Digital Screen for Hair Dye Newbies

Yesterday I went to Target and saw a really cool digital idea in the hair section of the store. There was a digital screen that was user friendly and interactive, where one could look up their hair color and what they wanted to dye it to get recommendations on which dye to get for the best results. My best guess is that this idea was aimed at females in their college years who have little to no experience with hair dye. In other words, me. As a brunette who tried going blonde over the summer because why not, I'm slightly resentful that this didn't exist until like, now. This is a really awesome idea, and it would've saved me several trips to the salon, not to mention like seventeen breakdowns when every at-home dye experience left me with hair the color of cat pee. Needless to say, I'm back to being brunette.

Tweet-a-Coffee

Post-twitter rant, I do think that Starbucks did an excellent job integrating this social media site into their recent digital campaign known as "Tweet a Coffee." This campaign, aimed at a broad audience of loyal Starbucks customers, particularly those between 15-30 that utilize twitter often, allows you to send anyone a $5 Starbucks giftcard through Twitter. The way it works is by users linking their Starbucks and Twitter accounts, then simply mention @tweetacoffee to send a gift card to whoever they want. The user also has the option to customize a message to be included with this. So the real question is, does it work? I'm sure I'm not the only person out there who is about to try and test it out, which I guess proves that it does.

My Thoughts on Twitter

I go back and forth on how I feel about Twitter. Right now I'm on a Twitter hate spree that can be easily attributed to my aversion to people who don't know how to use it. I consider myself a twitter snob, and the second someone #hashtagswholephrasesjustforthesakeofhashtagging they are immediately unfollowed. I used to use twitter to follow some of the celebrities I am a fan of, but that was before posting selfies every hour on the hour became socially acceptable. Now I follow my friends that understand hashtag etiquette, bands/musicians so I can see if they'll ever be performing in the Austin area, and the few actors that can formulate something interesting into 140 characters without a close-up photo of them making some goofy looking face.
It really, really bothers me when people incorrectly use social media, and I feel like this occurs mostly on twitter. Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake's hashtag video  that went viral touches on this, but rather than getting people to stop hashtagging #every #word #they #write, the video had the opposite effect and encouraged them to do so even more. MAKE IT STOP.

Karmic Synergy

I adopted this phrase from the TV show Greek, (which used to be awesome until it sucked and then got cancelled) but it goes by many names. Destiny, fate, whatever; I chose the term that sounded least like a trashy stripper. Basically, it means things always work out the way they're supposed to. One example could be today when my dad said he wanted pumpkin pancakes or cinnamon roll pancakes for breakfast, and then we went to Kerbey Lane and their pancake special was, I kid you not, PUMPKIN CINNAMON ROLL PANCAKES. Karmic Synergy is real.
To keep this post relevant to my blog, I'll tell another tale of karmic synergy that occurred between myself and my best friend/ portfolio classmate David Bassine. We're really adorable together. We call ourselves Broocine and I can't tell if people think its cute or annoying or self absorbed, but its a little bit of all three. At the time of said karmic synergetic incident, David and I were partnered up for campaign 2 in our P3 class on Burt's Bees. In our digital portfolio class, it was just announced that it was time to choose partners for the next campaign, which we didn't learn until hours later because we missed the class for reasons I can't recall. By then, everyone had paired up except us, which meant we'd be working on two campaigns together simultaneously. I think we were both a little nervous about it because we already spend the maximum amount of time hanging out we can spend without wanting to kill each other from too much togetherness. Little did we know that karmic synergy was behind all this.
We decided to work on Las Vegas' "What happens here stays here" campaign, and in the end we came up with some really solid ideas that we were both really happy with. In P3, Burt's Bees was a little more of a struggle. However, in the end we were both really excited about what we had to show for it. Yesterday we were texting about how happy we are with everything we have for our campaigns so far, and it occurred to me that this situation was total karmic synergy because if we hadn't gotten paired up by circumstance in digiport, we wouldn't have this digital campaign for Las Vegas that we are both so excited about.
Karmic synergy saves the day.

Creative Pressure on Halloween

Let me preface this by saying this blog post is white girl problems at their finest. I tend to have a lot of them. My biggest white girl problem is that no one actually has time to listen to my white girl problems, but luckily this particular WGP dabbles on the topic of creativity, so my paragraph-long rant can double as a required blog post for class. Anyways, here goes.
Sometimes I feel like being in the portfolio sequence makes people expect me to be creative in literally everything I do. They don't really realize that the sequence itself burns me out too much to extend said creativity much elsewhere. Today someone said to me, "Hey Brooke, what are you being for Halloween? I'm sure you'll come up with something really awesome, you're so creative!" and in my head I'm like "...can I just be a cat?" Needless to say, my Halloween costumes are just about as basic as it gets....Minnie Mouse and 80's decade girl. I would love to come up with something a little more imaginative, but I just didn't have the time/patience/money to go all out this year. (We can thank my evil professors that scheduled tests in the first week of november and my weakness for shoes for the time/budget constraints.)
It's unfortunate that I couldn't have more time to throw something much cooler together. Maybe next year. I'll have my shit together 366 days from now.
Here's hoping.

Little Ceasar's and Haunted Houses

One of the first days of our digital portfolio class, we were looking at examples of what digital campaigns are already out there. Little Ceasars' stood out to me the most. In summary, this campaign by ad agency Barton F. Graf 9000 consisted of entering your address on the website, upon which your house became "haunted" by little vector ghosts. Based on your address, you would be directed to the nearest Little Ceasar's location to pick up a pizza and "unhaunt" your house. The vector ghosts squeal "yay!" and disappear. That's it.
This digital idea is so random and has nothing to do with anything, but it works. Really well. It's clever and funny and I could see this idea prompting lots of people to go pick up a Hot-n-Ready from Little Ceasar's. It's just so interesting to me  how sometimes an ad campaign can be focused around an idea that has so little to do with the product, yet it's clever and brilliant enough to work. Ideas like this go against almost everything we've been taught in advertising classes at UT. It just goes to show how subjective this industry really is.

Are we ever satisfied?

In my ICM class on Monday, my professor was speaking on the topic of creative strategies. Since this is now my third semester in the sequence, most of what she talked about was redundant of the lectures I've countlessly recieved in my portfolio classes, but there was one thing she said that I found particularly interesting- "creatives are never satisfied with their own work."
I can't speak on behalf of all the other creatives I know, but from my own experience there is definitely a lot of truth to this. After I finish executing an art direction for one of my campaigns, I'll find myself staring at the computer screen for about twenty minutes trying to find something else to fix. Eventually I send pictures to my campaign partner and am only satisfied after getting their approval.
I could go on and on listing all the experiences I've had where this statement applies, both in and out of the creative sequence. I believe this statement could easily apply to anyone, not just creatives. Your biggest critic is always yourself. I've been trying my best to get out of this mindset so as not to feel discouraged when I'm not completely happy with the way something turns out, and that's why I love being in the creative sequence so much- even when I feel discouraged or not certain whether what I art directed works well with the campaign, I have a room full of peers in the same position and we are all willing to help each other out.

Trial and Error

When it comes to art directing campaigns, it's inevitable that you'll learn the hard way how to go about it. Being in the creative sequence, I've done my best to make sure each campaign I art direct has a different and unique style from anything else I've done, which usually means I'm teaching myself something new on photoshop or illustrator every time I start a new campaign. The hard thing about this is sometimes I'll have a vision in my head of how something should look but no idea how to go about it.
The best example I can think of is the Burt's Bees Beeswax Lip Balm campaign I recently art directed for P3 Midterm Critique. My partner David Bassine and I wanted the art to slightly resemble illustrations in storybooks (think Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol). I spent hours upon hours asking other art directors for suggestions and googling everything from "storybook illustrations photoshop tutorial"to "line art tutorial" before I accepted that there wasn't anything out there that could help me create the art exactly how I saw it in my head. In the end, I used bits and pieces of each of these tutorials to get the illustrations to look just the way I wanted. After that, the rest of the prints came together easily.
Basically, the point of this story is that no matter how long it takes to figure out the art direction, power through. Once you figure out the first one, the rest are easy because you have the strategy down. The final result of our Burt's Bees campaign we can be found by clicking here.

Despicable Me 2 Interactive Screen

There's something really cute about using interactive screens to connect with a user. No matter how old we are or how much we don't want to admit it, we all want to play on them. Even if whatever the interactive screen is has nothing to do with you, you're gonna be intrigued and play on it a little anyways. Or you're at least gonna want to. This is something that isn't seen as often as most other forms of advertising, but it's gradually increasing it's presence.
For the digital creative agency TVGla, promoting the movie Despicable Me 2 involved the use of such screens. They were placed in malls across Europe, and gave shoppers the opportunity to customize the actions of the lovable yellow minions in the movie using your smartphone. The fanbase for this film falls within a younger demographic, so this campaign targeted kids and parents.  Even if you've never seen the movie ( I haven't), everyone knows who the minions are and is going to find an interactive screen like this interesting, possibly enough to give it a try.

TNT Digital Campaign

This digital campaign that TNT did cracked me up. The agency responsible was none other than Duval Guillame. I linked to the video, which you can access by clicking here, but here's a brief summary of what goes down: In order to target fans of drama shows on television, a button was placed on a seemingly ordinary looking street in Belgium. The button that says "Push to add drama." When pushed, a series of ridiculous events occur almost immediately, and once its all over a giant banner rolls down from the side of a building with TNT's logo and it's signature tagline, "We know Drama." That summary doesn't even begin to do this campaign justice, the video below is definitely worth watching. Much like the previous post I did about Mercedes' invisible car, the reactions of bystanders is priceless. The cool part of this idea was that it took place on a quiet ordinary street in Belgium, where nothing particularly interesting happens. It sends the message that TNT can add some drama/ excitement to your everyday life, and it definitely caught peoples' attention.

Mercedes Invisible Car

While looking for some digital inspiration, I stumbled across a seriously awesome campaign by Jung Von Matt agency for Mercedes' new f-cell vehicle. They were trying to market their "most innovative drive technology," and found a really awesome way to do this. In this digital campaign idea, Mercedes was promoting their new fuel cell vehicle to increase awareness about it's minimal environmental impact. This idea reached out to adults that can afford luxury vehicles and are environmentally conscious. Minimal environmental impact was key feature to communicate in this campaign, and they did so by covering the car in screens and parading the car around Germany. A camera on one side of the car was connected to the screens so that the car appeared to be invisible. The idea was to showcase the vehicle's "invisibility" to the environment through this digital idea, and making the car appear to be invisible was a clever way to show this. There is a link to a youtube video showing how that made this possible that can be accessed by clicking here. The best part is seeing everyone's reactions.