Never before has a U.S. president evoked such an outpouring of artistic inspiration abroad. With his face depicted in frescoes and graffiti in 25 countries around the globe, the art world has stepped in to ensure that George W. Bush’s visual image, at least, will resonate with generations for years after his term ends. From South America to Australia, from Europe to Africa, no continent is spared in this outburst of love!  In one voice, we eloquently dedicate this tribute to you.

Here are some of our favorites:

Argentina portrays our cowboy president ridin’ his noble steel:

From our friends in New Zealand:

And the only solution, according to a wall in East London:

Side rant/Relevance to branding:
With virtually no experience or qualification aside from blood affiliation, Bush was propelled into the Oval Office, continuing a trend of “puppet” presidents that began with Reagan. What does it say about a country that chooses such presidents – the “brand” of a country, so to speak? (in a manner of speaking, the president is, very much, the face of a country to the international community).

Fine, go ahead and keep your colorful, chunky plastic pens and ugly canvas totes.
As long as I can keep my five-star dinner and “business” trip to Hawaii, I’m happy.

Essentially, that’s what every doctor is thinking when they hear about the recently passed Industry Code on Interactions with Health Care Professionals. The bill is designed to improve transparency between pharmaceutical marketing aimed at doctors to woo them into prescribing their products.
According to the new code, now every pharmaceutical company CEO has to sign an agreement saying they promise to enact policies and procedures to comply with the code, eliminating mugs, pens, other gifts from their marketing strategies.
Only problem here? The bill doesn’t address biotechnology or medical technology makers at all, who can just keep on giving huge gifts under the table. It also doesn’t ban lavish, “business dinners”, or conferences “conveniently” held in Hawaii. It demands a limit on how much pharmaceutical companies can pay doctors to speak at conferences endorsing their new drugs, but doesn’t say how much. Kind of important, since some current paychecks have reached millions.

“Right now the public has no way to know whether a doctor’s been given money that might affect prescribing habits,” Senator Chuck Grassley said in a report in Medical News Today.
“This bill is about letting the sun shine in so that the public can know. Whether it’s dinner at a restaurant or tens of thousands of dollars or more in fees and travel, patients shouldn’t be in the dark about whether their doctors are getting money from drug and device makers.”
And why would the American public be offended at these cushy endorsement deals? Because it’s their money that the drug companies are using to woo the doctors. ….
“This is a system in dire need of reform,” says Senator Herb Kohl, who co-sponsored a bill with Senator Chuck Grassley to require drug and medical advice companies to publicly disclose payments to doctors of $500 or more.
“We’ve been pushing to see reforms like this for some time now,” said Senator Kohl. “Consumers will undoubtedly be the beneficiaries of these industry changes”, he noted, adding how currently, Americans are charged the highest prices in the world for drugs that are sold in other countries for a fraction of the price.

Bottom line:
Yes, a step has been made towards transparent marketing, which is absolutely a step in the right direction. But while baby steps count as forward progress, I’ve never heard anyone congratulated on baby-stepping through a hundred-meter dash.

Bill Murray made baby steps look cute in “What About Bob”, but when millions of Americans are going to other countries because they can’t afford drugs or health care here, it’s no longer cute. Let’s stop pretending pharmaceutical marketing is transparent, and point out how dirty the window really is.

Lately, the movies have been a full blown penis fest—Walk Hard, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Art School Confidential, and 28 Days Later, to name a few. Where’s all the vagina? Art School Confidential’s scene in question seemed to satire this very subject. In the scene, an art student takes a portrait-drawing class so he can peep at nude women rather than study. His excitement turns to disgust as a naked man walks out instead of a pretty young lady exposing her goods. The man’s junk is exposed for several seconds, and even waved in the poor art student’s face. Depending on the film audience’s sensibilities and sexual orientation, they may have felt like the art student—downtrodden and deflated.

What is the message being sent by the MPAA? Are they essentially saying vaginas are more obscene than penises? Or, perhaps they are assigning a value system to sexual stimulation, asserting that hetero male sexual arousal is more harmful and obscene than hetero female or homosexual male arousal.

Interestingly, the films of the late 70’s and early 80’s seemed to embody the reverse of these values—lots of bush on the screen in those days. And no, “bush” is not a bad word. Ask George Carlin.

Amazingly, graphic images of violence that have an exponentially higher capacity to traumatize the audience are commonplace in R and even PG-13 rated American films. This contradiction has been brought up ad nauseum in press and popular culture. If the MPAA is worried about the film audience acting out what they see on film, and rating films accordingly, they are sending an astoundingly deranged message to the world.

A couple years ago, IFC released a revealing documentary called “This Film is Not Yet Rated” which investigates the MPAA’s backward film rating tactics in depth. It’s an interesting watch, for sure.

George Carlin would surely agree with jungle[8]’s consensus—the MPAA needs to re-evaluate their film rating practices and, at the very least, show us one vagina for every penis displayed in R- rated films. Balance it out a little for pete’s sake.

BTW: George, you’ll be sorely missed!

While this innovation offers advertisers an exciting solution to the age old- struggle of reaching the right person with the right message, is the sacrifice of our privacy worth it? Slightly disturbing when you consider much of the technology video advertising company TruMedia Technologies uses was created originally for surveillance work for the Israeli government.

At this point the camera is only gathering data and not storing any images, but Quividi, the company behind the camera says that capability is in the near future. Their ultimate goal is to quickly process the gender, age and ethnicity of the viewer, then quickly project a digital ad specifically targeted to that viewer.

Great. In a world where we are continually struggling to break down stereotypes and reject labels, are we really heading into a future where you’ll be categorized as you walk down the street, not by people, but by billboards?

Personally, as a 24 year-old female, I’m not looking forward to sparking a series of tampon ads on passing screens as I stroll down the street. Will the modern form of chivalry now be to insist your date walk instead on the side closest to the street, and subject yourself to a stream of ads for razors and sport utility trucks?
They may not be storing data now, but companies like Quividi have said themselves they might be soon, and if they did, they could be forced to share information on court orders. Sounds reminiscent of movies like Minority Report, to me. As if cell phone tracking available to the public wasn’t bad enough!
Maybe I’m being extreme, maybe it’s not so bad, and advertising will just become less impersonal, and more effective. Either way, its worth it to pay attention as steps are made that could potentially affect our privacy. Even if it’s ten years down the road.

You may have picked up today’s Los Angeles Times and read an article entitled—“‘Legal Weed’ is just beer, but Feds want to cap sales” by Eric Baily. It tells an alarming story of government oppression, censorship, and wasting of tax dollars. Mt Shasta Brewing Company, located in Weed, CA, seals one particular brew with bottle caps labeled with the knee-slapping words “Try Legal Weed” and “A friend in Weed is a friend indeed” Apparently, the US Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (if you’ve heard of these guys you’re lying) weren’t so amused— they’ve threatened the brewery owner with fines and sanctions if he doesn’t remove the tagline because it alludes to the use of an illegal substance.

This is highly alarming because it’s a blatant act of censorship and thought control. Mt Shasta Brewing Company isn’t selling a controlled substance, nor are they selling drug paraphernalia, or even trying to mislead the public—the caps aren’t labeled Smoke Weed are they?

Too bad the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau doesn’t have broader powers. If they did, Cocaine Energy Drink could be shut down and its founders incarcerated. Not “Legal Cocaine,” just plain old “Cocaine.” Yes, it tastes like liquefied jolly ranchers and tonic water and makes you jittery, but won’t make your gums lose sensation or inspire disco parties because it contains no actual cocaine. Nevertheless, Cocaine energy drink has gone more or less unnoticed by governmental powers.

This is yet another example of government bureaus being hijacked by persons with extreme political agendas—John Ashcroft would be proud. It’s hard to understand what harm could possibly come from the bottle caps. If anything, it will help sway pot smokers away from the devil weed and into the much safer and healthier world of alcoholism, resulting in more tax revenue from alcohol sales and further justification for additional bureau funding.

The White House has officially admitted their “Mission Accomplished” banner displayed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1st 2003 wasn’t, as we say in the jungle, an “authentic message.” For those who don’t recall, this was the much-publicized event in which president George W. Bush landed a plane (with much assistance) on an aircraft carrier and later declared the “end of major combat operations in Iraq” from a podium underneath a large star and stripe infused banner displaying the words Mission Accomplished. More than 97% of the war’s casualties have occurred since then, so it’s about time the White House took responsibility for their overzealous messaging tactics. White House press secretary Dana Perino made the grudging admission yesterday, saying the banner should have read “Mission accomplished for the sailors who are on this ship on their mission” (wordy and not very catchy—not much of a tagline) and chastised the critics, saying the “media is going to play this up again tomorrow as they do every year.”

Dana, don’t be surprised if the media plays this up every day for the next millennia. The banner has already been immortalized as a symbol of the Bush administration’s lack of foresight, deception, and overall ineptitude. It will be remembered as one of the biggest debacles in US history for sure. It’s alarming that it took this long for the White House to admit they made a huge mistake—claiming victory in the earliest stages of a war. It was misleading to American citizens, the rest of the world, and most of all to the men and women of the armed forces. Could it have been premeditated as part of propaganda scheme to boost armed forces recruitment at the time, since the entire Iraq war was to be executed with an all-volunteer force? Since the armed forces advertises itself as some sort of job-training technical college, rather than an instrument of war, that sort of deceptive messaging is not outside the realm of possibility. There are simply no redeeming scenarios or explanations for why the banner was displayed.

Cut to the present—a recession looms on the horizon. Experts say a recovery from the mortgage crisis is far, far off, and the notion that we are years away from anything resembling the salad days of the Clinton or Reagan administration is widely accepted. Unless the next president has divine powers, he/she will be powerless in stopping the economic tsunami headed our way, and reelection for second term will not occur. Short of divinity, he/she will also find ending hostility in the Middle East an equally daunting task. So what’s left for our next president to accomplish? Restore the American brand, that’s what. You’d be hard pressed to find a liberal, conservative or independent American citizen that would not agree the current president has left the American brand in shambles—his low domestic approval rating is continual proof if this, but what about approval of the America overseas? If America were a tennis shoe manufacturer, it would be British Knights, as in, people stopped wearing them long ago.

The branding of the Barack Obama presidential campaign would indicate understanding of this idea. In a recent Newsweek interview, graphic design guru Michael Beirut breaks down the Obama campaign, comparing its branding philosophy to that of Target, Apple, and Volkswagen, naming “those three brands as ones that share a lot with the way this candidate is presenting himself. They’re meant to look transparent, open, accessible and democratic to a certain degree. Non-intimidating,”— characteristics few can apply to the current commander-in-chief. Beruit goes on to explain how Obama’s underlying principles that emphasize change and campaign slogans—A Coalition of Change—are incorporated into the graphic design of the Obama brand, citing that the “ specific choices are also made in really good taste and I’d say to certain degree they also philosophically align with what his position is.” Essentially, the Obama brand seeks to repair, and modernize the presidential brand in the same manner of Apple, for example, redefined computer-branding philosophy.

Perhaps Barack Obama, if he becomes president, can reinvent the American president in the eyes of the rest of the world. 4 years certainly is enough time to make America the “Nike” of countries once again. It took Apple, by virtue of its shrewd advertising, product design, and branding philosophy, less than 4 years to raise itself from the ashes. America is, after all, nothing more than a large corporation that is no longer chic. Popularity of the American brand pays astronomical monetary dividends—one needn’t look further than Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez threats to denominate Venezuela’s oil market with Euros instead of dollars as proof of this. If this comes to fruition, vast sums of money will be lost because of one country’s disapproval of the American product. If Obama gets elected and does return the American Brand to universal favor via expansion of the Obama brand design and overall image, don’t expect him to be reelected, as rekindled offshore America-loving, sadly, can’t save our recession and debt crunch, will it allow Obama a second term.

The days of public plazas and public parks are long gone though. Private companies with corporate accounts hold land “in the best interest of the public”. As an Orange County native, I know this too well from The Irvine Company, a company that manages what used to be the James Irvine’s ranch. Today his ranch spans the city of Irvine and parts of Newport Beach. What does this mean for Orange County suburbia? Shopping plazas, parks, gated communities all under the jurisdiction of the Irvine Company.

Somewhere I’ve heard of governments that can’t fund public works, and the benevolent publicly-owned organizations that take up land to care for it. But the Irvine Company is definitely privately-owned. Some would praise the Irvine Company for their superb urban planning. I have some doubts.

Public space is one of those poetic ideas that most people are willing to give up because it hearkens a bygone era when people shopped in open-air markets and gathered in the public square for civic functions.

In this day of big box stores and retail chains, didn’t we expect our land to go down the same route? Well, maybe not everyone. Robin Howe’s “A Dialogue with Public Space,” is a series of photographs taken in London that makes up one half of a book that provides us with some food for thought about those city spaces we inhabit everyday.
You can check it out at:

Robin Howe- click here!

I seem to think of all the versions of designs that go back and forth between our agency and the client before we finalize our campaigns or designs. It’s not exactly constructing a building, but I can imagine it is somewhat similar in process.

So somewhere in that process, someone MUST HAVE noticed the blueprints for a particular building look somewhat like a swastika. Unless, of course that was the intention. Perhaps the joke was on us, the public who would not have noticed the shape of a building, simply from viewing on the ground, masked by scale and the subtle human inability to comprehend the holistic experience of the mass structure.

That was before Google Earth, that is.

The building in question was constructed in the 70′s, well before Google Earth was a thought. So the joke is on the architect and really on the client that commissioned that building to be constructed in the first place.

But just what kind of client would commission such a thing?

How about the American Government. The US Navy to be exact. The swastika shaped building is in fact a building located at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, just South of San Diego, the largest government subsidized swastika display on Earth.

Hmmmmm…… Surprised?

I’m not.

I came across a site that posted  files for printable cold sores. (BRILLANT!)  What would you do with them and just why is that relevant to New Yorks subways? See for yourself, instructions pulled from the original post here.

1. Download the printable cold sore sheet. This is optimized for use with 1″ x 2 5/8″ Avery Easy Peel Clear Mailing Labels, #18660.

2. Print it out on a transparency sticker sheet.

3. Tag an subway poster that seems appropriate.

4. Document and submit to printablecoldsores@gmail.com
5. Repeat.

*NOTE: Tagging subway ads is illegal! You can make your point simply by documenting your work, removing your stickers, and submitting an image. I am in no way responsible for your actions, I am merely presenting a theoretical solution to a real-world problem.