How to Merge Life with Fantasy and Wonder.

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida and the Kuroshio Sea in Okinawa, Japan.
Experiential marketing masterpieces, I dare say.
Fulfilling my childlike (?) desires:
"I want to go to Hogwarts"
"I want to see a whale shark"
And now I can do both. Or at least I could.

Wizarding World of Harry Potter - Opening in 2010, a two acre “theme park within a theme park” which will allow visitors to go inside Hogwarts castle and visit Hogsmeade and the Forbidden Forest. This is the most genius way that I could imagine the franchise continuing after the movies end because this is exactly the experience that every fan would want after 12 years of being devoted to the series.
How will it go from this...



...to this...







Kuroshio Sea at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium - The world's second largest aquarium which houses four whale sharks and a collection of manta rays among many other fish. And 430,835 views as of July 22 on YouTube of 4:33 of fish swimming back and forth in the aquarium, set to good music. Shot bu Canadian producer and cameraman Jon Rawlinson, who has also shot commercials, the video is breathtaking, especially when viewed full screen. It's not every day that I see a video of something I have never seen before, but always wanted to. It's the greatest ad the aquarium could ever have. The only problem is how do I get to Japan...



Visit this link immediately. Full screen only.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7deClndzQw

Sources:

http://momento24.com/en/2009/07/21/the-okinawa-aquarium/

http://www.brianorndorf.com/2009/07/wizarding-world-of-harry-potter-construction-update-7709.html

Slumdog kids

I know, I know. I'm so original, I love Slumdog Millionaire.
What can I say? It was an amazing movie.
But what I loved even more than the movie itself was the kid who played the youngest Jamal, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar.
In this clip, he's the smallest one in the front who is screaming. He is the cutest child ever.
Enjoy. I know I did.

The Cutest of the Cute

I swore I would never own another Samsung phone.

This video may have just changed my mind.


I love that the hedgehog is evil, because they really are evil.
But my hedgehog is way cuter than that one.

Smart Romance.

Just awesome.

And so romantic. Good writing. A story about one piece of candy...





JWT London.

For anyone who watches infomercials at 4am...

This is just one of those times when you realize that people will try to sell you ANYTHING.
Ever seen the Snuggie nonblanket commercials? If not, this is it.


Now, that's funny enough by itself. But here's a parody of it. I'm glad someone did this or I would have had to (this is an example of good writing, Onion style.)
[found this on adfreak.com btw]



*Available in blueberry, mint, and blood flavors.

Some things are good.

In case you somehow missed the only good Superbowl ad (confirmed by Creativity Top 5's number one pick of the week):




Alec Baldwin is pretty awesome. That's right, I finally admitted it.


And I don't really even know if this is necessarily a good example, but here you go. If you like eyebrows, you'll love this:





I am still on the search for the latest and greatest copy-driven ads. Yes, they are that difficult to find. That's really what I want this blog to be about. Great writing and great copywriting.

Stay tOOned.

Toddlers love it so.

Welcome to The Dumbest Ad of the Day


<a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=533e05d2-9f12-4a86-bdda-efd0455fcd36" target="_new" title="Kylie">Video: Kylie</a>


Wait, cute little Asian girls use PCs? That changes everything.
Touche, PC. I'll throw my mac in the trash right now.
How is this not insulting the intelligence of anyone who uses a PC, or even looks at a PC?
"You're as stupid as a 4 year old. Luckily, we have a program for you"



And then probably the most disturbing ad I have ever seen for a car I will never, ever get in (and I'm not even a cat person):

Hello.

So I have decided to make a conscious effort to write. Being that I started the first sentence with ‘so’ and this one with ‘being’, I can tell that it’s already going well.


This is me.


I want to be a writer, in any capacity.
But the problem is that no one wants a writer these days. It’s a dying [dead?] skill, one that is constantly being taken for granted.
Sure, everyone can write, one might argue. But everyone cannot write well. Perfectly normal people in every other capacity have trouble putting together a cohesive sentence. It seriously baffles my mind. And it's not only poor grammar, a complete disregard for punctuation, and hideous fragments, but also a complete lack of originality and structure. But it’s okay, we can just use pictures to express everything...






THE TRUTH IS, WORDS ARE DEAD.

I thought that being copywriting in advertising would be the ultimately cool career choice for me because I could essentially get to write whatever the hell I wanted, creatively and without boundaries. But also, I would get paid. So with these threads of knowledge, I set out to become a copywriter.

As it turns out, advertising writing has a very specific form and meter. There are certain ways in which you have to write, certain errors you have to inherently know how to avoid, and then there are the errors which you must commit. There are sentence fragments and run-ons, made up words (which I have no problem with) and most of all, a subjectivesubjectivesubjective view of each and every one of these components. Ads today focus on saying as little as possible with actual words. Why use words and make people go through the arduous task of reading when they can just look at a pretty picture?

Sure, I’m creative. Sure, I can think outside the box (blah blah blah). There is this other box, though, that I am trying to climb into but can’t quite fit. It’s not that I am too large, but I have a lot of rough edges that need to be smoothed out. Because it’s actually not a box at all, but an odd shape of which I don’t even know the name. It’s the advertising box. It’s where the speak, the lingo, the inside track resides.

Thinking outside the box (which is by the way the most trite and overused “creative” phrase out there, one that I have been hearing since I was in kindergarten) implies that you are the architect of your inventions, that they can soar to whatever heights you wish to take them. But sadly, as I have come to learn, that is terribly terribly untrue. You simply have to learn to think and express yourself in a certain way to succeed in the business of advertising. Or the business of whatever you might be doing.
Even Sylvia Plath was a rigid conformist to meter and verse in poetry, even if she invented her own; she stuck to it rigidly and is now revered as one of the genre’s technical masters.


As a side note, Blackberry Pearl Flip is the stupidest thing I have ever seen.


At first I was mad about the touch screen blackberry, but this is the worst.

And closing thoughts...

"Timing is everything. That's really cliche. Now. But if I would have said that a long time ago, it would have been really original."
-Demetri Martin.