I’ve added a new track to the Music for Monkey’s playlist: “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” by The Decemberists. I hope you enjoy it.
It’s sitting at track #70 and brings the total number of tracks available for your listening pleasure to seventy-five, and I think that’s as large as Music for Monkeys will grow. From this point on, if I add a new track, something else will have to go.
So look over in the right sidebar, scroll down to track #70 and have a listen. “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” is a lovely little ditty– actually, it’s more of a short story set to music– about a conversation between two sailors, had while they sit, trapped, in the belly of a whale.
I think I’ve mentioned one of the Art Directors on my team is a rock star. So who better to interview Lucia Ballas-Traynor, Senior Vice President and General Manager of MTV’s new “Tr3s” network? Right on. It’s José.
And it’s an excellent show.
Want to know what MTV’s new plans are for this new youth-targeted channel? Want to know what’s up with the exploding Hispanic teen population? Tune in by visiting Latincast.net, scrolling to the end of the podcast list and downloading the MP4 file. (You might even find podcasts on other topics that are of interest to you on your scroll-down). They’re pretty much all hosted by José.
God bless the Delta Blues and all who dig into its Muddy (Waters) red clay for rock inspiration. (Warning: music geek conversation follows.)
My birthday surprise was a nice dinner and tickets to last night’s relatively intimate Dallas-venue performance by The Raconteurs.
It was an awesome show. Jack White might be this super-group’s entrée to fast-track stardom, but he hardly fronts the band– at least in the traditional sense of the word. He’s there, he plays (and plays very, very well) and sings, but he does so with a classic (and classically undervalued) Jimmy Page sensibility.
Instead, he shares lead guitar/vocal duties with Brendan Benson, freeing him up to concentrate on improvisational guitar genius. I swear, at times it seemed as if White was looking down at his guitar as if to ask what it wanted to play, and it never steered him wrong. He, along with the rest of this “power cinco,” delivered a virtuoso performance.
I have to admit to a large lack of knowledge about the group before we arrived at the show; I knew the Jack White factor and little else. Because of my recent workload, I haven’t even had the chance to watch the MTV Video Music Awards show, on which they were, essentially, the house band.
We arrived just before they went on, having missed the opening act and, once they began, I looked over at the she monkey and said “they sound like the ‘birds,” and they do– in an “influenced-by-but-take-into-new-space” sense of the phrase. (If you don’t know the Yardbirds, shame on you but it’s unimportant for enjoying The Raconteurs’ sound.)
Their sound was slightly post-punk tinged, blues-rock from start to finish. Unfortunately, with few exceptions the Dallas Über-hipster crowd couldn’t fully fall in to it heart and soul. Our seats– excellent ones, especially for the pregnant she monkey who needed a cushy spot to sit– were four rows up from the floor. Having grown up with punk (and wearing a Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck” T-shirt), I desperately wanted to see someone, anyone, mosh. Finally, during the encore, a small area of the pit began to writhe but, before I could look over at the she monkey and tell her I wanted to drop in and join the fray, it was broken up and dispersed.
It’s probably for the best; at my age I would have likely broken something.
The almost total lack of crowd participation didn’t matter. These guys have more than enough talent to put on a great show without needing to feed off the energy of others. This is a live band, not a group of Ashlee Simpson/American Idol overdub, magic box studio fakers. I’ve spent the morning listening to their CD (which came with the tickets) and, as great as it is, I have to say the live show, which was full of wall-of-sound fuzz distortion improvisation, was even better.
I’ve placed one of the tracks off their debut album into the Music for Monkeys playlist over in the right sidebar (track #7). For sure, buy the CD; but if they come within a hundred miles of where you live, go see them live.
I hate to admit it but thanks to Michel, Tamara and my wife, it was a terrific way to spend a birthday.
I had an advertising blast from the past today and discovered I’m famous, but not necessarily in a good way. In any industry other than advertising, you’d probably call it “infamous” or “infamy” but, being that the ad jungle is all about getting noticed at any cost, I’m sticking with my original assessment of famous-ness.
Several years ago—it’s been five or six—I was called in to work on a general market (English language) campaign, on the side, for what would later become my current employer, Dieste Harmel & Partners.
The campaign was for a new beer that one of Dieste’s clients, Anheuser-Busch, was launching. It was a new concept: flavoring beer with outside ingredients, and the launch was intended to compete with the hundreds of “flavored malt beverages” that were flooding the market at the time.
The beer was to be called “Tequiza,” and the product was going to combine the flavors of beer, tequila and lime. I’m sure some marketing wiz at A-B was in a bar one day, saw people chasing their tequila with beer, and had the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup-brainstorm moment of simply combining the two (“Your tequila is in my beer!” “Yeah, well your beer is in my tequila!”).
The campaign we developed played up the “liberating,” in vino veritas qualities of tequila, and the copy line, “Speak your mind, drink your beer” was born along with the tagline, “Beer Without Borders.”
The campaign was all about being bold, as in, “Did I just say that!? Fuck it. I’ve been drinking tequila—I’m excused,” and it received a ton of press when it broke, getting written up in AdWeek– by Barbara Lippert, no less– and in other publications of the sort that get read by exactly four people outside our industry.
We broke a slew of print with the campaign—subway posters, bathroom signage, outdoor, magazine—and some pretty good radio spots, one of which I still have on my reel:
(The radio is showing some age, being written during the early stages of the dot com bust, but I still like it too much to take it out of my book.)
It was a fantastically fun assignment to work on and it sold me on DHP being a shop that had the balls to do provocative, breakthrough work.
Today, the Art Director/Creative Director who brought me in on the project, Jesse Diaz (with whom I worked at the ill-fated shop, Berry*Brown Advertising), dropped by my office to show me an excerpt from a book written by someone named Koren Zailckas.
In the book, “Smashed,” she mentioned our campaign. Our campaign!
Jesse handed me the photocopied sheets (pages 191 and 192 from the book) and there, in New York Times Best Seller-set type, was this quote:
“What does sell [alcohol], especially to women, is sex as an idea. Even more than men, we buy the concept that sex is a tricky proceeding. We understand that interacting on the coed level is a struggle for dominance, one that involves a million fouls and false starts, where the playing field is never level, and where one player almost always has the advantage. That’s why Anheuser-Busch advertises Tequiza using the brazen taglines ‘Actually, size does matter’ and ‘They’re not real, so what?’”
Wow! Is that cool or what?
I guess I should have researched the book before I had that “I’m an Ad God” moment, though, because, roughly ten minutes later, I found this review on Amazon:
This isn’t just one girl’s story of sneaking drinks in junior high, creeping out for night-long keg parties in high school and binge-drinking weeknights and weekends through college—it’s also a valuable cautionary tale. At 24 (her present age), Zailckas gave up drinking after a decade of getting drunk, having blackouts and experiencing brushes with comas, date rape and suicide. […] Zailckas had alcohol poisoning at 16 after a night of downing shots at a party with friends, but having her stomach pumped in the emergency room and enduring a month of being grounded didn’t check her desire to drink. […] Alcohol defined Zailckas’s adolescence and college years to such an extent that, as she tells it, she lacks the tools to be an adult: she’s unsure how to maintain relationships and unclear about sex without an alcohol buzz.
Oooooooh kaaaaaaay.
So now my work is being held up as contributing to the delinquency of a minor. A young girl who, at the time the campaign ran, was eighteen. (And a young girl (now, a young woman) who has a blog.)
And not just eighteen; eighteen and lured into a hazy, beer-goggled world of binge drinking, drunken sex and alcohol-induced coma by– wait for it– advertising.
My advertising. My wonderful, breakthrough, attention-grabbing advertising.
Fan-tastic.
So now you see why I said infamy might be a better word.
I’m so proud.
Of course, I think it’s much, much more complicated than that– advertising is incapable of holding a gun to someone’s head and ordering them to chug a beer bong. There’s the whole matter of upbringing, intelligence and, of course, Free Will to contend with, none of which– certainly– is meant to disparage Ms. Zailckas. Rather, it is to say a reduction of such things down to an algebra of advertising equaling the x factor is overly simplistic.
And I’m not saying she blames me specifically– hell, I’ve only read two photocopied pages from her book and a couple thousand words of reviews. Within its pages she might fault Martians or an overactive thyroid gland or even David Hasselhoff.
What do I know?
Still, reading it was a cold-water chaser to my high-proof day in the ad jungle.
The latest, greatest Latincast podcast from Dieste Harmel & Partners is on the topic of Hispanic teens.
More and more we’re seeing the “Latin-ization” of pop culture as Hispanics begin to flex their cultural muscle here in the United States, and when it comes to raw culture-bending strength, nothing matches the power of a gaggle of teens.
This week’s podcast combines the two, delving into the minds of Hispanic teens in order to find out what’s cool, hot, hip and, uh, happening.
Obviously, I am not one of those things.
Have a listen– you can find it, cleverly titled “Hispanic Teen Podcast,” at the very bottom of the list of podcasts found at LATINCAST.net, our repository of all things pod-i-licious.
I spent Friday at the studio working on another radio spot for 7-Eleven.
I’ve mentioned it before, but our voice talent, Bill Vogel, is a machine. The number of takes required to get what we needed in the can: four. As in fewer than five.
It took longer for our AE on the account to make her way to the studio than it did for us to set up, record, edit and mix the spot. I love that.
It’s a little-known fact to ad industry outsiders that most of the names you hear in television and radio spots (and read in print for that matter) are names of either clients or people associated with the agencies that produced the work.
The reason for this is pretty simple: If I use someone’s name in a spot– anyone’s name– and I associate them with a particular location, I have to perform research into whether or not someone living in that location carries the name I used. If I use “John Doe from Kalamazoo, Michigan,” and a John Doe really lives there, I then have to approach Mr. Doe, make sure he’s cool with me using his name, and then negotiate for the rights to use his persona or likeness in a commercial advertisement.
In other words, it’s a pain in the ass, adds a multiple to the time required for getting a spot in the can and might cost our clients a little extra money to boot.
We get around that by using the names of people we know– and then having them sign a release for the use of their name (either for free or for a nominal fee– like one dollar, or so).
This causes a never ending supply of inside jokes as we constantly work the names of our friends and clients into various roles, from dogs to wailing children to– well, to pansies who throw like a girl.
For today’s spot, I chose to pick on my internjunior Senior Art Director, Jason Tisser.
Jason hasn’t been blessed with an overabundance of talent, but I keep him around because when he’s not being funny in an oh-my-that’s-really-sad sort of way, he’s funny in an almost-nailed-it-let’s-give-him-another-chance sort of way.
He also loves sports (he’s a University of Texas alum) despite the fact he possesses the athletic ability of a six year old who’s been kept in a cage for most of its life. (Likewise, his skills with the ladies.)
So I thought this spot for 7-Eleven’s Slurpee was perfect for adding his name as the cherry on top:
Jason’s on vacation in New York this week, so he hasn’t had a chance to sign his waiver, but I know he will. Oh yes, I know he will– there’s no way he’d make us go in and change the name to, oh, Juan Daniel.
Because, if he did…
So what do you do when you blow through your session in four takes? You listen to the wonderful treats the nice folks at Reel F/X have created for you since your last visit.
I present to you, “The Suck.” Enjoy, and have a good weekend, everyone.
One of the projects I was working on a while back has broken: a new home for Dieste Harmel & Partners’ Hispanic advertising and marketing podcast is born (so no more horribly long mac.com web address).
You can now find the podcast (all of them, actually) at LATINCAST.net
I think it deserves a visit, don’t you? Come on, you know you want to.
(Oh yeah, and I’ve just returned from Texarkana, so goodnight everyone.)
Let me start by saying I don’t listen to podcasts.
Sure, sure, they’re hip, they’re cool and they fit nicely on my iPod. We have one. Hell, I’ve even been on a few of them.
The reason I don’t listen to them is pretty simple; when I plug in my iPod, I want music and, consequently, if I listen to podcasts, I listen to them on my desktop; if I’m listening to podcasts on my desktop, I’m listening to them at work; if I’m listening to podcasts at work, I’ve obviously lost my head (or at least my appointment calendar).
No, if I have twenty minutes to spare at work, I’ll spend it surfing porn dreaming up new Cannes-winning concepts, TYVM, or maybe even having, oh, lunch.
So I don’t listen to podcasts.
And, until today, that included the American Copywriter podcasts. What was so special about today?
They [the American Copywriter podcasters] remind you that making great communications is, above all, a craft. And that some skills - like getting a voiceover guy to deliver all the words he’s supposed to say in exactly 14.8 seconds - are not going to replaced by any amount of social media widgets or clever digital doodahs.
I won’t bore you with my thoughts on “Web 2.0″ (:cough:consultanthuksterhype:cough:), but this quote was enough to make me want to take a listen.
So this morning, around 10:30 or so, I carved out a half-hour from my schedule, and downloaded and listened to (on my desktop, of course), A.C. #40.
Roughly twenty-two minutes later I placed it on our server and sent a note to my agency’s owners and ECD, holding it up as a “best practices” example and urging them to listen and learn.
So, while I still don’t listen to podcasts, I have to say the American Copywriter’s is terrific.
I’ve added two new tracks from an artist named M.Craft to the Music For Monkeys playlist over in the right-hand column.
I sought him out after hearing one of the tracks, “Dragonfly,” in a VW Eos spot from DDB/London and promptly purchased his EP, “I Can See It All Tonight,” from iTunes. Good bossa nova-influenced trip-lounge.
“Dragonfly” can be found sitting at track #16 on the playlist and “Sweets” can be found at #58.
EMT-Man: makethelogobigger isn't really correct. The protocol changes every year based on your level of certification, and whether you are working on...
michel: Glad to hear you, know you have been busy!!! Enjoy the Pubs and see ya when you get back!!!
I think 
I had an advertising blast from the past today and discovered I’m famous, but not necessarily in a good way. In any industry other than advertising, you’d probably call it “infamous” or “infamy” but, being that the ad jungle is all about getting noticed at any cost, I’m sticking with my original assessment of famous-ness.
