I agree with Jory over Analogue, this is still one of the best commercials of all time:

I was walking through my old neighborhood in the East Village on Sunday when I spotted an amazing Federer-Nadal poster amidst the usually paste-ups of gritty ads and promotions:

Apple just posted a new Get a Mac commercial.
“fear of switching is the foundation of customer loyalty for PCs”
Ten bucks says Chiat Day got that line from Jobs.

Digital A-List 2008: Next in Line – #2 …Go Schematic!
UPDATE: I just realized we were also Webpick of the Week at CommArts for 02.29.08.
full disclosure: I’m an art director at this kick-ass agency.

After yesterday’s post on the great ad-blocking Firefox plug-in, AdBlock, I kept thinking about advertising.
We’ll always have advertising in one form or another. To get interpretive for a moment, we all engage in advertising, when we get dressed to go on a date, or an interview – you’re selling yourself.
Anyway, I was thinking about how banner ads on websites suck so bad and I realized something that is very comparable – Green Peace sidewalk solicitors.
If you live in a big city like New York you know who these people are. I’ve even seen them outside large department stores in suburbs throughout the country.
The reason banner ads are like Green Peace solicitors is because both of them distract you from your objective. Many of you are conditioned to block out both of these distractions and continue on with your objective, but regardless if you do or don’t have this ability, they’re annoying as hell.
We’re already seeing advertising changing from distractions, to destinations – advertising experiences that people choose to view.
I’ll leave this idea for another post.

The other day I was trying to imagine an online world with no advertising. No advertising meaning, no Adobe Flash ads, no banner ads, no Eyeblaster roadblocks and no ad pages that pop up before I get to the page I clicked for.
Then I thought – couldn’t you write an add-on for Firefox that removes ads?
Turns out, such a thing already exists – has existed since 2006. I know, I’m late on this.
Is called AdBlock and has changed my online viewing experience completely allowed me to enjoy online content more. I think it also shows not only how ugly ads are to the online landscape. but also how outdated the current ad models are.
I don’t click on banner ads, but now I don’t have to deal with the noise that ads create on websites I visit.
In cheesy infomercial style, I’d just like to say,
“Thank you AdBlock – you’ve changed my life!”
How awesome is AdBlock? Look below for the below-and-after shots of some websites I frequent (note that none of these images have been edited in Photoshop):

Buckethead and Claypool tear it up so much in this clip that I didn’t notice all the nasty hippies:

I have a client that has never seen the website I designed for her.
I launched the site 6 years ago.
Correction – She saw it once when I burned her a CD-ROM of it so she could view it on her laptop.
She doesn’t have Internet at her business or home but understands (now more than ever) the value of an informative web prescence. Over the years she has invested money in CitySearch and has become fanatical about her keywords and description. Street traffic in her neighborhood in Manhattan has dropped significantly over the years, being replaced by digital street traffic on Google.
This past weekend I shot some new images for her website.
Along with the image updates, she also wanted to review all the pages so she can edit the copy.
She asked that I send her printouts via postal mail.
Wow.
It’s so archane, but I actually got a little excited folding up the printouts, sealing them in their envelope and dropping them in the mail.
It was a combination of feeling like I was getting punk’d and being involved in some weird art experiment.

I ran across (literally) this Mini ad campaign in the Union Square subway station on my way to work.
I didn’t get it at first until I realized that this is what everyone does in that station stop.
Brilliant.
*This also brings to mind Ironic Sans’ old Star Wars game analogy (I loved that game as a kid!).

Wet woman. Fluids splashing all over …and she tells me she wants me all over her.
Man, advertising is funny.

Copan in bag, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

Maurice Saatchi, executive director of M&C Saatchi has had a revelation on saving advertising (He doesn’t say that in the article but someone is going to have to show companies ‘the way’ and why not Saatchi). Why is advertising dying? Oh this stupid thing we have called technology. Yeah, technology is making things difficult for the Saachi brains. His solution? See below:

What I am describing here is a new business model for marketing, appropriate to the digital age. In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind.

Woah.

For example, the word “search” is now owned by Google. For 20 years, “favourite” was owned by British Airways. Sony used to own “innovation”, but that word has probably now been taken by Apple. Royal Bank of Scotland, in its US marketing, will soon own “action”. The same applies to political parties or countries – Britain’s Labour party won three elections with the word “new”. America’s one-word equity is “freedom”.

More woah. Innovation has ‘probably’ been taken by Apple? I never knew Sony had it? It must be great to be at the top of the company and can afford to just make shit up.
Oh and Maurice has made a really nasty, bloated Flash site for his new paradigm. Ooof that is nasty! Why not carry over the simplicity of one word equity and make a simple, clear site?
Truly Amazing. Great rhetoric there, mister Saachi guy.

Hey Samsung, something is missing from this shitty iPhone imitation you’re launching.
…a shot of the software it runs.

Samsung, Motorola, Nokia – you all know how to make a beautiful looking phone. Now you need to take a step back. You need to start thinking about design in other areas of your business. You need to start giving the phone’s interface as much TLC as you do to the outer shell.
This will probably be a painful process for some companies, but without struggle, we don’t get any progress. Some of you will have to partner with companies who do know software, others will take the risk and dive into the software development themselves.
The problem is, none of this is happening. Apple’s competitors are taking 2 wrong directions.
They are:
A. trying to out-feature Apple’s products
B. trying to approximate the design of Apple’s products

Regarding A

Unless your offering a product as easy and fun to use as a competitor, offering dozens of more bells and whistles is not going to get you anywhere. Proof of this idea surfaces every time I ask someone in my office how they feel about their iPhone, two weeks after purchasing.
10 times out of 10 I get this response:

I wish the iPhone had x, y and z features, but its still the best phone I’ve ever used.

So everyone I talk to is well aware of the iPhone’s shortcomings, but they still love it. Keep this in mind if you decide to develop a phone with GPS, 10 megapixel camera, waterproof shell, flashlight, nail file, and an *AM/FM tuner.

Regarding B

The idea here is to be cool by association. To use the iPod as an example and to get a little extreme, Apple’s competitors have reacted as if the iPod was the ideal digital music player (DMP), in the tradition of *Plato’s ideal forms. If you look at the majority of DMP’s out there since 2001, they approximate the style of the iPod in some way or another.
Microsoft tried something similar when they launched Vista. They tried to copy the the shiny GUI of OS X, but they merely copied the style, not the design. They forgot to make Vista usable. When you get down to it, Vista is XP with some sugar coating. Microsoft essentially put lipstick on a pig.

Conclusion

Heed to design. Weave it into every aspect of your projects, from the inside out. If you design a sexy looking car, but the interior and dashboard controls are impossible to use, you still have a shitty product. You’ve dropped the ball.
If you want to steal something from a company like Apple, how about you steal their passion for great design?

*Speaking of which, can someone please tell me why having a radio tuner in your digital music player is a feature? Have you listened to FM radio in the last 20 years? I can’t understand why someone with thousands of songs and videos on their iPod would want to listen to the drivel they play on the radio.

*If you’re not familiar with this, Plato believed there was a heavenly, ‘ideal’ form for objects in the world from which everything else is based on. For instance, there exists somewhere, an ideal, perfect chair, from which all other chairs get their chairness.

Look closely, you’ll see that all the marine life are clothes.
Beautiful.