Steal Our Ideas
Here’s a novel way for two advertising types, Adam and Jon, to make an impact in their industry. It is a great blog/website. The pair behind this site offer up ideas for advertising campaigns and quirky products for people to freely steal. It is a superb flow of creativity. Here are my favourites:
- The safe fridge magnet – with so many people struggling with weight, they have drawn up a safe fridge magnet that you can stick on your fridge as a reminder that you are breaking in to a treasury of calories that you should think twice about. I like their thought that weight watchers could take the idea and brand up some magnets to give away.
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Great idea that needs stealing Love the alternative warning messages on cigarettes – unkissable, this will make me look creative, and no will power. How true!
- They’ve posted a message for Greenpeace to target the 60% of Americans who carry guns – “the more wildlife you save, the more wildlife you can kill”.
- An idea created for careerbuilder.com gives people the chance to talk to themselves in the future. They basically record a message that will be phoned to them five years later – a great way, they claim, for making people want to achieve goals, otherwise you’ll have your past self to answer to!
- The absolute classic is the two-sided Ts – with “Jesus Saves” on one side, then, when you are not with your Christian mates, whip your shirt off, turn it inside out, and it reads, “there is no god”.
Even if you are not in marketing or advertising, I think you’ll be surprised and delighted by the ideas from this site – steal our ideas.
Here is the intro to our show and we do, eventually, get to talking about Steal Our Ideas about 10 minutes in – sorry!
Karaoke Party
I have found the most dangerous site in the world. Karaoke Party will suck time from your life! It is a free karaoke site so if you have speakers and a microphone on your computer, you can sing along to a stack of songs. Register for free and you will be able to find your favourites quickly.
I belted out My Way, If Tomorrow Never Comes, All Out Of Love, and Your Song and had to stop because time was leaking out of my life. But it was fun.
Sometimes song pages don’t load – just return and go back in again. I allow those glitches on free sites. Some songs are blocked until you take out a subscription, but there are plenty on offer. Enjoy Karaoke Party!
Listen to us discuss the Karaoke site here:
Starring the computer
Have you ever wondered about what goes on in the mind of movie directors when they shoot a film needing computers to be part of the action? I do. I think many of them dread it. Unless they are dime-a-dozen, straight-to-video directors, or doing deliberate period pieces, they must curse the fact that no matter how impressive and timeless the day’s latest computers look during shooting, something deep inside must know that within a couple of years, viewers will be distracted from the plot by those quirky, quaint, old-fashioned computers. For example, who can lose themselves in Terminator 2, when an Atari is used to hack an ATM?
Of course, then you get the other extreme in which directors go crazy with futuristic vision, such as Tom Cruise in Minority Report in which he waves arms in the air to control a computer, based, of course, on today’s understanding of computers.
So, I would like to suggest a change to the great adage of show biz so that it now says, “never work with children, animals, or computers”!
If you would like a walk down memory lane, Starring The Computer is a simple site that catalogues real computers that have appeared in movies and tv shows over the years. It gives you a screenshot of the computer in action and a brief synopsis of the computer’s involvement in the plot.
Some highlights for a couple of old computers I had:
- Atari – Big, Joshua Tree, and Married with children
- Commodore 64 – Electric Dreams, Red Dwarf, and Three Colours: Red
- Amiga – Disorderlies, Get Smart Again, and Betrayed
- Tandy TRS – Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, The Royal Tenenbaums, and, most fittingly, Revenge of the Nerds.
You can walk down your digital memory lane (thanks to the tip off by my favourite geek, Brett Monten) at Starring The Computer.
Have a listen to us talking about Starring The Computer:
Drama Button
Not sure if this is really classed as a website, but it is a bit of fun. I suggest keeping it open on a screen at work for those moments when someone is just being overly dramatic. Then you would click the only button on the website and play a dramatic sting that goes – da, da, daaaaaaaa!
Here are some moments that might warrant this little fanfare:
- Your partner tells you they are pregnant
- Your boss says “can I have a word with you”
- A child claims the dog ate their homework
- The waiter brings your bill to the table
- A police officer pulls you over, walks up to your window, and says that you were clocked going over the speed limit
- You’re watching neighbours or home and away or any other schmaltzy production and you just hit the sound effect whenever they do those frozen-botox looks of shock.
Add the sound effect to your life at the drama button.
I am afraid radio got taken to new heights of drama in this segment as we play with the Drama Button – you’ve been warned!
Sean’s Snapshot
Sean has spotted a pretty cool dude chilling in his car at the lights – at least he looked cool at first, until the row of little toy dogs along the dashboard became visible. It’s a dog eat dog world out there on them streets!
