4 posts tagged “advertising”

Although the motivations and ultimate direction of the ban are unclear, the immediate result is amazing!  A city nearly as large as New York with next to no outdoor advertising.  Considering it's also a city I know to be famous for it's art, music, street art, graffiti, designers, and new media folks... sounds like heaven to me.  read more

Going to post now that the previous posting was likely a tad on the reactionary side.  GlassWorks shows credit to Chris Levine, a noteworthy light artist, for the laser manipulation including refracted nebula, obviously aware of and capable of producing effects similar as my friend Alan.  I'm also not suggesting anybody threw a camera in the production of that ad, but the light painting (by moving the sources or the camera rig) bore such an aesthetic similarity, perhaps inspired by perhaps not, that the culmination of these two graphical forces in an ad struck a little too close to home on first viewing.  I feel better now.

continuing the theme of creatively bankrupt advertising...

An appropriately timed quote arrived in my reader via QOTD.

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

Stephen Leacock
Canadian economist & humorist (1869 - 1944)

A bit more of the synchronicity today... This, Visual plagiarism: when does inspiration become imitation?, shared in flickr's Licensing Awareness Working Law Group.

The advertising world is getting really void of creativity, yet producing great ads. How is this possible? Because it is actively raiding the creative energy of our collective minds via the internet. Ad firms no longer have to come up with the "great idea", we do that all the time for them, they just have to spot ours', and that's not hard, they spread like wildfire. Then, all they need to do buy us out, usually rather cheaply, or not at all and just steal it. This spreads beyond product advertising. The news and other media are just as guilty of stuffing their reels and pages with unthoughtful drivel on these creativity memes as they surface. The people that come up with these things are usually quite bright, why don't they try asking them some intelligent questions and educate their audience a little?

This is speaking from my own experience with major firms and media outlets approaching myself and others in my community for our photographic content, often after attempting it themselves and failing, and then I see these two commercials:

And the much less interesting, although, slick edition for business class:

What does the creative brilliance of animating a scene with LED lights and stop motion photography have to do with cell phones? Answer: absolutely nothing! They can't even claim their brilliant ad firms came up with anything original. Perhaps if they shot it on one of their camera-phones, sure... but I seriously doubt that was the technique.

It's kinda sad really...

I share the things I create online in a optimistic attempt to inspire and get the public to create! I often aim to educate, but will settle for entertainment. I do not aim to encourage people to buy things, especially completely unrelated things.

The question becomes, what do we do about it? Does every good idea have to continue to die by over saturation within 6 months? What can we, as a creative online public do to protect our own creations from creatively bankrupt corporations? We could just not put anything online, but what fun is that?

An interesting question to think about.