February 1, 2012 In Tinsley Blog

New Television Spot for Key Largo

By Dorn Martell

Our new spot for Key Largo took us from the edge of the Everglades to the bottom of the sea. Key Largo has long been known as the Dive Capital of the World, but our mission for this new spot is to show the world that it is much more. Key Largo is home to eco-adventure, world-class fishing, incredible ocean-front dining and some great places to just chill. This new spot encourages the viewer to “look deeper” into Key Largo.

January 17, 2012 In Tinsley Blog

New Television Spots for the Florida Keys & Key West

By Dorn Martell

Our first new spot, launched this winter, for Key West is all about art. And not the kind of art that’s all about matching a suburban couch. It’s the kind of art that makes you think, makes you feel and definitely gets your attention. In Key West we find that art and life are wonderfully intermingled and that everyone here is part of a massive performance piece.

Our new spot, “Island Made of Art”, is part of a 7 spot package that was shot over several months in 2011. Capturing the beauty and unique environments of the Florida Keys – from the Everglades to the Dry Tortugas – One World Productions and our team shot from ultralights, underwater, from sea planes, power boats, canoes and waist deep in mangroves. We met some very knowledgable and dedicated folks, as well as some truly strange people. But it was all an amazing adventure and we couldn’t be happier with the final product. The music was created by Audacity Recording in Hollywood, FL. Editorial & finishing by I Think Studios.

The results of this shoot are some of the most inspiring images we’ve ever captured. Stay tuned for more new spots over the coming weeks.

December 19, 2011 In Tinsley Blog

How Bad Creative Can Kill a Whole Medium

by Dorn Martell

I tried to listen to commercial radio this weekend, I really did. My wife and I were working in the garden and plugged in a boom box with no iPod dock and turned on the radio. I know, I know – no one does that any more. But we just thought that we could listen to some light holiday music to get us in the gardening mood. But after a couple of songs it started. An incessant barrage of horrific retail spots with “chain saw” voice announcers and horrible, aggressive sound effects and “music.” There were endless blocks dedicated to a new electronics retailer and a car dealer who is still ripping off the Ghost Busters theme song. Every single spot started on “11” and went up from there. We tried to tough it out, just to get through to something listenable, but the endless stream of mindless scripts read at a scream level got the best of us. ” The radio is all crap, Baby”, said my wife Adriana. “Yes it is, Honey, they must think we are all morons”, said I as I yanked the plug out of the wall. But, I couldn’t help but feel sad. Radio was such an important part of my childhood and it can still be an amazing medium. Some of our classic radio spots like “Michele” and “I love food” prove you can make a radio spot that people actually like and our retail advertising for the Huizenga School of Business got great numbers while refusing to wallow in the ditch of cliche retail radio tactics.

If commercial radio wants to stand a chance against iTunes, Pandora, Spotify and XM it will have to come to terms with the fact that some of the advertising they air is so abrasive and condescending that listeners will simply opt-out and choose to listen to the neighbors’ weed wacker instead.

November 7, 2011 In Tinsley Blog

Google Travel Conference

by Scott Sussman

I recently had the opportunity to attend The Travel Forward Conference at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. A group of approximately 120 individuals from the travel industry were presented the latest thinking from Google on how emerging technology can be integrated into marketing plans for travel related companies.

Currently half of all domestic travel is booked online and that continues to be a growing trend. Moreover, research for travel continues to be a growing area with over a billion travel related searches a day. Also, 70% of all travel related searches are not for a specific brand, but the search begins generically, this presents a tremendous opportunity for those in the travel industry. Google is making search more relevant by making it easier to access with less movement. For instance it is not necessary to leave the search results page to get hotel or flight rates. It is a rollover and click away.

Mobile is where Google sees the biggest growth in the next few years. Mobile traffic grew by 400% last year and that trend will increase with nearly a million new smart phones sold each day. About 50% of the population now has a smartphone. Smartphones can’t be viewed as an extension of a computer website. It is its own device and should have its own site. Mobile is a local based marketing opportunity as most purchases from this device are made within 20 miles of the transaction.

Mobile commerce is in its infancy, but will explode over the next two years. The much discussed Google Wallet is in test and should roll-out over the next year. Using Near Field Communications (NFC) technology (a chip in your phone) consumers will be able to purchase items without having to access their credit card from their wallets. The consumer will “wave” their phone over a device at the merchant and the transaction will be complete. This technology will also be used for boarding passes at airports.

Location based marketing will also develop over the next few years as messaging will be delivered through Google Spot, which will know your exact location (down to the aisle in a f store) and deliver messaging to you, such as a coupon or offer from a competitor.

As organizations like Google invest in innovation, the manner in which travel and nearly every other category is sold will evolve and change how business is conducted.

October 19, 2011 In Tinsley Blog

Memes. Mutation and Cultural Artifacts

by Dorn Martell

New Zealand 3011 – A team of archeologists were examining the remains of a village from the 21st century and came across an artifact that was quite puzzling. It was a well-preserved ceramic mug with a strange drawing of a baby monkey going backwards on a pig. Was it a Hindu religious icon? A depiction of the Chinese lunar calendar or was it the most misunderstood phenomenon of the digital age – The Meme.

A Meme is a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes. And like genes they mutate over time. To understand this meme we call Baby Monkey, we must first explore its provenance.

A video of a tiny monkey riding backward on a small pig was shot somewhere in Asia with a hand-held consumer video camera. That video was posted on YouTube and received hundreds of thousands of views. It was then “discovered” by punk rock band Nerf Herder’s front man Parry Gripp. Parry scored it with the lyric “Baby monkey going backwards on a pig” and it went viral all over the world.

But it didn’t end there. You see, memes are more than just peer-to-peer sharing, they inspire parody, mutations and millions of people who want to be a part of it. In fact there are countless variations of this video on YouTube featuring re-mixes, dubsteps, reenactments and bad photoshop jokes. It has even spun-off into an iPhone app. But the only mutation that will last into the future is the ceramic mugs created by Tinsley Advertising’s Associate Creative Director Rick Blitman (Rick’s Bad Art). The mug, unlike the fad, will not fade or decay. But when a future viewer sees it, will it make any sense at all? It’s impossible to tell.

There is a distinct possibility that some memes will become part of our cultural vernacular the same way that archaic terms from our past like, “Three sheets to the wind”. (a term for being drunk – derived from the erratic behavior of a sailing ship with mis-aligned sails).

But will things like “Antoine Dodson“, “Charley the Unicorn“ or “Nyan Cat“ evolve into an enduring part of our collective consciousness? Or will the original meaning be lost and the reference survive like, “freezing the balls off a Brass Monkey” (originally refering to a “Brass Monkey”-a device that held cannon balls that would fail in cold weather.)

New memes are being spawned every day and new parodies and mutations will continue. To be relevant, when communicating with a new generation of digital natives, we must be aware of the power of memes, the challenge of context and the fact that really silly stuff will always get more attention than overt sales pitches.