A new shopping experience

Online shopping is not a new thing, by a long shot, but I found this site to be a refreshing change of pace. Bellona.com takes a much more visual direction in its navigation. Rather than just showing a bunch of photos of product, they place them inside the house, or on the lawn to seen in an environment. The navigation is just that as well with hot spots on windows to different rooms, etc. At the same time they also add little bits of whimsy as well, the guy in the lawn furniture who changes position, the truck that drives by in the background, the little dog that gets up and moves as you click on him, the blimp with the sales info, the reflecion of the water in the pool, the mailbox and even the need to fire up the weed wacker around the pool.

Overall, just a nice refreshing site and fun shopping experience: http://www.bellona.com.tr/source.cms.docs/bellona.com.tr.ce/bellona.html 

Favorite commercials - Multi-generational appeal?

I was walking the other day with my two daughters 9 and 11 (those are their ages, not their names, however, that could launch a whole new version of "Who's on first" but I digress...) and as we were walking we saw an owl that appeared to have a wounded wing. And while we walked I ask my girls if they knew a commercial that had an owl in it. Immediately, my 9 year-old pipes up that it was the tootsie pop commercial, which of course was the one I had been thinking of and remember so fondly from my days as a child sitting in front of the TV. At that time...(warning: here is one of those "when I was a kid we had to walk to school uphill both ways kind of story") we only had 4 channels and the amount of air time devoted to children's programming on the three major networks was about as rare as actually licking to the center of the tootsie pop, save Saturday morning.  So, commercials, those entertaining and bit sized little bunches of creativity sprinkled like chocolate chips in my cookie dough, were enough to keep me glued to the TV.

So, how is it, I ask that my 9 year-old and I have the same frame of reference. Thanks to cable TV and networks like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. They randomly play old TV commercials in their programming, and take me right back to when I was a kid. But, are the commercials still relevant to the audience of today? For this and many others, the answer is yes. Timeless appeal.

While creating the next ad, commercial, website, etc. Think about it. In 30+ years, will it still have that same emotional appeal to your audience as it does today? Even if the product has changed?

Here is the commercial that started this all, do you have a old-time favorite?

Early Bird...

Does the early bird get the worm...or work? If you haven't seen or heard of Aviary before, this is quite interesting. It is an online answer to Photoshop and the whole creative suite. Built on the Adobe AIR platform, in beta, it will be intersting to see where this leads.  And given that in the past..oh decade or so, Photoshop has had no real rival, this has potential for being interesting. Aviary is a a suite of online web applications for artists. I haven't had much time to play, but it certainly does look interesting. You can sign up for the current beta at http://a.viary.com. Or check out all of the other tools from Aviary.

Check out this page or the youtube video morphing Emma Watson int a biker dude.