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.