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About a year back I wrote a piece on Levi’s ‘Go Forth’ campaign and how it does a remarkable job of taking the discontents and hopes of the historical moment and packaging them compellingly, towards the end of selling jeans. They’ve continued on this streak with an eerily timely new ad which seems to be in conversation with the London riots and the ‘Arab Spring’. The previous ads featured Walt Whitman’s poetry while this new one is narrated by Bukowski’s “The Laughing Heart”. The ad won’t air in the UK because it has imagery and verses that hit to close to the ongoing unrest:

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

August 16, 2011

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Brilliant!

andreavlewis:

Classic Agency Shenanigans

andreavlewis:

Advertising T-shirt “I work at an advertising agency that…” (via @fearlessqa) #OLDSCHOOL

Tags: advertising agency shenanigans

July 11, 2011

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Video

I hate being drawn in to commercials, but I have to admit my chest swelled with emotion when I saw this one.

I grew up feeling intensely the presence of my own father and the absence of that figure in the lives of others. I saw the results of that void every day in the cyclical brokenness of communities I’ve lived in.

As many resentments as I’ve borne him over the years, at the core of me there was always the knowing that having a present and caring dad is much less than a promise to a black boy in America - it is a lucky thing, a beautiful thing.

So the imagery in this commercial is no less than iconic for me, of the wonderful privilege I’ve had and would hope for others. I’m almost afraid to say it out loud, knowing how the universe laughs at our plans, but I think I’m going to be a great father one day and the thought warms me to the core.

Tags: fatherhood manhood black race commercials advertising

May 01, 2011

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“Become an Entrepreneur Today With an Online Masters in Entrepreneurship”

I keep seeing these ads on FB and elsewhere: “Become an Entrepreneur. Earn a Masters in Entrepreneurship”. Something about that wording, and maybe the thinking behind it, seems off. Maybe what bothers me is that you can teach useful skills and concepts that help people start successful ventures, but even if you figure out how to break down the ethos of the entrepreneur into discrete, absorbable units, it’s absurd to then rubber stamp someone as a “master of entrepreneurship’. This seems almost anti-entrepreneurial in the sense that entrepreneurs by definition don’t wait to be accredited as such - you’re either an entrepreneur or you’re not, and you become one not so much by studying as by doing. This is what happens when action paradigms become buzz words.

Tags: entrepreneurship fluff buzzwords education advertising tariqwest.com

February 03, 2011

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Advertising Done Right

Haha, good stuff, reminds me of my days in Seattle. I was terrified of getting caught not recycling and spent several minutes each day at MS cafeterias (me and a hundred high-brain-power engineers) trying to figure out the convoluted recycling system.

This video is by Pemco Insurance. They are based here in Seattle. They do a great job of branding their company as Pacific Northwesterners. Their commercials are great examples of this. They are also tremendously entertaining because they depict actual behavior by the people up in this…