A letter to Warhol. ‘I hear you like Tomato Soup’.

August 12th, 2010 • View Comments We like
Tags: Art, Cool, Funny, history, PR, World

Lovely.

This is a letter from 1964 written by overjoyed William McFarland, at that time product marketing manager at Campbell’s Soup to the young Andy Warhol. Some complimentary cans of soup soon followed. Two years prior to the letter Warhol had staged 32 of his now world famous Campbell Soup Can pictures.

Ah…multiplier outreach. You gotta love it. And as a letter almost as good as Mick Jagger’s letter to Andy Warhol five years later.

(thanks to A letter of note)

google. A not so evil look back on its History.

August 9th, 2010 • View Comments Brands
Tags: Business, google, history, net neutrality, Presentation, Truth, visual, World

google sure does combine many elements of a modern tech fairy tale. It is extremely successful (please, don’t mention social networks now), it did not exist 15 years ago and started with a very philanthropic vision…at least they tried. While the company still pretends to stick to its ‘Don’t be evil‘ mantra, others call it ‘a company on steroids with fingers in every industry’. The glass is always half full or half empty, right?

Google UK has now staged a (very) quick look back at the its history over the last 11 years. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome. Enjoy the cute little animations and in case you are keener on a more critical view of the brand, try the Beast File. (via)

Absolut. 25 years in fantastic ads.

Dezember 7th, 2009 • View Comments Ads, Brands, Classics
Tags: Absolut, Ads, Branding, Brands, Classics, Cool, Creativity, history, Lifestyle, Print, visual, We like, World

My friends at Creative Criminals have published this fantastic compilation quite a while ago. But it is still worth taking a look at: For over 25 years Absolut vodka has run a simply überinspiring advertising campaign. The well known bottle of Absolut is formed in the shape of a tradtional Swedish medicine flagon. It may be hard to use for bartenders but the shape was an inspiration for their print campaign which just does one thing: Position the product as hero.

Check out the ad compilation here.

Scare tactics. Apple, Microsoft and the question who’s lying.

November 6th, 2009 • View Comments Ads
Tags: Ads, Analysis, Apple, Fail, history, Microsoft

Microsoft has delivered quite a lot of enjoyment to my computer screens when it came to ads. Highlights such as Songsmith and the latest Windows 7 party spots can only be described as either really, really dark self-ironic humor or plain and simple as bizarre. In comparison – all of us love the Mac and the PC guy. But what they do is actually still to paint a pucture of the boring, conservative, uncool Microsoft which constantly tries to ignore its bad product quality and still lies to the user. But is this true?

Check out this short analysis of Apple vs Microsoft spots. It rather makes me perceive Apple as a brand constantly working with scare tactics.

Twitter. The story so far.

Juli 5th, 2009 • View Comments Twitter
Tags: history, Twitter, visual

The story of twitter is not very old. In fact, it is just two years. But apart from selfish idiots tweeting about where they have a Chardonnay tonight, a lot of interesting things happened. Especially lately. Check out this cool visualization by Manolith (via Flowingdata) By the way. I am @ghensel.