Things that caught my eye this month
Creative inspiration for the advertising professional | July 2020
Each week, I send a things-that-caught-my-eye email to my creative colleagues. Here are all those things from this past month.
This campaign for the Crown Act, a celebration of Black hair
These mini dioramas for a paint company
These food face portraits
This meltdown at the Museum of Ice Cream
These letters from an art director father to his son at summer camp
These amazing “womb stories”
This eye-opener about racial segregation
These 50 ideas that changed this guy’s life
This terrifying stock market graph (the thread has some good examples of 1930s advertising after the crash)
This app version of the old “hands on a hard body” promotion
This new ad for Audible that evokes classic airline travel ads
This unapologetic birth control ad
This maybe-it’s-bullshit take on the idea of “brand purpose”
This new WFH short film from Apple
This example of what happens when the brand manager writes the ad copy
This take on why copywriting is critical in a post Covid world
This silky new jam from my friend and colleague Jawnii-Ahbi
These teens who are dressing up as Covid-masked grannies to buy booze
This new, free online portfolio school for Black creatives
This trailer for a film about what happens when a piece of art you created gets adopted by the bad guys
This look at how the “millennial aesthetic” became ubiquitous in start-up land
This made-at-the-creative-director’s-home Domino’s spot
This hard seltzer that made a mask you can drink through
This new campaign for Iceland is…a scream (sorry, not sorry)
This short film from Google about The Compton Cowboys
This analysis at what makes a YouTube video hit the trending tab
These birds with arms
This new logo for Nissan
This, the saddest graph in advertising
These knit installations
The news that WalMart, Target and CVS are teaming up to tackle the problem of the single-use plastic bag
This piece about how Covid is changing work friendships
These TikTok-ers
These, the five Emmy nominees for best commercial
This mustard beer
This open-source physical distancing DIY-kit (that Character developed for an RFP but then decided to make it available to cities for free)
This article about white VO actors relinquishing their roles as the voices of characters of color
This hypnotic CGI
This look at creating a jingle for TikTok
This dad who photoshopped his kid’s drawings as if they were real
The story behind the branding and launch of the new Seattle hockey team
This look at the diversity/representation numbers from the big ad agency holding companies
This change to the theatrical window that theaters will have movies exclusively (this is a huge change)
This look at what you can do with greenscreen today
This visualization of the relative sizes of the different moons in our solar system
These McDonalds ads made of emojis
These Amazon reviews of the diarrhea-inducing sugar-free gummy bears (disclosure: I work on a competitor gummy bear brand)
These nominees for the “comic book Academy Awards”
This drawing machine
This storytelling tip from the creators of South Park
This new report from Google about how people actually make purchase decisions
This, the first “elevator pitch”
This charming little ditty from Cheerios
This amazing let’s-use-existing-footage ad from Nike
These (self-promotion alert!) first three episodes of the dumb web series I’m making
This will end fine, I’m sure
Previous things that caught my eye: Early 2019 | Late 2019 | Early 2020 | June 2020
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Kovacevich is a creative director in San Francisco. He publishes a weekly newsletter with bits of creative inspiration, just like the stuff above. You can see the newsletter here and subscribe if you’d like.
You can read all his musings about the advertising biz here.
