Author: Delphine Hirasuna

Publishing

A Bibliophile’s Addiction by Kit Hinrichs

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Editor’s note: Anybody who has been around Kit Hinrichs for long knows that he can’t resist beautifully designed books, especially if they are on design and typography. So, we asked him to tell us his favorite books from 2010 and why he liked them. We made him cull his favorites down to 9. Here’s what he had to say.

Kit's Books

Here are my favorites. 1. George Lois, The Esquire Covers @MoMa. A look at some of the best magazine covers… EVER! 2. Mapping America: Exploring the Continent. A magical look at cartography from Lewis & Clark to the typographic textures of Paula Scher. 3. Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters. An historical look at curious typographic forms from the origin of alphabets to x-rated typefaces.
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Advertising

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

By Delphine Hirasuna |

To get the full impact of this BMW commercial, you have to watch it in a theater and close your eyes.

What BMW has done is utilize a phenomenon called the after-image effect. At the end of the commercial they use a powerful photo flash to literally imprint the BMW logo into the viewers’ eyes, so when viewers close their eyes they see “BMW” in afterglow. This would be subliminal advertising except that BMW told the audience in a German theater what they were about to experience.

That apparently wasn’t the case in a 1957 experiment conducted in a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey. There, a man named James Vicary claimed to have placed a tactistoscope (a device that flashes a series of images rapidly onto a screen) in the projection room. During a screening of “Picnic,” it flashed the messages “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat popcorn” on the screen every five seconds. The messages lasted 1/3000th of a second, too fast for viewers to register the messages consciously, but still trigger an overwhelming urge to go to the refreshment counter. He claimed that Coca-Cola sales increased by 18.1% and popcorn sales jumped by 57.8%. About five years later, Vicary admitted his “experiment” was a hoax, but the concept of subliminal advertising lived on.

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Humor

Online Video Ads Come of Age

By Delphine Hirasuna |

According to industry forecasters, online video ad spend is expected to top $1 billion in 2011 and keep on soaring upwards. Even in the depths of the recession in 2009 when overall online advertising fell, online video spend grew by 41%. For good reason. Some of the most creative and memorable ads today are video ads found on YouTube and Vimeo that get tweeted and fanned virally. They run the gamut from the infomercial-like Blendtec video with the company’s CEO Tom Dickson liquefying an iPhone to JC Penney’s hilarious classic “Beware of the Doghouse,” which won the 2009 World Retail Award for Best Digital Retail Advertising Campaign. With the ads typically running more than a minute to nearly five, there is time to create an engaging storyline and no fear of being forgotten when the real TV program returns. Consumers click on it by choice and stay because it holds their attention. They recall the brand, the message and they like it.

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Advertising

LaLan Intimate Apparel Dance

By Delphine Hirasuna |

This Japanese television commercial for Wacoal LaLan bras is a fascinating departure from the usual approach to selling intimate apparel in Western cultures. No sultry bedroom eyes, no come-hither looks, no languorous poses. Victoria’s Secret models they are not. The contrast is stark between the lingerie ads in the U.S. that imply that the right underwear will make you sexy and desirable, and this Japanese ad featuring young women doing a surreal and zany dance. What’s even more interesting is that Wacoal, a company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, employs the sexy underwear strategy in ads that it runs in many other countries.

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