Stirling McLaughlin’s Cabinet of Internet Curiosities

All skyscrapers can be as cool as The Chrysler Building.

All rappers can be as good as Lupe Fiasco.

All kids shows can be as crazy as Yo! Gabba Gabba.

All cellphones can be as cleverly designed as the iPhone.

All strollers can be as sturdy as the Bugaboo.

All cars can be as remarkable as the Mini.

All customer service lines can be as courteous and as helpful as Room&Board’s.

All newspapers can be as credible as The New York Times.

All reality shows can be as creative as Project Runway.

All movies can be as amazing as Citizen Cane.

All businesses can be as ubiquitous as Starbucks.

All video games can be as addictive as Guitar Hero.

All chocolate can taste as good as Lindt.

All ad agencies can be as funny as Cliff Freeman.

All bikes can be as uncompromising as Independent Fabrication’s.

All guitars can be as well crafted as a P.R.S.

All websites can be as successful as Myspace.

All software can be as easy to use as WordPress.

All blogs can be as good as mine. Maybe even better!

No matter what field you are in, there are people doing truly remarkable things. The question is, what are you doing to become one of them. If it has been done, it should stand to reason that it can be done.

I don’t want to hear any more excuses!

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If you are thinking of quiting your job and traveling the world for a year, Ian’s travel blog makes for some informative reading. If, like me, you have no idea how you’ll ever find time to go to the bathroom, let alone Zanzibar, I’d recommend checking it out anyway.

Next week Ian, a successful illustrator, and his wife Magda, a high-end photographer, will be walking away from their plush urbanite existence and taking a year long round the world tour. The trip will take them from here to here, and everywhere in between. Ian will be documenting the whole thing, with his trademark humor, for those of us less fortunate (or perhaps less ballsy).

So, bon-voyage you lucky so-and-sos. Don’t forget to get me a T-shirt. I wear a medium.

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This past weekend, I had the pleasure of once again making the trek out to Metuchen, NJ to participate in a Misplaced Planet production. This was notable for a few reasons. This marked my first time in front of the camera in almost 5 years (that’s me with the astronaut). Also, when its finished, “Security Deposit” will be the first Misplaced Planet production to be shot entirely in High Definition.

When I was in film school, my camera, a Sony TRV900, was the envy of all of my friends. But that was almost a decade ago! I’m talking way back in the day when people rode to the market in their horseless carriages and cameras used things like “video tapes”. Back in the late 90s, if you wanted to transfer your footage to your computer, you first needed to go through and log whatever clips you wanted. Then you had to wait as your computer played through it all in real time. Hell, why do I even bother? Most of you probably weren’t even born yet!

The camera we used this Sunday, a Panasonic AG-HVX200, uses solid state p2 cards, not tape. Every hour or so, we would take a break for a few minutes and they would dump all the footage to a laptop. When our director got home, he didn’t need to sift through hours of tape. He just pulled up the clips and started reviewing them right away. He hopes to have us a rough cut in another day or so. With any luck, we may have a final cut in the same amount of time it used to take us just to capture the footage!

Now, I’m a fairly tech savy person, so its pretty hard to make me feel old. Still, as I watched the director and DP review takes by scrolling through thumbnails on the camera’s LCD screen, I have to admit it made my angina act up.

Such is progress.

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Today is BBDO New York’s Bring Your Kids to Work Day. Call me old fashioned, but there’s something really cool about seeing all of my coworkers running around after their children, while I do the same. By letting my personal and professional life overlap for a few hours, I’m reminded why I work so hard and what I’m working for.

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The 2008 elections are almost a year and a half away and already the candidates are coming under an unprecedented amount of scrutiny. Everything a candidate says or does is being put under the magnifying glass. Well, now you can add their font choices and color preferences to the list. Ryan Bowman at Good Magazine has written a terrifically biting analysis, not of the presidential candidates themselves, but of their bumper stickers.

Here is what he had to say about Barack Obama’s sticker:

“Beautiful but empty. Tries hard to avoid the traditional vocabulary of political design but ends up using the same familiar tropes—patriotic colors, red and white stripes, heavy handed Steinbeckian symbolism, and even a font named Perpetua.”

Say what you will about Mr. Obama (I happen to rather like him) but its hard not to draw parallels between his campaign materials and his campaign.

Maybe design really does matter.

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When I first came to New York, I spent several years working in “sports promo”. You know those little ads at the top right corner of the USA Today’s sport section? That used to be my job! I would download pictures from a stock photo site, one player from this team and one from the other, and drop them in to ads designed to look like the they where about to eat each other’s spleens.

Unfortunately, any type of conceptual ad or headline was next to impossible to pull off. Usually it would end up being something like “Rumble in the Big Easy” or “Come On, Feel The Heat!” This was because we couldn’t't focus on any particular athlete. If someone became injured, or sucker-punched a fan, or killed a bunch of pit-bulls in a backyard dog fighting ring, we needed to have alternate images to swap out at the last minute. That way we wouldn’t run an ad that would garner bad publicity for the event, or show an athlete who wasn’t actually playing that night. On occasion, these changes would be made several hours after the newspaper’s “drop dead” deadline.During hockey season, we would occasionally have to go to our fourth or fifth alternate.

Fashion runs on a totally different time-line. Back in my sports promo days, I would look at people working on fashion and cosmetic accounts with serious envy. These people might be working four, five, maybe even six months in advance of their deadlines. By the time the fall season was here, the ads for the following spring season where already of being retouched and polished up. For an over worked, ulcered guy like myself, that sounded like a huge improvement!

Now, I’ve never worked for a fashion magazine, but its  easy to imagine that they work on a similar time-line. So I guess it isn’t so surprising that a coked-up jail-bound drunk with her career firmly in the crapper is gracing the cover of one of the nation’s most prestigious fashion magazines.

As I walked to work this morning past the ritzy section surrounding Carnegie Hall, I noticed a phone booth ad proudly displaying the September issue of ELLE magazine. There, in all of her freckled glory, was none other than Ms. Mean Girls herself, Lindsay Lohan. One might think that ELLE is taking risks by placing a human lighting rod like Lindsay on their cover, but I tend to think that decision was made a long time ago. Back before her May drunk driving arrest or her stint in rehab. Before her latest movie tanked or her July re-arrest. I’m talking way back in the salad days when the lovable star of Parent Trap was starting to show herself to be a true movie star.

Perhaps ELLE could learn something from the USA Today sports section.

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My copywriter Ben and I have been swapping books for the last couple of weeks. Since we are both grown men, sharing clothes is considered strictly taboo. I think this is silly since we’re both about the same size. But I guess sharing books is the next best thing. So far I’ve turned him on to Story by Robert McKee and he’s lent me his copy of  Call of the Mall by Paco Underhill. By sharing books, we’re starting to create a common conceptual vocabulary. Kind of like an analog knowledge base.

If you work in any kind of partnership or team, I highly recommend starting a book swap.  If the people you work with won’t go for it, ask to barrow their shoes.

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http://blogging.at.work.hurts.us/

Enjoy.

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Widgets are starting to show their potential as an effective form of interactive advertising. Widgets allow for a deeper level of interaction as apposed to traditional banner ads, by the fact that they are meant to be shared. Also, brands can endear themselves to influential blogger by allowing them to wear these widgets as a sort of badge of honor, or by providing them with a useful tool. Companies and websites are learning that providing widgets to bloggers and social networking sites can turn their fans into a sales force, or at least a media department. Seth Godin would be proud.

If you are looking for effective widgets, check out the one below from the Superbad site. Or check out that funky clock in my sidebar. Both are good examples. More companies are going to catch on, and then you can expect a flood of this kind of advertising. Most of them will be awful, but hopefully a few will be truly remarkable. Enjoy.

P.s. Sites that have widgets on facebook are seeing huge increases in traffic. Check out Quantcast’s recent report on the facebook effect.

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Imagine for a second that you’ve hired a contractor to build a set of shelves in your living room. They come in and measure. You discuss what you will be using the shelves for. Maybe you even show them some pictures clipped out from some home decorating magazines. They give you an estimate, and you cut them a check. They come back a week later and start building your new shelves.

One night, after the construction has started, you get an idea. You get a hammer from the toolbox, grab a few pieces of scap wood, and bang in a few extra shelves. Maybe you even pull out a couple of those nails. If you can’t figure out why they’re there, they probably aren’t important. Before you know it, you’re done! In just a few hours you’ve doubled your storage space!

When the workers come back the next day to finish the job, what do you suppose their reaction will be? Do you think they’ll be thrilled at all the work you’ve saved them? Do you thik they’ll praise you for your ingenuity? No. they’ll probably be pretty angry.

But why? Why should they care? The customer is always right, aren’t they? Afterall, It’s your bookshelf in your living room!

The answer is twofold:

1. These are profesionals, hired to do a job. By cutting them out of the decision making process, you are essentially saying their hard work and expertise is worthless.
2. The finished product, in this case your bookshelf, is a reflection on them. If you damage the finished product, you are damaging their reputation.

This type of thing happens all the time in advertising and graphic design. At the 11th hour a client makes “one small change” that fundamentally alters the final product. An ad or a website may not collapse on your head, but by ignoring the recommendations of the advertising and design professionals you employ, you risk causing serious structural damage to your brand.

If you wake up late at night with a brilliant idea about how to change the colors of your logo, or tweak the copy in your ads, put down the hammer and go back to bed. Call your agency in the morning and discus your ideas with them.

You’ll be happy that you did.

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