We’ve been on a roll with new clients here at C+F. On Wednesday we launched our latest creative work for our newest client West Marine. The campaign will initially roll out in three markets and consists of outdoor, online and radio. Read the press release and check out a few creative samples here.
The other day, my kid asked me what I did for a living. I reminded him that he was 17 years old and that he damn well better know what I do for a living by now. He clarified that he knew I was a producer at an ad agency, but wanted to know exactly what I did. That set off a rant about all the things that make my job great and/or nightmarish. As his eyes began to glaze over, I made him a deal. If he took out the trash, I’d write him a job description to a) answer his question and b) save him from his mother’s incoherent ramblings. So here you go, Ian.
Job title: Executive Producer, Advertising
Description: Manage budgets, timelines and execution of creative
Requirements: Round-the-clock availability is a must, even if vacationing in Europe (having a good data plan never hurts). 20/20 foresight followed by murky hindsight is key. You need not apply unless you have the boundless energy and the intestinal fortitude to tread water in the Bermuda triangle of constricted budgets, high expectations and short timelines. Must also possess the ability to serve competing interests with grace and diplomacy. Must be able to smile when you don’t want to and keep a serious face when you want to howl. Judicious use of a menacing “death stare” is often helpful. Must demand nothing less than perfection to achieve the desired result of “hella good.” Must be able to treat the pressure cooker like it’s your happy place. Note: if you do all of this successfully, you will be given even more of it to do.
Benefits:
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whether operating a global corporation or a 3-person startup, managers constantly seek ways to measure employee performance and productivity. Some are quantitative (billable hours), some are qualitative (“Gwen’s a good collaborator.”). All have merit, but there is one seldom-tracked metric that is arguably the core cultural value of every successful organization: Joy.
Quite simply, how joyous are we at our work? Do we bring energy, passion and optimism to the job every day? Is enthusiasm at the center of all we do?
Joy should not be confused with pasted-on smiles or ritualized rah-rah. Steve Jobs was famously moody, mercurial and difficult. But beneath his complexity was the intense joy he took in creating “insanely great” products that propelled Apple from near-collapse to stunning success.
Joy is the tingling sensation that accompanies the quest for excellence. Or, as Helen Keller described it, “the faith that leads to achievement.”
There is a story about a 12th century Parisian laborer, one of an army of workers with crude shovels that excavated the hard, rocky ground from which Notre Dame would rise. 
He would begin each day of backbreaking labor with the joyful declaration, “My friends, we are not digging a ditch. We are building a cathedral!”
Whether you’re building a cathedral or software company, don’t underestimate the power of the Joy Factor.
An awful lot of people share with each other on social media services. From Facebook to Twitter, Pinterest to Vine, people carry on all sorts of online discussions.
One thing missing from all this exchange, though, is a direct connection back to the physical world. The subject of the conversation often comes from the real world, but once you post it, all your interaction with that content is virtual. Whether it’s on your desk or in your pocket, your window into the dialog is limited to whatever can be displayed on your screen.
Enter Arduino, an open source platform for building electronics projects. Arduino is relatively inexpensive and simple enough that nearly anyone can have a go at making robots. With a little programming and a whole lot of experimentation, the online interaction of social media can be expressed in the physical world.
We wanted to build something for the Seattle Mariners, Copacino+Fujikado’s oldest client, to celebrate the release of this year’s Mariners TV commercials. And what says “baseball” more than a bobblehead figure? In this case, it’s a bobblehead that bobs whenever someone tweets about the new Mariners commercials. Here’s a quick guide to what makes our little robot tick:
And what does this delightful contraption look like when it’s running?
We’ve also helped other social media escape the confines of the internet and join us out in the real world. The flashing musical extravaganza on the left was built for Visit Seattle in connection with the 2 Days In Seattle campaign. It responds to tweets with the hashtag #2DaysInSeattle. The terrifying construct on the right took part in Copacino + Fujikado’s 15th anniversary celebration, swinging its mighty tweethammer at a piñata when people tweeted party pics with a #CF15 tag. It was a Mexican-theme party, so the piñata made sense, I promise.
Where else can we go with Arduino? The flow of information can also go the other direction, so switches, buttons, or sensors connected to Arduino can control web apps through direct physical input. This two-way communication adds an important tactile dimension to online interaction. Engaging the sense of touch, even in a limited way, adds a lot to a medium that traditionally caters only to vision and hearing.
We’re looking to build more complex projects, expanding on these early efforts to make more compelling connections between the physical and online worlds. Hooking up the internet to real-world objects has potential to attract, engage, delight, and inform. And really, who wouldn’t want to build an army of robot minions to do their bidding?
I enjoy Spotify and Pandora as much as the next guy, but I’m also a fan of buying albums and continuing to grow my iTunes library. Call me old school circa 2008. Who knows? Maybe it’ll contribute in some small way to helping music return to its former glory – those not-so-heady days when furniture was glued on hotel ceilings and ballers on epic yachts emerged from epic hot tubs and got in epic helicopters to fly off into epic sunsets. Plus, I still like to shut off the shuffle and plow through an entire record, just as the artist intended. It’s the musical version of reading a book. Problem is you can get so immersed that you don’t sense the dark little monsters hiding around the corner. One minute you’re jamming out to a particularly righteous Mogwai tune when, blamo, you’re hit with Murray Head’s One Night in Bangkok. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Murray Head. It’s just nice to get a little warning. In that spirit, I have created a list of the most jarring transitions in my iTunes library. Study it. Learn it. Build off it. It may just save your life.
Beirut to Bell Biv DeVoe
Ben Folds Five to Beyoncé
Billie Holiday to Billy Idol
The Black Angels to The Black Eyed Peas
Bob Marley to Bobby Brown
Bon Iver to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony
Chuck Mangione to Chumbawamba
Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi to Daryl Hall & John Oates
Dead Confederate to Dean Martin
DeVotchKa to Dexys Midnight Runners
Elvis Presley to Eminem
Fang Island to Fat Joe
Frightened Rabbit to Fu-Schnickens
George Clinton to George Winston
The Hold Steady to House of Pain
Led Zeppelin to Leona Lewis
Mogwai to Murray Head
The National to Naughty By Nature to Neil Diamond
The debate rages in marketing circles: Is Twitter a true branding and marketing tool? Or is it best used as a CRM and PR instrument? What is the value of a follower? How can a company monetize its Twitter footprint?
Time and technology will determine Twitter’s role in the marketing mix. But one interesting sidebar is the increasing use of tweets in traditional forms of marketing communications. Ads, TV commercials, outdoor boards, even radio commercials are starting to deploy Tweets as graphic and verbal content. And why not? A Tweet often represents the voice of the consumer as third-party endorser, providing word-of-mouth credibility.
At Copacino+Fujikado, we’ve been working with Visit Seattle (formerly Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau) over the past year. Our goal is to attract leisure travelers to Seattle during the off-seasons—October to December and January to May. Our strategy is to engage upscale tourists for a weekend visit to enjoy indoor, urban pleasures: food, wine, art, and culture.
The campaign theme is “2 Days In Seattle. What will you do with your 2?” Part of the program relies on inviting social media influencers from cities like San Francisco, Portland and Vancouver to spend a weekend in Seattle. We encourage them to tweet about the city’s restaurants, bars, music clubs, wineries, museums, galleries and entertainment. This tactic has unleashed a torrent of social media activity, highlighting the landmarks and hidden gems of Seattle.
This enabled us to turn social media into traditional media—by leveraging the influencers’ tweets in our ad campaign. This month, “tweetcars” will roll through Portland, emblazoned with the words and images from our invited guests. The graphics are striking; the copy is persuasive.
That’s Twittertising. A virtuous circle that begins as a social conversation then is re-purposed as traditional advertising that encourages others to visit Seattle and tell their followers about it. The lesson to be learned? Avoid compartmentalizing media into “traditional”, “digital” and “social” buckets. Instead, view our communications options as a robust, interconnected ecosystem that rewards compelling content.
Newly-hired Managing Director Brandy O’Briant answered a few questions (some from the Proust Questionnaire—her idea) to help us get to know her better. Here’s what she had to say.
Tell us about your time at Microsoft, where you worked prior to joining C+F.
I spent the past five years at Microsoft working in Xbox marketing. I moved there to work as a global media manager because of the opportunity to develop media skills outside the US. My favorite part of the job was often being the only woman in meetings where guys said things like ‘It needs more blood and bigger boobs’.
What other jobs have been formative for your career?
My love affair with advertising began with my first job at Leo Burnett. Hired out of university into the media department, I walked in the door my first day having no idea what media was. I spent six weeks in the Burnett media training program called ‘The PIT’; within those first few days, I knew I was in the right place.
What is your first impression of C+F?
A group of incredibly talented people who are passionate about delivering the absolute best to their clients, who dig deeply into the clients’ business needs and provide insights that lead to real impact. And they’re funny. Really funny. I have laughed out loud every day since I started here.
What are your goals?
My goals are to help take C+F into its next growth phase and to make the most of all the great talent here. This is the agency everyone should want to work at and I am going to make sure people know that. And my personal goal is to learn to play the cello. Yes, really. Can’t ever stop learning new things.
Why is Spotify nearly constantly playing at your workstation?
Music is important to me. I play it all the time and I have no particular affection for a genre. On any given day you could hear Yo-Yo Ma, Neil Young, Florence and the Machine, Frank Sinatra or The Ramones coming from my desk. Oh, and Johnny Cash. I like some Johnny Cash.
Tell us about your family.
My brood is the modern American blended family. We are a motley crew of me, my husband Brett (a middle school science teacher), four daughters (Maeve, Ainsley, Hannah and Hailey ages 14-11) and two dogs (Baker, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever and a very bossy Beagle named Molly).
What are your interests?
Anything from yoga to BBC television shows to blogging to mid-century design to Byzantine art to 19th century literature and whatever lives in between. Everything is interesting if you’re curious enough.
Where are you from?
I grew up in South Texas and moved to Chicago to go to university. I lived there for 12 years and moved to Seattle almost 12 years ago too.
List your favorite qualities in a person:
Manners, kindness and humility.
What do you hate the most?
Talking about myself. And lack of curiosity.
For what fault have you the most toleration?
Insecurity. We are all insecure in our own ways and should see that everyone we meet is fighting their own difficult battle.
What is your favorite motto?
“Tell me the time, not how the clock works.”
Ask people if they like advertising and 8 out of 10 will tell you they absolutely hate it.
The other 2 likely work in advertising.
Now ask people if they like the Old Spice Man, the Allstate Mayhem campaign, Nike commercials, Nike Fit (that’s advertising too), the PEMCO campaign, the Washington Lottery flightless birds spot, Skittles advertising weirdness, Larry Bernandez or Leonard the Goldfish (to plug a few of our own) and you’ll likely get a much different response.
Here’s the thing. People hate most advertising. And that means the industry as a whole is failing. It means for every hit there are hundreds of misses.
What are we doing wrong? Better yet, what should advertising look like, sound like, ultimately be?
That’s exactly what we want to know. And so do our friends at Portent here in Seattle. Working together, we’re opening up the conversation to include the very people we’re trying to reach everyday. People like you.
So please tell us what you think. Just use the hashtag #AdvertisingShould on Twitter and help us get better at creating the kind of advertising you won’t hate.
We’ll listen. We promise.
We’re also collecting the responses at advertisingshould.com for everyone to see, and Portent will be analyzing the Tweets for trends and insights.
What’s our angle? To be honest, we don’t have one. There’s no client behind the effort and no money to be made. We just want to find out what people think about this industry that so often thinks the only smart advertising answers come from within our own walls.
Consider yourself officially invited to join the conversation. All you need to do is finish the sentence “#AdvertisingShould…”
We look forward to hearing from you.
On a recent project we needed to create some static comps using the Pinterest UI. So I did what I usually do in these cases and hit Google to see if anyone had already built a Photoshop template. I was hoping to find something along the lines of the exquisitely detailed iOS and Android PSDs generated by Toronto’s Teehan+Lax. No such luck. That left me with the choice of either hacking together a bunch of screen captures (how things are usually done on deadline) or building my own layered file from scratch. I figured the PSDs would be useful later—to paraphrase fashion mogul Jacobim Mugatu, Pinterest is so hot right now—so I went ahead and redrew a profile and pinboard page from the ground up.
It was a useful design study. With judicious use of drop shadows and about a dozen subtly different shades of gray the Pinterest team has created an interface that is clean and clear but with just enough depth to push users’ pins to the forefront.
I didn’t redraw every interaction state, but most of what you might need is here.
Download: Pinterest GUI PSD
We all know that fully integrated creative campaigns are the most satisfying form of intelligent marketing. When components seamlessly fit together, making an impression is not only possible but probable. But all too often, due to various reasons, agencies are backed into marrying elements together. While trying valiantly to maintain concise visual and written messaging, the result is often less than ideal. Yet every once and a while a project comes along where true integration starts from creative development and extends all the way through production. Simply put, a producer’s dream! As was the case most recently with Premera Blue Cross, where two television commercials inspired a series of companion illustrations that were re-purposed for print, transit, billboards, online display and microsite.
Our initial assignment was to create two TV spots that featured a parallel 3D universe that is familiar yet something we’ve not seen before, uniquely visual in color and line. The fabricated TV world had to seamlessly transition to a live action world so our animated heroines could become real live breathing humans at the end of the commercial. And…the television world and the people who inhabited it also had to feel the same in style and tone with 5 unique illustrations being developed.
The only problem was that although TV led the creative charge, it was produced last in the sequence of events. No problem, our talented creative team took a step back and with diligence applied the goals and aspirations of the TV to the development of the illustrations. Voila, full integration in all its glory. Not only could we follow our TV heroines through their respective TV worlds, we saw their neighbors and friends come to life in billboards, transit and online display throughout Washington. The cohesiveness and success of this fully integrated campaign is now being extended and re-interpreted for Alaska. Check out the spots and illustrations at premera.com/peaceofmind and celebrate fully integrated creative at its finest.