This is cringe inducing. It’s the first salvo being fired back at Apple’s Get a Mac campaign with Justin Long and the superb John Hodgeman.

This is weak tea. Microsoft is going to need a lot more than esoteric comedy and a act who used to be great to shake off the branding corner that they’ve been painted into.

On the other hand, their Mojave Experiment TV Spots are brilliant; just don’t actually go to MojaveExperiment.com it’s an almost an unusable Silverlight GUI disaster, but that’s another blog post. They can’t beat Apple on funny, or slick production, so all they’ve got is their product. Fortunately for them, Vista has a bad name that no piece of software, no matter how terrible, could actually live up to. It’s a case where not living up to the hype is a good thing. They know this and played off it well, this is where they should concentrate. This Seinfeld stuff is just Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot with an insanely expensive bullet.

Google announced their web browser, Chrome, this morning. All the things that make Chrome better than the competition are based in tech which few people outside the field would understand. So they released a comic book to lay it all out. It was illustrated by Scott McCloud and is pure genius. The comic is here.This is a sample panel. I love the gluttonous plug-in, clearly worried about being busted.

It’s not yet available to us Mac users, but PC types can download it now.

Someone got canned over this for sure. Bloomberg news sent a preliminary obituary of Steve Jobs out over their news wire yesterday. It was quickly retracted, but raised more than a few eyebrows, considering the pancreatic cancer rumors that have been swirling around the Apple icon lately. Gawker has the full obit, if you care to parse.

[Source]

Voltage Creative is excited to announce the addition of our latest team member, Melissa Mackay!

Melissa comes to us from the great state of Texas – Dallas to be exact – where she previously graced the hallways of mundayMorning Creative Group. Melissa brings to the table expertise in print and branding design as well as her passion for stellar creative.

Here are some notable details on Melissa:

• Lees’ Summit, MO native
• Digs traveling abroad, Sunday brunch and classic blues.
• Does NOT dig traffic or forced karaoke.

Welcome aboard Melissa!



The mark Voltage created for dry ice supplier Allied Refrigeration will appear in the 2008 Design Annual from Print Magazine. Woohoo!

Here’s a little background: Allied Refrigeration, an established supplier of dry ice products wished to create a brand for their consumer product. While the brand was new, the product has been available to consumers for decades. The team at Allied wanted to convey the history of the product and catch consumers eyes.

Solution: Focusing on retro typefaces and classic illustrations styles, our team developed a mark that speaks to product use, the longevity of Allied Refrigeration and product quality.

Voltage Founder Ryan Lorei directed the project. Nice job, Ryan!

Reuters reports that Orange (a European wireless service provider) is padding a lukewarm Polish iPhone reception by paying actors to “line-up” outside 20 stores to “buy” the Apple iPhone. Ah, there’s nothing like alienating your core customers to possibly generate some new ones. Hey, I’ve got an idea, how about you make your current product/service so amazing that you core customers can’t help but recruit new ones for you?

UPDATE 8/28/08: Orange denies it. The outside hires aren’t to stand in line, “Their aim is to welcome people to the Orange shop, share in their excitement and give information about Orange tariffs,” a spokeswoman told Ad Age.

After staring sadly at the number of reality show competitions on TV these days and longing for a show that would truly touch my soul, I’m frightened glad to hear that designers (in this case digital artists) finally get a show of their own. I know, its hard to believe that MTV would produce a show thats not about music, but believe it or not, thats where you can find this program in September. The show is called Engine Room, probably because it sounds cool. Anyway, it looks to be interesting at the very least, so check out the Engine Room website and keep your eyes open. We’ll try too keep you posted on when this show premieres, so check back every single day like you already do.

I’m also intrigued by the unique partnership with HP as well. HP makes nice laptops, I’ve got one at home, but the majority of digital artists use Macs to do their work, so this is kind of like seeing Snoop Dog selling acoustic guitars. I can understand that HP is trying to sell their brand as design savvy and that’s cool, I just wish I could have seen the look on the designers’ faces (many of whom have probably never used a PC) when they were told they would be doing everything on an Hewlett Packard.

Oh, by the way, that sure is an awesome logo for Engine Room. I enjoy the use of the lightning bolts and the circle with the white ring. Boy, that sure looks familiar. (For those who don’t look at our awesome logo every day, heres an “Engine Roomified” Voltage Creative logo next to the one for Engine Room for you to check out.)

More YouTube drama-goodness today:

In August last summer, a fan of Electronic Arts‘ Tiger Woods PGA Tour ‘08 posted a video showing a glitch in the game that allows Tiger Woods to literally walk on water and perform a golf shot. He referred to it as the Jesus glitch.

Well, someone at EA saw it (after 100,000+ views) and responded with the following vid a few days ago:

These kinds of marketing opportunities wouldn’t exist without mainstream sites based on user generated content, like YouTube. It’s nice to see a company mastering the medium and using it to communicate directly with their fans on a level otherwise not possible. This is as opposed to, say, freaking out and unleashing the attack dog lawyers, because you don’t understand your product, your audience and their culture.

Nicely played, EA. (Tiger, too.)

Bear with me here, this gets a bit complicated…

For years, the #1 YouTube video had been Jud Laipply’s The Evolution of Dance. It’s funny, pretty timeless as far internet phenomena go, and has a universal appeal. It also had about 92 million views as of this writing.

Multi-platinum Canadian pop-tart Avril Lavigne has just dethroned The Evolution of Dance with the music video to her single, “Girlfriend.” This is not all that surprising. “Girlfriend” has a hook approaching ABBA levels of catchy, the video is humorous, and Avril is a Hot-Topic-esque punk-but-pretty girl in a short skirt prancing about suggestively. (For what it’s worth, she’s risen far enough that Hot-Topic is now aping her style, not the other way around.)

This is YouTube fodder, if I’ve ever seen it, but that’s self defeating because “Girlfriend” is exactly that: fodder. How did this middling-concoction get 97,000,000+ views in the last two months? Is it really that clever? Is there ground being broken? Is it, in and of itself, phenomena? No, no, and no.

The video for “Girlfriend” is catchy, sexy and funny. (Edgy, too: she drops the f-bomb, but they’ve edited it out.) However, it’s still the same hook-and-beat ear candy that Gwen, Britney, Madonna and The Cast from High School Musical have been churning out for years. Enjoyable, but without staying power. So, whither all the views? Well, as you’ve no doubt surmised, there’s a lot more to this than meets the eye…

On June 19th, the Avril Lavigne fansite Avril Bandaids launched a “Girlfriend” YouTube Viewer (It’s now been retired) with the intention of making “Girlfriend” the #1 YouTube video of all time. The url that hosted the viewer reloaded the video every 15 seconds. The theory was that Avril fans could load up that url, let it run, and Avril would get the top video spot in no time.

Well, Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, Wired.com, The Globe and Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, and many others picked up the story and started crying “foul.” How dare this hardcore group choose the number one YouTube video for us!? How dare they! And that’s where this story gets good.

There was no foul. YouTube caps it’s views per specific IP at 200 per day. (That may sound like a lot, but it’s not enough for a small legion of hardcore fans to make a dent in a number approacing 100,000,000.) There was no way they could game YouTube in the way they were purporting; and they knew it all along.

This is an excerpt from a letter addressed “Dear Media” that was posted on the Avril Bandaids forum. It’s titled The Two Steps I’ll Always Be Ahead Of You.

…But like a magician revealing the M.O. to a convincing trick, I have to admit that Bandaids’ YouTube Campaign was nothing but misdirection. Bandaiders didn’t cheat: the YouTube Viewer was a Hoax.

All along, I knew that YouTube capped the number of views added to a video at 200 per IP address per day. As such, the only way to make Girlfriend the most watched video on YouTube the fast way was to increase our reach, not our views per person. And the best way to do that was to use viral marketing to tap into traditional news sources. So our members went about inflating the count on the YouTube Viewer and spreading the link around the net.

In the mean time, the real end game of the campaign was unfolding nicely. As media outlets around the world began accusing Bandaids of cheating Avril’s way into the record books, they drove thousands upon thousands of curious folks to watch Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend video on YouTube (yes, even you Perez). This resulted in a much larger boost to Avril’s view count than Bandaids could ever have generated on its own.

Don’t believe me? When the Viewer launched on June 19th, Girlfriend had amassed 88.0 million views on its own merits. On June 24th when the viewer was retired, Girlfriend had 88.9 million views – an increase largely on pace with what Girlfriend had been steadily gaining in the past few months. At best, Bandaids’ YouTube Viewer added under 100,000 (legitimate, as per YouTube’s terms of service) views to Girlfriend’s total view count. The only thing we cheated was hundreds of reporters into doing our promo for us…

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Avril Lavigne Fansite Owner,

Sharifa xx

It was a genius gaming of the system. The foul-criers were perpetrators of that which they were condemning. Whether you like the song or the artist, you’ve got to admire the execution. Now that is viral marketing.

Oh, and this is not to mention the fact that now “Girlfriend” is being covered by bloggers like me, as well. Getting them a third dip out of the campaign from people who otherwise never would have seen the video. So, go over there and watch “Girlfriend.” You know you want to, and it’s not bad, it really isn’t. But then go watch The Evolution of Dance, as long as you’re there. You won’t be dissapointed. It was, after all, number one for a reason.

Some marketers dream of having a Coca-Cola budget and making Superbowl commercials, because they think it would allow them to do whatever they want. That sort of thinking couldn’t be further from the truth.

It can be a rude awakening when you realize the wider your audience is, the more interpretations (intended or not) of your message you have to account for. That’s why some of the happiest designers I know, just make gig posters in their living room.

Phelps in Midstroke (Speedo USA/Michael Muller)

Michael Phelps is the billion dollar man of the moment. He’s the one the kids currently want on their Wheaties. So, let’s say, hypothetically, you’ve got his agent on the line and he owes you the biggest favor in the world…

So,what do you use Micahel Phelps to sell? Anything is game. (He’s already hawking Visa Inc., Speedo, Omega, AT&T Wireless, PowerBar, Kellogg’s, Rosetta Stone, and PureSport.)

I’d put his face on a box of fishticks. Maybe a box of Phelpsticks.

It’s not… (Warning: cringe factor is high.)

Now, I’m a admitted Apple fanboy, and I’m all for artistic license. But when the thing you’re promoting is speed itself, you might want to show things in real time…

Shady advertising aside, they’re obviously doing something very right…

Steve Jobs would say, “BOOM.” Apple (AAPL) has eclipsed Google (GOOG) in market value. Apple’s current market cap: $159.37 billion. Google’s: $157.56 billion.

The irony here is runs thick… A VC firm, EDF Ventures of Ann Arbor Michigan, has no idea how the internet works. The guys are venture capitalists, right? So you’d think they would be entrenched in the web’s culture, rainmakers with money; fingers on the pulse of the internet. Eh, not quite…

These guys just forgot one of the most basic truisms of the internet: If you want something that is online to become well known and famous beyond your wildest dreams, just get a lawyer involved. This is known as The Streisand Effect and it’s been proven again and again.

Someone posted a nasty comment about EDF on The Funded. An anonymous community of entrepreneurs talking about good VC’s and bad VC’s.

“Worked with these people on several deals and they are to be avoided unless you are desperate. Beaus Laskey, the only honest straightforward person in the bunch, has left the firm.’”

Well EDF Ventures has issued a subpoena to The Funded demanding the name of the poster. Well, the joke’s on EDF. Now everyone knows about this guys comment. It’s on the front page of TechCrunch right now. That’s the TechCrunch covering the startup industry to the tune of 900,000+ subcribers.

Avoiding stuff like this should be brand management 101. Nicely played, EDF.