DIGIDAY AGENCY INNOVATION CAMP

I recently had the great pleasure of attending Digiday’s Agency Innovation Camp in Vail, Colorado as a mentor and a speaker. 

“Digiday’s Agency Innovation Camp is a unique — by invitation only — multi-day event, created for the brightest minds from today’s leading digital advertising agencies. These are the millennials creating change and innovation — the digital natives who are rethinking and reshaping brand communication through technology and a continuously evolving media landscape.

Over the course of three days, these rising digital media stars focus on modern-day media buying, planning and tech innovation in think tank sessions and workshops. An emphasis on collaboration and leadership is woven throughout the camp, as participants are divided into teams to ultimately compete in a Brand Hackathon.”

I had a blast! I absorbed so much positive millenial energy, I feel like I’m ten years younger. Maybe I feel older. I don’t know. There were around 80 young digital natives attending the camp from agencies all over. They were split up into eight teams that competed in a series of challenges. The most important challenge being a big ‘Brand Hackathon’. All of the teams we’re given a brief, a budget and were tasked with coming up with a pitch to be presented in front of a panel of four judges. My team (the Blue Team) put the epic Digiday smack down and WON it all. They took home the trophy for the big ‘Brand Hackathon’ and they took the trophy for being the overall ‘Camp Champions’. Hell yeah, it was an epic victory! 

While at the Digiday Agency Innovation Camp, I gave a 15 minute talk on "How to Sell your Ideas Internally”. It was fun. A brief description of that talk along with a video clip and my presentation slides can be found below. 

“The struggle to sell your ideas is real! For most young professionals, the battle begins right there in their own agency. Way before their idea hits the client, they’ve got to get it through the gauntlet of trained idea killers: the art directors, creative directors, account planners, chief innovation officers, chief strategy officers, chief insight officers, chief technology officers, chief sitting bull, the officer officers, the mailman and the chief chief of agency chiefs. Unfortunately for most, many ideas never make it out of the notebook. It’s not their fault, they’re just not properly trained to fight for their ideas. We’ll discuss how to give those ‘idea killers’ a swift kick to the nuts.”

CREATIVE MORNINGS

Myself and Griffin VanMeter (Kentucky for Kentucky) will be speaking at Creative Mornings in Louisville this Friday June 12th from 8:30am-10:00am. We'll be speaking on the topic of Revolution. The event will take place outside at Resurfaced. We'll give away some gear and we'll also have a little Kentucky for Kentucky pop-up-shop set up at the event. We can't wait. The event is free BUT you have to register and seating is limited. Registration opens on Monday June 8th at 9:00am. Register here. 

HEAVY METAL BRANDS

"Heavy Metal makes everything better" - that's what my friend in 8th grade once told me right before he bit the head off a baby bat.  To this day, I still think he's right (even though he got rabies).  Heavy Metal does make everything better.  We decided to apply that crazy 8th grader's wisdom to a fun project at Cornett.  Would Heavy Metal make a corporate brand's branding better?  We asked members of the Cornett design team to pick a few different brands and make their branding metal.  Just as we suspected, it worked.  

Credits: Clay Gibson (Tylenol, Benadryl, Kleenex), Matt Newton (American Girl Doll, Fancy Feast, Disney), Matt Bitley (Anthropologie, Lululemon), Randy Steward (Mary Kay, Tampax), Chris Adams (Google), Ivy Oddis (Midol), Lauren Woods (Pinterest) Layout by Kris Ange

Heavy Metal Brands Press

“Heavy metal-inspired typography reinvents iconic logos” - Creative Bloq

“Famous Brand Logos Redesigned With Typography Inspired By Heavy Metal Music” - Design Taxi

“ROCK OUT WITH YOUR FONT OUT: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BRANDS GET A HEAVY METAL MAKEOVER” - Fast Company

“Corporate Logos Get A Heavy Metal Facelift”-Metal Injection

“Popular Corporate Brands Re-imagined as Metal Logos” - Metal Sucks

“Heavy Metal Brands” - Brand New

“11 corporate logos re-imagined as heavy metal bands” - AUX

LEX TALKS

We're doing a LEX TALKS at the Livery in Lexington, KY on Wednesday, April 29th. It's free but you'll need to register if you wanna go. Register here. We'll make sure it gets weird and awkward. 

"Watch the Most Strangely Hilarious Addy Awards Best of Show Acceptance Speech Ever"

Our Kentucky for Kentucky ‘Gold Plated Kentucky Fried Chicken Bone Necklaces’ recently took home the big ‘Best Of Show’ award at the AAF Lexington ADDY Awards. Hell yeah! Unfortunately we could be there to accept the award. We did create (with the help of Ian Friley) this little acceptance speech video that was shown at the event. Apparently the speech was a hit. It was also featured on ADWEEK. Check it out below. 

“Watch the Most Strangely Hilarious Addy Awards Best of Show Acceptance Speech Ever KFC necklaces were just the beginning” - ADWEEK 

#SHARETHELEX PART TWO

We just launched a new #ShareTheLex video for VisitLEX. Once again we had a blast working on this. My buddy George crushed it as Daniel Boone and my buddy Ian (Kong Productions) killed it on the video. You can ready more about it on Skift and on the Cornett blog. Check it. 

FAKE FLIER #8 : RENT-A-TEENAGER

It's been a little bit since I made one of my infamous fake fliers. Here's the latest : Rent-A-Teenager. We threw it up on Reddit where it would have made the front page but unfortunately an admin took it down because it had an email address on it. That didn't stop it from making the front page of Imgur where it had 480k views in under 24 hours. From there, the Huffington Post picked it up and wrote a little story about it. Hell yeah for another successful fake flier. 

 

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Kentucky Fried Chicken Bone Gold Necklaces

Last week we (Kentucky for Kentucky) launched a rad new product - Kentucky Fried Chicken Bone Gold Necklaces. We worked with local jewelry designer Meg C to handcraft gold necklaces  made with real bones from a Kentucky Fried Chicken 8-piece chicken dinner. No joke, read all about it on our blog. The necklaces sold-out in a few hours and received a ton of press. It was a win/win. They were featured on the LA Times, Daily Mail, People Magazine, Eater, FoodBeast, Complex, Metro, USA Today, PSFK, CNET and a ton of other news outlets around the world. Lots of hot television news action with NBC and ABC. Boomtown. 

A few photos and a kick-ass video below by the talented Stanley Sievers. 



5-WORD WEBBY SPEECH

This past Monday several of us at Cornett got lucky and had the pleasure of attending the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences 18th Annual Webby Awards in New York City. Somehow our ‘Beardvertising’ website won a People’s Voice Award. We had a blast, it was an amazing evening. Like Buzzfeed said, it was the ‘Internet party of the year’. Funny man Patton Oswalt hosted. The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee was in the house to celebrate the 25th anniversary of his invention (the Web). The “Godmother of Punk” Patti Smith presented to person of the Year to Bansky. Questlove presented the Webby for Artist of Year to De La Soul. Speaking of De La Soul, ‘Three Feet High And Rising’ was the first Compact Disc I ever owned. That makes me old. George Takei was in the house talking smack about William Shatner. It was really awesome to see all of our Internet heroes (gangstas) under one roof.

A famous tradition of the Webby Awards is their “5-Word Speech”. Check out our “5-Word Speech” below. According to my dad it was a horrible “5-Word Speech”. That speech was for you dad, I love you. 

American Marketing Association’s ‘Kentucky Kicks Ass’ Case Study

The American Marketing Association recently published a case study on both ‘Kentucky for Kentucky’ and our ‘Kentucky Kicks Ass’ campaign in it’s May 2014 Marketing News issue. Check out the full article here. Thanks Molly for the great case study!

“Peggy Bendel, president of the New York-based travel marketing firm Bendel Communications International and a board member for the Association of Travel Marketing Executives (ATME), says that the “Kentucky Kicks Ass” messaging is disruptive and untraditional, as is the effort, itself. “They’re not only using some of the iconic Kentucky things, like bourbon and the Kentucky Derby, to appeal to tourists, but it also seems to be appealing to people who live in Kentucky or who are from Kentucky who’ve moved elsewhere,” she says. “Anything that raises the visibility and positive awareness of a destination helps with tourism.”

Adds Krista Pappas, also an ATME board member and the COO of Somerville, Mass.-based DuVine Cycling and Adventure Co., a marketing futurist and the former head of travel media at NYTimes.com: “It drives value to the state for sure, and that’s what [the state and the Kentucky for Kentucky team] want. … It’s reaching an audience that [the state] wouldn’t otherwise have, to promote Kentucky in a way that it otherwise wouldn’t be.” ”
— American Marketing Association