Name a brand or media channel and Bill Green’s probably worked on and in it. An art director by trade, he’s focused on an overall holistic approach to brand madness that merges the worlds of traditional, digital and social – whatever it takes.
Having worked previously with Darryl and Humongo and current AdVerve podcast partner with Angela, he’s currently doing creative strategy and pitch development with BFG in Hilton Head. The ad blog Make The Logo Bigger is about his experiences in the world of advertising and beyond.
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a strategist, copywriter and journalist based in Paris. She writes MarketingProfs’ #SocialSkim, is a frequent guest on marketing podcast The Beancast, and co-hosts AdVerve the podcast. Most of her secret thoughts are on her blog, Live and Uncensored.
Darryl Ohrt
Darryl Ohrt is a former punk rocker, and Executive Creative Director at Carrot Creative, in NYC. In addition to his posts here, he also writes for Advertising Age’s Small Agency Diary, as the voice of the small guy in a big, big world.
After founding the legendary agency Humongo, he sold out to the man, left the entrepreneurial life and joined Carrot. Now he’s the self proclaimed Prime Minister of Awesome, and he’s tweeting, blogging, and exploring the internets as if it matters. He knows just enough to be dangerous, and is always ready for action.
See, this is why we don’t date. It’s just too hazardous.
However you may feel about the ad, the story’s moral probably rings right for those of us who’ve survived that long stretch of deathlike valley called College. Talk a little first! Let’s start with our family trees and sigils.*
The Toronto Silent Film Festival’s put three of its trailers on Instagram in delicious flipbook fashion, making the experience of silent film feel as fun and innovative as it must have in the ’20s.
One of the issues people have with the industry is how important it is to itself. Which is why we sometimes need reminding that we just make ads, that’s it. And that nobody cares, really, besides our clients and a handful of zealous ad students that all want to work at W+K.
Canada’s Cassie Awards is dedicated to recognising advertising that was actually ruled to be effective. They kinda like to think of themselves as the Canadian Effies (irony: no one cares). But here’s some of the funny work they’ve done to promote their upcoming ceremony.
“Ex-Wife”:
“Cop”:
Work by the inimitable john st., which we totally do care about … even if their ex-wives don’t.
Seasons Greetings — kind of? — from Crush + Surly Santa
Clever people in the creative space do a weird thing over the holidays. On this time of commercial overkill mixed with ambient donkey-punches of nostalgia, agencies far and wide release their season’s greetings — a tradition met with eyerolls, whose fruits are mainly forgotten, but in which everyone nonetheless feels enormous pressure to participate.
The inevitable result: a lot of cynical vids that somehow still manage to end on some semblance of a festive note. It’s the stuff of adults raised on once-funny, now-stale reruns of A Christmas Story, lubricated by generous helpings of Mad Men-era whisky.
Case in point: Crush’s holiday shorts. Try not to gaze too long at the seedy elf, because that guy is just objectively creepy. Also see episodes 2 and 3.
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Direct Mail that Puts the Fantasy in Your Driveway
“Direct mail has never been more direct,” brags client Pfaff Porsche in this video about a recent direct mail it conducted in Toronto.
Agency Lowe Roche Toronto targeted a wealthy neighbourhood in the city, drove a Porsche up the driveways of select homes, took a photo, and produced a direct mail piece that was unique for every residence. The headline read, “It’s closer than you think.”
The campaign — which probably took all afternoon — yielded a 32% response rate to a site where recipients could schedule test drives, says AdWeek, which adds, “Direct mail is typically about hitting as many people as possible for as low a cost as possible, but this creative idea shows that for luxury brands, a smaller effort can sometimes go a long way.”
We don’t think this applies merely to luxury brands, although luxury tends to be so far out of the stratosphere that they probably need to hear the “go-local” message more often than most. You don’t have to invent a new way to market; just think differently about how you go about it.
This effort unites peoples’ desire to be personally addressed, to be seen, with the immediacy of direct mail. And while it takes time and more labour than sitting at a desk printing 20,000 postcards, isn’t this how you want to touch people?
A touch that personal takes time, in the same way a face-to-face conversation carries more personal resonance than a pitch made to thousands.
A social story that brings you back to bear essentials.
By plugging cameras and motion sensors into various parts of Canada’s wild, Bear 71 Live provides a non-linear story about how humans, technology and animals (particularly bears) interact.
Great example of how technology, coupled with a knack for storytelling, can teach us more about our place in the world in relation to others. Brought to you by Toronto’s own Jam3 for the National Film Board of Canada.
The blog and podcast where we discuss ad stuff the way we want. Check the podcast out 
