Viva La Revolución

TAKE A JOG THROUGH THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE.

Kevin McKeon writes...
I have this little farmhouse in the country that I escape to on weekends. This past weekend I was inspired to go for a run (okay, jog) – my first in probably 10 years. As I meandered down the road at a semi-leisurely pace, trying very hard not to pull anything my first day out, I couldn’t help but feeling, as I took in the sights and sounds around me, an odd sense of traveling down this route for the very first time. Which was really odd, since this particular road was one I’d driven down a thousand times before over the past 5 years. Oddly enough, though, I had never traveled it ON FOOT. As I groaned past old houses, stone walls, fences, barns, and fields that I’d seen million times, it was almost like I was seeing a whole new landscape. Did that front door always have that incredible hardware? Was that amazingly gnarly tree always there? The way that wall is build right into the landscape like it had always been there - never picked up on that. The smells, the sounds, the light on the pasture, the scent of the honeysuckle… I’d been by here so many times and yet, it all seemed somehow… different.. Much richer. More interesting. Full of detail I never knew was there. It was inspiring. And all because, for the first time, I wasn’t just passing through this space, I was a part of it. I was in it. Experiencing it firsthand. At a jogger’s pace. Not behind the wheel of a car shooting by at 40 miles an hour.

Culture is best absorbed the same way. At street level. Want to know what’s going on in the real world? Want to be inspired? Put down the cultural anthropology bibles, leave the research and the must-read reports and the trade pubs on the desk, close the advertising award books, get out of your intellectual SUVs, and get out there on foot. Be your own expert in the field. Form your own hypothesis’. Take a jog through the cultural landscape, and see a little something. Spend more time on the streets, in the bars, the clubs, the supermarkets, the parks, the malls, the office parks, the online communities… and don’t forget to look around (remember, it’s not a race, it’s a jog.) Take in the sights, the smells, the sounds, the details of our amazing, complex, and often bizarre culture. See the world up close. It’s really rich, fascinating, and full of detail. All of which is hard to see from a safe distance.

I, for one, plan on squeezing a few more cultural jogs into my regular weekly schedule.

Keep your fingers crossed I don’t pull a muscle.

Photograph by Belinda Lopez

NETFLIX, NOW FREE FROM EMBARRASSMENT

Chris Coots writes...

If you're a frequent user of Netflix (and by this, I mean you update, add and rate your Queue at least once a week) you may have already noticed a new feature offered in the "Friends" section called MOVIE PRIVACY. It allows you to pick and choose which titles your friends can see that you have in your Queue. So now, for every Rashomon or Fitzcaraldo you can five-star Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People or Music and Lyrics without fear of being outed as a rom-com sellout or a potential serial killer.

Also, look for new lower pricing on your Netflix plan. For the past 24 hours www.netflix.com has said it is "temporarily unavailable," continually pushing back its time of availability... yet letting you know very clearly that you can now get a plan for as low as $4.99 a month. Clearly a staged outing... or it could be attributed to the fact that Benson: The Complete First Season drops today.

IT'S ALL OVER, HARRY.

Chris Coots writes...
We weren't there waiting in line this time, but I found an interesting write-up on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at this link. Two reporters have been assigned the unenviable task of buying the book at midnight and reading/blogging about it simultaneously. Some sort of geekish duel. More info and postings will be added as the days go on, so keep checking in on HP and his horcruxes and that guy whose name you can't say.

Warning: The AV Club's blogs will contain spoilers.

FLARE

Caroline Jackson writes:

Lets face it. Sometimes it’s really not easy being a girl – “becoming a woman,” giving birth, exercising with breasts and the like. But one thing that we’ve always had over the boys is the opportunity to dress up. We can wear jewelry (and not get lots of slack for it), we can paint our nails and toes any color of the rainbow (something I really enjoy doing at least once a week – I spend endless minutes at the salon counter deciding between 20 shades of red or pink), and wear make up…. the list goes on and on. It is really fun to dress yourself up. But what about the boys? If they did any of these super fun things we as women take for granted, what would people think of them? Maybe a little crazy or weird.

Well don’t feel sorry for them just yet - it’s ok cause boys have their own outlet to dress it up – we just cant see it! My boyfriend for example has the best, most outlandish collection of boxer shorts known to man. From puppies on a blue background, to penguins on a red background, to pink frogs on a blue background – the list goes on and on. He has about 30 pairs.

On an off day the tartan print might come out, but that’s only if he’s been lazy with his laundry. (Might I just add here for my own reputation’s sake – they are all cotton NOT silk – remember when guys used to think silk was cool?!? His boxer shorts are his flare. Another channel for him to express himself is his glasses. Poor Michael is almost blind, he literally cant see without his glasses on. But that’s ok because he has about 7 pairs of eye glasses – an expensive habit I might add. But he has everything from the very fashionable thick, black plastic frame, to a tortoise shell almost lady-like frame to the silver wire frame – look quickly and it doesn’t look like he’s wearing glasses. He loves these “fashion accessories” so much that they are the reason he would not consider laser surgery…. Anyway enough about my poor boyfriend. There are a couple of culprits in our office too. Take Austin. Now I have only known Austin for a couple of weeks so Im not going to get into too much detail (also cause he’s my boss and I value my job), but I have noticed a definite tendency towards very loud socks. Like the boxer shorts, it’s not really something you can easily see unless you really look, or are drawn to the extremely bold colors when one crosses his legs. So far I have seen some striped, some argyle and maybe even polka dots – I might be making that last one up. And of course the best dressed man in the office, Lee and his wonderful collection of shoes, amongst other things. I am more and more impressed everyday that I see him. I am not familiar with all the brands but the ascetics are definitely right on. Anyway, I think my three man case study conclusively proves that us ladies don’t need to feel sorry for men having no outlet in which to express themselves – whether we see it or not, they are, and they have a good time doing it.

SCOTT GOT INTERVIEWED

Scott was interviewed in Cannes.

Porching those Spanish Lessons / Cutting a Red Thread in the Digital Disco

Austin McKenna is a 12th Level Ad Wizard...

Sadly, I’m one of the few staffers here that wields zero command of a foreign language. I can count to ten in Spanish, order a ham sandwich in French (avec moo-tard), and know that Deutsch means German, in German, but that’s about the extent of my functional literacy. However, it dawned on me while extolling the merits of some banged up web widget to a gaggle of non-admen friends at a dinner party recently, I actually do speak a second language, one which is nearly impossible to follow by laymen and is entirely rooted in a pirated, highly nefarious reinterpretation of the King’s English. Jargon-driven, chock full of marcom buzz words, rife with acronyms, it’s learned in boardrooms and on conference calls, certain gems passed down by mentors or via an addiction to our industry trades. Both preposterous, and terribly genius, this new parlance often suggests replacing once-simple directives with “actionable” nouns, thereby creating all new uses for common household items, like the table and couch.

Many of us leverage scalability and engage measurability metrics on countless calls during a workday, but it’s the devotion to furniture-driven analogies that really plusses out this lingua franca. For instance, “couching” an idea is solid, as is “tabling” a strategy, and how many of us “carpet” key markets as a means to ensure the big idea “rugs” under our heroics? Most points possible: our campaign was “stove” by the accountants. “Stove”, both a cooking apparatus, and the act of being delivered to the bottom of the ocean by a whale, achieves perfect application.

Weapons and soldiering also make for good vocabulary, and seriously ratchet up the urgency of any sentence: The campaign is tanking. Let’s unleash the full arsenal, page the silver bullet and execute the surgical strike, our guerilla teams are in the trenches, we can pound the beaches with staggered salvos, bangalore the CRM department, buttress vanguard communications with blanket message, and redeploy resources as needed. When the brick and mortar guys sack the cloaking strategy, we counter with human capital – that’s mission critical.

I’d propose heavier attention to Hollywood, clearly an untapped resource for mach-five jibber jabber. Rewrites are rewrites, but pulling a Weinstein while green rooming a hostile client, demands the tissue session comes with a rider. Alternatively, we gaff the ROI modeling exercise and put the second unit on brief detail.

Smell a curtain call. Laptop requires percussive maintenance.

Off to make sausage thereby operationalizing the mouse potatoes.

GLOBAL VOTE PICKS NEW SEVEN WONDERS

Frog alumnus André Galhardo reports...

http://www.new7wonders.com

A non-profit foundation has named the Seven New Wonders of the World at a ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal. The Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu in Peru, Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer, the Colosseum in Rome, the Jordan's Petra, the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza in Mexico and India's Taj Mahal were voted the world's new seven wonders.

Here's a good view of Brazil's Statue of Christ Redeemer:

America's Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower in Paris missed out. Organisers say about 100m people cast votes over the internet and by phone. The New7Wonders campaign is the brainchild of a Swiss man, Bernard Weber, who has had a varied career as a film-maker and museum curator. American actress Hilary Swank said at the presentation ceremony: "Never before in history have so many people participated in a global decision."

THE MOOTS POINT 1.4 and a half - NOT THAT MUCH MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE.

Chris Coots writes...

FILM REVIEW

Transformers directed by Michael Bay

The Nitty Gritty: Good alien robots are trying to save Earth from bad alien robots, er... no, they're actually trying to find this cube thing before the bad guys do - but they're cool because they don't want to hurt the humans and they know English really well. Transformers thrives on the majesty of Jon Voight, the hips of Megan Fox, and the comic timing of Shia LaBeouf (most notably his scenes with movie parents Kevin Dunn & Julie White.) It’s visually stunning, full of laughs, and ultimately, full of other flaws that make it silly enough to be enjoyable. Can you believe it? It isn’t horrible.

Culture: Movies that last over 2 hours are hard to execute well unless the story is full enough to call for it, and even then you might lose about half of your audience after about 90 minutes (at least to a bathroom break.) Transformers isn’t a film that brings anything new to the table apart from its visuals and the discovery that robots love teenage boys, and while exhausting it earns points for trying to stave off boredom by mixing up the good bits with the dumb ones. The running storylines are drawn out to a fault to accommodate plotlines, cameos, and hot young “actors” (ie: Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson are laughable as stand-up military dudes and Rachael Taylor has the fakest and most annoying sounding real Australian accent in the history of history.) But for all its flaws, Transformers shines in specific executions that are entertaining because they’re surprisingly perfect (I’m not talking about the action sequences.) Probably not worth a second viewing, but go once for the 1-18-08 trailer and the surprising number of laughs (it had about as many LOL’s for me as Knocked Up.) I hope they sell a lot of toys.

THE MOOTS POINT 1.4 - IT’S BEEN A WHILE.

Chris Coots writes…

Culture: It’s been a while since we’ve had a good monster movie. I’m not talking zombies/walking infected – I’m talking end of the world 100-foot-tall-monsters-who-eat-jeeps movies. No, War of the Worlds doesn’t count. Neither does the last Godzilla. What those tallied in great visual effects they lacked respectively in engaging (read: watchable) story. JJ Abrams’ super secret Cloverfield/1-18-08 project definitely isn’t lacking in back story, as the buzz is fluttering all inside the interweb at a fever pitch over the puzzles and videos on www.ethanhaaswasright.com. But will it deliver? Hard to tell since it just began shooting in NYC mid-June. But I guess it was long enough to shoot some party scenes and finish some EXTREMELY enticing special effects and monster sounds. Long enough to cobble together the best trailer in the history of the universe and slap it in front of Transformers.

The Nitty Gritty: Abrams and his team have six months to finish, release and deliver on the early hype… but it’s the opinion of this blogger that they need do nothing but watch their planted seed grow. Make the Blair Witch comparisons if you want, just because it’s mysterious and handheld... but even if I see or hear nothing else about this project, I’ll be there excited on opening night (and I’ve only seen this bootlegged recording of the trailer.)

SCOTT GOODSON'S CANNES LIONS BLOG

The following passages are from Scott Goodson's guest blog for AdWeek during the week of Cannes.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Am leaving for Cannes on Wednesday night with my Frog colleague Kerry Quinn. Looking forward to the ruckus. Was supposed to be there today, but we made the final of a rather exciting pitch that culminates tomorrow at high noon. The anticipation of it all has inspired me for the last few yards to the pitch finish line. The dash to the airport. The old friends, new friends, the work, the meetings, the bar of great gutters. All rather fun and very inspiring—in small doses, of course.
Last year as a member of the Titanium jury, I was whisked here and there, had my personal door opener, valet parking service. This year I’m a pack rat, and rather looking forward to it. All the stress and pressure of judging ... I’m actually looking forward to putting my feet up and enjoying it all.

I most look forward to:
1) The globality of it all. Hanging out with great talent from Tokyo to Toronto, from Sweden, Holland, Brazil, Mongolia, New Zealand, Russia, India. This is the true greatness of Cannes. Much like the thrill of the global family coming together at the Olympics.
2) Seeing a ton of work. There’s nowhere else on the planet where you can peruse warehouse loads of category work. You work on shoes? Well, the shoe industry will run 793 TV spots from around the world at 1 p.m. You do digital work for cars? Salon H from 7 a.m. until midnight.