ml haynes design

ANNOUNCEMENT: The LMA Your Honor Awards program — recognizing excellence in legal marketing by promoting projects and programs that provide innovation and return on marketing dollar investment — awards the first place Advertising – Campaign honor to “IP for a New Age.”

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I always loved that phrase, and have a postcard somewhere around here with a great shot of a neon cowboy grinning above the illuminated type/art. A PR Director from a past life turned me on to it and it has stuck in my head ever since. She said it as “a Texas thing” and I believe her. And when it’s time to bring it out, it’s time.

Which brings me to a bit of good news and braggin’ stuff. Just heard that some great work — well, we ad and marketing folks sure thought so — will compete for the highest honors in the Legal Marketing Association’s annual competition. Now you may not be familiar with the “Your Honor Awards,” but with more than 200 entries this year there’s a lot of buzz and excitement around the event. Winners will be announced in April and we’ll see then how this trade group responds to an approach that took a real turn from leather-bound books, bronze scales and every kind of play on poor blind lady justice.

Cheers to forward-leaning marketing and messaging and creative that brings it home. May the best campaign win!

In its first year, TED’s Ads Worth Spreading challenged the global advertising community to produce ads that inspired thought, consideration, action, reaction and, not least, sharing. 1,000 entries netted 10 winners, and an annual event and honor was created.

This year, ad submissions were organized into six categories: Talk, Social Good, Cultural Compass, Creative Wonder, Brand Bravery and Education. Other changes included the refinement of overall process and elimination of the open entry system. In the end 10 ads made the cut and were deemed to be “ads worth spreading.”

“The best ads are excellent content — driven by ideas. Culturally relevant content with strong storytelling has the power to spark change, raise awareness, and communicate new ways of thinking,” noted Ronda Carnegie, Head of Global Partnerships at TED.

“The ads selected have a common thread around human connection,” says Carnegie. “They create contagious emotion around wonder, imagination, culture, humor, and ingenuity. We think it is an exciting beginning of a larger conversation about brands as curators of content that creates a playful connection.”

The Winners

Justin Timberlake — singer, actor, spokesperson — is the new creative director for Bud Light Platinum. Sure Yeezy introduced you to the blue bottle, but JT is driving it home with a new single, sepia-toned Grammy performance and a little something Paul Chibe, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president of U.S. marketing, calls “relevance and credibility.”

“Justin Timberlake is one of the greatest creative minds in the entertainment industry, and his insights will help us further define Bud Light Platinum’s identity in the lifestyle space,” Chibe stated. “Since launching Bud Light Platinum last year, we’ve worked to align the brand closely with music, including leveraging tracks by Kanye West and Avicii in our first ads. Partnering with Justin as he makes his return to music brings a new level of relevance and credibility to the brand.”

“Bud Light Platinum brings a refined, discerning aesthetic to beer that plays well with what I’m doing,” said Mr. Timberlake in a statement. “I’m looking forward to not only being a part of the creative process, but in bringing other talented musicians to the forefront as well.”

The jury is still out on the Timberlake-MySpace collaboration, a partnership that was to tap JT’s creative superpowers. Sure the portal’s been redesigned and like so many other sites it’s sporting a Pinterest-like aesthetic. But the swell of superfans and music junkies has not appeared and it looks like the crooner’s rescue might have been a little too little, a little too late.

What of Timberlake’s brand? CD heal thyself, to twist a phrase. He’s been off the charts for more than five years. His film credits are middling to fair. His SNL performances — especially those Lonely Island jams — have been acclaimed but still number in the single digits. What’s the long-term value of these co-branding connections? Is this meaningful collaboration or just borrowed equity? And which brand in the end will truly benefit — will it be the beer or the boy band leader?

I’ve long been an advocate of mobile as the perfect platform for point-of-sale interactions. Perhaps just as long I’ve downplayed the QR code as just another fad that would disappear, fading quickly when the “next big thing” blew up. Then I saw this and had to re-think the whole bloody thing.

The winners of the second annual Interaction Awards were announced on December 6, 2012 and will be honored at the Interaction Awards Ceremony, held during IxDA’s annual conference, on January 29, 2013.

A list of 75 short-listed entrants from 17 countries was reviewed and a group of 25 standouts — recognized for their excellence in interaction design — were chosen as the 2013 winners. Top winners will be announced at the event and in the class of: Best in Category, Best Concept, Best Student, Best in Show and People’s Choice Award.

The 2013 Interaction Awards winners are:

Optimizing
Making daily activities more efficient

• 10,000ft, Artefact
• FreshBooks for iPhone, FreshBooks
• MyFord Mobile for Ford Motor Company, IDEO
• Nike+ FuelBand, R/GA
• Practice Fusion iPad application, Cooper
• Rehearsal: an App for Practicing Musicians, Kirsten Southwell/North Carolina State University

Engaging
Capturing attention, creating delight and delivering meaning

• 21 Balançoires, Daily tous les jours
• Chrome Web Lab, Google Creative Lab
• Fiiiit, Ke Zhao/Beijing Sport University
• Gundulas Stories – an interactive learning environment, Fabian Gampp/HTWG Konstanz

Empowering
Enabling people to go beyond their limits

• 100 BPM, Maxime Dubreucq + Doris Feurstein + Shivanjali Tomar + Natalie Vanns / Umeå Institute of Design
• Nike SPARQ, R/GA
• Nike+ FuelBand, R/GA
• Sonivivi, Daim Yoon/Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
• Teemo, Ammunition
• ZocDoc, ZocDoc

Expressing
Encouraging self-expression and/or creativity

• Iuvo, Matteo Loglio/SUPSI
• Lego Life Of George, Lego System
• Paper by FiftyThree, FiftyThree

Connecting
Facilitating communication between people and communities

• Honolulu Answers, Code for America
• JK5, Ilari Laitinen + Enni Koistinen / Lahti Institute of Design
• Obama for America Mobile Campaign, thirteen23

Disrupting
Re-imagining, completely, an existing product or service by creating new behaviors, usages or markets

• Hormone check, Apt
• Nike+ FuelBand, R/GA
• Nova, LUNAR

Having spent the last two months in an extraordinary place, this clip and project featured struck a very deep chord in me. I typically use this space to share what I’m thinking — and this is no exception. I hope this strikes you and sparks your thoughts as well. Peace.

We’re finally getting a glimpse at the latest, pop-infused incarnation of MySpace. And if you’ve ever wondered what might happen if Pinterest hooked up with Instagram, well, you might want to see the love child yourself.

It’s been almost year and a half: long enough to forget that a handful of dreamers and $35 million were going to resurrect the social media has-been. Long enough to witness Facebook’s fall from grace. And long enough to watch the visual, particularly the photographic, take over the language of social and sharing.

Will a heavy dependence on imagery, a swipe at horizontal scrolling, and a renewed focus on artists and the fans that follow them be enough to breathe new life into an all-but-forgotten portal? Will the differences, functional and aesthetic, coupled with the cache of Timberlake’s attentions woo users away from their social spaces of choice? Many people have already left Facebook for Pinterest and Instagram, tired of the sameness of the experience and the indifference of the Powers That Be. Will this be something altogether different?

I snarked at the logo redesign. I rolled my eyes at the name dropping. I don’t expect much now. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Like they say in this business, “Underpromise and Over-deliver.” Let’s see what you got, Mr. Timberlake.

“Today 90% of our media consumption occurs in front of a screen. As consumers balance their time between smartphones, tablets, PCs and Televisions, they are learning to use these devices together to achieve their goals.” This is according to Sterling Brands, a New York–based branding consultancy and co-producer of the recent survey titled, “Our Multiscreen World: Smartphone Users’ Media Consumption Patterns.”

Sterling Brands partnered with Ipsos MediaCT to conduct and analyze a study of approximately 1,600 participants — adults located on both U.S. coasts, owners of smartphones (100%), and tablets (43%). Using mobile diaries to track their mobile interactions, each participant recorded usage throughout a 24-hour period, tracking nearly 8,000 hours of media engagement all within 2Q2012.

The infographic below represents their findings.

If you’ve ever freelanced, done project work, or just picked up a casual job to make a little pocket change, you’ve come up against the question: What do I charge for this? Or maybe you’ve been quizzed by a prospective client curious about what you’d charge to deliver on their wish-list. Well, technology has, once again, come to the rescue and, not surprisingly, the App Store has what you need.

MD Interaktiv, a Mexico-based iOS & Web Development Agency, has launched MyPrice — an iOS app that helps designers calculate fees based on input such as project type, client, and location, plus the designer’s experience and history. This cloud-based tool is accessible from any web-connected locale and on any device with the app installed. Templates and past project figures can be stored and retrieved, making the process of pricing a more iterative one.

Specific features (from the creators’ website) of the app are listed as:

Ideal Hourly Rate
Keep a log of your working and personal expenses so when you find the price you may charge per hour, all those expenses get covered.

+75 Specific Projects
From how much you will charge your uncle for creating his Twitter account to the responsive redesign of a medium enterprise’s new web site.

CloudSync
You will be able to create quotes from your iPhone and check them or modify them on your iPad.

Tips
Every week you may consult up to three little tips that will help you achieve your professional goals.

FreshBooks
Transfer your estimates from MyPrice to your FreshBooks account as a new estimate for a specific client.