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.
A little case study for our Kentucky for Kentucky gold KFC chicken bone necklaces. Video by Stanley Sievers.
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.
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.
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.” ”
It was my beautiful wife's birthday yesterday. This was her epic 'Tom Cruise' themed birthday card. Thanks baby Clay for helping me put this bad-ass birthday card together.
I loved this movie back in the day. So rad.
We recently launched a much needed new website for Cornett. It's dope, check it out. The 'ABOUT' page on our brand new and improved Cornett website has been receiving quite a bit of buzz recently. You can read about it on both Fast Company and PSFK. Check out the 'ABOUT' page here.
“Taking inspiration from the Internet’s all-abiding love for things organized neatly, the Kentucky-based design and branding firm asked their employees to come to work with their 10 essential items: the objects they just couldn’t live without. After photographing what their employees brought in, they made the resulting gallery the company’s corporate “About” page.”
All of my gear.
Hit a farm pond and did a little bass fishing on the fly with my buddy Colin last night. Good times.
Big thanks to everyone that voted for 'Beardvertising'. We won the People's Voice Award in the professional services category. We're stoked, that kicks all kinds of ass!
Beardvertising has joined Jay Z, Beyonce and Pharrell in being a nominee for the 18th Annual The Webby Awards in the professional services category. We're stoked! We're competing for both The Webby Award and The Webby People's Voice Award. If you got a sec please hook us up with a quick vote for the People's Voice Award. Do it for the beard. Thank you!
Our #ShareTheLex campaign recently won a bunch of ADDY awards. It took home the big ‘Best Of Show’ award, ‘Best Social Campaign’ award, the ‘Ralph Gabbard Broadcast’ award, and a gold ADDY for video (branded content, more than 60 seconds). It also won the ‘Tom Cruise Certificate Of Scientology Excellence’. Our Beardvertising campaign also won Best Copy-Writing and took home a gold for a Non-Traditional campaign.
Our "Hipsterish Brands Reimagined As Their Corporate Counterparts" project earned a ton of press. It's been featured in Fast Company TWICE, Time Magazine, Digiday, Brand New, Buzzfeed and a bunch of other rad media outlets. Hit the links below to check out some of the press.
"Hipster Brands With Corporate Logos" - Brand New
"19 Hipster Logos Rebranded As Evil Corporate Doppelgangers" - Fast Co.Design
"16 Hipster Companies Rebranded As The Corporate Giants They Hate" - Buzzfeed
"Experiment gives hip brands uncool logos" - Digiday
"See Your Beloved Hipster Brands Transformed Into Uncool Corporate Giants" - Fast Co.Create
"Here's What Hipster Brand Logos Would Look Like If They Were Redesigned To Be Corporate" - TIME
"Hipster Brand Logos Gone Horribly Corporate" - Design TAXI
"Hipster Brands Become Corporate Sell-Outs With These Logo Redesigns" - Creative Bloq
"Cringe-Worthy Corporate Makeovers Of Hip Indie Brands" - Laughing Squid
We’ve all seen the corporate logos reimagined as the hipster logos. We’ve all seen the hipster logo generator and the hipster logo guidelines. They are both awesome. How bout those NFL teams reimagined as hipster logos. Hilarious.
We (Cornett) thought it would be fun to reimagine a bunch of hipster-ish brands as their evil corporate counterparts. We got together with several different members of our design team here at Cornett and we got to work on making a bunch of hipsterish brands look a little more corporate. The results are pretty damn funny. It was also a fun little agency side project.
Notice Urban Outfitters? The logo is the same either way. Get it? They’re a corporate hipster brand, ha.
Team Cornett Designers: Ace Hotel by Nick Child, Deus Motorcycles by Tim Jones, Vice by Jason Kaufman, Band Of Outsiders by Danielle Podeszek, Dollar Shave Club by Steve Broderson, Fab by Clay Gibson, Freeman’s Sporting Club by Nick Child, Brooklyn Brewery by Shannon Adams, Dogfish Head Beer by Shannon Adams, Intelligentsia Coffee by Bobby Oakley, Brooklyn Nets (we didn’t do this one), Sight Glass Coffee by Clay Gibson, St. Archers Beer by Shannon Adams, Urban Outfitters (we didn’t do this one), Warby Parker by Clay Gibson, Poler Stuff by Tim Jones, State Bicycles by Nick Child, Mast Brothers Chocolate by Tim Jones, Best Made by Tim Jones. Layout by Kris Ange.
Ever hear of an indoor throwing star range and sake bar? Neither had I, until this one day a few months back when this crazy idea for an ‘indoor throwing star range’ popped into my head. To my inner 12 year old self the concept was a dream come true. Alcohol and throwing stars. Throwing stars and alcohol. Everyone loves throwing stars and everyone loves alcohol. Everyone loves ninjas. I love ninjas. Why the hell didn’t something like this exist? Seeing a need for an establishment that allows people to pound sake and chuck throwing stars, I set out to bring this business to life.....on the Interwebs of course. I enlisted a group of trained ninja assassins at Cornett to make this happen: Kris Kross Ange on the design, Golden Nick Child on the video, and Shammy Shamick Gaworski on the web development.
We purchased a very long and awesome url www.ninjasindoorthrowingstarrange.com. We created a hipsterish logo. We then created a simple one page website packed full of ninja goodness. Stuff like WuTang Clan lyrics, ninja warriors and Japanese curse words. We put together a simple little video based on Youtube’s ‘best death scene ever’. We even made a fake gmail account under the alias Satou Watanabe. Everything came together like ancient oriental magic and ‘Ninjas Indoor Throwing Star Range’ was birthed and thrown like a throwing star onto the world wide web. Of course the Internet loved it.
No one knew what to believe, but they all believed it to be awesome. Everyone wanted to believe it was real. Everyone was talking, tweeting, and Facebooking about this crazy throwing star range coming to Lexington, Kentucky in the spring of 2014. No one could believe that Lexington, KY (not Brooklyn, NY) was going to be the first city in the US to have an indoor throwing star range. People were sending us emails asking if this was real. People were sending us emails asking how they could become a franchisee (we received seven of those emails). The media was emailing us and asking if they could interview the ninjas behind this. People even emailed trying to sell us throwing stars. Everyone was excited about pounding sake and chucking throwing stars.
The media jumped in a started writing about this indoor throwing star range. It got big in Japan. Ninjas have always been big in Japan. It was written about on Guns.com. America loves guns. I faked an interview with Yahoo. I felt bad about that. i don't feel bad about using the alias 'Timothy San Bernardino', I love that name. We came really close to dressing up like ninjas and going live with a local news station. I really wished that had happened but unfortunately it didn't. Check out some of the stuff the media had to say about ‘Ninjas Indoor Throwing Star Range’ below:
“If this website is to be believed, come 2014, Lexington, Kentucky could easily replace Orlando, Florida as the most popular vacation spot in the country. Because next spring the city will be host to the nation's first indoor throwing star range and sake bar.” - Gizmodo
“Ninjas' website links out to a Lexington-based marketing agency called Cornett, so there's unfortunately good reason to think this might be nothing more than a publicity stunt.” - Gizmodo
"Why the word “f*ck” is displayed in large katakana characters on the website, though, we’re not sure.” - Rocket News 24 (Nice little easter egg on the site)
“"Ninjas" and "Kentucky" are two nouns that very rarely manage to show up in the same sentence. But all that's about to change when the first indoor throwing star range opens in the Bluegrass State this coming spring.” - io9
“Ninjas is an upcoming indoor throwing star range and will be the first of its kind in Kentucky.” - Laughing Squid
“When we asked about owner Watanabe’s background, San Bernardino stated simply, “he is a ninja.” He adds that Watanabe owns several dojos (martial arts schools) across the state of Kentucky and, many years ago, operated a now-defunct water park.” -Yahoo
So why the hell would we want to make a website and video for a fake business? Why does Tom Cruise do what he does? We'll never know. We do know that ninjas, throwing stars, blow guns, Wu Tang Clan lyrics and alcohol are an awesome combination. Our little bad ass throwing star range earned Kentucky and Lexington a little media. It earned Cornett a little media. It gave the Internet some fun content to play with. Hopefully the websites that wrote about it got a ton of shares and views. I think the Laughing Squid article had over 4000 tweets. Maybe it sparked some ideas. Maybe it will make someone rich, ninja rich. Maybe it created some awesome memories of throwing throwing stars as a child. Who knows, maybe we’ll turn this joke into a reality and end up opening the world’s first throwing star range and sake bar later this year. Until, then go get your ninja on online.
We just dropped a new case study video for our 'Beardvertising' campaign. Check it out below and you can read all about it on Agency Spy. Big thanks to my buddy Ian Friley for putting the crush down on this video.
My daughters recently graced the front page of Reddit and imgur with this hilarious photo of my six year old feeding her baby sister with her foot. Or as one redditor liked to call it: feeting the baby”. The photo has been making the rounds on the old Internet. It was picked up by Buzzfeed, the Huffington Post, etc. While we don’t condone, encourage or ever want to see another ‘feeting’ going down in our house, we think the photo is pretty damn funny. We applaud her multitasking skills. She appears to be like her daddy, lazy with a side of ADD.
The Romanian ad pub IQuads recently interviewed me for their AdStory series. I talked about Tom Cruise, naked Modonna in Playboy, Sonny Crockett, buying weed, acid trips, advertising, some of my favorite ad campaigns, my family, Cornett-IMS, Kentucky for Kentucky, Walking Dead, fly fishing, etc. Read it in English by clicking here and read it in Romanian by clicking here.
Kentucky for Kentucky and our famous mofo 'Fried Chicken Candles' made an appearance on Good Morning America today. Right in there with Beyoncé. Check it out below. Kentucky FTW.
