Internet ad sales keep rising

Internet advertising revenue reached a record $4.9 billion in the first quarter of this year, up 26 percent from a year earlier and up 2 percent from the previous quarter. That's according to a report commissioned by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Online ad sales have been rising steadily since a slump in mid-2002. They have more than tripled since then.

10 Tips To Higher Response Ads

10 Tips To Higher Response Ads

You're ready to launch that new product or promotion, & you're really counting on a piece of advertising copy to come through for you.

You're looking for stellar results! And, you're determined to do everything in your power to get them. Which means surveys, thorough testing, and ongoing refinement of your ad copy.

Hold the phone!

When you've got your draft, run it through this 12-point inspection. Cover off these basics, and you can be sure you're off to a running start.

1 – Do You Have A Compelling Headline?

Does it generate curiosity or envy? Does it promise a benefit that will compel someone with an interest in what you're selling to keep reading. Remember, your headline is the ad for the ad.

When I am being paid to write direct response ad copy, or a sales letter, or have a very important sales objective of my own, I normally write 25 headlines before I begin the body of the piece.

Then I'll pick half a dozen that I think will work & test them. The best of the rest, I use as sub headings throughout the piece to propel readership, and draw skimmers & skippers back into the copy as they move down the page.

2 – Are Your Headlines Pleasing To The Eye?

I most often find that headlines work best when they are centered on the page, & present a balanced appearance in terms of the shape they create. Encasing them in quotation marks also serves to grab more attention.

Long top headlines tend to reduce readership, but if they help qualify more effectively they can improve sales! Try them, but look for ways to modularize the text using punctuation & spacing so your readers don't suffocate trying to read them. Sometimes a long top headline is better presented as two or even three separate headlines.

3 – Is Your Opening Provocative & Arresting?

Does it trip the reader, interrupting the internal turbulence of the day? Each line of your ad copy must serve to "sell" the reader on continued reading, especially at the beginning.

You are looking to build enough momentum & interest to convey the points necessary to generate a greater desire for the product than it's price. Generally speaking, the higher the cost of the product, the more words required.

4 – Are You FAB Balanced?

You must focus on painting a picture of your prospects future life, as a result of their purchase. Does your copy promise emotional benefits? Does it pledge the realization of positive feelings, or the relief of negative ones?

Does it show how these outcomes are achieved with concise descriptions of the features & advantages that will deliver them? Your ad copy must strike a balance between emotion & logic if it is to be effect.

5 – Are You Creating Excitement & Enthusiasm?

Demonstrate your personal belief in what you are selling. Will your message quicken the readers pulse? Is it upbeat, positive, & full of inspired energy? Is there a sense of WOW?

6 – Is Your Body Copy Highly Readable?

Remember simple is best. Keep sentences short. Use a plain 10-point to 12-point font. Paragraphs no more than a few lines. Words that are comfortable & specific to the audience you are targeting. Inject subheads to break up text. Highlight important points.

7 – Do You Have High YOU density?

Remember to you use the words YOU & YOUR to the hilt. Your reader is auto translating to ME & MINE.

8 – Are you speaking intimately?

Can you get a strong sense of personality when you review your letter after being away from it for a while? Visualize yourself, or the character you are personifying, writing a personal letter to your perfect prospect. Never write to a crowd.

9 – Are you inspiring the readers imagination?

You must trigger mental images with your writing. The mind has difficulty distinguishing between vividly painted word pictures, & reality. Daydreams enchant, & emotions flow in their wake.

When you have emotion, you have desire. When you have desire, you have suggestibility. When you have suggestibility, you can direct action. Your levers are allegory (storytelling), metaphor, similes, verbs, adjectives, & specificity.

10 – Do you offer proof?

Impulses for Remember Cards

Agency: DDB Stockholm
Creative Director: Johan Holmström
Creative: Mattias Manitski, Simon Higby, Ted Harry Mellström
Directors: Fredrik Bond + Emil Möller
Production: Sonny London + FLX

Should 75% of search results really come from one company?

Agency: Fallon — London
Creative: Ali Alvarez, Nicolas Randall
Creative Director: Micah Walker
Agency Producer: Dionne Jackson
Director: Kalle Haglund
Director of Photography: Tim Bret-Day
Producer: Bart Yates
Editor: Tony Kearns
VFX: The Mill — London
Engineer: Aaron Reynolds
Engineering: Wave

Lynx 'Bom Chicka Wah Wah' Teacher TV advert

Bom Chicka Wah Wah



Funny new Lynx (Axe) ad shown on TV.







Agency: BBH

See www.utalkmarketing.com for more like this.

25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer

25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer

(In no particular order)

1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.

2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.

3. You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.

4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.

5. You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.

6. You consider meals interruptions.

7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.

8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.

9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.

10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.

11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.

12. When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.

13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)

14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.

15. You’ve actually $paid for a font.

16. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)

17. The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.

18. You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.

19. You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.

20. You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)

21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.

22. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.

23. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.

24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.

25. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.

The Apple Ipod Mini

This is because harddrive space is so much important for Apple iPod users, the original Apple iPod have so lots space available to the user of about forty winks* gigabytes. This amount of space can store more than five hundred thousand songs. Aside from this, the prime Apple iPod too has a longer batch life.

However, criticizers should consider the frame of the Apple iPod mini. It is slender and is more styled, that which made it seem more functional and more attractive to the tabs and has a more ergonomic feel to the fingers. To largest people, it would not be the ideal piece player, but to the 99,000 or so Apple iPod mini clients, they beg to disagree.

The Too Sexy Apple iPod Mini

The Apple iPod mini is compared to a US$ 1,200 purse from Chanel. This is being the US$ 249 Apple iPod mini, with its variety of five colors, brings out class and transcendent.

It has an anodized figure made of aluminum and weighs about 3.6 ounces. It measures about 2 inches in width, 3.6 inches in point, and only about half an inch in thickness. It does not look analogous it at first glance, but the Apple ipod mini is almost like a stalky* than the original Apple iPod.

It is also silky to the touch and smooth. It also fits wonderfully in your gift. This is the reason for the premium price tag.

The Apple iPod mini still has no external moving parts. You will notice that underneath the smaller 1.67-inch LCD screen lie the shiny touch-sensitive and highly ergonomic Click Circuit. This Click Wheel is the one which covers the Apple iPod mini's auxiliary controls. The control's buttons are located on the pad itself. This is much different than the early Apple iPod's four occupation buttons that is located above the scroll pad.

Anyone who is familiar with the software for the iPod knows about the seamless integration of iPod with iTunes. In no time, you would be cruising with the nutcake.

The Apple iPod mini notices pure resembling definitely as other newer generation Apple iPods. It now unvaried packs a batch being of 8 hours. The original Apple iPods have a longer battery heart.

Besides the smaller sensible dimensions and the new warm minimalist choices of color, which can be gold, silver, pink, green and dismal. A major difference optical between the original Apple iPod and the Apple iPod mini is the harddrive spaciousness capacity.

The Apple iPod mini has a tiny Hitachi harddrive that can dominance about four gigabytes of song. Piece files interpolate AAC, Audible, MP3, WAV and AIFF. This is enough storage for a number of Apple iPod mini customers.

Apple iPod clients usually prefer to convey an entire library of song any go of the day. Ratherish than manually raring and transferring set songs to the Apple iPod mini. The Apple iPod mini can only hold as much as a prime of the drowse gigabytes music set.

The Apple iPod mini also has contrivances that constitute the earbuds, a USB 2.0 cable and a FireWire denude connector, an AC adaptor, a belt wallop, and the Apple iPod mini software.

The Apple iPod mini could have bygone more lenient by adding a dock or armband to teh package.

The US$ 29 armband is a great help for joggers who want to hearken to good music while jogging suit and shifting the very lightweight and effectively skip-free Apple iPod mini.

Conclusion

To summarize, the Apple iPod mini has a sleek styling, it is a small capacity and has an excellent integrated Click wheel. It has a possible hardship to the user, though, that is the ransom per megabyte which is much higher as compared to the original Apple iPod..

Greenpeace campaign "Stop Whaling"

Greenpeace campaign "Stop Whaling"




Agency: Saatchi and Saatchi, Poland
Art Director: Bożena Ślaga
Copywriter: Radosław Kotapka
Creative Director: Max Olech

Jim Beam and perfect girlfriend

Jim Beam commercial featuring the perfect girlfriend.

Meth. Not Even Once from Montana Meth Project

My friends and I share everything. Now we share hepatitis and HIV.





My girlfriend would do anything for me. So I made her sell her body.

Quiz Your Advertising Skills

Advertising is the key part of business marketing. If the advertisement succeeds, it can mean big profit. Advertising requires innovative thinking in todays world because the traditional advertising mediums are becoming very expensive. A well thought advertising that is different may create a big impact. But advertising is not being given the attention it deserves. As soon as the profits go down or the market scenario looks bad, advertising expenditures are cut first. How much do you know about advertising in a business? Please quiz yourself about that.

What should be the ideal percentage of advertising in total marketing expenditure?

Should the advertising expenditure increase with growing business or decrease?

Which advertising media should be used for advertising in a very low budget?

Should every business advertise in the beginning?

Are advertising professionals must for getting the best return out of the expenditure?

Is a small market survey about advertising effectiveness always necessary before full-fledged advertising campaign?

Do women add value to advertising? What if you are advertising nuts and bolts?

These are some small questions that I have raised about advertising in business. Please think about the answers. Advertising is tricky, because wrong advertising means total loss. There is no scrap left to recover anything. It is like a bad dream, but it costs. A business succeeds if the advertising succeeds at the right budget. Please try some more quizzes on your personality and career and improve your performance manifold.

The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School

The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
by Michael McDonough

1. Talent is one-third of the success equation.
Talent is important in any profession, but it is no guarantee of success. Hard work and luck are equally important. Hard work means self-discipline and sacrifice. Luck means, among other things, access to power, whether it is social contacts or money or timing. In fact, if you are not very talented, you can still succeed by emphasizing the other two. If you think I am wrong, just look around.

2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking, negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you don’t learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.

3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
You hear a lot about details, from “Don’t sweat the details” to “God is in the details.” Both are true, but with a very important explanation: hierarchy. You must decide what is important, and then attend to it first and foremost. Everything is important, yes. But not everything is equally important. A very successful real estate person taught me this. He told me, “Watch King Rat. You’ll get it.”

4. Don’t over-think a problem.
One time when I was in graduate school, the late, great Steven Izenour said to me, after only a week or so into a ten-week problem, “OK, you solved it. Now draw it up.” Every other critic I ever had always tried to complicate and prolong a problem when, in fact, it had already been solved. Designers are obsessive by nature. This was a revelation. Sometimes you just hit it. The thing is done. Move on.

5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
In design this means “draw what you know.” Start by putting down what you already know and already understand. If you are designing a chair, for example, you know that humans are of predictable height. The seat height, the angle of repose, and the loading requirements can at least be approximated. So draw them. Most students panic when faced with something they do not know and cannot control. Forget about it. Begin at the beginning. Then work on each unknown, solving and removing them one at a time. It is the most important rule of design. In Zen it is expressed as “Be where you are.” It works.

6. Don’t forget your goal.
Definition of a fanatic: Someone who redoubles his effort after forgetting his goal. Students and young designers often approach a problem with insight and brilliance, and subsequently let it slip away in confusion, fear and wasted effort. They forget their goals, and make up new ones as they go along. Original thought is a kind of gift from the gods. Artists know this. “Hold the moment,” they say. “Honor it.” Get your idea down on a slip of paper and tape it up in front of you.

7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
Overconfidence is as bad as no confidence. Be humble in approaching problems. Realize and accept your ignorance, then work diligently to educate yourself out of it. Ask questions. Power – the power to create things and impose them on the world – is a privilege. Do not abuse it, do not underestimate its difficulty, or it will come around and bite you on the ass. The great Karmic wheel, however slowly, turns.

8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
The world is not set up to facilitate the best any more than it is set up to facilitate the worst. It doesn’t depend on brilliance or innovation because if it did, the system would be unpredictable. It requires averages and predictables. So, good deeds and brilliant ideas go against the grain of the social contract almost by definition. They will be challenged and will require enormous effort to succeed. Most fail. Expect to work hard, expect to fail a few times, and expect to be rejected. Our work is like martial arts or military strategy: Never underestimate your opponent. If you believe in excellence, your opponent will pretty much be everything.

9. It all comes down to output.
No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you can’t output it, distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesn’t exist. Orient yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The Output.

10. The rest of the world counts.
If you hope to accomplish anything, you will inevitably need all of the people you hated in high school. I once attended a very prestigious design school where the idea was “If you are here, you are so important, the rest of the world doesn’t count.” Not a single person from that school that I know of has ever been really successful outside of school. In fact, most are the kind of mid-level management drones and hacks they so despised as students. A suit does not make you a genius. No matter how good your design is, somebody has to construct or manufacture it. Somebody has to insure it. Somebody has to buy it. Respect those people. You need them. Big time.

From www.designobserver.com

The original author is Michael McDonough (www.michaelmcdonough.com).

Peugeot 207 COMMERCIAL

Е5 fashion internwt shopping

Agency: 7Beaufort
Account Team: Heidi Seys, Filiz Temur
Copy: Nadia Verbeeck, Tom Devliegher, Véronique Vier, Valérie Place
Art Director: Jurgen Beirlaen
TV Producer: Brigitte Baudine
Strategy: Heidi Seys
Production Company: Caviar
Director: Annemie Vande Putte
Post-Production Company: Masda
Photographer: Lars Deneyer
Retouching: The LivingRoom

WOW! Best Rube Goldberg Ever!

This is from the guys that brought you the Dorm Room Rube Goldberg. They continue to amaze us with their intricate set ups and executions.



The only innovative part was the cellphones. It was cool I guess.

and old Honda Commercial (video)



And other Rube Goldberg device goes through 6 minutes of gadgetry before making a bowl of ramen from Japan

iPhone vs smartPhone

Walkman Phones - Sony Ericsson

Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi Germany
Production company: Emenes GmbH
Director: Cassiano Prado

iPod - Tekserve Dominos Commercial

TEKSERVE

People Power - Shaw (bbdo, Jack Neary)

Agency: BBDO Toronto
Creative Director: Jack Neary
Art Director: James Zentil
Copywriter: Craig McIntosh
Agency Producer: Kevin Saffer
Director: Arno
Production company: Spy Films Inc
Executive Producer: Carlo Trulli
Line Producer: Peter Oad
D.O.P: Ray Dumas
Editor: Flash & Third - Christina Humphries
Music House: Eliasarts - NY

Ternet Oxi COMMERCIAL

Agency: DDB Argentina
Chief Creative Officers: Hernan Jauregui, Pablo Batlle
Creative Directors: Mariano Jeger, Felipe Vieyra
Art Director: Facundo Zapata
Copy Writer: Aurelio Martin
Agency Producers: Claudio Migliardo, Brenda Morrison Fell
Production Company: Muu Cine
Director: Fatty Iastrebner
Post Production Company: Tambo Post
Editor: Eduardo Trechuelo
DP: Sol Lopatin
Original Music: Super charango.