Category: Humor

Pop Culture

Tonight Show’s Star Wars Jam Session

By Delphine Hirasuna |


This 90-second plug for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show is as ingenious as it is entertaining. Featuring Fallon, house-band The Roots, and the Star Wars cast, the video shows the performers singing as an a cappella choir. Arranged in a grid a la Hollywood Squares or the Brady Bunch, each performer is shot against a plain background while giving their own solo rendition of the film’s most familiar tunes. By shooting at different times and places to accommodate the performers’ schedules, the producers were able to make Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Lupita Nyong’o, Gwendoline Christie, BB8, storm troopers, 3CPO, and R2D2, part of the all-star chorus. The juxtaposition of colored squares and overlapping of a capella voices turned the video into a spontaneous jam session, with performers playing off each other even though they were in different parts of the galaxy.

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What To Do About Pets That Shed

By Delphine Hirasuna |

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Don’t worry, no pets were harmed in the making of this ad for 3M Lint Rollers. Created by Grey Group Singapore, this print poster campaign for 3M India provides a wildly exaggerated demonstration of how effectively the product picks up pet fur and other types of lint. The Grey Group team included chief creative officer, Ali Shabaz, with art direction by Ang Sheng Jin, photography by Jeremy Wong (Nemesis Pictures), and major retouching by Evan Lim (Magic 3).
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Viral Marketing

Funny Ad, Plus Sales Pitch

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Insurance companies are their own liability when it comes to describing the services they provide in advertising. Boring. This explains why the insurance giants resort to surreal humor, wild exaggerations, and CGI characters to keep viewers from immediately switching channels. Particularly memorable are Geico ads, which feature anthropomorphic animals such as its gecko mascot, created by Richmond, Virginia-based The Martin Agency. Geico ads have featured other animals too, including a talking duck, pig, squirrel, goat, kraken, and chihuahua. Lately, a smart-ass camel has a starring role. What’s interesting is that the 30-second commercials give viewers no clue what product or brand they are promoting until the last five second closing voiceover. “It you want to save 15% or more on car insurance, get Geico. It’s what we do.” It must work because viewers remember Geico’s tagline.
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Pop Culture

Kumamon, a Grand Prix-Winning Mascot

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Kumamon_Single

In the U.S., most sports teams and many consumer products adopt mascots to give their brand a friendly, animate identity, but as far as we are aware, only Japan has mascots to represent prefectures, towns and public offices. Called Yuru-chara, which translates as “loose character,” the mascots generate millions of dollars in merchandise sales (keychains, mugs, t-shirts and plates, etc.) and the costumed characters make special appearances at promotional events and festivals. Without exception, the yuru-chara are cute (a la Hello Kitty), unsophisticated in design, and exhibit childlike manners. Yuru-chara proliferate throughout Japan, so much so that some prefectural governments worry that the number of little towns that have come up with their own yuru-chara are diluting the impact of the big city mascots and cutting into merchandise sales.

The best-known mascot in Japan is Kumamon (seen here) introduced by Kumamoto Prefecture in 2010 to draw tourists to the region’s Kyushu Shinkasen train line. Kumamon instantly shot to fame, and won the 2011 Yuru-chara Grand Prix, drawing more than 280,000 votes in a nationwide survey and crushing other yuru-chara competitors. The next year Kumamon single-handedly earned the prefecture more than $120 million in product sales and was even featured in a popular video game. As with most other yuru-chara, Kumamon doesn’t speak,has only one facial expression, and is of unknown gender and species. It merely dances around and makes spectators happy.
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Humor

Designer’s Guide to Fair Pricing

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Fibonacci_Pricelist
Creative Bloq recently ran a wonderful piece on how designers wish they could really set their fees. (This method of calculating billing rates could easily apply to anyone in creative consulting services.) Creative Bloq claims the price calculation is based on a proportional sequence postulated by 13th century Italian mathematician Fibonacci, who took the idea from ancient Indian Sanskrit mathematics. Fibonacci’s Sequence became the basis for the Golden Ratio, a way of describing the ratio between two proportions. You don’t really need to know this; we digress in an attempt to appear more learned than we are and to extend the length of this introduction to make the design look more proportional (ratio of image to text). The Designer’s Golden Rule chart, shown above, proposes setting fees based on the ratio of actual creative work you are allowed to do versus the amount of unproductive client interference. This calculation can also be called the Nuisance Factor, the more meddlesome the client, the higher the fee. Note: We took this chart from Creative Bloq, but redid the graphics because we wanted to show a proportional value-add.