A case of the tech goggles

The tech world just gets more and more amazing everyday. Some in the tech world stand by the idea that technology doubles in performance every 18 months, sometimes referred to as Moore's Law. This can easily be seen in cellphones, just picture your phone five years ago (if you can remember back that many phones ago) and now look at all of the capabilities of the new IPhones or Android phones. We never thought how integrated everything could be, from mobile calls to shopping and adverting, everything is at your finger tips. For example look at Google Goggles, and even better yet download it immediately. Whats it do? Well hold your smart phone up to pretty much any item you can imagine, and snap a picture..... Boom! Seconds later you have instant feedback from Google, if you took a picture of a business it will come up on a map, take a picture of a new tv, find a listing of that tv's prices locally. How bad ass is that! You can even use a little app called RedLaser to scan whatever barcode your little heart desires and shop for the best price right on your phone. Hell, why even leave your couch anymore, we haven't. 

Now you see it, now you don't?

We have always admired advertising in its many forms, we even collect old ads and use them as inspiration. If your a true ad enthusiast like us, definitely check out this series by Jim Heimann. As much as we can admire the art and copy of some of the best ads throughout the years we also admire the bad, for example Camel's long running campaign of 9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel over the other brands. Which you can take a look at here.

So what is advertising? By definition its a form of communication used to persuade an audience to buy a product or service, and in "layman's terms": Selling you s$#t you don't need.

How do advertisers do this? Well the most often used way is visual stimuli, followed by good copy, and that accounts for advertising in its many forms: billboards, print, tv, radio etc. Often times advertising may "enhance" how things look, sometimes even using subliminal messages. Take a look at the following examples and see how it targets the viewer and uses persuasion. Here are two great examples of how products are enhanced the first being the Dominos video above, and the second being the famous Dove Evolution video. Recently BMW has been getting some slack attention for a new video they released, which uses some subliminal messaging, check it out for yourself and read the article from fastcompany.

So in our opinion advertising as a whole is awesome, but as a marketing tool and a form of communication, consumers need to take advertising with a grain of salt; and don't be afraid to do your research so you don't get stuck with something like this!

In the year 93?

In many respects 1993 seems like a short time ago but on further thought it was almost 17 years ago now. Rendering us without a cell phone, computer, internet, and GPS amongst many other technological marvels we take for granted. Check out these great ads from the year of 93' from AT&T. Crazy how accurate they were since we currently have most of what they predicted.

The Next Areefa

We are sure most of you have seen the new Cricket Wireless commercials, if you haven't its a newer cell phone company to this area and there slogan is Respect (Along with Aretha's song). One particular ad has Youtube vids of people singing "Respect," one girl in particular is ridiculously good, and apparently she's only 10 years old. Her name is Lukeja Poland and she is sick! I couldn't believe it after hearing the respect song and then I listened to "I Will Always Love You," and "Take a Bow" and they are even better. This girl is gonna have a long and successful career ahead of her.