RIVERRUN

The last post to say goodbye

2010-02-06T02:41:00.000-08:00

I have started this blog with the intention of sharing inspirations. It worked well. I have made many friends and met a lot of interesting people. But because of the time and the my lack of inspiration for cool and interesting posts, i have decided to close Riverrun down. I wish you the best and please keep on following me on Twitter: salrussomanno.
Stay Tuned
Goodbye.

Bar code revolution

2009-11-08T11:09:00.000-08:00

I love this barcode design. Check the entire collection here.

I wish i was dead. I just turned 30.

2009-11-01T10:19:00.000-08:00

It's long time since my last post. I have been thinking if it was still worth to keep a blog in a world that goes faster and faster and the time to read is in 140 character of Twitter. But then i said "what a fuck" this is my personal space and i still want to express my thought freely. So here i am.
The biggest novelty is that i turned 30. I finally crossed the line and now the only thing i can do is either looking towards the 40s or back to the 20s. You can guess what my choice is.
Then second thing i'd like to talk about is the new world i discovered: ARG games. Where Arg stands for Alternate Reality Games. They are games that involve people in a broader sense: you don't have just play in front of a computer but you are going to be dragged inside the game in the real life by doing challenges, receiving phone calls or emails and so on. If you want to know more here's a great website: http://www.argn.com/
What is really interesting is the perfect integration of many media and the storytelling.
So have fun!

On Family Guy

2009-09-19T04:52:00.000-07:00

Family Guy is one of my favorite shows ever. It's so unpolitical correct and have such a bad taste that it really makes funny and exciting to watch. Every episode is full of references to the entire show biz and it might get hard sometimes to get the connection . But this makes Family Guy even more exciting to watch. I was curios about the creator of this series and here i found this speech at Harvard. It's great.
By the way here's the best joke i heard today from the show: Peter is on the sofa watching chick movies and crying. His wife asks why he's been watching chick movies the entire night and he answers: " Before i found these movies, women only made me cry through my penis, now they make me cry through my eyes..."

Who says heavy metal is bad for children?

2009-09-02T09:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my CD showed me this wonderful documentary about Anvil, a very famous heavy metal band at the beginning of their career in the '80s. They were expected to sell millions of albums but in the end they didn't make. Till now. In fact, even though they disappeared, they never stop playing and for 30 years they have been waiting for their moment of fame. They didn't care to get nice and well payed job.
They have done what they always liked to do: playing fucking good music. They have dedicated their life their passion and they have believed in it. And the movie will show what happened. They only deserve respect and their story is a great lesson of life: never quit what you like the most. Even if you have the world against you , you must never give up.
Hail to you Anvil.

This post doesn't have anything to say

2009-08-29T14:08:00.000-07:00

I am just back from holidays and i haven't been connected for a while so i need some time to fine some cool stuff to write about. When i got to my village the 1st of August i closed my computer and i haven't opened it for 3 entire weeks. It seems crazy but it is really nice to stay off line and enjoy the simple real life of a small village.
So i don't know really what to write right now. i don't want to bore you by telling my holidays. So stay tuned and soon i will be posting again.

Happy birthday Major Tom

2009-07-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

This is a different celebration of 40th anniversary of the landing on the moon. 40 years ago David Bowie composed this awesome song that talks about an astronaut who get lost in the space. It was rush-released on 11 July 1969 to coincide with the landing of the Apollo 11. Even though the song must be interpreted in a more metaphorical sense concerning the use of drugs, in the UK BBC used the song in conjunction with its coverage of the landing.

Ideas, Ideas, Ideas

2009-07-11T01:05:00.000-07:00

This is a brilliant idea from BBH. Read the story here and visit the web site. It's amazing.

Great video but read the story

2009-07-03T01:24:00.000-07:00

Read the story here.
;)

Kill your ego

2009-06-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

Just because it is Cannes time, it is nice to listen and the the wise words of this guy.

if you are pig, you stay a pig.

2009-06-20T16:12:00.000-07:00

I simply love this short movie from this agency. it's so true that should make many people think about it. Enjoy it.

The Viral effect

2009-06-19T01:54:00.000-07:00

- Do something unusual, silly, original;
- Believe in what you do;
- Find the right contest and people;
- Involve those who are the first to be interested in what you do;
- Enjoy the success.
Brilliant!

It's good to know this.

2009-06-16T13:10:00.001-07:00

What are you waiting for?

2009-06-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

The Audience Is Always Right

View more Microsoft Word documents from Mad Blog.

This is a brilliant presentation about the advertising revolution. I found it extremely inspiring and i hope it can be the same for you. Enjoy.
(Via mad-blog)

Movie recycling

2009-06-07T03:21:00.000-07:00

I totally love what this guy did: he took copyright-free stock footage, mashed them up, and create a movie out of it. You can read here the entire story.

When people stood up

2009-06-06T01:29:00.000-07:00

One of the problem of the thousand social campaigns that we see around is that they are totally uneffective. They might create buzz but they don't produce any change. Why? Because people have had enough of messages. People no longer believe in them . People move if they touch the problem with their hands, if they experience it but what's more important, they must really feel part of the solution. A great campaign was The tap water project. Another one is this campaign from Air, a Belgium agency.

Just a great idea

2009-06-02T02:01:00.000-07:00

When you focus on ideas, you can come up with this. A simple youtube video instead of an expensive web site. I have nothing to add to this brilliant idea of this agency. Please enjoy.

David Droga speaks: please everybody shut up!!!!

2009-05-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

This great video is the manifesto for the new era of communication. David Droga gives a speech about his experience and presents his works himself. The video is quite long but it is worth to be watched till the end. So you'd better find a good excuse with your girlfriend;)

After this, business won't be like before

2009-05-29T01:33:00.000-07:00

Hi to everybody. As i am big fan of twitter i couldn't help to post this nice article which explains how twitter will change the way to make business. I shortened a bit and even though it's still quite long it's really worth to spend some time and read it. in the end it's about our future.

24/7 Wall St. has come up with ten ways that Twitter will permanently change American business within the next two or three years, based on an examination of Twitter’s model, the way that corporations and small businesses are currently using the service and some of the logical extensions of the ways that companies will use Twitter in the future. Some of these firms are already using Twitter but their efforts are in the earliest stages of development. 24/7 Wall St. evaluated other sensible and potentially highly profitable ways Twitter’s real-time, multi-platform presence is likely to be exploited, in the best use of that word, to expand businesses both large and small.

1.) Hyper-local marketing. Twitter is currently being used as a marketing tool for small businesses. At the same time the local outlets of some of the largest retailers in the world, which are often competing with local vendors, are turning to Twitter as well. As an example, Twitter users can follow the local pizzeria or the store’s owner. Since Twitter is still mostly a person-to-person service and not a business-to-business service, it is likely that the Twitter relationship will be with the owners of small shops. With access to their Twitter addresses these small shop owners can send customers news about special offerings, sales, new merchandises, store hours, or events. International companies which operate through thousands of locations are beginning to use the same methods to gather their own lists of Twitter names. Recently, Starbucks launched a multi-million marketing program in which the company put up advertising posters in six major cities and attempted to “harness the power of online social networking sites by challenging people to hunt for the posters on Tuesday and be the first to post a photo of one using Twitter”, the company said. The project seemed like a good way to get the company’s brand in front of a large number of people online and encourage them to search for ad messages in their cities.

One of the by-products of Starbuck’s marketing foray into the world of Twitter illustrates how social media can be used against a company. According to Alternet.org, filmmaker Robert Greenwald who has done a short video critical of the way that Starbucks treats employees, entered the Twitter contest as a way to get out news about his new film.

Twitter has the potential to drive substantial amounts of business to retailers as diverse as the local clothing store or the Gap (GPS), the local car repair shop or the Jiffy Lube franchise, and the local deli or the McDonald’s (MCD) even though there may be adverse publicity from unhappy customers or disgruntled employees. The time may come when multinational oil companies with local gas stations can tweet people who want to save money on gas costs when the price at the pump drops a few cents, since Twitter users can follow local businesses and companies closely by zip code. The hyper-local marketing aspects of Twitter have the opportunity to move billions of dollars of business to and from retailers based on targeted marketing.

2) Outdoor ads are used almost everywhere in the world because of their simplicity and the relatively low cost of creating them. Current estimates are that global outdoor advertising sales will be a $30 billion business this year. One of the great weaknesses of older ad media, like outdoor billboard marketing and newspaper display, is that results have been nearly impossible to measure effectively. Twitter will change that. Up until recently, marketers could survey whether people remembered what they saw on outdoor ads and measure the number of cars that passed a sign on any given day. Using Twitter opens up the opportunity to make a very large and nearly unmeasurable medium measurable.

Marketers using outdoor ads will have to give Twitter users an incentive to report that they have seen a billboard. A Twitter user who sees an ad for a Toyota (TM) Corolla could be encouraged to send a tweet to the local dealer. In exchange he could get a pint of oil or a T-shirt. He will obviously have to come to the showroom in order to get that promotional item. The same principle will apply to newspaper display ads, a shrinking category which is disappearing so fast that it is helping to destroy the newspaper industry. Some display ads have coupons, but the ability of a newspaper advertiser to get reactions back from consumers though Twitter help make another hard-to-measure medium at least partially interactive.

If the use of Twitter to measure these categories of marketing are even modestly successful, it could completely change the marketing methodology and advertising investment that companies are willing to make in outdoor media. That category includes billboard, telephone, taxi, and public transportation. Because Twitter can be used on mobile devices as well as PCs and since Twitter allows messages of a maximum of 140 characters, the reactions to outdoor ad messages can be instantaneous. Conversely, relying on e-mail responses or postings on MySpace or Facebook requires a much longer and more complex process for both the end user as well as the company. Many people will not take the time to follow through if the incentives to do so are modest. It only takes a few seconds for a Twitter user to indicate that he has seen an outdoor ad or newspaper display message by texting.

3) Twitter will become a huge platform for discussing stocks and other financial instruments and will probably replace message boards like the ones at Yahoo! Finance as the preferred method for discussing individual public companies. The size of the Twitter audience makes it possible for groups interested in one stock to post opinions on that company, trades, research, rumors, and data directly from the company in real-time. A stock with a large shareholder base could have a following that brings in thousands of comments a day. This kind of information market for stocks has already begun to emerge through services like StockTwits. Communities of active investors and day traders who are sharing opinions and in some case sophisticated research about stocks, bonds and other financial instruments, will actually have the power to move share prices. In the cases of some smaller and more thinly traded stocks, this power could be used to spread rumors and influence trading patterns. At some point federal government agencies such as the SEC are going to have to examine how Twitter users access the service to spread information about public companies. Some of these comments are likely to be misleading as is true on message boards because some investors will seek to move share prices up and down based on their volume of messages and the messages that they can get their friends and affiliates to tweet.

As this function of Twitter use grows the community of commentators on any one publicly traded company could become nearly as large as its stock’s daily volume making Twitter-based input as important as any other data on many stocks. Yahoo and other large message boards may start to supplement their services using Twitter, extending the power of the medium to pass along information whether it is accurate or not. Twitter is one of the most disruptive technologies to become part of the financial markets in decades. It will allow individual and professional investors to exchange hundreds of thousands of bits of information about the markets in remarkably short time periods. The problem will be that a great deal of this information will not be correct.

For people who do not have money to put into the stock market, Twitter will be an ideal platform for fantasy stock trading in which people post the price at which they would have bought or sold a stock. That could become a part of a large contest among people who want to compete with one another to show who can create the best performing portfolio, even without money

4) Much has been written about the democratization of the media and how blogs and other non-mainstream media have begun to supplant traditional media as a source of information, news and entertainment. Twitter will almost certainly extend this trend. Twitter will also expand the power of the blogosphere by further severing the relationship between mainstream audiences and traditional media which have typically been controlled by TV’s distribution through a large number of viewers, in addition to the millions of people who subscribe to magazines and newspapers.

Blogs, including Perez Hilton and TechCrunch, have huge Twitter followings and Twitter will allow content operations which have limited numbers of employees and small distribution budgets access to hundreds of thousands of Twitter users based on the community’s views of the “merit” of their content. Twitter will not only democratize content; it will democratize the advertising that goes with content. Each tweet about a piece of content can be attached to a short phrase or sentence from a sponsoring marketer. This could backfire among Twitter users who sometimes resent the use of the service for commercial reasons. But, that is unlikely to happen in all cases, especially if people following blogs or major media see value in the messages that they get and understand that media cannot survive long-term on free content. Twitter also democratizes traffic because on Twitter traffic does not have to be paid for. Twitter gives major media the opportunity to extend its reach but will simultaneously help media with quality content but no marketing budgets gain access to a large and potentially national audience.

5) Data mining. Collecting data about what people think about products or services is among the most expensive activities of large companies that rely on consumers for their sales. Market research, product development, and research techniques like focus groups can take months to organize and execute. Large corporations from Sprint (S) to P&G (PG) could find quick feedback on the quality of their products and services, especially ones that have been recently launched on Twitter. Sprint would give a lot to get thousand of responses to the Palm (PALM) Pre the first day that the new handset hit the market.

Twitter is a nearly ideal platform for tapping opinion about customer views of products. Twitter users have the capacity to segment themselves into discrete demographic groups, if they have an incentive to do so. P&G could arrange to have only women between 18 and 40 react to a new bleach product with instant positive or negative opinion. Because Twitter and the Twitter community encourage users to post information about their biographies and person tastes, many of the demographic aspects of Twitter are already built in. People tweeting about their daily habits are a free focus group on a massive scale, not unlike the Nielsen in home surveys that have been used as market research in the television industry for years. The risk is that users may begin to see Twitter as “Big Brother”, and remove personal information.

6) Large media companies are already using Twitter as a way to alert people to breaking news and new features. CNN, Time, The New York Times, the BBC, the London Guardian, and Good Morning America are among the most widely followed media on Twitter. CNN ranks third among all the people or companies who use Twitter, with over 1.5 million followers on Twitter. The traditional media are setting up systems to more tightly tie their audiences to them with the use of social networks. Twitter has the opportunity to become a distribution method for premium content.

Tweets can contain short URLs the system can be used to transmit print content, video, or audio files. Movie trailers can be tweeted to hundreds of thousands of people within a short period of time. The same holds true for audio content or links to articles. Video aggregation sites including YouTube and Hulu will have completely new ways for Twitter users to distribute links to their content. Media companies will have the opportunity to send Twitter users, who follow them, summaries of the daily news with links to articles or videos. CNN has already begun to take advantages of this and distributes a number of breaking news links a day to its followers. That gives CNN an advantage over other news services like MSNBC.

News media with the largest and most comprehensive lists of Twitter followers will begin to have distributions channels that are not available to many other media. If Twitter grows to 100 million or 200 million users, major media could have Twitter followers in the millions matching the size of all of their other delivery channels combined.

7) The use of Twitter for “micropayments”, small loans or payments to companies for services, which is essentially no more than an extension of a user’s PayPal, checking, or credit card accounts is already is in its early stages. Exchanging money, making payments, charging for goods and services through fairly traditional means is only the start of a large independent economy that will emerge on Twitter. One model that is being tested on Twitter allows consumers to sign up and put some cash in a Twitpay account through a payment service like PayPal, and then allows them to send out a “tweet” to another Twitpay member, structured like “@josh twitpay $10 for Burger King.” The Twitpay operation takes a $.05 commission. Its founders are hoping that, eventually, it can be used for charity and disaster relief payments.

Twitpay and services like it will extend the reach of operations like eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal. eBay, Amazon (AMZN), and other e-commerce operations will get a financial benefit from real time micropayments. Hyper-local marketers will also benefit from the ability of Twitter users to make small payments.

Twitter is also likely to evolve into a service like the old Western Union. A customer or business would walk into a physical location and give Western Union cash which would be wired to another location where it could be picked up as cash. For decades the large global florist alliance, FTD, worked in a similar way. One florist would send an order to another. The payments would be settled later by wire or mail. Twitter could well be the basis of a service in which florists, bars, or restaurants could set up payment networks. A trusted patron at a bar in San Francisco could tweet money to a patron in a trusted bar in NYC. The relationships between customers and businesses would revert, to some extent, to those of another time when bonds were based on longer-term relationships. The advantage of this return to a cash payment system is that a bar where someone can get money from a saloon-to-saloon tweet is a bar that sells more liquor. It is important to remember that millions of Americans do not have credit cards and many do not have bank accounts. Using Twitter as a way to transfer money will makes local businesses into simple versions of banks.

One of the results of this kind of vast and unregulated system for transferring cash and credit is that it could create a sort of black market in goods and services which would be hard for the government to track and tax. Twitter may become a remarkably good way to keep money from the IRS.

Twitter may not replace the landline, the cell phone or voice and texting communications but it will certainly supplement them as a way to get around telecom data plans. Tweeting inside a browser does not have the same data cost for the telecom user that texting does which adds another huge non-metered communications opportunity for businesses and consumers. It opens the question of what large cellular services providers will do when conversations move away from their ability to track them. TwitterBerry accounts, used on RIM (RIMM) Blackberry handsets make it nearly impossible for messages to be tracked by data use.

Telecom companies have chosen to manage user behavior by forcing customers to transfer voice, video, and data on platforms that they can track. Twitter will force telecoms into a position similar to the one cable companies find themselves in. Cable would like to charge broadband users by the load that they put on the local system. So far, the government has rejected that model, but as broadband use grows, cable may not be able to give customers access to unlimited bandwidth because of infrastructural limits. Cellular companies could face an analogous problem with the growth of Twitter.

9) The commercial sector will not be the only part of the enterprise landscape that will be affected by Twitter. Large government agencies will quickly realize that Twitter may be one of the single best ways to communicate with the public and may even mandate that Twitter participate in some programs that allow emergency notices to make their way to citizens quickly. There is some precedent to this with the old Emergency Broadcast System that was used to reach the public over radio and TV starting in 1963. Eventually, certain departments of the federal government will certainly want to have broad access to Twitter users for sending out information about man-made and natural disasters. People would be asked to “follow” certain government agencies. In the case of a major hurricane, people in the affected region might have to follow @Katrina @Fema Hurricane. A portable device with GPS would allow Twitter to be used to send or receive messages by location. A person without food or water could send a tweet with the location sent by the GPS on the portable device.

This would add certain “911” aspects to Twitter which could be used for health alerts like following the spread of a major disease like swine flu, @swineflu. This could be done on a local or national basis, @nyscswineflu. The service could be used regionally for programs to find children who have disappeared, a sort of Amber alert over Twitter.

10) Philanthropy “as business” use of Twitter will involve social activism and fund-raising. Tea parties, whether they are held in public or in cyberspace, can be set up by getting Twitter users to follow certain political groups and causes. Twitter will be an immensely useful way for people to voice their opinions in response to public opinion polls. This offers an opportunity to access tens of thousands of reactions to critical questions in very short periods of time.

The Twitpay aspect of Twitter will become essential to fund raising as people can make donations to a cause while they are in the middle of a march for that cause. And, if social or political groups on Twitter want the government to get a feel for the power of their movements, they can encourage government agencies, Congress, or The White House to follow them as they collect money and work to affect social change.

The Internet and the major products set up to use it are changing at a remarkable speed, permanently altering the way we live. Twitter could have as large a role in this transformation as Google or Facebook have had in the last decade.

via www.mashable.com

Show what you are made of

2009-05-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

It's not easy to get a job in advertising. Actually is getting really hard now more than before. At the beginning i was complaining about that but now i can understand why CDs are so selective. It's not their fault if our field is full of people who want to work in an agency just because they want to say "Wow i'm in advertising, i go to the coolest parties" without having the will to work hard and have great ideas. You have to be good and you have to show your creativity not just mention it during the interview. Sometime you must do even more, as this guy did to get a job at CP+B. I can only congrats with him. I wish i had thought his idea.

Need interns? Buy them here.

2009-05-24T11:37:00.000-07:00

Be an intern is not always nice. You have to do more work than the others (sometime the shittiest one), make extra assignments, without being payed or just get the lower salary. Because you must show that you are good, the best. Sometime it's really frustrating i have to say. but if you have the luck to intern in one of the best agency of the world as CP+B, then you are kind of lucky In fact they launched the inters auction which will provide the best bidder of a creative presentation for its brand created by the interns. You can read everything here.
Great idea, indeed.

A great idea doesn't need much to spread

2009-05-22T02:05:00.000-07:00

To spread an idea you don't need that much. You just need a powerful idea, as this video shows. And you don't need traditional media either. In this case, They would have even made it boring. That's why it is time to spend time and money on finding great and engaging ideas, instead of looking for the perfect execution of a boring, old, simple concept.

Be yourself to be happy

2009-05-20T03:41:00.000-07:00

Masquerade from Aziz K. on Vimeo.

Many manuals explain that having a positive attitude at the working place helps a lot to rise your popularity and make everybody feels comfortable. This is true. But it is also true that if you don't feel positive there's no reason why you should put a fake smile on your face. Everybody has his ups and downs and he should be free to express it without caring of the so called positive attitude. The others get bothered? Fuck it. You don't have to be happy just because you have a job, it is the job that has to make you happy. If it is not like that, well just change job. This might sound a little bit arrogant but it is the only way to survive, even during the crisis. Be always yourself and don't accept compromises. Then you can feel happy even though you work 14 hours or you come in the weekend. You can feel proud of yourself and the things you do. I did like that and i am happy now. I made mistakes in the past but i don't regret them, now everything is paying me back. I know that it might not last forever, but i try to make he most out it now. I wish you the same luck.

Baby you are a teaser

2009-05-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

Make The Girl Dance "Baby Baby Baby" ( official video )
Uploaded by placeblancherec. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Very cool video...i wonder where they are going to show the words when they remove the tags.

Start a revolution

2009-05-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

This video says everything. I don't to add anything. Enjoy.

Mother lovers

2009-05-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

In case you don't have time to call your mom let this call for you.

Integration is the key

2009-05-09T02:37:00.000-07:00

Vinyls are one of my passions and I love to collect them especially the old ones. I am fascinated by them: the screechy noise, the big covers, sometime even a little bit dirty, the big pictures and the lyrics. When I have a vinyl in my hands, i study it, i read every details on the cover without destroying my eyes like it happens by reading on a cd cover. Vinyls tell stories and make me think about music as something real.
However, yesterday, i finally decided to buy a turntable and i went to the shop. I was looking around, when my attention was caught by the machine you see in the picture. It is not just a turntable, it is everything. In fact it has the classic turntable, the radio, cd-mp3 reader and USB door. Everything in one. From classic to digital, to give a unique experience. Can this be a way music labels can use to sell more, giving out personal codes inside LPs or a cds, with extra material people can download for free from their web site? Is this also an example of how advertising should work nowdays? I don't know. i am just asking.
Ps: The LP i am listening is from Rory Gallagher. Live in Europe 1972. It's great!!!

About krisma

2009-05-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

Krisma is an italian band of the 70s-80s. i really like them because they have been the first to play electro-punk. Checked it out in these rare videos, they are really cool.

About twitter in advertising

2009-05-06T01:27:00.000-07:00

I love twitter and i am spending time to study it and figure how to create creative ideas with it. I have to say it's not really easy. First because it is really basic (you can use only messages of 140 characters) and then people have the total control on the media. So in case they smell ads they simply avoid your messages really easily. Do we need to give it up, then? I don't think so but we have to learn how to use it. So take a look at this video from adage the title of the video is Building a Twitter Ad Agency for Entertainment Companies.
Here it is the case history:

The saga of the Mad Men Tweeters
On February 11, @PeggyOlson won a Shorty Award for being the top tweeter in Advertising and revealed herself to be @CarriBugbee (Carri Bugbee) in real life. That night, two of her Mad Men cohorts and Supporting Characters cast members also revealed their identities. @BettyDraper is @AdBroad (Helen Klein Ross) and @Roger_Sterling is @Bissell (Michael Bissell).
Their identities have been a highly guarded secret for nearly five months. In fact, in September 2008, they turned down interviews with the New York Times, BusinessWeek, and many other publications in order to maintain anonymity. This provides some of the history about how @PeggyOlson, @Roger_Sterling, @BettyDraper and their cohorts became clandestine Internet celebrities and Twitter marketing rock stars.
In August 2008, an idea that began as a social media marketing “experiment” on Twitter blew up into one of the biggest social media debacles to date. In an old media vs. new media firestorm, over 120 bloggers and journalists from around the world reported and weighed in on the debate in just a few days. Twitter users also offered their two cents on the issue – and word spread like wildfire.
It began with a handful of Mad Men fans tweeting as if they were the actual characters in 1962 from the Mad Men period drama produced by the AMC network. Characters such as @Don_Draper and @PeggyOlson talked about their activities as if they were working every day at the Sterling Cooper ad agency depicted in the AMC drama. They also interacted with other Mad Men characters and anyone on Twitter who wanted to engage – but they always did so entirely in character, eschewing references to anything post-1962.
Just a few days after appearing on Twitter, their efforts were hailed by many marketing bloggers and tweeters as “genius” because they were using social media in exactly the way it works best, while brand-building for AMC and creating new fans for the Mad Men program at the same time. However, nobody knew for sure whether it was a paid marketing effort by AMC and its agency or whether it was simply fan fiction.
On August 25, just 10 days after the first Mad Men character tweeted, Twitter suspended the accounts of the first three Mad Men characters on Twitter: @Don_Draper, @PeggyOlson and @Joan_Holloway. It was widely reported that this suspension was prompted by a DMCA take-down notice that AMC sent to Twitter.
The response by bloggers and news reporters to the suspension of the Mad Men characters was fast and furious, and the twitter accounts were restored in less than 24 hours. AMC later said it didn’t intend for Twitter to take down the profiles of the Mad Men tweeters and there was some confusion at Twitter about their intentions.
During the short time the three Mad Men tweeters were down, dozens of blogs and news articles were written about it. In the following two weeks, many more bloggers and journalists from around the world covered “Mad Men Twittergate.” Articles appeared in Germany, Brazil and the United Kingdom. Today there are approximately 180 blogs and articles written about the saga. BusinessWeek, the New York Times and the U.K. Guardian were among those that covered the story.
Of course, journalists and bloggers desperately tried to find out the identities of the people behind the Mad Men tweeters, but only one of the tweeters revealed his identity at the time of the DMCA take-down (he said he feared a lawsuit). The rest of the Mad Men twitterati resumed their anonymous roles, tweeting to fans and each other from 1962 as if nothing had ever happened.
They’ve since built a huge fan base on Twitter, with @PeggyOlson hitting many of the top milestones, paralleled by the activities of @BettyDraper, @Ken_Cosgrove and a handful of others. These characters all have over 11,000 Twitter followers each. The Mad Men twitterverse (twitter universe) includes tens of thousands of followers combined – many of whom participate with the characters on a regular basis.
The Mad Men tweeters created such a groundswell of publicity and Twitter activity, they’ve even been joined by many prominent figures from the 1960s – all created by fans who wanted to get in on the action. Those include @David_Ogilvy, @Frank_Ohara, @Dick_Nixon, @Benjamin_Spock and whimsical characters such as the copy machine at Sterling Cooper, @Xerox914. These characters are closely followed and reported on by a few tweeters who might be described as the TMZ of Mad Men tweeters. They include @MadMenTalking and @OnMadMen. There are approximately 80 characters in all.

Some "beautiful" ads are like some italians

2009-05-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

Some italians really believe that just because they are italians, they must be cooler than the others. This happens especially, when they go to north europe. There, they think of having an easy life with girls just by showing off. They forget a simple rule: to get a prize you have to play and win the game of seduction. Otherwise it might end up like in the video.
The same thing happens with those "beautiful" ads or commercials shot by famous people without any idea inside. It makes me laugh when i read stuff like: the latest ad from this famous photographer or the commercial created by famous movie directors. I mean not just shot but created!!!! Most of the times, everything ends up in beautiful images that don't communicate anything. Those images just scream: i am wonderful, beautiful, choose me!!! They don't give anything back to people. And people start to fight back.

Even creatives are workers

2009-04-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

As it is the first of May,like all the workers, even creatives have a day-off. So i decided to take a little holidays in Stockholm to visit my brother. i won"t be posting for some days. Have nice weekend.

The most complained ads

2009-04-30T00:43:00.000-07:00

Here are the most complained ads in Britain. Take look and if you can, try to be as complained as them. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/apr/29/asa-most-complained-about-adverts-2008

Great insights make things easier

2009-04-29T01:42:00.000-07:00

I saw this teaser posters when i was in Berlin. They are part of a the new campaign for O2 a telephone company. The headline simply says: "What are you thinking when you phone?". I like it because it is based on a very cool insight: When you call and you are relaxed you think about random stuff. They simply visualized this thought. The aim of the campaign is to promote a very cheap plan that allows people not to think about phoning when they phone. This example shows that new insights are always more surprising and more memorable. tschüss.

Better be prepared

2009-04-28T00:40:00.000-07:00

The pig flu is coming and in Berlin there's already somebody prepared to deal with it.

ADC Review

2009-04-27T09:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night i came back from Berlin after being at the exhibition of the ADC. The weekend was great. After travelled there by car, i met a very good friend of mine since the MiamiAdSchool. A really talented art director called Armando Bertolini. Friday night i was at JVM+DDB party. It was great: free drinks, great music and dancing all night. Saturday i went to the party of Vice, a fashion german magazine. The location was an old, filthy building a little bit small. I didn't enjoy the party so much because i was still tired of the night before. On sunday, i enjoyed a wonderful brunch at StudioFunk and after i headed at ADC exhibition. I was really excited but once there, i found out it wasn't so cool as i expected. The location was small and the quality of the work wasn't that high. Of course there were some great stuff: my agency scored very well and in the rank is the first agency here in Germany. Here some stuff i really liked. Stay cool.
tschüss.

ADC Germany

2009-04-24T00:46:00.000-07:00

Today i am going to Berlin for the german ADC, the most important advertising festival in Germany and one of the best in Europe. i am pretty curious about it. I have never been in these festivals. Tonight i will be at Warm up Party from JVM+DDB. So i'll keep you updated via twitter (http://www.twitter.com/salrussomanno) of what is going on there. Check it out.

My first speech at university

2009-04-23T10:39:00.000-07:00

Last week i held my first speech at the university of Salerno, the place were i had been studying for 6 years. It has been nice to meet my old teacher Anna Cicalese, who invited me and some old good friends of mine. The topic of the speech was about my life and and experience in the advertising world. So i talked about the places where i worked and i gave some tips to those who are interested in starting the creative career. The students were really curios and asked me a lot of questions, but i felt they were confused as well. In fact the problem of university is that most of the time the reality is pretty different from what you read on the books especially when it comes to a creative field as advertising. Most of the questions i received were about building a good portfolio. To give an even better answer, here's a list of advices from Ben and Sophie from Wieden+Kennedy London (thanks to Jay&Wal to have plublished it on their blog). I hope it can be useful.

Ben and Sophie’s top 11 book tips.
We decided to write a list of things we’ve learned along the way. This is just what we think, somebody else’s tips might be completely different.

1. Keep it quick. Creatives looking at your book have limited time so make the most of the opportunity. Keep storyboards and radio short and sweet.

2. A balanced book tends to have between 7-9 ad campaigns and a few other creative ideas.

3. Get to the bottom of a brand. Try to find out what makes them different to everyone else and what’s at the heart of their product and their company.

4. Demonstrate different tones of voice. How does this brand talk to people? What’s their personality?

5. Find different ways of talking to people. You don’t always need to conform to the conventional. Logos don’t have to sit in corners. Photos don’t have to be funny. And long copy is not scary.

6. Do more than just press ads. There are many other interesting ways of exploring an idea. What are the appropriate media for your idea? What medium is right for your audience? What will draw people in and surprise them? (TV, press, radio, online, viral, ambient, talking dogs…)

8. Expand at least one of your ideas into a big campaign and prove it’s not just a one off poster or TV ad.

9. We like to find out about you as well as seeing your book. Show us your matchbox collection, the short film that you’re making on the side or your greatest baking success. We see tons of ads, but sometimes it’s these little funny things that sums up who you are.

7. Listen and take notes too. You’d be surprised how many people don’t! Which is annoying to creatives who’ve given up their time to see you.

10. The advertising world is small so don’t piss people off or others might get to hear about it.

11. If you like a particular team, try to go back to them again with more work. Try to build a relationship. This will help you make more contacts, they may recommend you to their advertising friends and colleagues.

Just back

2009-04-20T02:32:00.000-07:00

I am really sorry to post something only now. As you can imagine, i have been on holidays for eastern and i was back yesterday. I was in italy in my hometown, Caposele, to visit my family. I just chilled and enjoyed some good time with my old friends and refilled my batteries. I spent a nice weekend in Florence with my girlfriend, as well. She's studying costume design and her school was having a big fashion show there and she had to attend it. It was very nice. The funniest thing i have done during these holidays was a speech at Salerno's university. I will tell more later about it. Stay tuned.
Bye

Bill Maher silences god.

2009-03-31T04:13:00.000-07:00

Bill Maher is a very clever and funny american comedian. He just did a beautiful movie called Religulos, where he simply makes questions to religious people and shows all the bullshits religions preach around. I was almost pissing my pants when i watched. Here's a clip from a talk show where he's involved and it is really entertaining and interesting. Worth to be watched more and more times.

I' m a Pc done with a Mac?

2009-03-30T02:14:00.000-07:00

By working in an advertising agency, i know that the 99% of the creatives are in love with Apple. They all have Macs, iphone or at least an ipod. So i really wonder what kind of computers have been used to create the microsoft campaign. Has Bill Gates forbidden the agency to use Mac products like he did with his family? Has Dave Ballamer checked that no Macs where involved in the production? if they didn't... well i am sorry Bill.

Baudelaire knew it all

2009-03-26T09:46:00.000-07:00

"Copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another -- and the artist never emerges from himself"

If this is true for artists, it's even more true for creatives in advertising. Many times i met creatives who get pissed if someone "normal" tells them "Sorry i don't get it". They don't realize that if you lose the contact with the real people, you will do only arty-farty stuff without meaning and emotion. Real people aren't in the top-roof bars or in the advertising festival, they are on the buses, metro, supermarkets... If you don't talk to them, well, you'd better find a museum for your ads.

Viral receipt

2009-03-22T14:53:00.000-07:00

Originality, Simplicity, and just damn Funny. These are the best 3 ingredients for a great viral movie.

Till things are brighter, i keep the blog in black

2009-03-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

The title of the post paraphrases the final verse of one of the most beautiful songs ever written, Man in black by Johnny Cash. I apologize for that but it fits to the topic.
Surfing around blogs about creativity and advertising, i have noticed that they have all a white lay-out. I cannot find a reason yet for this. My first thought was because of Apple. The computers are white, the commercials are shot with white background, the ipod used be white ecc. Another reason could be that white lay-out gives more light and life to the content, even if it makes our sight get tired very soon. Or because the white gives a sense of purity that we might have lost doing a "dirty job" like ours. Till i find a good reason or the things gets better, i will still keep my blog in black.

The curios italian advertising world

2009-03-14T01:40:00.000-07:00

"What happens when the camorra cracks the church?"
This post is about a situation that really pissed me off. I am italian as you may know but i work in german. I have to say that now more than ever i am happy of the decision to work abroad. Here's why.
Current tv, the tv network created by Al Gore, decided to promote Vanguard, a program of ground breaking journalism. Created by Cookies Adv, the campaign was supposed to run in Milan and Rome. In Milan everything went fine, in Rome instead, the campaign had big problems. ATAC, the society that manages adv spaces in Rome, said that people would be offend by this poster and wouldn't understand. An officer even added that the censorship was due to the fact that Rome is the city of the Catholic Church. Actually catholic church and the Vatican are just guest of what is supposed to be a laical country. So i don't see why we have to mind if something can be offensive not for the people, that of course are much more smarter than Atac thinks, but for the high hierarchy of the church. When somebody asks if i want to go back in my home country one day, I just think of Atac and i say "No thanks".

A momentary lapse of self-celebration

2009-03-12T04:08:00.000-07:00

Yes we did it. After 6 though months of trial period, yesterday, me and my team partner+best friend Andres signed the contract and became officially part of Jung von Matt. Now we really need to learn German.

Nooooo, the Cadbury gorilla is not advertising

2009-03-11T02:20:00.000-07:00

The Future of Advertising, APA, 17/02/09

View more presentations from John v Willshire.

It's simply the future of advertising. Take a look at this interesting presentation to understand why.

An idea enchanted a nation

2009-03-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday night a great concert was in Hamburg. To be more precise it was the biggest classical concert in the world. Here 100 musicians of the Hamburg philharmonic were placed in different area of the city. Each musician was in a different place, and, connected via web cam, they held the concert. They had a tv in front of them so they could follow the director as they do in a normal opera. Everything was broadcast live on German tv. People around the city were totally fascinated. The idea comes from the agency i work for, Jung von Matt. A great idea that turned advertising into entertainment. In other words, the future.

When i think ideas, i have them in mind

2009-02-17T04:35:00.000-08:00

My generation

2009-02-16T00:53:00.000-08:00

Guys you can't miss this video. It's so damn funny. Take a look.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2009-02-14T01:47:00.000-08:00

I have been working really during last week an a half. I didn't go home before midnight almost everyday. I have been involved in an integrated campaign. The first real one. It has been hard to crack down the brief but after almost 1000 ideas we saw the light. I felt a strange emotion to see all the ideas on the wall. Making integrated communication it's like writing a book or a movie: you don't have just to exagerate a benefit of a product, you need to have a big story.
Since ever everybody working in advertising knows that there are 2 kinds of creativity: one for clients and one for Cannes. Well integrated communication is the synthesis of the two. In fact integrated campaigns involves audience, sells the products and at the same time it reaches high level of creativity. Here's some great example.

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2009-02-07T02:30:00.000-08:00

Today i want to introduce you a surreal artist called Salvatore Arato. We were in the same class during high school. When we finished, we took different ways and after some years i finally found him on Facebook. I really like the stuff he does.
Take a look and enjoy it.

The real story behind the Gorilla (Ep 3)

2009-02-02T11:38:00.000-08:00

Despite the shoot’s slow progress, this wasn’t an especially expensive production. The shoot took place over two days and, aside from buying the music, the biggest cost was getting the suit and its three operatives over from LA and making sure it worked perfectly. The ad even came in on budget, another plaudit for the
project.
The team also made the brave decision to make only a 90-second version of Gorilla. They felt that, in order to do the concept full justice, the level of anticipation needed to build. Viewers needed to empathise with the gorilla, something that could not be fully achieved with either a 30- or 60-second slot. Ninety seconds was the ideal length so they convinced the client, who then briefed media company Starcom, only to buy 90-second slots. Starcom came back with a schedule that was very low in terms of the actual number of spots. However, these were all peak-time, prestigious shows: the Rugby World Cup and the Big Brother final, to name just two. ‘Although they were low in quantity, because we cherry-picked the spots we were able to achieve fame on television, and then frequency came virally and through YouTube,’ says Willingham. ‘There was a scarcity about it so when it did come on it was a real event.’
The launch of Gorilla was even advertised in newspapers and online. The notion of advertising an ad may seem strange and is still a rarity in the industry; however, Fallon had learned from its past award-winning Sony Bravia campaigns, as Willingham points out. ‘If it’s good enough, then why shouldn’t you treat it in the same way and launch it as you would a film or a TV programme?’
And it was certainly good enough. Posting on YouTube started on the night of the Big Brother final and by the following day there had been some 100,000 hits. That figure has now topped 12 million. Then the spoofs started. To date, more than 300 spoof versions of Gorilla have been posted online: a clear demonstration of the lengths people are prepared to go to for a piece of advertising. ‘Gorilla broke the mould in many respects and is still getting hits on YouTube a year later, so it’s lived way beyond the conventional television advertising campaign,’ notes Willingham. This viral potency has given Gorilla an enormous extra impact; predominantly free media. ‘It’s an excellent model – to spend money on the production of something great, to showcase it in a small number of top spots on TV and then wait for the viral effect to really deliver the full impact,’ observes Willingham. The team followed up the initial Gorilla ad with the Airport Trucks campaign, but the demand for Gorilla was so great that he had to be brought back. ‘We wanted to give it a new twist so we’ve taken Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse Of The Heart and used that instead of Phil Collins, which gives it a freshness rather than just replaying the old version,’ says Willingham. ‘We’ve also been buying three minutes of airtime and running the new Gorilla back-to-back with a different version of Trucks to what I think, with hindsight, was probably the ideal soundtrack – Bon Jovi’s Living On A Prayer.’
The success of the campaign can be seen way beyond its on-screen success. ‘In the short term we saw a rise of about 9% and certainly as we’ve aired it again, and its successor Trucks, we have seen a gradual, consistent build in sales of the brand,’ says Rolston. ‘We have also seen a real turnaround in terms of brand preference, so there has been a really positive commercial aspect to this as well as a positive brand response.’ Gorilla was a complete and unique piece of film, so its success was initially hard to assess, according to Rolston. But now that understanding will inform more of Cadbury’s future campaigns. ‘We’ve learnt about the power of irrational creativity. Sometimes you can’t rationalise why something works or what people take from it. It just feels like the right thing to do and, as a wider business, we’ve realised how powerful that can be. And, as a business, we’ve gained a real positive confidence on the back of Gorilla.’
As for the future, the relationship between Fallon London and Cadbury continues apace, with a number of new ideas already in development for early next year across a range of media. ‘Everyone believes in it and when you’ve got that shared belief in something, I think the relationship tends to be very strong,’ concludes Willingham. ‘There’s a lot of trust in us, having succeeded with Gorilla, to make this idea sing again.’

(The end)

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2009-02-01T04:30:00.000-08:00

It doesn't matter how great your ads are, you are not Mick Jagger. That's what i thought after reading the interview of a very famous CD. He was explaining why he's so successful and was presenting himself as the genius outsider of the advertising business. After reading that, I simply noticed that many people in our business consider themselves some kind of rockstars and act like that. Here's a list of typical attitudes of these people :
They always put the "I" in front of everything.
They get pissed if somebody doesn't recognize them or doesn't know their latest commercial.
They always try to bring a normal conversation on the field of creativity. And if they fail to do that, they just leave or stay in a melancholic silent.
They go to parties dressed like junkies because "they just use the system but they are not part it".
They smoke in their office.
When they win an award they always say about their work " I don't do it for awards".

The real story behind the Gorilla (Ep 2)

2009-01-29T07:48:00.000-08:00

What was fantastic – and unusual – about this project was the fact that Cabral’s initial script was almost exactly what was made. ‘The details and the nuances that you see in the final execution were in the original script,’ says Rolston. ‘There were a few technical differences in terms of how it was shot but as a feeling and a piece of film it’s as pure as it could be versus the original script thatwe saw that day.’One of the reasons for this was the level of detail Cabral had included in hisinitial script. The concept was presented more as a treatment than a script and it was this level of detail, plus the fact that Cabral already knew exactly the music What Cadbury bought into was much more than a single execution, however. The company embraced the much larger idea of Glass and a Half Full Productions: an ongoing concept that could embrace anything that is as enjoyable as eating the chocolate in any media. The relationship between client and creative may have been in its infancy, but the limited time frame of just one week from Cadbury’s call to Fallon presenting its ideas was helpful in many ways. ‘I think that galvanised everyone, including the client,’ remembers Willingham. ‘There was a sense that we were doing something together at high speed that was against the odds and I think that created an immediate sense of togetherness and partnership.’ The relationship with Cadbury was then and remains extremely good. ‘Relationships with clients tend to be great when you’ve got a big idea that everyone buys into and has a lot of depth, and Glass and a Half Full Productions has that.’
Rolston adds: ‘In terms of our background we like to be involved in the creative Gorilla was Juan Cabral’s vision in every sense of the word, so it made sense that it should also be his directorial debut. Cabral preferred to work on his own, rather than as one half of the traditional twosome of copywriter and art director.
This was another big step – undoubtedly the right one. It not only saved time and money but, more importantly, it guaranteed Cabral’s pure vision of how Gorilla should be brought to life.
In terms of the practicalities of shooting the ad, there were a number of obstacles to overcome, not least Cabral’s absolute insistence on getting the very best gorillasuit in the world. The perfect suit was eventually tracked down in Los Angeles. It
was the very suit used in Hollywood blockbusters such as Gorillas In The Mist and Congo and it came with no fewer than three operators – one inside the suit and two to operate it remotely. Negotiating for these three people to pause their current projects and fly to London for the shoot was a feat in itself. Next came the task of teaching the person in the gorilla suit to play the drums convincingly; he had never touched a drum before. Thankfully he did play the guitar and thus wasn’t a complete musical novice. The unbearable heat inside the gorilla suit meant shooting was limited to only a couple of minutes at a time, before the operator would emerge, drenched in sweat, to be fanned down and rehydrated for the next session. Securing the music, however, was uncharacteristically straightforward. Music negotiations are notoriously difficult, but getting Phil Collins to buy into the idea proved surprisingly easy – and benefited the artist tremendously. Once the ad broke, both the featured track and Collins’ Greatest Hits album rocketed back into the charts...

(To be continued)

Real story behind the Gorilla (Ep 1)

2009-01-28T06:56:00.000-08:00

The Gorilla has brought fresh air in the creative circus. It has generated a lot of discussions as well. For sure it didn't remain unnoticed. Either you love it or you hate it. However if you want to know more about it, you'd better read this document from D&AD which explains the behind the scene of the most controversial commercial ever done.
(the document is quite long, so I am going to publish it in 3 different episodes:)

D&AD Creativity Works 2008

Cadbury ‘Gorilla’

Chris Willingham (account handler, Fallon London)

Lee Rolston (director of marketing for block chocolate and beverages,
Cadbury)

‘If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.’
Albert Einstein

Cadbury Dairy Milk has been around for over a century and is nothing short of a national treasure, enjoyed by young and old alike. But no brand, no matter how popular, comfortable or comforting, can ever afford to stand still. ‘We sensed from all the research we were doing that, although people were still talking about their love for Dairy Milk, it felt a bit passive,’ explains Lee Rolston, Cadbury’s director of marketing for block chocolate and beverages.
‘It’s a bit like the comfy sweater you keep at the back of the wardrobe that you’ll never throw out but you start wearing less and less.’ Keen to reinvigorate the brand, Cadbury approached Fallon London in March 2007 with a clear, concise brief: ‘Get the love back’.
‘We chose to work with Fallon because what they are great at is igniting an emotional connection with brands in a vivid, expansive and creative way and we really felt that was absolutely the kind of people we wanted to work with,’ says Rolston. Fallon’s response to the brief was that the communications should feel as good as eating the product itself. This immediately shifted the focus from the somewhat formulaic approach that had characterised previous Dairy Milk campaigns to an altogether more emotional one. Rather than being seen as simply manufacturers of chocolate, Fallon’s concept repositioned Cadbury in terms of the end benefit of the product as ‘producers of happiness’. The campaign was due to go to air just two months later in May 2007 (this date was later pushed to August) and Fallon was given just one week to come up with
a concept. ‘Obviously, we jump at those opportunities, so we put a couple of creative teams, plus Juan Cabral, on the brief,’ recalls Chris Willingham, account handler for Fallon London. The teams came up with three ideas but just one
clear recommendation: ‘Glass and a Half Full Productions’. Arriving at Glass and a Half Full Productions as an umbrella concept for the brand was very much part of a brainstorming session – but how was the leap made to a gorilla playing drums to the sounds of Phil Collins? It simply can’t be explained, according to Willingham. ‘There’s only so much method in the process
and you then hand it on to fantastic creative minds – and that’s where Juan came in. It was one of those moments when you sit and look at each other as the script is being read, thinking, “Is he mad?”’ Willingham is the first to admit that it took the team at Fallon a little while to recognise the brilliance of the Gorilla concept. ‘I think we had a pragmatic concern that it was just too far for Cadbury to go from where they were at that point; that there had to be some sort of stepping stone. But then we thought, “You know what? This is an opportunity – we’ve got a week, we should do what we feel is right rather than what we think they will think is right.”’ As it turned out, both Rolston and Phil Rumbol, marketing director for Cadbury
UK, loved the idea. ‘We were as close to punching the air as you can be,’ recalls Rolston. ‘It was an idea that, at script stage, you felt rather than thought – but you just couldn’t help but listen to the feeling. It wasn’t just the execution but the thought of a holding production company becoming a place where smiles are made, which we thought was a stroke of genius.’...

(To be continued)

Just a reminder

2009-01-25T13:29:00.000-08:00

I would forget valentine's day as well, if this was the reminder;)
Another very sexy movie from Agent Provocateur, the lingerie that all men would wear if they were women.

Should i stay or should i go?

2009-01-18T05:20:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting for a while because I thought to close this blog after reading this article from Wired:

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.
Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.
If you quit now, you're in good company. Notorious chatterbox Jason Calacanis made millions from his Weblogs network. But he flat-out retired his own blog in July. "Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it," he wrote in his final post.
Impersonal is correct: Scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.
When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google's search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for "Mark" ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No more. Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama's latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.
That said, your blog will still draw the Net's lowest form of life: The insult commenter. Pour your heart out in a post, and some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack is sure to scribble beneath it, "Lame. Why don't you just suck McCain's ass." That's why Calacanis has retreated to a private mailing list. He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters.
Further, text-based Web sites aren't where the buzz is anymore. The reason blogs took off is that they made publishing easy for non-techies. Part of that simplicity was a lack of support for pictures, audio, and videoclips. At the time, multimedia content was too hard to upload, too unlikely to play back, and too hungry for bandwidth.
Social multimedia sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook have since made publishing pics and video as easy as typing text. Easier, if you consider the time most bloggers spend fretting over their words. Take a clue from Robert Scoble, who made his name as Microsoft's "technical evangelist" blogger from 2003 to 2006. Today, he focuses on posting videos and Twitter updates. "I keep my blog mostly for long-form writing," he says.
Twitter — which limits each text-only post to 140 characters — is to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004. You'll find Scoble, Calacanis, and most of their buddies from the golden age there. They claim it's because Twitter operates even faster than the blogosphere. And Twitter posts can be searched instantly, without waiting for Google to index them.
As a writer, though, I'm onto the system's real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter's character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase. @WiredReader: Kill yr blog. 2004 over. Google won't find you. Too much cruft from HuffPo, NYT. Commenters are tards. C u on Facebook?

SO what should i do?

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2009-01-10T04:44:00.000-08:00

Welcome back,
i hope you have had very nice holidays and got good rest. I did.
The post of today is about a campaign that will be probably one of the most interesting of this 2009. I am talking about the Atheistic bus campaign. It has started in England and now it is spreading around Europe and America. This campaign wants simply to spread the idea that god doesn't exist. If religions for thousands of years have been convinced people of the existence of god, why don't do the opposite?
The buzz around this campaign is really big. Take a look here.
It raises much more money than expected and there are more and more people contributing by creating ads.
This campaign shows us a simple truth for advertising in general. Be provocative and you will be heard.
See you next saturday.

It' s true, kids always work

2009-01-06T04:37:00.000-08:00

Hi guys, take a look at one of the most politically incorrect show with kids i have ever seen in my life. The Wonder showzen.
If you want more, check this classic from Brass eye.
Have fun.

Let's come back

2009-01-04T08:56:00.000-08:00

Hello,
here i am after a couple of weeks of very relaxing rest. I am waiting for my flight and i took the chance to write you something. The new year brought me a radical change in the job. In fact my division has been absorbed by the main division of JvM. So now i am in Jvm/Alster. That's really great because we can develop really big ideas and more integrated campaigns. I am so excited to start tomorrow.

Holidays

2008-12-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

hi everybody,
i will be on holidays for a couple of weeks and so does this blog. I wish everybody a great and amazing Xmas and new year. See u in January.
Take care.

Ladies and gentlemen: A toys orchestra... and i am the groupie :)

2008-12-19T01:08:00.000-08:00

A toys orchestra is an italian band from Agropoli, a city very close to i come from. They play indie rock and sing in English. Two days ago they came here in Hamburg for a concert, so i sent them an email and i hang out with them. They are really cool and play very well. Check them out.

Xmas party

2008-12-13T11:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday i had my first Jung von Matt Xmas party:)

Fuck the ads let's make a show

2008-12-09T14:13:00.000-08:00

After seeing this stuff from Diesel, i am more and more convinced that to sell your stuff today, you have to get rid of your ads and create a show. The more you entertain people, the more they love you. But try to tell that to those who still are looking for the USP....
Please Enjoy the show.

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2008-12-06T02:30:00.000-08:00

Hello,
many of you might have seen the ads above. These ads are quite funny, have a very good illustration style and are relevant for the product. But a big discussion about the suicide subject pictured in the ads has started on many advertising website. Because of this big buzz and many critics, Pepsi has been forced to apologize for the content of the ad. All this has let me astonished. It reminds me of the Moms against the rock music or horror movies and the sex on tv. In fact many critics came from people who work in advertising and probably are even creatives. but i wonder, when are these people going to lighten up a little bit. When are they going to stop to misunderstand black humor and grotesque style for instigation to suicide? I mean in a world where everything is shown live, where you can see thousand of real suicide on internet, we have to mind if some ads use suicide matter in a very absurd and cartoonish way? Come on who would really think about killing himself after seeing these ads. Have you ever heard of somebody committing suicide after watching Tom and Jerry or after reading Brothers Grimm's tales? I personally think that the matter concerns more the industry that the real people. In fact people are smarter and have more sense of humor of many so called creatives. PEPSI YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO APOLOGIZE.
Please join the group on facebook PEPSI DON'T APOLOGIZE.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=39259178163

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2008-11-29T03:57:00.000-08:00

Last week i talked about tv series as source of inspiration. This week i want to present you the so called Motivational posters. They are just funny pictures with a comments which adds other meaning to what we see. An image and a headline. I personally think they are really inspiring because show funny thought and totally unexpected situations. And the great thing is that they are real. Thought and written by real people. These posters are full of directions and approaches.
So when you feel that nothing is coming out of your brain, just go through these posters. Probably you might find the tiny little path that leads you to the big fat great idea.
Here"s some examples.
Cheers.

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2008-11-23T02:52:00.000-08:00

Today i'd like to talk about inspiration. Where to find the most interesting ideas now days? Sit-coms and tv series in general. Hollywood has lost its creative sparkle and we see remakes of recent movies or adaptations of Asian ones. It's really hard to find something interesting there. Sit-come and tv series instead are no longer stories for desperate housewives but are getting clever and clever. Dexter, The mighty boosh, the Office, the Peep show and so on are incredibly addicting. Great humor, surreal stories, great direction, smart dialogues make them the biggest source of inspiration. Here's some examples. Check it out.

Italian hypocrisy

2008-11-21T05:18:00.000-08:00

Today i found this ad. It's to create awareness for the violence against women. the Headline says: Who's going to pay for the man's sins?
Well i think it's pretty good: provocative, incorrect, eye catching, thoughtful. But probably nobody will see it. Devoted politicians are complaining because it would be outrageous to the christian religion. That's the typical italian superficiality and hypocrisy. They don't care about the message the poster wants to convey, they only see a naked woman posing like Jesus Christ but if that girl would pose on a magazine everybody will be looking at her.

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2008-11-16T06:59:00.000-08:00

This INSPIRING SATURDAY is about READY-TO-SERVE COMMERCIALS. You have a funny video made by you or others, you just spend some time to find a product that could fit and voila' here's a brand new commercial, ready right there.
There are million of potential commercials out there for everything. I suggest you to try. It's really funny. I did one some months ago. Now i am preparing others. The one, i am going to show you today is from Diego, a copywriter from Italy. Take a look please and if you want show yours, just send them to me.
Bye

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2008-11-08T06:51:00.000-08:00

Hello to Everybody,
welcome to a new appointment of THE INSPIRING SATURDAY.
Today i want to show you a project made by Christian Behrendt and Leif Abraham, two creatives who used to work at JVM/next and now work at CP+Bogusky. They created The Advertising Sourcebook, a book about how to use all the free or very cheap things in our environment to create advertising ideas with a budget of less than € 1.000.
You can download the book for free, here. Unfortunately, the book is only in German but it's really easy to understand.
ENJOY THE IDEAS AND SEE YOU NEXT WEEK.

Italian creatives

2008-11-07T00:45:00.000-08:00

After the historical victory of Obama, the members of the italian government, first of all the showman Silvio Berlusconi, are congratulating with the new american president in a very creative way. In fact yesterday Berlusconi defined Obama "suntanned". What a nice thing to say. Today the newspaper that belongs to Berlusconi's brother, IlGiornale, was justifying him saying that Silvio is very direct.
But another member of the government has been even more funnier. His name is Maurizio Gasparri and he said: " Now Al Queda will be happy". What nice people govern Italy. Luckly i live in Germany.

Atheistic bus campaign

2008-11-06T16:32:00.000-08:00

Guys, some of you might be interested in a great initiative that is taking place in London. Ariane Sherine is organizing the first atheistic bus campaign. If you feel to contribute giving out ideas would be great. For more details read here.

Brings the boys back home

2008-11-06T08:35:00.000-08:00

The reality of the war in this action. No comment please.

THE INSPIRING SATURDAY

2008-11-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

Hi, I am really glad to inform you that a new section will appear on this blog: THE INSPIRING SATURDAY. From now on every saturday i will post articles, video, pics that can really inspire you and open your mind.
This week i will publish a part of an article from AdAge. The article is written by Phil Johnson. Enjoy your INSPIRING SATURDAY and see you next week.

Every creative director in the world must have his own theories, but here are a handful of qualities that always get me excited when I'm talking to creative talent.

Creative trespassers. I love people who continually wander out of their own discipline: writers who sketch, art directors who want to design buildings, account people who like to write scripts. The ability to explore ideas in multiple disciplines dramatically expands a person's creative range.

Mastery of the tools. It doesn't matter if we're talking about a complicated Flash animation, or a Facebook page, great ideas come from a deep understanding of the tools that create the work. Today, creative people need to think and produce within the vocabulary of digital technologies. It's not enough to have an idea and then translate it into Flash or html. You have to create using the technologies that drive all the new digital channels.

Powerful hard drives. Ideas come from making surprising connections between things. The more source material the better. I recently had dinner with a creative director who talked intelligently about Greek mythology, watches, contemporary fiction and the economy. That was before the second bottle of wine.

Wired into the culture. In our business, we need to connect with people on a subconscious level. That can only happen when you're tapped into your audience's tastes, their hopes, and their passions. Increasingly, we're talking about being wired into the lives of specific subcultures, whether they are communities of scientists or Sneakerheads.

Childishness. Not to be confused with acting like a baby, but rather the ability to play and explore like a child. There's got to be a reason that a room full of creative people often feels like a preschool class. For the record, that's a good thing, and one of the reasons I love this business.

I want to work for Obama

2008-10-30T03:18:00.000-07:00

I am totally impressed by the quality and freshness of the communication of Obama. He has really changed the way of political communication. He has been the first to use an integrated approach. He really deserves to become the new president. Good luck Obama, i wish you the best. Let's change!!!

Wassssssup has changed

2008-10-27T01:44:00.000-07:00

After 8 years see what is left.

Need to believe

2008-10-23T10:47:00.000-07:00

These days i have been engaged in curios discussion on an italian blog of a friend of mine. She posted about quitting advertising because she feels to have lost enthusiasm even if she just started this job. It can happen. I thought to change job after 6 months, as well. The funny thing was to read the comments of other young creatives that feel the same and that are totally unhappy of advertising. What can i say? They are right. When you start working all the funny things you used to create in an advertising school disappear and the boring job begins to fill the days. Boring products, hard clients, no budget.. this shit can be really frustrating. You may envy those who work in the office from 9 to 3. At least they have a life!!! But.. i think that even if there moments where you don't give a shit about the work, you have to react. When i was at university many people from this business discouraged me from going into advertising because of all the shit. i never listened to them and despite most of the things they said are true, i keep in mind that i worked really hard to get a job. And like me everybody who starts has worked his ass off. i mean it is not the easiest thing in the world to get a job in advertising, is it? So why give up so early? You have to try and work like hell for everyday stuff and awards. I might regret it one day but until then i am happy not to give up.
Bye

This video makes me high

2008-10-17T00:58:00.000-07:00

Such a simple idea. Funny, effective, addicting.
bye.
Hamburg is burning

Something to look at.

2008-10-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

2 weeks have passed since we have been starting working. We have been really busy for Mercedes and SoE ideas. I haven´t gone home before 11 pm. Anyway it´s really worth to stay here till late. Even because ideas seems to appear after 6 pm. I don´t want to bore you with long description of my job, you better have fun looking at these pics i took around Hamburg.
Bye.

GPS film

2008-10-06T08:57:00.000-07:00

A genius idea which mixes art and technology. Please take a look at www.gpsfilm.com and enjoy.

New stuff of USA election 2008

2008-10-06T02:12:00.000-07:00

I wish i was a Jew

2008-10-02T08:27:00.000-07:00

In the next italian elections, i will do the same with my grandparents. Guess against who?;)

Ready. Steady. Go.

2008-10-01T05:21:00.000-07:00

Today it´s an important day. Finally me and Andres have started at JVM next. Our first working day has begun with a nice breakfast at the agency and a small tour of the company ( which is quite big with its 3 buildings ). We have been shown everything we need to know and now we are at our desk. The client we are going to work for is Mercedes. From now on we must run. Faster.

What scares you the most?

2008-09-26T02:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night i was watching a very funny debate on tv about the use of fear in order to get social control.
The debate was between a famous italian ad-woman and a minister. When the journalist asked if advertising technics are used nowdays to spread fear, the woman differentiated advertising from propaganda. The first one creates desires and give a positive vision of the life, instead the second one is used by politicians to emphatize social problems and get an easier consensus.
The minister replied saying that advertising shows an artficial world where families are happy and everything is fine. On the contrary, the role of politicians is to deal with real life and problems and free people from fear rather than creating new ones by using lies.
What do you you think about that?

If he says so, i believe him

2008-09-22T03:56:00.000-07:00

David lynch is absolutely great, just watch this enlightening video about ideas.

Documentary on China

2008-09-12T05:08:00.000-07:00

Filippo Cariglia, a very good friend of mine, did this documentary on Chinese workers. Take a look at it. It's very interesting.
Bye

Thanks a lot, Rome

2008-09-11T03:49:00.000-07:00

I am spending some days in Rome with my girlfriend. She has just moved here to start a school of costume designer and i am helping her to fix her flat. Rome is great. The sun keeps on shining and everybody is chilled and relaxed. Walking through Trastevere, Campo de' Fiori makes me feel really good. i wish everybody could do such experience. I'd love to live and work here. I tried to do that 4 years ago. After i got graduated i moved to Rome and i started to look for an internship in advertising. I thought i could have made my way there because Rome has all the big networks . The reality was different. i spent 9 months having interviews and begging for a place, even without being payed, because i badly wanted to learn the job. I found only closed doors. After that, i made up my mind and i left Italy. Looking back now, i should thank all the CDs who didn't give me the chance to stay here. Now Rome is even more beautiful.
Bye

Have you already seen it?;)

2008-09-04T18:20:00.000-07:00

That's so funny. After watching this commercial from Ogilvy New York, take a look at this. http://theideasflow.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2008-06-10T09%3A19%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=20

On my new job

2008-09-04T11:22:00.001-07:00

During this summer, I got a new job. After Beijing, I was unemployed and so was my new team partner Andres. We needed to find a new job but we didn’t want to end up just doing print or TV commercial. We wanted to experiment more, create more entertaining and surprising stuff. Things that people want to have fun with and overall things I would have been proud to send to my friends who are not in advertising. I wanted to do less advertising and more “entertising”. My new team partner Andres Maldonado shared the same view and we were looking for an agency that allowed us to do that. We decided to play frankly and expose our vision without trying to please the agency just to get the job. Firstly, we chose Hamburg as the city where we wanted to stay. Then, carefully we selected those agencies that want ideas and not just ads. The first one that invited us for an interview was Jung Von Matt/next, the branch of the company that deals with new media. We met the CDs and after showing our portfolios we exposed our vision. It went great. They really liked what we said and wanted to do. Immediately we felt we had found the right place for us. They offered us the job. The 1st of October we start.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Mr Andres Maldonado

2008-09-04T11:16:00.000-07:00

Andres Maldonado is my new team partner. He is Swedish. We have known each other since school. He’s a very good art director but first of all he’s one of my best friends. Check out his portfolio.
Bye

Just back from holidays

2008-09-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

Hello to everybody,
my holidays took longer than i expected but it has been such a relaxing time to be by myself without computer, internet and the rest that it was hard to open my notebook. Finally i've found time to read some books and my beloved Dylan Dog (one of the most famous italian comics ever).
I didn't do much. I went to the seaside just a couple of days, i had a walk on the mountain. i slept a lot, had a lot of food and great wine, met all friends of mine. I have been lazy like never before. I think idleness is good for vices and creation :)
i hope you have had great holidays as well. Now it's time to come back to work. I have a lot of things to tell you.
Stay tuned.
bye.

Closed for holidays

2008-07-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry if i write this post only now, but i have been really busy during last weeks. As you know i left Beijing and it took me a while to arrange all the stuff. The journey back was pretty nice. It started like shit because i had to pay 200€ for 10 kilos more in my lugguage:( . I stopped one night in Rome to visit my brother and finally i went home in my small village, Caposele. I wasn't able to post before because internet is not working there( i don't know if it's good or not ;). In fact I writing this post from a village next to mine. Anyway, even if internet should start working again, i won't write here for a while because i am going to enjoy the seaside. I wish great holidays to everybody and meet you back in some weeks. Bye

A post to say goodbye

2008-07-08T21:52:00.000-07:00

Today is my last day at work. After some time spent working in China, i made up my mind and i decided to come back in Europe. I have had very good time here and i don't regret the choice to start my career in China. It has been tough especially because of the language but in the end i can't complain. At the agency, everybody has been really kind and tonight it will take place my goodbye party.
Now adventures and new stories are waiting for me in the old continent. Do you want to know what's going to happen? Stay tuned.
Bye China.

Ideas comes from everywhere

2008-07-07T01:51:00.000-07:00

I love this web site http://www.ted.com/. it's really inspiring please take a look and watch all the videos.
Bye
Sal

I Love rock and Roll

2008-07-05T09:18:00.000-07:00

Every creative has its own way to find new inspiration but, for sure, music is something that everybody uses to get ideas. What’s really popular among creatives is elettronic music , techno, drum and bass, dub anyway everything that has something to do with the club culture. Suddenly deejays have become the new rockstars. It might be I am a little older than the average but personally I love rock and roll. Rock music is the perfect example of how an idea should be. Simple, direct and powerful. A punch in the stomach. A kick in your ass. Great ideas are rock and sound like the most famous rock songs . For example the “Gorilla” sounds like “Smells like teen spirit”. This songs has revolutionized the way of doing music just when everybody thought that rock was dead and nothing could have no longer been invented.
What do you think about it? What’s a rock song you would compare with a great advertising campaign?

Spread love

2008-07-02T21:10:00.000-07:00

After my political post, I want to come back to the main topic. Some days ago i was skyping with Emilia, and i told her that in while i am leaving China and going back to Europe. She asked me where i wanted to go and I said i was spreading my portfolio around to find a new job. Then she said: " Don't only spread your portfolio, spread love" . This statement touched me very much. Spread love. The love for ideas, the love for the infinite challenges you encounter when you do this job. The love for pushing ideas further , for searching different ways, for looking at the things from new perspectives, for not giving anything for granted and find new approaches. The love for never giving up.
Spreading a portfolio is just normal. Everybody who approaches an agency must have a decent one. So if you just spread your portfolio you are one of many. Spread love instead, and you will make the difference. You will stand out. That's what Emilia was trying to tell me in 2 words, and SPREAD LOVE is what i pass to you.
Bye

Law save the queen

2008-06-30T21:16:00.000-07:00

This is a political post against the italian prime minister. The 8th of july, the shitty government that leads my country will vote a law to give the immunity to highest ranks of the state. Which means that if the president of the republic or the prime minister commit a crime they can't be prosecuted until they finish to be president or prime minister. This is because Berlusconi wants to stop the trials against him. This is a shame for a democratic country . The 8th of july in Piazza Navona in Rome, thousand of people will protest against this law that is useful only for Berlusconi. Berlusconi is not a good person and it's our right to attack him. Feel free to use this space to do that. I'll publish everything.

Team building

2008-06-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

Last weekend i went to a team building provided by my agency. I didn't have any clue what could be. Actually i thought we were going in a posh hotel outside the city to party and have fun all together. Well...we did have fun and we party but the location was a bit different. We ended up on a mountain, in small little rooms full of mosquitos and the weather was shit. It was more like a scout camp than a trip. The funny thing is that the location was still Beijing even if it took 3 hours to drive there. We drank a lot and we tried to party even if the rain was all over. DId we build a team???? I don't know but al least we integrate more with the chinese. We got to know each other better.

Company trip

2008-06-26T11:34:00.000-07:00

Guys, i won't be posting for a couple of days because my company will take the entire creative department out of Beijing for a weekend trip. i don't know what's going to happen anyway i'll let you know on sunday.
Bye

Sal

About creativity

2008-06-26T00:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a nice article about creativity. Download the pdf.
via www.cpluv.com
bye