That's right: RDJ in all his puzzling, saucy beauty.

Now it’s no secret that I love me some Robert Downey Jr (and maybe the subtle hinting at his crotchal region).  However, the thing that really intrigued me was the puzzle box on which our hero is perched.  It’s Augmented Reality, and Esquire just did so many things right with it.  The basic premise is that you can hold the box up to your webcam (after installing the nifty AR software) and the magazine will come to life right before your eyes.  RDJ jumps off the page and delivers his monologue brimming with flustered charm as though one were watching an Iron Man redux as opposed to holding a page in front of a webcam.

Other AR segments include funny jokes told in person by a beautiful woman, a Lexus ad where you control the speed of the car with the magazine, and a sample jazz song from a featured artist.

I mentioned that Esquire did several things right:

1. Not out with the old…just make it some new.  It used an already beloved column as a guinea pig.  Readers love funny jokes told by a beautiful woman, and it’s a logical leap that they’ll probably love it even more in person.  Take something the consumer is already comfortable with and make it avant garde.
2. Let the advertiser try it.  Readers will abide by it (and maaaaaybe even think it’s cool), the mag can charge higher rates for cool new technology, and Lexus gets to use infrared to find your face.
3. Keep it right on target.  Every issue of Esquire has a theme (perhaps based on the assumption that men are mono-thinkers) and this issue’s theme is…the Augmented Reality!  Everything in the issue and on the landing page points straight to one thing: try the damn AR already. From the front and center HOW TO and easy download buttons to the nifty video with the mag Editor explaining the wonders of modern technology, the only thing that could distract said man from his objective is wanting to know what the creepy JC Penney’s kids are doing.

In short, I love this idea, its execution, and its cover star.  And I plan to subscribe to Esquire until the dying day of multimedia magazine production.

Click through to watch the video after the jump

I stumbled upon Annie Leonard’s “Story of Stuff” through Facebook.  One of my friends had joined a group called Buy Nothing Day, an anti-consumerism play for people opposed to the buy! buy! buy! mentality of the day after Thanksgiving (Black Friday).

Now, my daisy chain-making hippie dippie side cheers when I see things like this, and my evil soul sucking business major side hisses and boos.  Which leaves me smack dab in the middle: a pragmatic observer of the things gone right or wrong with this manifestation of activism.

Number 1: The means of communication

It’s a video, so 10 points right there.  Oh, it’s an online video?  5 bonus points.  Wait, it’s based off a book and has a blog with several international versions?  Okay fine: infinity points for communication types.  But in all seriousness, the vessel is key to understanding, and the Story of Stuff has it’s recyclable, compostable, and non-toxic containers down pat.

Number 2: The message

I love a good flash animation.  Know why?  It actually focuses on the message!  This animation is primo because it’s clean, on message, and is used for all the branding of the video.  I know plenty of for-profit brands who could use this kind of consistent messaging across all corners of their brands.

Number 3: How it found me

This video is something I wanted to see.  I may not agree with it 100%, but I personally find it interesting and applicable to my life.  But before I could decide whether I wanted to see it, it had to get its grubby little internet paws on my eyeballs.  How did it do this?  By appealing to my network and sparking interest in other actions.  The group on Facebook that my friend was a member of wasn’t even for the video: it was for an event (Buy Nothing Day) that was created in the spirit of the video.  And my friend didn’t even directly show me the event.  The fact that she joined the group showed up in my news feed without me even asking her what she’s been up to lately.

I realize that these points are not the newest news, but I think it’s always good to take a step back to realize just how many ways there are to get a message out there in the ether and into the brain of the people who you want to use it.

And in the spirit of Buy Nothing Day, watch this SNL short:

Big ups to The Consumerist for this one

What’s that you ask.  Why no: I don’t think it could get any better.  But I’m always open to suggestion.

The house!

The living room.

The bathroom.

The backyard.

Riley! Our 10-year-old border collie mix.

So…when are you coming to visit?

Anyone who know me notice anything (or…multiple things) strange about this assessment?  The question now is of course two fold: why is the internet wrong and how can I fix it.

We going to pump...your website up.

The virtue of being at a smallish firm is such that I have a lot of freedom to learn.  I’ve done everything from designing a logo for a kids soccer team to coding HTML to making sales calls and finding new business.

Translation: a lot of self-teaching and observation.

I spend the time not spent writing proposals brushing up on my skills (and creating new ones out of thin air).   Enter Lynda.com, a way cool resource for plopping in front of the computer and cramming knowledge into one’s screen-wearied brain.  Lately, an ecclectic guy named Deek has been teaching me the eccentricities of Photoshop, a tool I’ve always known about but never really gotten to know.  Photoshop to me is like that barista you order coffee from every morning and are always friendly to, but all of a sudden the zombpocalypse occurs right in the middle of your caramel macchiato and you find yourselves side-by-side barricading the front doors and sawing off steamer wands to slow down the onslaught of the undead.

I digress.

My point is, even at $25/month, Lynda is a really great resource, especially for an entry level aspiring technical marketer like myself.

We’ve been dreaming of full-sized refrigerators, comfy couches in our very own finished basement, tending watermelons* in our garden, and hearing the click-clack of Riley’s toenails on the hardwood floor.  Especially now that we’ve overcome the hurdles of employment and transportation, housing is beckoning like a siren song of chili dogs over a cold, rainy carnival parking lot.

*Not kidding.  WATERMELONS.

So I give you…the paper chain:

Hung in between the closet and the microwave.

We made the chain for our own sanity.  Every day, we can get out of bed and remove one link, knowing this simple action brings us one day closer to the NoPo hearth and home we’ve been dreaming of.

I had dinner tonight with three friends from my honors business class, two of whom are in temporarily bunking in the PSU dorms like me and the other of whom is temporarily bunking in Vancouver, WA (which apparently has an adult version of Chuck E. Cheese and also lower property taxes).

We count among us…

The marketer turned nerd: Working 30-40 hours at a technical marketing firm with a PR/media relations gig with a food cart (go KOi Fusion PDX) on the side.

The accountant: Doing the same internship I had last year (with a different firm) and we all know how well THAT went for everyone.  Granted he’s approximately 10x smarter and 3x more devoted to accounting than I, so I have vast amounts of hope for this as a viable career path.  He spends 2 hours wrestling with printers and mailing labels and goes on jaunts at Lloyd Center around 3:00 PM when the team runs out of work since apparently even accountants don’t want to account when it’s 90 degrees and the Nord’s half yearly sale is on.

The downfall of number crunchers everywhere

The aspiring accountant: Working at a health insurance company for the second summer in a row, this time in internal audit.  She’s headed back to UO for a Masters of Accounting in the fall, but for now she passes the days hunting down supervisors to edit work papers that are #104 on the top 50 ToDo’s of any boss she set her sights on.

...I need real work.

The “corporate” retail goddess: She interned at a large retail chain last summer and was hired on to work at corporate.  Unfortunately, no one at the company bears resemblance to the two friends profiled above and had trouble with the basic math of open positions (0) + jobs offered (15) = salaried college graduate “supervising” management in store locations.  She passes the time asking 10-year retail veterans about the basics of inventory tracking that she’ll never use in a true calling position.

Maybe she’ll have a chance in the virtual corporate word.

So here’s the basic lesson: we’re all working jobs that aren’t great, living day to day in temporary situations that may or may not involved game tokens and frequent karoke nights at bar named for gleeful reptiles.  But we’re happy as clams and thrilled to pieces to have any kind of income at all and be in a city as awesome as Portland.  Even if we have to fight the meanest of photocopiers to stay here.

ALSO…I got a bike and I think I’m in love.

Yep, love affair.

Everything in advertising and marketing needs a purpose.  In an ideal world, every dollar spent of client money would translate into more than a dollar in return.  Call it ROI or just good business, but agencies won’t last long without making a return for clients.  The good agencies find the ways to infuse creativity into every step of the process, despite the fact that thinking strategically can often constipate any semblance of creative flow during your average brainstorming meeting.

Mantras and buzzwords are flying through my brain: no idea is a bad idea in brainstorming…strategic brand alignment…landing above the fold…it’s enough to make an intern throw up her hands, right?

However, crowd sourcing is still one of my favorite topics.  Tasks that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars, such as approving a promotional video, can now be handed off to the discerning filters of the internet for a fraction of the cost.  The value of popular opinion as a tool is so up for debate, it’s practically impossible to pin it down.  Sites like the Eternal Moonwalk have made crowd sourcing into a novelty, and engines like the one at Threadless have turned popular opinion into profit.

Crowdsourcing can also mean finding commonalities in the disjointed, such as this YouTube case study:

So in the spirit of crowd sourcing, have you stumbled upon any innovative and (nay I say it) profitable uses of public sentiment lately?

After two days of bed ridden sickness, I was ready to get back to work and back to the romp and fantasm of Portland. I traisped into work 20 minutes late (thanks a lot, Streetcar, for not running late when I’M running late) to find both my supervisors on early vacay/working from home.  After a quick permission email to leave early for the day, I promptly made like an obidient intern and GTFO’d.

I had my interview with the awesome folks at KOi Fusion, the awesome Korean taco stand I hope to be marketing/PRing for very soon.  I’ve also got another interview tomorrow morning with a marketing agency called 500 lb Marketing Solutions.  Multiple experience points, FTW!

After the interview, the beau met me (serendipitously) at the food carts on 9th and Alder.  There we discovered Spella Caffe, which Yelp was just loving ALL over.  The espresso truly was heaven, and the blended drink we went back for in the afternoon was heaven redux.

It spells delicious.

Next we headed to ye olde city of books (Powell’s) for an afternoon of time warp.  I managed to make it out with only one cycling book (I AM in Portland now) and a new sketchbook.  We headed over to Powell’s technical to help me bone up on my HTML skills, but I think we all know who had more fun perusing the tech-savvy shelves.

He's a voracious little reader.

Heading back to the streetcar, we (okay, I) was drawn to a little knitting shop I’ve had my eye on for a while.  The ambiance was perfect but the prices were…a bit pricey.  At least for this station in life.

Yes. Please.

Finally, we spent some quality time at First Thursday in the Pearl drinking some free wine and looking at modern art that, in the words of someone famous (and Max), “You could have done, but you didn’t.” (pictures to come on Facebook)

So that’s the story of a day in Portland.  Everyone reading this has either done everything I did today or should try everything I did today.