Send the bill to Gucci

This is a great story about a man who designed an ad (featuring himself) and sent it to a Swiss newspaper as a two-page full-color spread. A spread to be billed at $50,000 to Gucci. This is what advertising gets for being such a last-minute business. It makes it possible for things like this to take place.

Via AdFreak.

PDF magazines

This link on Coudal.com refreshed an idea I've been wanting to research for a while. That is the creation and distribution of .pdf magazines. How much of a market is there for these things? It really allows you to create anything you want and distribute it for a fraction of the cost of a traditional print publication. Do any of you regularly read anything in .pdf format?

Kia K2500

Some great ads from Kia for their new K2500. I really like looking for the new ways people are using traditional media spaces. This execution, using the bottom strip of the front page is creative and very interesting. People tend to either love or hate these executions because of their intrusion on the editorial space. I personally like them, but I spend more time in the advertising camp than the editorial one.

Via AdverBox.

The Wright news

Two of our photos from yesterday's snow appeared on the front page of today's Empire Tribune. Colton and Conner where really excited to see themselves in the news.

Finally, nobody else cares either

An interesting story on Ad Age about the fact that no one seems to care about video on their mobile phones. Over the past few years, this was seen as the "next big thing" for both media companies and advertisers. I've always looked at it and wondered what the big deal is. Video is slow to get over a phone and the quality is never great. The screen on my Treo 650 is gargantuan by most cell phone standards, but you still couldn't pay me to watch video on it.

There just doesn't seem to be a good fit for video on a cell phone. Do you offer full episodes of TV, or movies? Who wants to watch that on such a small screen. Ok. Then what do you offer? Maybe short videos that tie into larger media (movies, TV). It had better be truly great content to make me want to wrestle with most phone interfaces to get ahold of it.

The thing is they aren't offering anything truly innovative. They just look at the massive cell phone market and want to find a way to tap into it. Understandable, but desire to make money doesn't appear to be enough in this case.

The money quote of the article is this "The only thing holding up the explosion of the mobile phone content and advertising business continues to be the lack of interested viewers, panelists bemoaned at the second annual NATPE Mobile conference here."

AdPulp summed that quote up best with a quote of their own: "That's like saying "The only thing preventing me from getting laid every night continues to be the lack of interested chicks.""

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has never seen the appeal of mobile video.

EOF in the news

Erath on Fire was featured on the front page of last Friday's Stephenville Empire Tribune. They were shots from the recent fire north of Huckabay. It was a big one. You can see more photos at the EoF site.