Hi again to all readers. Sorry for the severe neglect of this blog over the last two months. A lot of the blogging energy has been going into another side project, called The 1llustr4t0r.
This tumblr blog captures the best of Melbourne’s street art and graffiti, and geo-tags the images in Flickr for enthusiasts to interact with in person.
If you’ve got a spare few minutes, check it out, or give us a follow if you’re on the tumblr platform!
Filed under Pop BRiefs
It’s funny how one letter or punctuation mark can make such a difference.
Take the cake and note left in our office kitchen as an example:
BEFORE
AFTER
One ‘s’ is the difference between a snack and a slap on the wrist!
And, if you think the quotation marks are unnecessary around the word ‘God’, you should check out The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks for more hilarious examples of punctuation desecration.
Filed under Pop BRiefs
Newly-elected Republican speaker of the US House Of Representatives John Boehner sure can turn on the waterworks when he wants to. So much so, they’ve now dubbed Boehner ‘The Weeper Of The House’. Ouch.
This little YouTube montage above reminded me of someone a little closer to home. Remember Hawkey? Whenever the public opinion polls would turn against him, out came a serious case of the blubs from Bob.
So, is it still taboo for gents to cry in politics? Or is Boehner just taking it a teary-eyed step too far? These pundits sure think it’s the latter.
Keith Olbermann’s Countdown
The View (eg. the show hilariously parodied as 5 chickens clucking by Family Guy)
Filed under Pop BRiefs
Since the new Facebook profile pages update in December there’s been some pretty nifty examples of creativity at work (Mashable summarises some of the best hacks here).
Schweppes have now made this fairly technical process easier with their cool Facebook app. In 5 minutes you can hero one of your favourite shots across the top of the page and left navigation. That is, until someone tags you in a new photo!
This is the result of my tinkering:
Create your own example here.
Filed under BRands and ADs
Brilliance from Spain, with the MUJI Noel Machine cruising down Las Ramblas, dishing out XMAS presents and cheer. The robot is the answer to the brand’s question, “What would Santa Claus look like if he were Japanese?”
Happy XMAS everyone!
Hat tip to Creativity Online, where you can spy a video of him in action.
Filed under BRands and ADs
Isn’t it amazing how a year gets compressed into a pile of grabs, soundbites, and Top 10 lists every December? Although the years continue to feel like they are accelerating, it’s almost impossible to imagine what I was doing on January 1 of this year. Apart from recovering from NYE, of course.
Well, Time magazine have provided one of the best summaries of the year with their Top 10 Everything of 2010.
I defy anyone to come up with a more comprehensive list across a multitude of categories, despite it being fairly US centric (naturally). Some of the highlights for me:
Transient buzzwords
Who would have thought that ‘Eyjafjallajokull‘ and ‘Vuvuzela‘ would drop in and out of our lexicon and our consciousness so quickly?
Quotable Quotes
“It was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency.” – George W. Bush on Kanye West’s sledge against him post-Katrina.
“If you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested.” – John Tyner on new airport screening methods.
Huge numbers
206 million – gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico.
$75,000 – the price of happiness in the US.
Have a squiz for yourself and review some of the gems from this fairly hectic year!
Filed under Pop BRiefs
For any viewers who caught the Spring Racing Carnival this year on Channel 7, they would have come across the 30 second version of this Longines ad. Beautifully shot, displays all the characteristics of a luxury brand. But wait… fast forward to the 1:46 min mark, Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai Bachchan seems to go all Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon! Now, I’m not a lip reading expert, but to me it doesn’t look like she says ‘You make my head spin’.
Does anyone else find this very disconcerting, and defeat the purpose of using global creative? I’m sure in hindsight, an extra 2 sec shoot for the end frame would have been ideal, for the markets it would run in. It just creates somewhat of a disconnect to the beautiful story they’ve just told, and doesn’t scream ‘luxury brand’.
Filed under BRands and ADs
Have you ever found yourself texting or emailing a friend, noticed the ‘red squiggly error line’, and totally ignored it, due to the faith you have in the Autocorrect function? Have you found yourself recording a terrible pop song, only to find that it sounds totally awesome on high rotation radio thanks to Auto-Tune?
Google recognised early that technology is making us totally dumb, and their ‘Did You Mean?’ feature has spared many blushes and saved countless hours in finding the stuff we want.
Grey Istanbul’s recent award winning campaign rolls out a number of humourous misspellings, illustrating that ‘Google knows what you mean, even if you don’t’. Jetleg becomes jetlag, astronut becomes astronaut, and battlesheep becomes battleship.
It’s slightly concerning that the basic ability to spell is being lost, but at the base level, it at least saves a few seconds of proofreading time! And, no matter how good the technology gets, it will always throw up some serious curveballs. Check out Gdumb for some serious giggles on what Google thinks we want to find. Baby diaper cake, anybody?
Hat-tip to @inspirationroom for the Google images.
Editor’s note: the ‘red squiggly error line’ was only used three times in the composition of this piece.
Filed under BRands and ADs
Commonwealth Games 2010 uniforms, or a Wiggles try-out?
With all the recent kerfuffle over whether Delhi is ready to host the 2010 Commonwealth Games, I am struggling to see how this is really worth all the risk for our Aussie champs. Sure the stadia are falling apart, there are terror risks which can’t be taken lightly; but the biggest crime being perpetrated against the athletes may be forcing them to dress like they have a performance at the local primary school to get to. Wake up Jeff, the 100m sprint’s about to kick off!
Unless there was a cast iron guarantee that the Indian Premier League Twenty20 cheerleaders would be turning up to my event, there would be a slim-to-zero chance of me turning up to represent my country. Un-Australian? Maybe… but I thought representing your country was about performing at the highest level and taking on the world’s best, not just some guys who have yet to break free from the shackles of Colonialism?
The Australian dollar is absolutely flying at the moment, almost reaching parity with the Greenback. Amazing. But in contrast, the current Olympic Gold to Commonwealth Gold AOC-200 index shows that one Olympic Gold is trading at about 5 Commonwealth Golds. It’s seriously a bear market, and Tom Piotrowski’s trading report is indicating a STRONG SELL message…on the plane ticket to India, for all athletes.
The Chaser sum it up perfectly with the following clip; being unable to scalp their tickets to people, even if they paid them!
Aussie Aussie Aussie? No, No, No…
Filed under The BRoAD World of Sports
