered what it was like to intern at an ad agency? Check out Ontario-based McMillan Agency’s hilarious 8-bit game, Interns. Created to train their interns, the objective of the game is simple: wander around the office, respond to clues, help develop ideas, stop a coworker from surfing cat videos… and learn how to power nap. Via the website:
“Congratulations, you’re going to be interning at the McMillan creative agency. Overcome the distraction of cute pets and conquer the temptation of free alcohol to uncover the best creative ideas and establish yourself as a rising star. But remember: you’re not getting paid so don’t work too hard.”
According to the agency:
“As you know, there’s an ongoing debate about the internship system in advertising (and other industries). Do they help you prepare for a career, or are they simply a way for agencies to get cheap labour?” asks McMillan’s Ankit Verma.
“We didn’t want our interns here at McMillan to feel unprepared or unappreciated, so we created an 8-bit video game that featured them as playable characters. In the game, they must collect ten ideas for an upcoming client presentation… as in real life, sometimes ideas come when you least expect them.”
How to grow fresh food in space – the first on-orbit tasting of space-grown lettuce. According to Space.com:
For the first time, at least officially, the NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station have tasted the product, or more specifically, the produce, of their work.
Expedition 44 crewmembers Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren of NASA, together with Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on Monday (Aug. 10) happily chomped on “Outredgeous” red romaine lettuce, which they freshly harvested from the orbiting lab’s Veggie plant growth system.
[…]
Their space garden snack marked the first time NASA had cleared its astronauts to eat what they grew, following in the farming footsteps of earlier Russian cosmonauts, who first ate the leafy greens they cultivated aboard the space station more than a decade ago (whether U.S. astronauts unofficially partook in the previous harvests is not clear).
Before chomping down on the leaves, Kelly, Lindgren and Yui first cleaned the red romaine lettuce with citric acid-based sanitizing wipes. Mission Control gave them the go to eat half of the space bounty, setting aside the other half to be packaged and frozen on the station until it can be returned to Earth for scientific analysis.
Good morning Monday! For its 3rd birthday, Hailo ran a prank on its customers in Dublin, with a 3-year-old taxi driver. The stunt was thought up of by Dublin agency Guns or Knives. Via The Stable:
[A]according to agency, Guns or Knives, “It’s our [Hailo’s] 3rd birthday, so we’ll do what we want to.” At 11am, Hailo launched the first phase of the latest campaign, The Three Year-Old Taxi Driver, a hidden-camera stunt in which a 3 year old goes to work as a Hailo taxi driver. The 90 second film – of some shocked, confused and/or amused Dubliners – was then released online across Twitter, Youtube and Facebook.
Guns or Knives art director, Dave Kee, explained the idea, “Our starting point really came from the initial idea, what if a three year old brand took on a three year old’s behaviour? What would the outcome of this look like and what would be the most impactful way we could demonstrate this?”
The campaign’s job is to celebrate the company’s third birthday but also to reward loyal customers. The second phase of the campaign will include an online draw allowing customers who had travelled under 1000km to win their exact kilometre mileage in Hailo credit; and, for those who have travelled further, there is the chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to a mystery location at a distance equal to their Hailo mileage.
Here in the Starship office, we have been following The Trump’s rise to (more) power with amusement and anticipation, for such gems as:
As such, we were glad to see that the internet has helpfully redesigned his 2016 campaign logo to make it more distinctive and on-brand.
Did you know? Over the years, the Donald has also been behind a few retro endorsement ads, including this post-divorce 1995 ad with his wife Ivana for Pizza Hut:
He’s also been behind a similarly retro McDonalds ad and had a memorable cameo in the film Zoolander.
Keep it real, Mr. Trump. And to everyone else: have a lovely weekend 😉
Viral marketing agency Thinkmodo came up with a clever drone stunt to promote the Fantastic Four film, in a piece of great marketing that quite likely ended up more entertaining than the actual film itself. Released in NYC, the stunt was filmed with firefighters standing by, and professionals operating the drone (Professional Drone Pilot. Now that’s an unusual job). You may remember Thinkmodo from their previous viral stunt, Flying People in New York City. From Wired:
[T]he video shot at Nassau County’s Fire Service Academy shows a human-shaped and -sized drone flying through the sky, as aflame and defiant as Johnny Storm.
“We understood that it was risky, but we had complete faith in the team we worked with and the local firefighters at the facility who made it their priority to keep everyone and everything safe,” Thinkmodo co-founder Michael Krivicka said to Adweek. “We selected the safest location, a fire training facility, which is designed for the purpose of burning and extinguishing things.”
It’s not uncommon nowadays for the marketing campaigns leading up to the film to turn out better than the film itself – see Prometheus, for example, with the fake TED talk by Peter Weyland and other collateral. Looking forward to the next big campaign!