Underground Ads (Advertising, Design & Strategy for Non-Profits

VCU’s Brandcenter recently invited Underground to participate in their Friday Speaker Series (January 23, if anyone is in the Richmond,VA neighborhood), and be profiled in a class.

Below are some words and images we sent to the grad students at VCU so they could see what the serious business of saving the world is really like.  

this is kira, senior account manager. it is kira’s birthday. underground’s has purchased the rights to the color orange. we are the only agency in the united states allowed to use orange with favored gum, chew toys and natural flowers (we could not secure the rights to fake orange flowers. goodby got to those first. hacks.) hence, we go overboard every chance we get. esp. with kira. and esp. on kira’s bday. Read the rest of this entry »

Say you’re a presidential candidate who wants to reach a nontraditional audience– maybe young men who aren’t engaged in the political process. How do you do it? Well, if you’re Barack Obama, you advertise in the XBox racing game Burnout Paradise.

And if you’re John McCain? You probably just yell at them to get off your lawn. (via Talking Points Memo)

I was in Chicago last week for the annual Communications Network Conference, and I had the good fortune to attend the keynote, given by Ira Glass of This American Life fame. In addition to making all the ladies of a certain age swoon just by being his charming self, Glass gave a really interesting talk on the building blocks of effective storytelling, illustrated with sound clips from the show and music that he played off a couple CD players. It was like sitting in on a live version of This American Life and getting an ongoing meta-analysis of what made the stories compelling.

I’m a geek for this kind of stuff, of course, but man it was fun.

And this gives me a chance to link to a Youtube clip from Current TV that I’ve been meaning to share for a while– Glass covers a lot of the same ground he went over last night in it, though without the cool sound effects.

More of these short segments can be found here.

Oh, and if the phrase “Squirrel Cop” means nothing to you, you must, must stop what you’re doing and listen right now. It starts about 20 minutes in.