There are continuing troubles ahead for traditional TV news programs as the most productive large, demographic segment for many marketers (adults, ages 18 - 49) shifts elsewhere. The first paragraph of this Ad Age article sums up the situation:
“The big three TV network newscasts lost about 1.2 million viewers last year, and advertising on their three big morning news shows fell to an estimated $1.03 billion. The average viewer is 60 years old, and the demographic marketers most want to reach is more likely to be facing a computer screen than a TV screen when the evening news comes on.”
Author Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife) gives a wonderful talk about creativity and how it intertwines with her/our lives. You’ll have to wait until the end to see what’s in the bag at her feet.
On the way back from Ad:Tech in San Francisco, I saw this Navy SEALs’ ad in the May issue of National Geographic Adventure magazine. I think it is an outstanding example of strategy, concept and art direction. I spent several minutes (to no avail) looking for the SEALs the ad introduces, which, of course, is part of the point. Here is another ad in the series.
Recently on Surfin’ Safari, WebKit—the engine used for Apple’s Safari browser—introduced CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) gradients in their latest nightly builds. The ability to create gradients with code and without the need for Photoshop or other image editing applications is a great enhancement in giving developers more flexibility when it comes to adding depth found in modern web design.
Two of my all time favorite authors, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates, coined the phrase, ”Code [your project] as if the next guy to maintain it is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.” I truly wish more people would take that to heart. All too often I am working on a maintenance task, and I find that I spend more time trying to figure out what the hell the code is doing than I spend actually fixing the bug.
Take, for instance, the following real code snippet that a colleague of mine recently sent me…
