The Real Cost of Drinking and Driving

Ogilvy Brazil has a great new PSA guerilla campaign reminding bar goers of the real cost of drinking and driving by adding those costs to their bar tab. They actually did this in a bar in Brazil. Check out the video below:



(via Direct Daily)

Applebee's Jumps On Calorie Bandwagon

In light of the new national law requiring restaurant chains with 20 or more locations to post the calorie content of their food, Applebee's has an interesting new marketing angle for their menu—the under 550 Calorie menu. While this not a new law for California and New York, or even a new direction for Applebee's, I like what they're doing and they're the first ones I've seen advertising a calorie specific menu.

Applebee's had (and maybe still has) a Weight Watcher's menu that also provided healthier choices, but if you weren't in Weight Watcher's it meant little. You basically assumed you were getting something healthier that what was on the rest of the menu. A calorie specific menu, however, is something everyone can relate to whether you're dieting or not. The menu items look pretty good too, even if the commercials don't.





I'm sure more marketing campaigns like this one will start appearing as we get closer to when the law goes into affect, but Applebee's is a full year ahead of the game. Unfortunately, as much as I like the marketing idea for a calorie specific menu, the actual campaign and creative leaves much to be desired. I expect chain restaurant commercials to have that all-too-familar uber-friendly, cheesy vibe the concepts behind these two commercials were just lame.

Regardless of the mediocre creative, I think Applebee's is on to something.

Nestle Crunch gets creative with fun hotline promo

Nestle has done something quite refreshing: It's made the always-dreaded automated caller system highly enjoyable.

To promote its Crunch candy bar, Nestle's developed some fun options on its 1-800 hotline menu. But they're not explicitly sharing the secret of calling this phone number as in the recent US Cellular commercials--it's only been passed virally through Facebook. I hadn't heard of the fun until a Facebook friend of mine posted this yesterday:

"TAKE A MINUTE AND DO THIS! Call the Nestle Hot line at 1-800 295-0051. When asked if you want to continue in English or Spanish, wait quietly for about 10
seconds and you will smile. Keep going and press 4. Then press 7. Don't give
away the surprise. Whoever thought of this at Nestle... deserves a raise and a
pocket full of sunshine!! Totally worth it!!!!! Enjoy"

It also seems that it's not new. This article about it was written back in November.

I'd recommend calling, perhaps a few times. Follow the instructions above, or take your own adventure. Just don't be surprised if you get a busy signal--seems it's pretty popular lately. You can also shortcut and hear the fun here: forthekidinyou.com.

Shamrock Shake In the Chicago River

This post from Direct Daily on Leo Burnett's Sharock Shake installation for McDonald's spilling into the Chicago River. Mostly I'm reposting it since I love Shamrock Shakes and the photo made me smile, but it's also a clever little installation to play off of Chicago's annual dying the river green for St. Patrick's Day.

Typography Tip #4: Learn About Leading

Leading is a key component to good typography. Whether you know what it is or not, you use it every time you set type. If you live in the world of Microsoft Word, you know it as single spacing vs double spacing. In the land of typography beyond that of Microsoft Word, there are significantly more options.

The word leading comes from the old school typesetting days when type characters were individually set by hand and those lines of characters were separated by slabs of lead of varying thicknesses. Like font size, leading is measured in points.

In Typography Tip #3, I discussed using smaller type to achieve a better typographic look. Well that concept goes hand in hand with properly using leading. A smaller point size doesn't help you much if you don't give it room to breathe. In my first post, introducing this series, I discussed how poorly set type can actually tire your eyes and poor leading is often the culprit.

A lot of understanding leading is really training your eyes to see when type feels too close together or too airy. As mentioned in a comment on Typography Tip #3, 10 point type with 14 point leading is a great place to start when setting body copy. Another thing to keep in mind is that san serif fonts (like Helvetica) typically need more leading than serif fonts (like Times New Roman). Check out the examples below to see how much leading can affect good typography.

So start playing around with different leading and point sizes and see what happens!

Blatant Logo Rip Off

I read this article Yahoo! this morning and simply thought, "Wow, who could be so stupid?" Essentially, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Oregon, Marc Delphine, was using a logo donated by apparently some designer associated with whoever designed his website. Well, that's nice and all except that it's a blatant rip off of the Columbus Blue Jackets NHL team. Oops.

(The logo on the right is the Columbus Blue Jackets logo and the one on the left is the Marc Delphine logo.)

Essentially the designer just took the logo and flipped it. Really? Did the designer really think that was going to pass trademark infringement? Even a non-designer should know better! It's pretty common knowledge that you can't just take a trademarked logo and adopt it for your own purposes. The designer even went to the extent to tell the senate candidate that the logo's shape evoked the D from his last name. Right... Or you just stole what was a C for Columbus and flipped it.

Shame on you unnamed designer. And shame on you Marc Delphine. While I can't totally blame him since he simply used a logo someone donated and thought it was such a nice gesture, he really should have done a trademark search before using it.

Apparently, the Blue Jackets were alerted to the infringement via Twitter. Oh the small world social media creates.

Typography Tip #3: Use A Smaller Point Size

Back when you were typing papers in high school you were told to write in double spaced 12 pt. Times New Roman type. Yuck. Okay, the double spacing make some sense in school since it gives the teacher ample space to write notes, but you never see it in the real world. Luckily, most people leave double spacing when they leave school, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for point size when setting type.

12 point type is not the average type size you see day to day. To be honest, it varies a bit since each font. For example, san serif fonts, like Arial, tend to be larger than serif fonts, like Times New Roman. 10 point type is a good rule of thumb for body copy size for most fonts. Of course this varies a bit based on what, and where, you're writing. It's a little hard to tell in the sample above since this is the web and typography for the web is a whole different ballgame, but it gives you and idea. You can also make the font larger for design and aesthetic reasons, but if you're just writing something standard in Word, try defaulting to 10 point rather than 12 point. It makes a big difference.

Eat A Chiquita

Chiquita bananas are playing up their branded and recognizable blue and yellow stickers in a fun new campaign. instead of just blue Chiquita stickers, the new campaign has a whole slew of fun little blue and yellow faces.

One their Eat a Chiquita website, you can design your own sitcker face, watch videos and play games—oh and learn about bananas. It's a fun little site and a great campaign, all based off of those blue and yellow banana stickers that hold so much brand equity all by themselves. Brilliant.

(via Be Inspired Daily)

SuperBowl Ad Controversy

There's a big controversy brewing over a SuperBowl ad to be aired this Sunday, and no, it's not the latest censored ad from GoDaddy. This ad is controversial not just because of it's controversial subject matter, but because it's breaking a long standing SuperBowl rule.

I never knew this before, but apparently CBS had long standing rule that advocacy ads were not accepted as advertising during the SuperBowl. The reason being that the SuperBowl is a fun, family friendly event and let's not spoil it by bringing up sensitive, heated issues. Honestly, I think that's a great stance. I don't want to be watching political or controversial stuff in the middle of SuperBowl party, do you? This year however, CBS approved an advocacy ad on one of America's most controversial issues: abortion.

A pro-life ad featuring football star Tim Tebow was approved by CBS to air during the SuperBowl. Not surprisingly, this made a media splash, with advocacy groups on the other side calling foul. The ad—paid for by Focus On The Family, a conservative Christian group—features Heisman trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother. The speculation is that the ad tells the story of his mother's decision to have him despite doctors' encouragement to have an abortion due to health reasons. (Though the truth to that story is now getting questioned as well.) I have not seen the ad and as far as I know there isn't a leaked version anywhere on the web.

Focus On The Family says that the ad itself is not controversial. The theme is 'Celebrate Family. Celebrate Life.' Of course it's a bit hard to judge before seeing the ad, but either way, the press surrounding this controversy and it's sponsorship by a pro-life organization has made it controversial regardless. It boils down to CBS looking biased about abortion if they air the ad without offering the other side an option to air their opinion as well.

My original hunch (and hope) was CBS saw the ad and didn't think it was advocating pro-life so they approved it. But apparently, after push back from women's rights groups, CBS declared they're now accepting controversial ads—well except from the gay dating site that tried to buy a spot this year. To me, that kind backpedaling seems like a sorry attempt to keep the spot, and thus the $3 million dollar price tag, in the programming without having to accept any opposing opinions. When they rejected other controversial ads—particularly ones that would appeal to their liberal audience, like the gay dating site—CBS comes across as a conservative biased station.

Were they desperate for advertisers to pay the hefty price tag in this recession? Otherwise I can't imagine why they wouldn't dump that ad and fill it with something else. Is it really worth all the bad PR they're getting?

So to CBS, I'd prefer you didn't air the commercial during the SuperBowl, but if you are, at least air everyone else's advocacy ads too.That's my stance anyway. What do you think?

Typography Tip #2: Properly Using Dashes

There are three types of dashes used in type. Yep, three. Most people, unless you are a writer or work in a publishing industry, are unaware of anything beyond the standard hyphen and unfortunately I frequently see hyphens placed where they shouldn't be. It's a big enough problem that our agency proofreader has a Word document he sends to people when he gets enough of their writing that doesn't use dashes properly. Since he spelled things out to nicely, I'm plagerizing a bit of it in this post. Here's the rundown on the different kind of dashes and how to use them:
There are three categories of dashes: hyphens (-), en dashes (–) and em dashes (—). What's with the weird names? Well, en and em refer to the letters 'n' and 'm' respectively. In a given font, much of the distinction of width is based on the width of the 'm' since it is the widest letter in the alphabet. Therefore an em dash is the same width as the letter 'm' for a specific font. The same goes for an en dash, which is usually about half the width of an em dash (since the letter 'n' is generally half the width of the letter 'm'.)

That said, here are the guidelines for when to use these different dashes:

Hyphen (-)
Hyphens separate compound adjectives or hyphenated words
Examples: small-business owners or Pre-Raphaelite

En Dash (–)
En dashes substitute for the word “to” when writing dates
Example: January 15 – 17, 2010 
Note that there is a space on either side of the en dash.

Em Dash (—)
Em dashes separate the start of a sentence from the text when listing bullet points

• Visual Communicators—Art Directors, Graphic Designers, etc.    

Em dashes also help when a list of items separated by commas contains additional commas that would make it difficult for the reader to understand:
(… the key Great Lakes states—Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, with the longest coastline of all, Ohio and Pennsylvania—have all agreed …).
Note that there is no space on either side of an em dash.

Okay, that's great, but all you see on your keyboard is a hyphen key right? Well you need to know a few commands to make en and em dashes happen and unfortunately it varies based on the program, but no worries, we have the short cuts listed below.

How to type en and em dashes:

PCs—for Microsoft Word (and most other PC word processing programs)
En dash
Typing a word followed by a space, two hyphens, another space and then a word will result in an en dash: word – word.

Em dash
Typing a word followed by two hyphens and then another word with no spaces either side of the hyphens yields an em dash: word—word.

Macs—for Adobe Creative Suite programs and anything within Mac OS
En dash
Key command: Alt/Option + - (hyphen)

Em dash
Key command: Shift + Alt/Option + - (hyphen)

**Please also note that a hyphen is not the same as the minus symbol. There is a separate glyph to use for this so that it matches the plus sign. (Thanks for the tip, Suzanne!)