Advertising is advertising because of the people. You get to meet some of the most colorful, interesting, amazing, creative, innovative, charismatic, etc. people in this industry and you know without a doubt if they didn’t have the industry of advertising, you don’t know what the heck these people would have done with their lives.

Case in point: Peter Arnell. Peter runs his own branding company and is most famous of late for his work for PepsiCo, including the new Obama-like Pepsi logo (the accompanying leaked manifesto to PepsiCo clients) and the infamous Tropicana package redesign. To learn more about this man and to gauge where-or-not you may want to one day work for him or with him, read this bio from Newsweek.

The essence of online banner ads are that they’re “so of the moment”. Take for instance the just launched March Madness banners we help build for our Client (who we will not name) to run exclusively on the ESPN.com web portal. Since they are promotional ads for people to sign up to the ESPN 2009 March Madness game, it will only run for a short time before the sign-up period time is over. Then these banners which took time to build/animate, then to make revisions with the client, QA, traffic with the ad servers and then run on-site — will soon never see the glaze of public eyes again. They will then live on the local drive of someone’s computer, to lay there until they are erased or totally forgotten.

Sort of reminds me of the Cherry Blossoms in Washington D.C. Every spring, they come to bloom, and for a period of 2 weeks people can interact, glaze, smell and appreciate their beauty. And then just like that, they fall off the branches of the trees, not to re-appear until another year passes. If you didn’t see them bloom for that short span, you would never have known they existed.

But thanks to our trustly ole’ server, I have one of the original banners March Madness banners here for you to view, even if it no lower will “bloom” in spring.

Here is another banner from the same campaign.

Agency industry blog AgencySpy did a review on our client’s project — ScapeNation. Its always good to see reviews and write-ups on work we have done and the article is balanced to say the least. The pros is that they believe the virtual world that Red Tettemer created is good and solid — and since we helped them, that sounds good to us. The cons is that the writer believes 2009 and beyond will be harder for virtual worlds to make money (and ScapeNation is a for-profit endeavor).

Its an interesting read. Click here to read the full post.

So Tom Kaczynski is our Director of Flash during the day and during the rest of his days, nights, weekends, any free time of consciousness, he is a incredible graphic artist. He has been consistently published in the quarterly book “Mome” (by Fantagraphics Books), one of the industry’s leading contemporary anthologies.

On March 6, The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) will host a retrospective of comic artworks published in the Harvey and Eisner award-nominated quarterly Mome, where Tom will be presented with other fine artists from the book including Sophie Crumb, Tim Hensley, R. Kikuo Johnson, Zak Sally, and Dash Shaw.

If you are in the area and would like to attend, please click on this link for more info and read the spotlight below: