The Joy of Photoshop

Have I mentioned I work at a small agency? We don't have a Studio department. I can't sketch stuff and have it happen overnight the way I used to. So I wind up doing a lot of my own heavy Photoshop work. As part of the promotion of the annual ZooLights holiday light display at Utah's Hogle Zoo, I spent some time turning a marquee style logo into a more 3-dimensional rendering to help emphasize the transformation the zoo makes at night. We used this on a landing page and Flash banners that allowed viewers to switch the lights on and off themselves. 

Incidentally, I really like the way it looks when the lights are off.

I lit and 3D-ified this one.

I lit and 3D-ified this one.

This was the original.

This was the original.

Solutions for America

There aren't a lot of solutions in politics. But here's my idea to pay down the national debt—product placement.

Think about it.

The State of the Union address is carried by all the major networks and the cable news networks too. What might a company pay for that kind of exposure?

In 2014 the going rate for a :30 Super Bowl spot was about $4 million. A :60 was double that. Granted, the Super Bowl beat the State of the Union in total estimated viewership 111.5 million viewers to 33.3 million viewers—ouch. But that being said, the top rated prime time show in 2013 was NBC’s Sunday Night Football, which had an average nightly viewership of 21.5 million. They charged $545,000 per spot. By that logic, with 50% more viewers, The State of the Union could fetch 50% more in placement revenue per product. At least. Factor in total screen time and an implied presidential endorsement (which admittedly may depend heavily on the popularity of the sitting President) and I think you could justify something approaching Super Bowl costs. Imagine Obama pausing to wet his parched lips with a sip of Pepsi.

Cha-ching.

Of course we’re only talking tens of millions annually, when it’s all said and done, which is ultimately just a drop in the bucket with our national debt approaching 17 trillion. But what the heck, at the very least it’s money that could go toward reviving the Death Star initiative.

Obama to America: Snap into a Slim Jim.

Obama to America: Snap into a Slim Jim.

Cocoa Matrimony

Cocoa Metro is a dark belgian chocolate milk with little brand awareness. We wanted to help put them on the map by giving Facebook fans a chance to make their relationship with chocolate official. The idea was a fake post to timelines that mimics the look of Facebook relationship status changes. Unfortunately, after initial optimism, our programmers deemed it undoable. Crap.

Regrets

As an intern at Fallon, I was given the chance to develop a print campaign for the Citi Simplicity card. The key benefit was no late fees. The awesome part was that we were the only team on the project. Our executions dealt with the many reasons you might be paying late. Much to my regret, the strategy as well as the media shifted out from under us. Too bad. I still like what we came up with.

Hard to tell in the sketch, but this man's eye glasses are igniting his bill.

Hard to tell in the sketch, but this man's eye glasses are igniting his bill.

We had plenty of options.

We had plenty of options.