Well, Henrik, Tibo & I ended up winning an Andy for our Voiceipt Campaign for the Swedish Tax Agency. Now if only somebody would tell the IRS that the socialists are beating us! The first one to direct democracy wins!

The brainwashing institute where I learned all my tricks has a lovely summary of our success. Big thanks to Le Bureau for the brief!

This was a great experience. The Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst is a contemporary art gallery in Bremen, Germany. They came to my brainwashing institution asking for our help – they’re recognized internationally for the artists they exhibit and the careers they’ve helped launch, but nobody from Bremen supports them!

Working alongside the fantastic strategists Jonathan Chu and Geraldine Szabo, and the brilliant creatives Boris Grunwald, Florian Spielhofer, Penelope Abreu, Jen Maerkert, and Andreas Rasmussen, under creative directors Gerrit Kleinfeld, Nina Rieke, and Nina Jünemann, we discovered our client’s real problem, developed a clear insight, spun it into a big idea, and wound up with a creative campaign that wowed the gallery’s curator and won us a Top Dog award.

My favorite part? Testing our key human insight – if you tell somebody not to do something, they’ll definitely do it. To test it we created two posters, one that says “VISIT THIS WEBSITE”, and one that says “DON’T VISIT THIS WEBSITE.” With ridiculously amazing support for my ridiculously ridiculous tasks that have nothing at all to do with him, Hamburg’s Best PHP Programmer Jonas Franke created a pair of beautifully ridiculous web counters that feature the character GIR of Invader Zim fame doing a fancy dance (as seen below). Adding one dancing GIR per visitor allowed us to count how many people reacted to each poster. And I simply cannot imagine what these people thought when all they saw was 200+ GIRs dancing away on the screen. LOL!

And the results? Well, I told you not to read this presentation! (PDF)

Don’t worry world, there is no need to thank Matt Entin and I for harnessing the technological marvels of cardboard to let you finally take that permanent vacation you’ve always dreamed about. Just imagine… they’ll never even know you’re gone!

And here’s the video I made and sent to the White House last February, 5 months back:

I’m totally tickled he actually likes cupcakes as much as I made him say he does! The idea seemed to go over well with the crowd at the town hall, and with Twitter… although now there’s a “have your cupcake and eat it too” controversy… but that was foreseen…

Sadly, I don’t think I’m going to get any credit for this one; my video is probably too lame for prime time… but I wonder if I can get a job writing things like this for the president all the time…

Obama: I graduate soon – call me. You probably know my number.

Carving up hundreds of Ramen noodle bricks for these letters was the most frustrating typographical experience of my life, with dry noodle bits flying all over the place like shrapnel, and if you put the knife in at just the wrong place and cut the wrong noodle, the whole brick would crumble and you’d have to start all over. The looks I got when I was buying 5 crates of Ramen (for like, 8 bucks) were pretty good though…

Fingers crossed the judges like my cheap Photoshopping as much as cheap noodles?

It was a great experiment, but it’s finally time to admit that my playful Twitter experiment, Mozart the Lost Sock, has come to an end.

The spontaneous story began on January 9th with his first tweet…

My name is Mozart. I was an average white and grey crew sock, but it seems that’s changing now.

As the eventually 1,000+ followers would learn, those socks we all mysteriously lose are zapped into hollow earth, where evil irons force them to build giant water irrigation systems to feed their oppressive steam regime. Our hero Mozart fell through the vortex with his iPhone, and changed the way irons interact with socks forever.

Mozart tweeted his followers with live accounts of what was happening in his adventure, and often talked about the latest flavor of cupcake he’d eaten (which is, of course, a sock’s preferred form of sustenance). Chamomile cupcakes, cinnamon hazelnut cupcakes, chocolate chip zucchini cupcakes, banana maple syrup cupcakes… phew, he sure did love cupcakes. I was considering opening Mozart’s Cupcake Delivery website and actually whipping up these delicious flavors (lavender cupcakes are a-m-a-z-i-n-g).

In any case, 300 tweets later Mozart tweeted about a video of exploding cupcakes… and was never heard from again…

Some fans hypothesized that with his love for cupcakes, perhaps he had tried to recreate the video and suffered some injury… But I must admit it was just finals week and I was a wee bit overstretched, what with cutting Ramen noodles and other really important things.

In the end it was a great experience. Twitter finally become fun for me, and Mozart got some really dedicated fans. One of them created a lovely compilation of all the tweets – Wanderings, Mozart the Lost Sock. It’s fun to read back through it and remember how exciting it was to try to keep a story going with only 140 characters per post to work with.

Rest in peace Mozart!

Cool typography on a sign at a reststop in the middle of Wyoming