CreatoBlog

I have been alerted to threadless.com …

It’s a sweet place where all the t-shirt designs are viewer submitted. And Lordy! Do they pay! $2,500 if your design gets picked. I am going to try it, so look for postings regarding voting on designs.

Prior to this, I had seen $200 as a high price for t-shirt designs. That’s a spicy meatball!

I know we’ve all seen it a million times by now. Enough to even notice the artist mention at the end:

“The artists Christo and Jean-Claude have no direct or indirect affiliation with AT&T…”

I know it sent me straight to the itunes store! That song is sweet. Nothing, nada, no song, no artist named Christo and Jean-Claude.

I’m just now finding out they are the orange-bolts-of-satin-cloth artists! Their big idea with all that cloth. THAT kind of artist. It seems like this kind of thing would only even seem remotely cool in a CG application. Oh well, they have been out there doing it since the ’70’s. Nutz.

While browsing through the Journal Sentinel this morning, I came across an ad that somewhat bothered me. It’s a new ad by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Building Partners for Humanity organization.

The ad is trying to bring awareness to the large medical costs of having leukemia. But what’s confusing (and a little offensive) is that they use an image of a man dressed in a hospital gown holding up a cardboard sign that says “Will work for $2,456,782.92″. What’s the point here? Are they saying that leukemia patients are like homeless people? That they have no money to pay their bills so they are, in essence, homeless? That seems a bit silly to me. Not to mention, a stretch for the truth. No, I think what they were trying to do is use a homeless person visual as a backdrop to create sympathy and that’s it.

So here’s my question to whoever put this one together: If you have a cause that needs some sympathy, are you going to just slap an image of homeless people all over it — even if the cause has NOTHING to do with being homeless? I’m sure if I was homeless and saw this ad, I’d be a little offended. How about use this image for the real cause– homelessness! Now, not to sound insensitive, I do have much sympathy for people that are fighting leukemia. And I’m sure the medical bills associated with this fight are astronomical and that saddens me. But from a marketing perspective, the ad should stick to not mixing up problems in this world. It’s one thing to garner sympathy for the homeless by using an image of them in an ad. It’s illogical to use it to garner sympathy for an entirely separate problem in this world.

Starting this month, there’s a new advertising option right in your customers’ hands. Apple iAds now appear inside of apps¹ running on 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches. (Eventually iAds also will be rolled out to the newer iPad devices.)

As of the July 1 launch, Apple had already sold over $60 million of iAd advertising space. Major companies that have purchased iAd space include Best Buy, Campbell Soup, Chanel, GEICO, GE, Nissan, Target and Walt Disney Studios. Based on the amount of time the average iPhone user spends using apps (about 30 minutes a day), Apple estimates that iAds could surpass one billion ad exposures every day.

Similar to ads on websites, the iAd initially occupies a small portion of the iPhone screen while the app will continue to run in the remainder of the screen. Clicking the iAd launches a full-screen ad.

Not all apps will include iAds – it is up to the developer of any given app to decide whether iAds will be delivered via that app. (The motivation to include iAds is that the developer will receive 60% of the advertising revenue generated by their app.)

One of the strong points for iAds is that they can be very precisely targeted based on such criteria as a person’s location, music and movie tastes, and other demographics. (more…)

1. Apps are the programs that run on an iPhone, such as email, a restaurant finder, games, etc. [↩]

Acronyms like HTML 5 and CSS3 may sound like a foreign language. They actually are the newest versions of two main programming languages for websites.

HTML (short for “HyperText Markup Language”) is used to build web content, pages and sites, while CSS (short for “Cascading Style Sheets”) determines how those web pages appear by applying styles such as color, font size and much more. HTML and CSS almost always work together — it’s rare to find a web page that uses one without the other.

The changes introduced by HTML 5 will make it easier for search engines to navigate our web pages, plus make it easier to pull and display video, images and other data that exist outside of the actual web page. In a similar fashion, CSS3 will make it easier to style a web page, plus introduces several new style properties. (more…)

As most people know, Domino’s Pizza is trying to tackle the criticism that they have been receiving on their “core product” with a new ad campaign. In this ad campaign they show you footage of a focus group they conducted in which (it seems) the only feedback on their pizza was negative. Anyone wonder how they’ve managed to stay in business all these years when people think of their pizza crust as “cardboard” and their pizza sauce as “ketchup”? (Sidenote: I think my little niece actually created that concoction as her “pretend pizza” when I was babysitting her once.)  But anyways, I was explaining to my fiancé one night as the ad was being aired that Domino’s was kind of sending out a double message. Yea, they’ve improved their pizza because of the bad feedback– that’s great! But they’re also saying that their long time customers were completely void of any real sense or good taste in choosing a pizza. Ouch! A few days later, I was pleased to see that Stephen Colbert shared the same sentiments. He said it perfectly actually. Click below to see the segment.