andy grayson

Orlando: "Where America goes to get fat."

So I'm in Orlando this week. At Frito-Lay "Corn Camp".

And I thought Claudine (a planner I work with) summed up Orlando in a pretty hilarious way – the title of this post.

Every year Frito-Lay has strat planning offsites for their core divisions; corn being one of them. And I work on Doritos. So here we are – trying to have a few days of lively discussion about tortilla chips. At Disney World.

It's a time for them to gather as an organization, relax a little, and it's nice they invite their agencies to be part of the process. I'll keep feeding in some updates from my time at camp. There actually is always a nugget or two that sparks some thinking and discussion.

made of japan

Super simple idea from Asics for the Onitsuka Tiger. (that's a shoe)

It's a Japanese classic, so they visually represent that thought with this website.  http://www.madeofjapan.com/

nba spot battle

In response to Chris. The game goes on.

failure

So many of you know that GSP is trying to help the NBA. I sent this commercial, as an example of my brief, to my creative director to look over. It's quite possibly the best Jordan commerical of all time. It's just elegant.

Well, to my surprise,he wrote back that he feels old because he wrote it. Damn.

more nba

So we're embarking on some NBA ethnographies this week. LA, Portland, San Francisco. It's West Coast only because of the short timetable, but hopefully we'll get out to Chicago & NY at some point. Anyway... I thought I'd keep throwing up great basketball spots to spur on any thinking about the NBA. All thoughts are welcome.

Flat Earth

I've worked on the launch of a new Frito-Lay brand for the better part of a year. The new product is called Flat Earth and they are chips made from real fruits & vegetables that actually retain some of the positive nutrition.

The planning process was a great example of how things can sometimes work. My original brief was Stealth Health, which morphed with the creatives into Impossibly Good. But the client wanted to really focus on the product specifics in year one and at launch, so in the end, the communications ended up reverting back to the original strategy. Go figure.

So Goodby, Silverstein & Partners was awarded the NBA account last week.

The National Basketball Association. Not the National Bison Association.

Or the Nashua Baseball Academy.

But professional basketball. How fun is that?
It was as if one of the greatest advertising accounts one could work on just fell in our laps. Well, anyway, they asked me to help out with the planning and it was as if the advergods had answered my prayers. I think this is going to be fun.

So in the spirit of the NBA, I thought I'd share my favorite basketball commercial of all time. It's not an NBA spot but rather an Air Jordan spot. But who cares, because this is the kind of stuff that gives me goosebumps.

pic of the day - Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

A little view inside the workplace.

say hello

Apple's iphone teaser commercial.

Watch it.

Super simple. Maybe that's why I love it.

*cut cut cut

This is a very cool website/project from Denmark. Premise is simple: cut out a paper schematic of a blank, non-descript delivery van and decorate it, design it, pimp it... whatever. Then you take a digital pic of it and send it to the danes at cut cut cut because they're hosting a competition where every web visitor -- designer or peruser -- can vote on their favorite design. The winners of that van race proceed to the final lap, where the van designs are placed on eBay for an auction-off. The proceeds go to help homeless childern in Brazil.

This is pretty brilliant, but would have been more brilliant if it were tastefully done by a major brand. MINI, notoriously good at this kind of participatory marketing, recently produced a print ad that included a stencil of a MINI that you could create and build for your desk. The online part of cut cut cut, with the voting, is a bigger idea, I think.

I could see UPS doing something funny and viral with the truck. (that's a shout out to my man Vijay Mali, planner on UPS) Do it.