Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Alien Invasion?





I've been sporadic with my postings because the office had to be closed down for the rest of the week after the steam explosion, and so we've been scrambling to catch up to the clients' schedules this week. Oh, fun.

But in the meantime, did any of you realize that counterfeit Harry Potter books are such a large problem in China? Which to me, seems bizarre --- faking a book. Maybe I'm naive, but it seemed like one of the very few objects you just couldn't make a knock off from. Yeah, sure - maybe making illegal copies of said book is a realistic problem. But these fake Harry Potters are actually books that CLAIM to be part of the series by JK Rowling, and make lots of money off of really excited Chinese children until it is (generally quickly) discovered they are of a much poorer quality, and leave out many of the main characters and settings. This isn't a problem in English speaking countries, because there was such hype and craze over the exact release date of all of these books. But the translated versions aren't as strictly distributed, since they usually don't get published in mass until after the English ones. So when that happens you get:



(actual book cover, actually sold.)

More soon.

6 comments:

Thinking In Vain said...

I did not realize that about Harry Potter.

Although, I did here something about entire books being put online (English versions). All I can say is if it's true, someone give that guy a job...

Best part of the post though? The sloth video - totally made my Thursday.

Thinking In Vain said...

p.s. Good luck with the scrambling. I too find that fun. ;)

anna kate said...

haha thanks - agreed on all counts.

good luck with the job decision, i'm sure everything will turn out well!

RFB said...

Get thee to a bloggery, woman.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure it just goes without saying the disillusionment I feel with the industry. I am sure that you can understand, especially being at McCann-Erickson...but does this also make me us the scum we cannot bear in other people?

Needless to say, we all know about McCann's recent and not so recent affairs with immorality: $1 billion contract with the pentagon to recruit soldiers, and indirectly brand the war or terror, the hundreds and millions of dollars in tax fraud, the gluttonous mastercard "priceless" campaign that continues to sink our middle & lower class deeper and deeper into financial recession.

All that is reasonable however, with the exception of the tax fraud, because hey we're advertising - we can excuse all efforts of manipulation, no need to fool ourselves.

What kills me though is that we are now working with a company called tom's shoes. did you know this? If you are not familiar, they are a progressive for profit business that is revolutionary all unto their own. I first read about them on Seth Godin's blog and was blown away. We have a company here who is completely self-made, is clean from the rapture of the advertising industry - pure, honest and good.

You can imagine my surprise, when it was announced internally that they were one of our clients. That we plan to reinvent their already thriving brand, that we are to head their marketing, much of their pr, and be the backbone behind their success I assume. Understandable even, now that we are desperately trying to clean up our reputation. BUT no, we are actually charging this company. This company that I assume will not be cutting profits for a few years, that is going to be butchered and attacked when word gets out. McCann can afford to support and invest on this company, if anything it would help us out - but, with over $8+ billion in revenue per year, we just decide...hey, lets not stop here?

Socially responsible and the advertising indsutry - both good things on their own. But they cannot be mixed, advertising will always destroy and come out on top. A terrible bloody disaster and the helpless remains of a potentially world changing company is what will be left with, and at our expense as well. Everyone EXPECTS more from these good companies, the few that there are, they have potential and opportunity. Why would they do this? Why would we accept such a project? We all know the answer to the latter of course.

What do you think, and in turn what would your readers think?

An innocent company just another casualty in the ad world, the blood on the hands of McCann. We are not for the good-hearted.

Unknown said...

To start off, I selected the top half of the sky and copy/pasted it onto a new layer. After that, I adjusted the Shadows/Highlights to darken up the mood a bit. After that, I used my buddy "google" (Seriously - TRY these guys. They're gonna be huge.) and did an image search for stormy clouds. I actually have a bunch of my own in a personal arsenal, but for the means of this tutorial, we'll use all fully accessible items. I then pasted the stormy clouds over the top of my scene, adjusted the values to a more purple tone and blended in the bottom half.

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