I hate to admit, I didn’t watch the Superbowl or check out the yardage of ad blogs all offering their opinions of the commercials. But here’s a sporting event where an ad might actually be powerful.
There’s no snow in Vancouver. No freakin’ snow! So why not take advantage of the situation with an awareness ad? I’m picturing a skier at the top of the hill, waiting to charge out of the gate. The crowd is going wild. The signal blasts and he lunges forward. Cut to wide shot of the same skier’s futile attempts at poling himself down the grassy slope. Cue themeline. “Global warming. It’s all downhill from here.”

When I was a kid, I wanted to become either a musician or a mad scientist. Put the two together and naturally I ended up in marketing. Here’s one of my favorite toys growing up. My favorites of the “100 in 1″ circuits were the radio tuner and the high powered tazer. Go figure. The soldering iron came later. That’s when I got really dangerous.

I caught myself saying this yesterday. What’s next? Pushing the green light and shooting the low lying fruit? Malapropisms rule.

STERLING, Conn. (AP) — A holy cow in Connecticut, perhaps? Or maybe a divine bovine?

A calf with a white marking on its forehead in the approximate shape of a cross was born last week at a dairy farm in Sterling, a small rustic town on the Rhode Island border.

AP Photo/The Norwich Bulletin, Aaron Flaum Dairy farmer Brad Davis carries Moses, a Jersey Holstein calf mix at the farm of Brad Davis and Megan Johnson, right, in Sterling, Conn.

Owner Brad Davis tells WFSB-TV he thinks the marking may be a message from above, though he’s still trying to figure out what that message might be.

The mostly brown calf is half Jersey, half Holstein. Neighborhood children have named it Moses.

The chairman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Dairy Science tells the Norwich Bulletin newspaper it’s not unusual for a Holstein cow to have a white marking on its head. But department chairman Ric Grummer says the cross shape is unique.

Here’s an animatic I put together when we were developing the Always Part of U campaign for UConn. The central theme is this giant hill on campus (UConn is big into agriculture) where students sled, stargaze and cow-tip. I built “Horsebarn Hill” using Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and wrote and performed the song using Logic. It was universally despised by alumni focus groups, but I still think it’s a great sketch. I can only imagine what the final, cinematically-filmed version would have looked like.

If I were a Yale graduate, I would demand my money —and my reputation back.
It’s times like these that I’m glad I could only afford a state college!

In advertising, it’s extremely rare to get a client that trusts you, listens to your advice, and lets you do your own thing creatively. Someone, maybe Bill Bernbach, used to say that if the creative doesn’t make you sweat bullets, you’re wasting your advertising dollars. Now I don’t think that this particular spot is all that extreme, but the client did, which makes him pretty much the gutsiest client I ever worked with.

It’s also rare to walk away with a spot that came out exactly as you envisioned it. I’m proud to say that the music was written by a Deckerhead (me) arranged and performed by a Deckerhead (Oliver) and approved by a Deckerhead (Andy). The last two are technically former Deckerheads, but I say “once a Deckerhead, always a Deckerhead.”

Today we’re all about experimenting with the tabber widget, which adds a nice little navigable area to my sidebar to the right. I’m also using the tabber widget on my “work” page to help viewers (okay, just me) navigate through a selection of videos. The widget has css rules of its own, so I’ve got layers upon layers of css going here.

I’m also quite proud of myself for learning how to use Firebug (a Firefox plug in) to discover what Builder names all the different widget classes. I can then go back to my style sheet and get more specific within specific areas.

This weekend’s lesson is how to best integrate video into WordPress. I’ve decided on Rodrigo Polo’s excellent Stream Player plugin. Here it is, loading my latest Days Inn TV spot, which will hopefully find its way to the “work” section of my site.

You can download Rodrigo’s most excellent plugin here.

It was a productive weekend for computer repairs. I upgraded our Mac Mini from 1GB ram to 2.5, swapped the optical drive with our old G5 iMac because the Mini could only burn CDs, and most impressively, replaced a bunch of capacitors in the G5 iMac power supply because it intermittently failed. Soldering is perhaps a man’s most important skill. Now we have an upgraded computer, plus an extra computer that wasn’t functioning before. Thank you, Internet, for helping me find all the information to make all these repairs. Oh yeah, I also took apart 2 Apple keyboards and cleaned the Kid Gunk out with Q-Tips. Plus fixed a broken Mighty Mouse.