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Archive for June, 2009

Big sky what now?

29 Jun

Montana ain’t got nothin’ on this.

As part of an ongo­ing project to cap­ture images of local … cap­ti­va­tions, I’ve recently spent some time roughly north of where I am now, but not by much. I think we’ll start with this one.

That vast expanse of blue is what you might call “copy space”. The sky was really coop­er­at­ing that day; it kept things inter­est­ing and tex­tural near the ground in the form of puffy clouds, and yet man­aged to remain clear and turquoise higher up.
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Posted in One Thousand Words

 

Okay. That counts as a score, I think.

26 Jun

Remember that snake ad what took the sil­ver Aster award? Just got an update from Healthcare Marketing Report — the ones who’ve been giv­ing me “merit” awards — that they dropped the gold on me for the same ad.

The bronze win­ner for the cat­e­gory (hos­pi­tal less than 300 beds, sin­gle news­pa­per ad) was Della Femina. Again. That’s gotta sting a little.

 
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Posted in Advertising Matters

 

On shrimp, and the lack of cuteness therein

24 Jun

So the lat­est round of inter­est­ing tasks included cre­at­ing some cute car­toony mas­cots for the swim les­son age divi­sions — from infant through about 13 years old.

The idea was to cre­ate some­thing fun and light, with each age divi­sion hav­ing its own mas­cot. The youngest was pol­ly­wogs, and the old­est was orig­i­nally going to be whales until I pointed out that might not go over well if any­one on the team was fat. So they got renamed orcas instead.

So far no prob­lem, right? The pol­ly­wogs were easy to make cute; they’re most of the way there already.
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Posted in Artiste's Tantra, One Thousand Words

 

2 girls, 1 cup reaction

16 Jun

For starters, well, yecch.*

That out of the way, let’s talk about this video for a moment. These women are viably con­ven­tion­ally het­ero­sex­u­ally attrac­tive. Buxom, one blond and the other brunette. I men­tion this because it’s clear that the video was intended — scat aside — to appeal to het­ero­sex­ual men. Apart from the parts that have spawned so many intense reac­tions on YouTube, this movie is clearly made with a het male audi­ence in mind.

Contrast this to what I’ve done with var­i­ous same-​​gender part­ners over the years. I can assure you that it’s been quite con­ven­tional. No leather, no whips, no latex, and no poop. Just what can be done with one healthy body and another, and kisses and hands and love and mutual respect.

When most straight boys get to third base with their girls, to me and my male lovers, that’s basi­cally been the home run. Get it?
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Posted in O, Pine With Me, You Must be F***ing Kidding

 

Spam, Spam, Spam, eggs and Spam

12 Jun

It’s easy to for­get that some­times humor has a basis in real­ity. Another nugget of man­u­fac­tured deli­cious­ness from Retro Press.

Yeah. Spambled eggs. And for God’s sake, give me that Spam and Velveeta sand­wich. Because noth­ing goes with a brick of chopped processed pig meat bet­ter than a slab of vinyl­ized cheese­like product.

 
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Posted in Advertising Matters

 

No bones about orthopaedics

11 Jun

This was another one that pre­sented what the man­age­ment types call a “chal­lenge”, specif­i­cally, how to grab the atten­tion of a prospec­tive ortho sur­geon who’s think­ing about chang­ing venues?

Our physi­cian recruiter’s look­ing to get a new ortho in to help the ones we’ve already got. The prac­tice is thriv­ing and fill­ing a def­i­nite need. Again, we have some lim­i­ta­tions in our venue (the pre­vi­ous post notwith­stand­ing) in that it doesn’t always offer the most spec­tac­u­lar vis­tas. While we work to address that*, I came up with this as a grab­ber for a post­card.
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Posted in Advertising Matters

 

Sunsets

10 Jun

We got ‘em.

I actu­ally took this one back in December, but what the heck.

 
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Posted in One Thousand Words

 

In help-​​wanted ads, less is often more

04 Jun

At least when you’re hir­ing professionals.

It’s been a bad habit in the past for us to cre­ate posi­tion ads that are far, far too dense on text. While HR wants to list every ben­e­fit — which does make sense as a mar­ket­ing tool — the truth is that most health­care facil­i­ties have equiv­a­lent ben­e­fits. And writ­ing all that copy pro­duces an ad that looks more like a car-​​rental con­tract than a job opening.

For a while we were try­ing to focus on the things to see and do in the area, but to my mind that’s not such a good idea. We’re about 30 miles from Laughlin, NV, where peo­ple go to gam­ble; next clos­est major des­ti­na­tion is Vegas at 90 miles, then Flagstaff at 120 and Phoenix at 180. There’s hik­ing, to some extent, though not as much in the imme­di­ate locale as one might pre­fer; and there are lakes as well but each one is far enough away to qual­ify as a day trip.

Besides, we’re not really look­ing for peo­ple who plan to spend every week­end in Vegas.

Another strat­egy has been to show images of some of the locale, most notably the west­ern end of the Grand Canyon — which is only eas­ily acces­si­ble by heli­copter flight, so I’m not sure what the point is. I sup­pose what set my teeth most on edge was when I learned a for­mer recruiter had taken out a full-​​page ad extolling the virtues of this city — but included, as the only pho­to­graph, a shot of Havasupai Falls.
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Posted in Advertising Matters

 

Another coupla things

03 Jun

Things, things, I got things.

I don’t always have the lux­ury of time when I’m doing what I do. Sometimes I have to go for some­thing fast, cheap and easy. This doesn’t always equal bad; some­times it even yields some non-​​excremental results.

F’rinstance, it was only the other day, when I got an emailed copy of our own press release, that I real­ized we had a can­cer aware­ness expo com­ing up, and there was no col­lat­eral mate­r­ial for it. No fly­ers, no ads, noth­ing. D’, as they say, oh.

I didn’t have a lot of time to lay hands on an image for it; ini­tially I was toy­ing with the idea of get­ting a group shot of var­i­ous peo­ple hav­ing what appeared to be a happy, some­what com­fort­able con­ver­sa­tion, tak­ing the sat­u­ra­tion way down and drop­ping a pink rib­bon on one of them (at 100% sat) to empha­size the hidden-​​yet-​​common nature of cancer.

Unfortunately (or per­haps not), no such stock images really jumped out at me. I was think­ing then of using sil­hou­ettes, but that didn’t grab me either, when I saw a pretty strong graphic that got my atten­tion. It was just a pair of sil­hou­et­ted cut-​​out dolls. They weren’t ren­dered in a way I could use, do I did my own.
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Posted in Advertising Matters

 

Boy, sometimes things just work

01 Jun

One of our bet­ter known physi­cians is also incred­i­bly busy, and com­men­su­rately dif­fi­cult to nail down for a pho­to­graph. I went into cahoots with our cath lab super­vi­sor and was able to grab him for about 90 sec­onds. Shot 12 frames. The best of the lot is below the fold.
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Posted in One Thousand Words

 

Just another reason not to go anywhere near Utah

01 Jun

Early in the era of talkies, a man named Al Jolson put on black­face and issued what is regarded by many today as one of the most shame­ful per­for­mances in American cin­ema through The Jazz Singer.

Possibly the only way for him to be more obnox­ious would be to affect a Rochester accent, eat water­melon and fried chicken, and demand to know where the white women is at. You’d think that after eighty years we’d be a lit­tle more enlight­ened about our stereo­types, would be less apt to roll in the self-​​made filth of bigotry.

Cal Grondahl must live in another dimen­sion.
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Posted in O, Pine With Me, One Thousand Words