a moving event

Today I had the opportunity to present at Hudson Valley's 140 Characters Twitter conference which was a scintillating event. Unexpectedly seismic. A 5.8 earthquake jolted the East Coast at 1:50 PM, rattling the audience, though not the speaker before me. It was the most powerful tremor to hit the right coast in decades, yet, happily, did little damage. Although there are rumors that the Washington Monument is now listing. Here's a pic of DC damage making the rounds via J McKinley, h/t David Benardo.)

DC Earthquake Devastation

coming to a bus stop near you: motion posters

Here's a new add-in for your media mix: the motion poster. Thanks to GIF technology, it's a cross between a poster and trailer. Foxsearchlight Pictures is using it to promote a film opening in October starring Mary-Kate's twin sister Ashley Elizabeth Olson. (Click on ad to the right to make GIF work in Blogger. Or, just imagine the girl in the M turning to you and opening her eyes.)

The studio is also making ingenious use of QR codes which few have devised ingenious use for. Instead of slapping a code onto the base of an ad, they're making it the visual and linking it to exclusive trailers that can be seen only by scanning the code. Sudden impact.

Thanks to @IanSchafer for finding it first.

forgive my wanderlust

I know, I know. I've been away a lot. Thanks, if you've noticed. It's not that I haven't missed you. It's just that I'm trying to conserve downtime and focus to finish an analog project--a novel. I've been working on it for (an embarrassing number of) years. It's set in Adland, of course. With dramas and settings and characters you may recognize. (But not well enough to identify, hopefully.) I'm turning in the manuscript on September 22. After that, patient reader, I'm back to more regularly scheduled Adbroading. Thanks for saving my spot in your feed.

how to survive without a fresh air

As a new Mac Book Air rolls out to roaring (sorry) reviews, those of us who bought its forerunner too recently to consider plunking down for its shiny successor, can console ourselves with remembering just how high performing our machine is even without a Thunderbolt port or an Intel Core i5 chip. Remember splicing film? And waiting for stats? How did we accomplish anything when cut and paste meant actually cutting and pasting?

Of course, it wasn't only those in our industry who would have killed for productivity made possible by what we have at our fingertips every day. A friend in the financial services industry recalls his computer-less days as a newbie and makes me grateful anew for my trusty old Air.

As the new guy in the finance department I got the job of making the books (showing financial comparisons to budget for our 5 divisions.) There were 4 charts. To make the charts we had a 2'x4' foamcore board and we drew an xy axis on it and hand pasted black tape on it to make the line and you'd add another 3" to it each month. Then the foamcore went across the street to the photoshop where they would take a photograph of it, reduce and burn a plate. Then they'd print 50 of each and send them back to me 8 1/2" x 11". When the 24 page book was done, I took it upstairs and delivered it by hand to every exec and the Board. The book, when completed had maybe 1,000 numbers in it. If even a single number was off by $1, I would have to go back upstairs retrieve all the books, disassemble them back into the collater, replace the offending page, reassemble them and take them back upstairs. That happened exactly 2 times in 3 years. I got very good at checking numbers.

for California Milk Board, PMS = Please Make it Stop

By now you may have heard that the California Milk Processor Board has pulled the offensive er--educational campaign launched by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners due to unanticipated backlash on the back channel. The ads (see below) are based on a study which (sort of) shows that ingesting 1200 grams of calcium a day help relieve the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome. The campaign included a microsite called "Everything I Do Is Wrong" offering words "proven" to tame a species made psycho by moon cycles. (“I’m sorry I believed nothing was wrong when you said nothing was wrong.”) The site now abashedly redirects to GotDiscussion.org

According to today's New York Times, co-chairman Jeff Goodby confessed that the campaign, which basically reduces women to an irrational species hapless in the face of their hormones, was "more controversial than we expected it to be." Perhaps his surprise resulted from the fact that he wrote and art directed a similar campaign based on the same study six years ago which continued its full run despite complaints that it was sexist and offensive. "It was a different world in 2005," Mr. Goodby said. Viva the girl power of social media.

what email looked like before it was email

Perhaps because I grew up with a dad who worked on the first computers, I am fascinated by the origins of our virtual existence. There's a terrific article in the New York Times that traces email back to its birth in the 1960s when two MIT grads working for the school's political science department volunteered to write code for a new idea: electronic mail. Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck were afraid, at first, that the US Post Office would want to get involved, insisting that a stamp be destroyed for every message sent. At the time, the rule was if you included a letter inside a parcel, you were to add an extra 5 cent stamp. They asked a superior to consult with someone high up at the Post Office who laughed and said no one in the department cared about messages sent on computers.

When Noel died suddenly a few years later, his family was afraid no one would attend the funeral, believing him friendless, as he spent all of his time at keyboards. They were amazed when the funeral home was packed. How did so many know about Noel's death, they wondered? "They all communicate with computers!"

More from Tom Van Vleck's "History of Electronic Mail".

apologies for the hiatus

Sometimes, it's restorative to immerse yourself in the actual three dimensional world, isn't it?