Month: April 2012

Advertising

Motel 6 Road Trip Through Time

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Motel 6 chose an interesting way to tell consumers that they’ve been around for a half century. They “time traveled” both the station wagon and the family of four inside through the decades by morphing them into the latest styles. For those who are baffled about how Motel 6 got its name, here’s the story. The motel chain was founded in 1962 by two building contractors in Santa Barbara, California, who figured out how to offer bargain rates by calculating out the cost of land, construction and ongoing maintenance. By cutting out any frills, they decided they could offer rooms at $6 a night and still make a profit – hence, the name Motel 6. Of course, inflation and other factors have caused room rates to go up multifold over the past 50 years, but relative to other hotels, it is still considered affordable to penny-pinching families.

This commercial was made by Dallas ad agency, The Richards Group, which has been running Motel 6 ad campaigns since the 1980s. They were the ones who came up with Motel 6’s famous tagline “We’ll leave the light on for you.” The Richards Group teamed with the production firm King and Country (K&C), which made the 30-second spot from start to finish – production, direction, editorial, animation and VFX – completely inhouse. Rick Gledhill directed for K&C.

Folk Art

Old Tech, New Art

By Delphine Hirasuna |

For more than a century, the QWERTY typewriter was the most important business tool in any office. Millions were made and sold. Then in the 1980s, along came the desktop computer and within a decade, typewriters were destined for the trash heap. Where most people saw outmoded technology, illustrator/sculptor Jeremy Mayer in Oakland, California, looked beyond the typewriter’s original function and saw an intriguing array of metal shapes and forms that could be reassembled into full-scale anatomically correct human and animal figures.

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Humor

Henri, the Existential French Chat

By Delphine Hirasuna |

If the existentialist playwright Jean-Paul Sartre had a house cat, it would undoubtedly have Henri’s morose outlook on life. This video short is written and directed by Will Braden, with narration in French by Will Braden, who lives in Seattle, Washington, and doesn’t speak French as his first language. Braden’s video production business is mostly engaged in making videographs of wedding receptions and producing special video projects for local organizations. He keeps his creative senses and his sense of humor sharp by producing his own film shorts. This one is a sequel to Henri’s first appearance in a short that Braden made as a student film project in 2007.

Design Classic

Shape As Brand

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Most people don’t know this product by brand name, but they know exactly what you are talking about when you describe the pine tree-shaped air fresheners that dangle from rearview mirrors of taxicabs and long-haul trucks all over the world. The product is trademarked under the name “Little Trees” and manufactured in the U.S. by the Car-Freshner Corporation, but the shape is far more recognizable than the name. In fact, unlike the contoured bottles that people immediately associate with Coca-Cola and the Golden Arches that is synonymous with McDonald’s, these cut-out tree silhouettes don’t recall a name so much as a particular scent, location and purpose. That hasn’t hurt sales a bit; Little Trees trees have sold in the billions since they came on the market in the mid-1950s.

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