Perfect hipster business valentine story:

The story of the Uglydolls, as David Horvath tells it, goes like this. A couple of years ago, he was living in Los Angeles, and his girlfriend, Sun-Min Kim, had moved back to Korea to be with her family. Horvath, an illustrator, wrote her long, pining letters, and at the end he would draw one of a number of cartoon characters he had made up – a blocky, orange guy named Wage, with startled round eyes and an apron. At Christmas, Kim surprised him by sending back a plush-toy version of Wage, about a foot high, that she had sewn herself. Horvath was so excited that he showed it off to Eric Nakamura, the owner of a store in Los Angeles called Giant Robot, which sold art books and magazines as well as toys and T-shirts made by artists. ”He thought I was pitching him a product,” Horvath recalls. ”He said, ‘Yeah, man, that’s great, I’ll take 20.”

The Dolls then got more and more successful, mostly among urban people in their 20s and 30s. It even appeared in the Whitney Museum.

They are now trying to sell them to actual children:

It’s clear that he and Kim see their invention connecting with children. Each character comes with a tag explaining the character’s back story and how they all ”know” one another and what each one is like. … To Tracy Edwards, the Barneys vice president who oversees the chain’s home and kids businesses, the Uglydoll characterizations are important: ”The stories, in the end, sell the dolls.”

But there is a story that might sell them to adults, like this writer:

Meanwhile, the Uglydolls have given Kim and Horvath more reasons to visit each other, and now they plan to marry. This in itself is the kind of ending you’d expect from a children’s story – of the sort that grown-ups can’t resist.

I am such a sucker.

Something interesting came up in class tonight. We were discussing the citibank campaign with the slogans telling you how money isn’t the most important thing and that they seem to be a kinder gentler bank.

Please note that I am not talking about their recent identity theft campaign, which is brilliant. Particularly the TV, although the print isn’t bad either. I am talking about the stark simple print and outdoor campaign.

My current ad teacher hates it. My previous ad teacher loved it.

There are admittedly some brilliant lines in the campaign, although they seem to be getting worse lately.

The idea is also a good one: position the bank as friendlier and less huge and corporate. It is the bank for people who aren’t obsessed with their money and just want their bank to work. It says that they understand that their customers have other priorities.

That idea is also the problem. Why exactly should we believe Citibank? The enormous corporation, parent to, among others, Solomon Smith Barney (via here). My current ad teacher has an account with Citibank and doesn’t find them particularly friendly.

I know. Citibank was there first. They made the claim so now people associate them with it. This actually works for the previously mentioned ID theft campaign. Other banks offer similar services, but Citibank was the first out with the ads highlighting it. Other companies will now seem like followers. But does it work with the other campaign. Citibank has, to put it mildly, a credibility problem.

It would be one thing if they genuinely tried to make the bank friendlier. In class a story was told about a store (Harrods I believe) which put out an ad campaign promising friendlier service. But they then backed it up buy holding their employees more accountable for being friendly. Citibank doesn’t seem to have made any changes to its large corporate business.

A couple of good lines make for some interesting ads, but the idea isn’t effective. I am not the only one who thinks so.

It is quite interesting how differently ad professionals can think.

Maybe more on this later. I have had no sleep recently and am running on fumes.

I have made quite a few additions to my main retouching site.

First of all: I added a new image, the lemonade shot(also seen here) to the layered image section.

It has six layers. Displaying every layer permutation would have taken 64(!) images, so you can only toggle each layer on or off. But you should still see how the image is put together. The original contained quite a few more layers of course.

An image of Katie Brown, just taken and retouched. Added to the People category.

The image that Colin, Phyllis and Delores (no link) used for their christmas card. They were styrofoam balls and I had to make them look wetter and more like snow cones.

An agency needed an image of a vanilla flower for an ad. We couldn’t find one in NYC in the middle of the winter. So I had to make one from other flowers based on nothing more than images found via google.

Speaking of J. Brown, here is another ad I retouched for them and Danon. Obviously copy has yet to be added.

Two images done for ads for FCB and partner for a Drug Free America. In prepping the image I am amazed how different the mug looks.

Another image for another ad. This one for Intercontinental hotels via the Zimmerman agency.

Which explains why this post is in the advertising category. I am advertising myself and most of my clients are ad agencies.

Jefferson Market on sixth ave. has great cheese guy. No big deal but it put me in a good mood tonight.

Cool Visual. Only OK ad. I would love to come up with a better ad to use such a striking image. Luckily I am still an ad student and can do stuff like getting an image and finding a client and strategy for it. Not that I have thought of anything.

Fantastic article in the Nation on neoconservatism. Via Gene Healy.

It explains who the neocons are, who they aren’t (they aren’t all or even mostly jewish), where they came from (leftist ideas) and what kind of influence they have had (quite a bit). Most importantly it explains why they are wrong:

The record is clear–most of the democratic transitions that have taken place in the world in the past two centuries have had nothing to do with foreign military intervention or military pressure, while most US military interventions abroad have left dictatorship, not democracy, in their wake. The two cases that neocons constantly return to, Germany and Japan, are among the few cases where democracy has been restored (not created ex nihilo) as the result of a US invasion. The Soviet bloc democratized itself from within in the 1990s, even though the United States did not bomb Moscow, impose a martial-law governor on the Poles or imprison former Hungarian Communist officials without charges in barbed-wire camps. In Latin America, Mexico became a multiparty democracy instead of a one-party dictatorship without US Marines posing for photos in the presidential mansion in Mexico City, and it was not necessary for American soldiers to kill tens of thousands of Argentines, Chileans and Brazilians for democracy to take root in those countries.

It also has a great conclusion:

Unfortunately for them, a political ideology can fail in the real world only so many times before being completely discredited. For at least two decades, in foreign policy the neocons have been wrong about everything. When the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the hawks of Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger declared that it was on the verge of world domination. In the 1990s they exaggerated the power and threat of China, once again putting ideology ahead of the sober analysis of career military and intelligence experts. The neocons were so obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat that they missed the growing threat of Al Qaeda. After 9/11 they pushed the irrelevant panaceas of preventive war and missile defense as solutions to the problems of hijackers and suicide bombers.

They said Saddam had WMDs. He didn’t. They said he was in league with Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t. They predicted that no major postwar insurgency in Iraq would occur. It did. They said there would be a wave of pro-Americanism in the Middle East and the world if the United States acted boldly and unilaterally. Instead, there was a regional and global wave of anti-Americanism.

Update: I almost felt guilty about simply quoting a good article at length with minimal commentary, but if Atrios can do it so can I.

I also changed the urls posted in comments to prevent spammers from increasing their google ranking. Now all urls posted of the form <a href=”http://www.wherever.com”> will be changed to <a href=”http://blog.scharlack.com/go.cgi?link=www.wherever.com”>, using the perl script I described previously.

The change is simple enough for anyone who knows perl. This regular expression will do it:


s/http:\/\//http:\/\/blog.scharlack.com\/go.cgi?link=/g


Not too bad for a regex, but still weird looking. It simply substitutes all instances of “http://” with “http://blog.scharlack.com/go.cgi?link=”. It does it globally hence the /g. The backslashes are placed before any slashes to “escape” them since / means something to a perl regex.

Now to put regex ability into movable type. For that I got Brad Choate’s plugin mt-regex.

There are manyways to use mt-regex, but I just needed to do a simple substitution in the comment body. To do that i just changed the MTCommentBody tag to:

<$MTCommentBody regex="s/http:\/\//http:\/\/blog.scharlack.com\/go.cgi?link=/g" $>

Due to the Comment Spam I had been getting I decided to edit my comment templates again.

It seems comment spammerrs aren’t spamming me to get my attention, but to increase their google ranking with a link. So I am changing all commenter’s urls to redirection links using a little perl script I wrote located at go.cgi:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI ':standard';
$link = param('link');
if ( !$link ) {
        $referer = referer();
        if (!$referer) { $referer = "javascript:history.go(-1)"; }
        print "Content-Type:text/html\n\n";
        print "No URL given for this user<br>";
        print qq|<a href="$referer"*gt;<-- Go Back|;
}
else {

        if ( $link =~ m/http/ || $link =~ m/mailto/ ) {}
        else { $link = "http://" . $link; }

        print "Location:$link\n\n";
}

The script is called as go.cgi?link=www.wherever.com. The very last line redirects someone $link, in this case www.wherever.com. The other stuff includes checking if there is an http:// in the name and adding one if there isn’t. It also checks for a mailto and it uses that if it is present. It also will print up a page saying there is no link if none is specified.

I modified the comment parts of my individual archive template to:

<span class="comments-post">
 Posted by: <$MTCommentAuthorLink spam_protect="1" show_url="0" $>
 from <a href="http://blog.scharlack.com/go.cgi?link=<$MTCommentURL$>">here</a>
 at <$MTCommentDate$> | 
 <a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>#<$MTCommentID pad="1"$>">link</a>
</span>

This creates two links, one for the e-mail and the other for the url. I couldn’t find a better way to do it since the <$MTCommentAuthorLink$> tag creates a whole link with both tags and a name.

This also resolves another issue of mine: it stops the url links in my comments from opening another window. Just a little thing I never liked.

First the good news:

When the 562 likely voters were asked for their choice from a Bush v. Kerry race, 53 percent of those picked Kerry, and 46 percent favored Bush.

That difference is greater than the MOE (4%). Edwards beat Bush too, but was within the MOE. Clark was close. Via Tom Tommorow.

Now I know it’s only one poll and I should definitely take it with a grain of salt but it is part of a clear trend.

Like most Democrats and liberals, I am strictly ABB. I will vote anyone over Bush, and my chief criteria for the nominees is that they can beat Bush easily. I think any of them can beat Bush, but it is good to finally see some positive numbers. Particularly for the frontrunner.

I just got done with the second session of my new ad class after a little adventure.

So I went to the open house, met a professor I like and signed up for his class. I then show up last week for that class. No one was in the classroom. I stick around for a bit. Still no one. So I call the registration office.

The class was cancelled.

No one bothered to tell me, although they were supposed to. And my second choice was already full. So I walked over to the registration office in the snow (uphill both ways), and sign up for another class. Then I walked back, 4 doors down from where the other class was supposed to be, into my current class an hour late. But it was the first class so it didn’t really matter. I got my first assignment: an ad for clothing that has SPF 30 sun protection (those links are to the actual product we were advertising).

So now I just had the second session of class. It certainly wasn’t as good as my previous class. There are two teachers, one of whom I think is a lot more interesting than the other.

The other different thing is that this is my second ad class, so I know more than the rest of the class, most of whom are in their first class. This isn’t to disparage them; my first ads sucked too. But it worries me a bit; I hope that I am as challenged to make great, not just good, ads. This isn’t too unusual though. While there are a few more advanced classes, most people take several regular classes first to build their book. I don’t quite feel ready for the more advanced classes yet, but I still want to be challenged.

All I can say is that we’ll see.

I waited to talk about the Superbowl ads until I found a good, free view them. (Here is a good, but not free source).

My opinion:

They sucked

Maybe it is just my hyper-critical ad student mind but I thought they were much worse than in previous years. Come on, this is supposed to be the time most people actually want to watch advertising.

Lets start out on a positive note though. I liked the previously mentioned. I also found the Budweiser ad amusing, fairly creative and well targeted. I should mention that neither are great ads, such as I would want in my book.

I also didn’t hate the FedEx alien ad, or the Pepsi Bear ad. I also thought the Shards ’O Glass anti-smoking ad was one of the better “Truth” ads, which are normally incredibly annoying. This one made its point clearly in a fun way without driving me nuts.

Now on to the crap. Like the talking monkeys. I know bad adolescent humor is key to this category, but this is bad and obvious adolescent humor. Also, how many monkeys have we seen in Superbowls? Worst of all, you don’t end an ad with a talking monkey with the word “real”.

The adolescent humor wasn’t funny the AOL? Your new “high speed” service works only on the internet as you say, so why does it make the various bikes and cars go faster? It might have been funnier and made more sense if the vehicles fizzled comically. Maybe its since I am a techie and I wonder these things, but what exactly makes the new 9.0 faster. Its still dialup, limited to 56K.

And Pepsi? Just making shit up about a great man’s development doesn’t convince anyone. Talk about borrowed interest. More like stolen. Pried out of the hands of a dead man no less.

However the game was fairly exciting. It was the first football game I had seen since last time the Patriots one. It ended the same way, with the same guy kicking a field goal at the last minute to win the game.

Oh and Survivor afterward kicked ass.