Finnish wonderkids Agency 358 and the largest Scandinavian newspaper Helsingin Sanomat are sponsoring a skate school in Helsinki's Kontula skatepark every Saturday. The kids who sign up get a sweet deck sponsored by the newspaper. It's made up of skateboard-themed headlines that came from the paper. Ripped from the headlines as it were. Pretty cool.

Credits:

Client: Helsingin Sanomat & Skateboard union of Finland
Agency: 358 Helsinki
Creative director: Ale Lauraéus
Designers / AD: Leo Karhunen, Ville Kovanen
copy: Ville Kovanen, Ale Lauraéus, Leo Karhunen
Client team director: Maria Falcken
Agency producer: Peggy Petrell

...for advertising, anyway.

You now have until Feb 1st to get it together and enter the 92nd annual Art Directors Club Awards. This is your chance to be judged by some true icons in the business like TBWA/Chiat/Day's Tito Melega and Leo Burnett's Susan Credle, If the potential accolades from these guys are not enough to motivate you, consider the fact that for the first time the ADC awards will be held in Miami instead of its native New York.
So while half the country will still be a frozen tundra in April, you could be sunning your arse and sipping mojitos instead.

Get cracking!

Gatorade through its parent company Pepsico announced earlier today that it won't be adding brominated vegetable oil to its drinks any more. This announcement came at the result of of a petition on Change.org, started by one 15 year old, Sarah Kavanaugh of Hattiesburg Mississippi.

Brominated vegetable oil, you see, has some issues. For one thing, according to the New York Times, "Studies have suggested there are possible side effects, including neurological disorders and altered thyroid hormones."

What did the spokespeople for Gatorade have to say about it? According to the Times:

Oh how I love these. Video artist Marco Brambilla newest 3D video installation opens in New York soon. It's called "Creation (Megaplex)." This is the third in a trilogy. The first being "Civilization (Megaplex)" and the second being "Evolution (Megaplex)."
These mashups swirl together to form a strange DNA helix, which suggests all kinds of things about the way we're ingesting pop culture. While I am fascinated by the work, I am also disturbed by what I see are the implications.

Either way, Brambilla's vision was brought to life in part by VFX- Post production wunderhouse Ntropic.

If you're still feeling the ill effects of the hell you went through to produce that Super Bowl spot, take heart.

Market research company Lab 42 released a study that found 39% of respondents prefer watching Super Bowl commercials to watching the game. While 28% said their favorite part of the Super Bowl was the game itself.

Some more facts and figures:

Even more interesting though is when the study gets granular and asks about bathroom breaks during the game. They study found 38% of the respondents would rather use the restroom during the game. 23% preferred to go during the commercials.

One third of the respondents said they're apt to share the spots on social media, and nearly 70% said they have re-watched spots online.

McCann Digital Israel came up with a fun way to recruit art directors. They placed ads in stock photo websites. They used keyword searches to target them (businessman, computer, etc.) but they only placed the ads on the 5th page of searches. This way the art directors who don't settle for what's on page one would see the ads. Photo Stalking.

Nice idea.

Digital CEO: Eldad Weinberger
CCD: Ami Alush
Copywriter: Arnon Rotem
Art Directors: Idan Gilboa, Joe Brodsky
Digital Producer: Niv Kantor
Studio: Pavel Goralikov, Tal Shpigler

Well here's a big ol' wtf for today. Ikea Thailand is now on the Thai LGBT's hit list thanks to an ad featuring, you guessed it, a Transgender.

I don't even need to speak Thai to understand what's going on here. Older dude walking along in an Ikea with his very obvious (to everyone but him, of course) Transgendered girlfriend. The girlfriend who at that point had been laughing at chatting away, all of a sudden sees the word "sale." Her voice drops to manly octave. Old dude gets freaked. She tries to laugh it off. So does her. We then end with Transgender left having to move her own shit because the dude is now sneaking off.

Twitter conditioned me to write in a short bursts. So much so I am not sure why I bothered writing more than the headline.

Anywho.

It's called Vine. This new mobile service (which was acquired, not created by Twitter) allows you to lake nifty little video loops. But just like everything in twitter's micro-world, you can only have six seconds or less to play with.

See some of the videos here.

This ranks up there with GIFs. In fact this may be the new GIF.

Creatives have it really tough. Our deadlines are pretty gnarly and we never have enough time in the day to do anything. Case in point, I started this post three hours ago but got pulled away multiple times because of meetings and debriefs and briefings.

Well, the good folks at CreativeWorx can't help me with that. But they can help with the management of time spent filling out time sheets. Thanks to TimeTracker.

According to the release:

First up is The Creative Confessional. It's already blowing up the internet. Most likely because it is a tired and true Post Secret rip-off. Also there are already a few repeats. And the creative entries are already trying to one up themselves in goofiness. For every one that could be true, like "I flew to New York to oversee a voiceover session that could have been handled from my car on the way to work." We also have ones like "While we were having sex, the only thing I was thinking about was which modernist, condensed, serif typeface I should use for his wedding announcements." har har har.

I'm predicting this will jump the shark by Friday.

Groupon will no longer be offering gun-related deals. According to Julie Mossler, Groupon Spokesman:

All scheduled and current gun-related deals featured on Groupon North America, including shooting ranges, conceal-and-carry and clay shooting, have been placed on hiatus while we review internal standards that shape the deal inventory we feature...The category is under review following recent consumer and merchant feedback."

The Wall Street Journal careers blog section has a post called Want to Kill Innovation at Your Company? Go Public. It suggests the tech entrepreneurs' quest for a bigger cash cow ends up killing the sacred cow of innovation.

A study by Shai Bernstein, an assistant finance professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, analyzed 1500 companies between 1985 and 2003. Some of the companies went public during this period, and some decided against it. The study measured the rate of patents and their content. While the rate didn't change between public and private companies, the study found that the awesomeness did.

The new American Airlines logo revealed in a film here that looks back at AA history and logos too, is a clean crisp update withe the eagle intact but abstract. The tail of American Airline planes look decidedly patriotic as they are drenched in the red white & blue stripes.

So while the logo update may be the most modern facelift they ever had, will it be able to yank AMerican Airlines away from the bankruptcy protection they are in?

The unions are not impressed, as a spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association told the Chicago tribune

LOGAN East is proud to announce the addition of Executive Producer Dan Sormani and multi-talented CD/Director Alan Bibby to its roster. Based out of the newly designed 7,000 sq. ft. office space in Soho, they will lead the East Coast division of the company.

If you were asleep or god forbid, not on social media yesterday, you might have missed a whopper of a story. The Atlantic posted an advertorial on Scientology. Paid for, obviously, by The Church of Scientology. And then apologized and took it down.

Why did they apologize, you ask?

As we grow older, our social media usage shifts. This may not sound like huge news, but it is of note to anyone in the industry looking to reach people. Especially people in that holy grail demographic: the kids.

The kids are moving away from Facebook slightly and spending more time on Tumbr where they aren't bombarded by ads, photos of abandoned dogs, and endless babies.

In a recent survey conducted by Survata, a consumer insights start-up, the 13-18 year olds shows 61% are using Tumblr, compared to Facebook's 55%. Small drop in the bucket, perhaps. But once we survey the 19-25 crowd, their usage is even lower.

TORRANCE, Calif., Jan. 14, 2013 – Honda is set to launch three distinct performance-oriented models in the year’s biggest racing game, Forza Horizon on Xbox 360. Beginning on Tues, Jan.

Sent to us today.

The Agency Pronunciation Guide.

"Dro-five-uh. Dro-five-uh. Dro-five-uh never returned my calls."

You don't say? Is it because taking an existing meme which parodies a unintentionally funny but started as serious youtube channel isn't very original?

I see you called it Volume 1, suggesting there might be a volume 2. Let's not and say we did. This is as DOA as another Shit Blank Says video.

Wallblog reports that Instagram loses half of its active users in a month, showing numbers from Appstats. Techcrunch has already offered ideas on why there's a fluctuation in the service suggesting that it's not the terms of service kerfluffle's fault. The anecdata around here where I and a bunch of people that I know who were active users deleted our accounts suggests that it was.

Advertising agencies try so hard to be badass it's funny. Believe it or not, one agency used to call its creative groups "fox holes."

Another calls the act of working endless hours for a fool's errand "falling on a hand grenade."

And of course in every agency I've ever worked, the designated pitch room is called the "war room."