The Internet of Things…for Advertising
Tremendousness is very honored to have been asked by the American Advertising Federation (AAF) to create the identity for their upcoming ADMERICA conference. ADMERICA is AAF’s annual gathering for education, inspiration, innovation, collaboration and celebration and happens June 2015 in Las Vegas. The event features their Diversity Achievement & Mosaic Awards, The National Student Advertising Competition, and culminates with The American Advertising Awards (formerly the National ADDY Awards).
Our goal was to create a poster that would convey a sense of celebration, reflect a world of diversity, and in some way feature the process of advertising itself—the players, the collaboration, the technology and of course the products!
Quick aside: one of our absolute favorite movies is Art & Copy by Doug Pray, which is a great inside look at iconic advertising campaigns such as ‘Got Milk?,’ ‘I Want my MTV,’ and Apple’s ‘1984.’
We had a lot of early ideas but none seemed to capture the breadth of what we were hoping for. You know how the creative process can be when you’re looking at good ideas but you know in your gut that you’re just not there yet. But in talking about what was lacking and discussing what we needed to capture, the idea came out naturally. Our North Star: “This poster should be like the Internet of Things… but for advertising.”
Hitting on the right idea is a great feeling. It can make me feel like a “wrestler” on TV whose opponent is stunned and lying there helplessly in the center of the ring, and I’m climbing up on the turnbuckle preparing to finish him off. Extreme? Yeah, maybe I watched a little too much Ric Flair as a kid—but it’s the feeling I’m talking about. You know you’ve got it under control, you can see everything, and now it’s just a matter of execution.
This poster what we call an ecosystem. We do these all the time for companies who want employees, stockholders, or customers to see the big picture. In this example we represent a simplified advertising process that starts with writing and brainstorming and continues through creative, audience testing, and multi-channel delivery. The process winds its way around the United States and ends in celebration at the big event in Las Vegas, with the city skyline illustrated as products. Advertising is of course all about products so we’ve represented some of the major categories throughout the map. Binding all of that together is a bottom layer of planning and technology.
Celebration, diversity, process, products. Our Internet of Things for the AAF.
