AdVerve Episode 12: End of Yearness

It’s our end of year madness. While it may be a little pretentious of us to run a year-end episode after only 12 episodes, eh, so what. Some of what makes it into this one are things we never got to cover during previous episodes but which we proudly beat the hell out of now.

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We wander everywhere, from music and films to current stories floating around the net. Safe to say, we earn the explicit tag with this show. (Chapter breaks below, a loose guide at best.) Tarantino to Star Trek to Brad Pitt to Facebook sibling revenge sex lists and beyond, the show goes there. We’ve also included links to anything we mentioned throughout.

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The Future, As Scripted by Family

Uncle Who Speaks with British Accent Because He Spent, Like, 8 Months in the UK Once Many Years Ago (UWSBABHSL8MUKOMYA): Oh, so Angela couldn't come down for Christmas? That's too bad.

Mom: I know it's too bad. She changed jobs recently and decided to stay in Paris this season.

UWSBABHSL8MUKOMYA: Tell me if she needs any help. I still know a few people back in France, and they can do amazing things for her.

Mom: Oh?

UWSBABHSL8MUKOMYA: She likes children, doesn't she? She'd make a splendid au pair. The benefits for au pairs in France are unparalleled -- they even get their own rooms!

Mom: You obviously don't know my daughter. She's no au pair; she's more of a tour guide.*



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*My dad also emails periodically to ask why I won't stop fooling around and get a "real job," followed by the names of airlines he's heard need flight stewardesses. This is Reason #209483093 why you should consider what Alain de Botton says in this video. Family may love you, but that doesn't mean ... well, I'll stop there.

...But Can I Get it Framed, Though?

Mainstream access to high-speed internet, coupled with the introduction of social networks, has completely changed our social rituals and the things we think represent us.

I never imagined how this might affect the memorabilia industry.

In any event, the above is "My Year in Status," created for me by a Facebook app of the same name. I'll let you guess what it does.

Choose from eight beautiful designs!

Don't Think of Her as a Zombie, Think of Her as a Kind of Human Scarf.

There are probably a lot of things that can be said about this ad for Lanvin's Spring/Summer 2010 campaign, but my head feels empty.

For now that's fine: fashion ads are under no obligation to mean anything while provoking. Plus, Copyranter and ChatteringGem have already mounted their theories: Undead as the new dead? Homage to Generation Gaga?

If you dig deeply enough behind an ad's labyrinth of logic, however, there's usually a charming if forgettable story that means nothing to people outside the industry. In this particular case, Lanvin wanted to shoot coupled-up photographers with epic professional backgrounds.

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The Long, Gritty Holiday Decompression

Yeah, I know we still have New Years ahead of us, but might as well start grinding on some brainfood early so Jan 4 doesn't get you all depressed and looking for candles and razors and Enya.

AdVerve partner in crime (and blogga from anotha motha!) Bill Green sent me the above greeting. I think it is nice.

Anyway, as the season winds down and we recover from the funnel-fest of food, I imagine a lot of you are using your downtime to scope out Twitter, see what's hot or at least peruse-worthy. To help, as we traverse that short road back to the mills, here are some links that I promised myself I would read sometime today or tomorrow(ish):

• Top 10 Branded iPhone Apps of 2009 (AdAge)
• Twitter is Profitable. Your Argument is Invalid.
• 5 Ways Slideshare Can Help Your Business (Rohit Bhargava, who I find quite neat)
• 10 of the Biggest Lies in History (includes some faux Vermeer action, and my favourite: the Trojan Horse)
• US vs British Healthcare (for sounding smart and well-rounded when the moment is nigh)

A coupla links in French, for those of you that read it or want to make the best of Google Translate:

• Retour sur la gestion de crise Eurostar (Sandrine Plasseraud, who is loveleh and who thinks)
• Les Français décomplexés du porno. How porn is penetrating the mainstream -- couples watching it together, people being able to say they watch it without looking like sick sad potential pedos, etc.

And some fun shit:

• I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S NOT BUTTER. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
• La Main Perrier (I'll write more on this later)
• Strindberg and Helium! If you liked Salad Fingers, you will quite enjoy this. (Thanks, Beeg.)
• Domino Day!
  
• Stefano Ferroni Photography -- generically Vogue on the surface, but pretty and a little stark. The Exhibition section also has some neat things:

• Gonna wrap this up with Violet Blue's Top 10 Sexy Geeks 2010, not just because Google can now index (and immortalize) evidence of my goddesslike countenance for time immemorial, but because... no, that's pretty much the only reason.
  

Mother London Breeds a Fresh Crop of Gullibles for Next Year.

Nodding to all the estranged princesses and Nigerian CEOs that overrun your email with promises of untold fortune, Mother London decided to write its own such letter and give the entirety of the Christmas budget to the first guy to answer.

Turns out that out of hundreds of emails sent, demanding a full name and bank details, only one guy was dumb enough sufficiently compelled by the belief in Christmas miracles to respond.

So they pay him a visit. With a suitcase full of cash. Which the winner in turn decides to......

...well, you just have to watch it. This definitely wins the race for best agency holiday greeting though.* Guess the rest of you slackers can just hang out and colour until January.

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*Actually this one by kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners was kind of all right. No, not really. What's ad land's fixation with self-aware body hair?

AdVerve Episode 11: The Sexism Song-and-Dance

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Our extra-special pre-holiday Episode 11 features Åsk Wäppling of Adland.tv, infamously known among ad land old-schoolers as @dabitch.

This week we tackle Sexism™, one of the more obvious "isms" in this fair industry we call advertising.

Having clocked in at a number of European shops and freelanced at some American ones, Åsk gets gritty about why it's tough for women to ask for more money, why breeding potential is an irrational metric for hire and what made method's scrubbing bubbles ad so uncomfortable to watch.

You can read more of Åsk's sexism thoughts on Adland, where she synopsizes a lot of what we discussed, and hammers in points we didn't have time to talk about.

In case you plan to check out early this week, happy holidays and check the shower before stepping into it. If you can, catch our year-end pop culture roundup next week.

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THASSA WRAP!

A Couple 'Casts As You Count Down to 2010

Bill Green and I just finished recording AdVerve #11, our sexism show featuring Åsk Wäppling of Adland.tv. It's currently losing some fat to the cutting room floor, but in the meantime take a year-end listen to:

Adverve #10 - The Jordan Kretchmer Show. Listen to secrets behind the TwitteRFP and exclusive details on his new communications hustle, Livefyre.

The BeanCast's YES (Year-End Show). Join Bill Green, George Parker, John Wall and me as we jam fast and loose on all the shit in Ad Land that went down this year: crowdsourcing, pay-per-blogging, agency consolidations and the like, salted heavily by torrents of George. (Look lively, it's a two-hour segment.)

That's what-all I've been up to, in between holiday parties and torrenting Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. Also keep a wily eye out for the aforementioned sexism show featuring Åsk; for those of you who like your "isms," we tossed in a little "nepotism" just for sport.

Gaultier Lovers Leave a Scent Long After They're Gone

This ad for Le Mâle, the men's fragrance by Jean Paul Gaultier, has been all over TV this week. It kinda bummed me out until the day I randomly opened the My Little Paris app on my iPhone and saw the variant for Classique (pour femme):



Delectable work that speaks to the respective sexes. See the makings-of here and here.

Previous campaigns reveal Jean Paul Gaultier favors other-side-of-the-coin ads for his dual (and dueling?) fragrances, distilling how vulnerability and predatory instinct manifest in both sexes. This series is called L'Appartement.

You can see what kind of thought went into them, as well as clips from previous series, in this set of videos featuring "maître parfumeur" Francis Kurkdjian:

Kurkdjian on Le Mâle (with English translations):



Kurkdjian on Classique:

Make the Girl Dance Inspires Brazil's As Apimentadas

Sao Paulo has French band Make the Girl Dance to thank for inspiring its Brazilian counterpart to drop trou with ghetto blasters:



The Paris version:



This was probably the best way to describe the contrast.

The concept, tamed down for American TV and packaged up nice, also wiggled its way onto the catwalk for Victoria's Secret.

Via @gregfromparis.

Diagram of Geek Culture

Nice break from agency holiday cards, plus this bad-boy is geek-tastically colour-coded and detailed. Click for full-size, and hat-tip to beloved Candace, who pointed me here, which sent me there.

Choice comment ("John" on Ibo):

Pretty funny man, got us almost spot on, except you forgot a few of our types like a standard music geek (non-band), and english geek. Few Misspellings here and there and a few of your postings are questionable but over all not bad. Would recommend as said before a Venn diagram to gather the thoughts and ideas together

("Misspellings" is not a proper noun, but "English" is. Just sayin'.)

Kris Kringle's Team iPhone, Apparently

Mrs. Claus knows exactly how to whip someone into codependence: get honey the device that does all the organizational management for you. For Christmas this year, interactive shop Modea gives us Santa's Lost iPhone.

Futz with apps and buttons, just the way you would a normal iPhone. The Calendar items are cute. Watch out, though; if you hang around too long, Mrs. Claus starts blowing it up in search of her hubby.

A Pulpy Happy Holidays from Crush/Toronto.

Crush's '09 holiday comic, A Very Jolly Holiday, is now available to read (beware: extended scrolling ahead) and to download (for all you creative packrats out thar).

The 8-page oeuvre sports something for everybody: social media douchebaggery, self-effacing Facebook groupage, a venison charcuterie (don't ask) and even some cutback crisis action. GET YOU SOME. Or look at more action-packed clips below.

For those that don't know who Crush is or what it's done, aw, aren't you special. This is the agency that does the cool social media/audiovisual promotional shit for Douglas Coupland's trippy tech-meet-man novels. See the post-post-modern videos they did for Coupland's Generation A, as well as the still-gripping, if less existential, stuff for The Gum Thief.

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AdVerve Episode 9: Ageism and Advertising

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That’s right frens, another “ism” show. This one features Ad Broad Helen Ross on the topic of age as it relates to the advertising industry. We cover a range of topics, from younger vs. older creatives, client challenges, and the changing agency dynamic.

Along the way we delve into Helen’s side gig as Mad Men fanista Betty Draper on Twitter. You can find her regular self there too. Plus her blog Ad Broad as well as new creation Brand Fiction Factory.

Send questions, comments or requests for newsletter inclusion to advervepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. You can also leave a review.

Image credit: Dove via the Getty Images blog.

Baby Food on Amazon. Act Now and Save!

There are a lot of things in this email blast I could nip at, from the apathetically anonymous "Dear Amazon.com Customer" to the misguided guess at my dietary preferences.

But if the million-dollar Amazon algorithm, to which I've been feeding my personal preferences for years, claims I've demonstrated "an interest in baby food," then who am I to argue? I suppose I should just be pleased that, when a weebie finally does slip down the hatch, I'll never have to worry about whether my app for WIC gets approved.

Breaking Twitter Etiquette

Chelsi: i twittered about you

Me: I just retweeted it even though that's a douche move

Chelsi: it's okay, you're drunk

Me: that merits a blog post!

Chelsi: cheers!

By way of explaining this behaviour, Le Web's wiped me out and I'll need two days alone, and gallons of wine, to recover. Also, I'm reading a copy of The Lovely Bones, which I won't say is bad, but which I'm not proud to admit I'm using as post-geekout therapy, either.

Interactive Windows Put Wind Behind Hermès Scarves

This window display serves the Hermès brand in a way that's understated and charming in its simplicity. See? Tech savvy doesn't have to be complicated; it just needs to compel.

Installation by Tokujin Yoshioka for Hermès Japan. Via Grégory Pouy.

Le Wheat, C'est Chic.

Only in Paris would wholesome wheat and fiber be converted into gilding for a mannequin. This piece comes from a bus stop near my apartment in République.

300 Kids, an Auditorium and Ingenuity.

That's what it took for a passel of business school students to create this nifty stop-motion video for ESCP Europe. There's even a little retro gaming action.

(v.)

'Every Search is a Quest. Every Quest is a Story.'

VOTW passed me this pretty video about an American expat finding love in Paris. Yeah, it's an old story; but in this case, it's told in the world's second language: Google search.

Embrace the warm fuzzies.* Or embrace the commenter who said:

I think one should be done on someone going vegan. Google definately played a big roll in me going vegan(along with peta)

...yeah.

See more search stories. Note the cinematic way in which new ones are presented. Doesn't it please you that Google and YouTube got hitched?

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*Just so it's clear, I'm touched by this video. But that's because I'm living a cliché.

How Poor Creative Destroys Great Product.

Today I found out about Knocking Live Video, an app that enables users to "knock" on other phones with the app and share live video in real-time. The first 50,000 downloads are free, so I snapped that bad-boy up before Pointy Heads could impose a payment wall.

How I discovered it: via Twitter and in the news. The message behind the Tweets and articles I saw were "See what I see." The functionality sounds cool; I don't even mind having to wait for other iPhone 3Gs users to get it before I actually try it out.

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more.madame: The Lovechild of Chanel and Le Figaro

With a few helpful tailor's tugs from agency Mediaedge:cia, Chanel Joaillerie (Jewelry) and Figaro Group -- parent company of French publication Le Figaro and related subsidiaries -- have partnered to conceive more.madame. Running from November 21 to December 19, it's toted as the first-ever "digital standalone" -- or hors-série digital.

Part ad, part supplementary miniseries, the work celebrates the contemporary woman: a pristine if idle creature reeking of restrained force, moving like a hot knife through a man's world. Art, games, editorial and videos add colour and context to her tapestry.

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