Burak Ekinil, who is the name behind many successful jingles and sound tracks, is to deliver his debut music album on 23 February 2012. Being one of the luckiest people who had listened to this entertaining music album before ten days to its release, I strongly recommend it to anyone with a good music taste.

Burak Ekinil, whose talent in music was discovered at his early ages and who was 9 years old when started conservatory, has produced several successful jingles, soundtracks and other works as a producer, a composer, an arranger, a songwriter and a vocalist at Turkey’s one of the most important jingle production companies, Jingle House since 2004.

Not only will “Balik”, Burak Ekinil’s debut album which consist of 11 songs, bring joy to your ears but also to your eyes with the exclusively hand drawn artwork by Ayşegül Kantarcı. By the way, Balik means Fish in Turkish.

01. -
02. Hulusi Kentmen
03. -
04. -
05. -
06. -
07. -
08. -
09. -
10. -
11. -

We all know the fact that the music industry is desperate, ruthless and have been going through tough times. CD sales are steadily down. Music is at the touch of our fingertips and only 3% of the music downloaded on the Internet is legal which does not cover the loss of album CD sales by any means, but let’s hope that the evolution of music brings so many benefits to the human kind and to the industry.

It has been ages since I don’t update this site and I would like to thank Lana Del Rey for inspiring me to start blogging again. She has been one of the latest Internet phenomenon of 2011 and thanks to a record label, her album is about to be released. I definitely believe that the first good damn music album of 2012 is Lana Del Rey’s debut album “Born to Die”, which is going to be released in the UK on January 30. I can clearly hear from her voice and see from her look that she will be one of the legends of this year.

1. Born To Die
2. Off To The Races
3. Blue Jeans
4. Video Games
5. Diet Mountain Dew
6. National Anthem
7. Dark Paradise
8. Radio
9. Carmen
10. Million Dollar Man
11. Summertime Sadness
12. This Is What Makes Us Girls

The McDonald’s giant interactive LED billboard at London’s Piccadilly Circus was created to do more than just sell burgers, it is an interactive poster allows the 34 million people that pass it every year to actually live the brand’s value of simple easy enjoyment.

Using a series of 40 second iconic still and moving images, people can take pictures of them with the poster as a backdrop and create a fun photo of them appearing to wear or do something. The digital technology allows to display a variety of creative executions – London – centric (e.g. bowler hat), seasonal (e.g. umbrella) and tactical (e.g. Mother’s Day, Halloween). Already in the short time that the poster has been live, a Flickr group has been created and when you go down to Piccadilly Circus you’ll now see people striking strange poses as they manoeuvre into position for their perfect shot. I think this is a piece of clever work!

Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett, London, Great Britain

Hard Times features a variety of characters from the Simpsons, most notably greedy billionaire C. Montgomery Burns. As Mr. Burns faces the loss of his fortune and worldly belongings, he learns to appreciate lifes’ simple pleasures like friends and family.

Advertising Agency: Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, USA
Creative Directors: Hal Curtis, Sheena Brady
Senior Production Agency: Matt Hunnicutt
Production Company: Gracie Films, Film Roman
Director: David Silverman
Production: James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Denise Sirkot, Richard Raynis
Art Director: Dima Malanitchev
Animation: Tom Klein
Production Manager: Jaspreet Dhillon
Music: Hans Zimmer, Michael Levine

This outdoor campaign, which was designed for a fish restaurant in Germany named Fisch Franke, uses the slogan  ”Fresh as can be.” which fits quite well with the design concept. The ad was released for 5 days and in order to keep the fish alive during the campaign, they were supported with food and oxygen. The water was cooled down with ice from the restaurant as well. Last but not least, the campaign was also approved by the Federal Veterinary Office, that none of the fish was damaged. Though, I suppose they were eaten after the campaign =). A really great work! Click on here to watch it.

Advertising Agency: Publicis, Frankfurt, Germany
Creative Officer: Stephan Ganser
Art Director: Nico Juenger
Copywriter: Peter Kaim
Account Director: Sven Lohwasser
Art Buyer: Katja Bonnert
Photographer: Johannes Krzeslack
Architect: Thomas Breen
Release on Feb 2009

This outdoor work was designed for an internationally well known health club; Fitness First. The seats of the bus stop acts as a scale and displays the weight of anyone sitting on the seat on a digital screen. Everyone looks impressed. Click on here to watch it.

Advertising Agency: N=5, Amsterdam, Hollanda
Creative Team: Marco de Jong, Thijs Bontje & Jurriaan Noij

Last week, I had a chance to read the book “Screw it, Let’s do it” which was written by the founder of Virgin Group; Richard Branson and first published in 2006. Branson in his book gives nice messages by telling his moments from his daily and business life. I thought some of the stories were really worth reading. So I wanted to share with you one of his very interesting stories here.

Richard Branson in his book talks about the importance of behaving equal, giving equal chance and being polite as well as showing respect to everyone. Branson admits that he learned all these long before the Virgin Stores existed when he was attending meetings in Japan where serious Japanese businessmen wearing suits were listening to the young Branson wearing a jumper and a pair of jeans and talking about setting up a joint venture music store with them. He tells how these businessmen showed great respect to the young guy, Richard.

One day, Richard Branson was going for another business meeting. He was late and grabbed some papers with him that he needed to work on before the meeting started. He jumped into a taxi. On the way, the cabby got very chatty like many other cabbies and the talk between the two started;

T: ‘Oi, I know you. You are that Dick Branson. You’ve got a record label!’
RB: ‘Yes, that’s right’ said Branson.
T: ‘Well aint it my lucky day. Fancy having Mr. Branson in my cab.’ the cabby said.

In order to work on his papers about the meeting, Richard Branson hoped the cabby soon to shut up but the cabby went on; saying that although he was a cabby by day, he used to be a drummer in a band before. He then asked whether Branson would like to hear his demo tape. Branson’s heart sank.

As a person in the music industry, I have also seen many people who have come to music patrons and made them listen to their voice or demo tapes in the hopes of being discovered and releasing an album. Branson, as the boss of Virgin Records and Virgin Music Stores, who have been in a situation like this for maybe more than a thousand times, was right to be bored by the driver’s behaviour but because he did not want to be rude

RB: ‘That would be lovely’ he said.
T: ‘No, you look tired. Tell you what, my mum lives around the corner. She’d love to meet you. Let’s drop in and have a quick cup of tea.’
RB: ‘No, I’m late-’ Branson started to say.
T: ‘I insist guy, a cup of tea’s what you need.’
RB: ‘Thank you’ said Branson weakly.

And as they reached the house, the driver put on his tape. The words heard over the speakers were; ‘I can feel it coming in the air, tonight…’ The cabby jumped out of the front seat and held the door open for Richard. Yes, the cabby was the English singer and song writer Phil Collins whose albums have sold millions and whose song was used in the background of one of the greatest and most viewed viral videos of all times in Great Britain: Cadbury’s Gorilla Ad. Richard Branson due to his respectful behaviour discovered a great talent who’s now followed and respected by millions of people.

You can watch one of the UK’s best viral video ads - Cadbury’s Gorilla here. You can also watch it on youtube as an alternative.

Luxury ice cream brand Häagen-Dazs released its first TV ad, ‘Melt Together’ in the UK after 4 years, which repositions the ice cream as one of the best products for sharing with people you love. This 60 second spot is just a start of a £3.5 marketing campaign which started to air last week on British channels. The music played in the background is ‘Open Up Your Door’ by Richard Hawley, the Sheffield artist and former Longpigs band member. In terms of creativity, the ad works well to spark one’s deep feelings.

However, in my opinion, one of the interesting things about this ad, produced by TBWA London with the slogan ’Melt Together’ is that it reminds me of the Algida Cornetto’s ‘Aşkımla Erirmisin?’ (Would you melt with my love?) campaign which has been aired in Turkey in the last couple of years. Don’t you think so?

This post is about the effects of global consumption societies. It can be considered as the next half of my previous post titled  ‘All Consuming: Turbo Consumption‘ in which I discussed how the society we live in has made each of us the citizens of a fast consuming society and how too much consumption caused a global financial recession.

With the rapid increase of globalisation in the 21st century, we, as the consumers of fast consuming societies, all entered into a tragicomic vicious lifecycle and we are not able to get rid of it anymore. We work hard, try hard to have everything and we continuously purchase even there is no need. The financial crisis occured due to this crazy behaviour called turbo consumption and the global financial recession was the biggest effect and reflection of turbo consumption on people’s lives. It seems that we may have forgotten another most serious and fast growing, hidden environmental problem that will maybe have the most negative impacts on humans’ lives; that is Global Warming. Despite the media’s too much focus on the early discovery of global warming, I cannot make any sense why the subject has been ignored recently – it may be because they do not want to give people the heebie jeebies after the explanation of some scientists about the global warming being unstoppable. However we should be aware that our planet warms due to our unconscious & careless consumption.

It is for sure that countries of the developed world like the USA, the UK, Japan, and Germany consume twice as much as we do due to having more buying power, but it is not an excuse for us not to take an action against global warming. We have also been making confident steps day by day to be a more developed country therefore becoming a more consuming society that damages the world as well as the environment.

In the last three decades, selfishness, rudeness is all around this fast consuming society which has been created by all of us. By living in consumption societies, the idea like “life is short, the world is mortal, so who cares, live it as you wish!” has been adopted by many. Individualism and marginalization concepts overrided the concept of society so we’ve all become independent and careless about the unification. Although we pay the society concept a lot of importance, we define ourselves as individuals. We care about human relationships, but want to live independently. As Neal Lawson points out, although our cars are designed to carry at least five to six people, we drive them alone on our own. Moreover, our modern cars equipped with latest technology accelerate global warming by consuming fuel in traffic jams and even going slower than the horse carriages in the ancient world.

Even though we use public transport, by wearing our earbuds on buses, we are withdrawn into our small worlds and alienated. As the people of the 21st century we take communication seriously, but even in a house shared with the family, everyone sits in different rooms, consumes different media, music, films, eats on their own; the communication model of human integration have changed, and mechanized with the invention and rapid development of smart computers and phones. There are people who prefer to socialise on social network websites like Facebook rather than meeting their friends in real world. From now on, even the nuclear family which is the core element of consisting a society is divided into smaller pieces that we have lost the common values shared in a family. People cannon even live without their phones. More choices for consumption have become available and this is just another effect of a consuming society.

And what about the famine and the global poverty that we cannot see in the rest of the world? As the developed and developing consumption societies, we eat more than what we need, and also chuck the leftovers out without any thought. While thousands of kids die every day of hunger in Africa, fast food companies like McDonald’s, in order to provide us hamburgers, feed cows and calves with the grain taken a few meters away from the homes of those people dying of hunger. While as a country we give our millions of pounds away to dieticians in order to lose weight, people on other countries try to live with 1 dollar a week and we continue ignoring this fact in our warm houses. Why do we consume that much?

In the past, we were only consuming to survive, and to meet our physical needs. Now we consume to fullfill our egos and emotions; we consume to buy our identity, gain respect, and protect our social status. The brands that we wear, eat, drink and buy form our identites, products talk on behalf of ourselves, and reflect our personalities. Young people are shamed to carry their phones if it is not the latest model. A child that does not wear a well-recognized branded piece of cloth is alienated by his/her peers at schools. The difference between the poor and rich is increasing among the turbo consumption societies.

We will continue to have unhappy lives in this vicious consumption cycle which is the core trigger of environmental pollution, financial crisis and global warming. The negative effects of this current system is severe and countless. I don’t think that we should stop consuming and die, but consume consciously to prevent ourselves from being the victims of our own egos and needless desires.

The creator of Playing for Change, Mark Johnson, tells that this great journey was born out of the idea that people have to inspire each other to come together as a human race. He believed music was the best way to do this. The project started four years ago in the streets of Santa Monica, California. They recorded a street musician, Roger Ridley, performing the song ‘Stand by me’. They travelled all over the world from New Orleans to New Mexico, from Barcelona to Tel Aviv, to Dublin, and several African villages. These musicians may have not seen or spoken to each other before but you will see that the music speaks on behalf of them.

If you cannot see the video above, you can view it on youtube as an alternative.

This campaign is a very clever one that makes people be conscious of how bottle water companies harm our world. It was started by anti bottle water group Tappening.

Bottle water companies, that spend millions on advertising everyday try to sell their bottles of water without showing any details and references to us on where the water source comes from. The reality, I believe is that, the majority of the bottle water companies bottle their water by purifying the tap water that we can already easily find at home. With the bottles of water sold everyday, we give away our millions of pounds to those companies and encourage them to produce more and more. Yet, we are unaware of how harmful it is for our environment. Although we can drink tap water in several cities of this beautiful country, we keep spending our money on bottles of water that come from the so-called volcanoes, mountains, or springs.

Because the anti bottle water group must have been bored with all these dishonest advertising tactics used by the bottle water companies, they set up an advertising campaign with a website called startalie.com where we can all create our own lies about the bottle water industry.

The lies people told about the industry until now have been quite creative; you can read a wide range of lies like the ones here; “bottle water making puppies blind”, “bottle water causing 98% of the melted ice caps” and “water into bottle filled by polar bear tears”.

In the last couple of years in Europe, big companies (such as Asda, Marks & Spencers, Tesco) encourage their consumers to buy a recyclable bag for life. It can be argued that this is still to make profit but I believe it is still worth to give it a try for the environment. If bottle water companies also used such similar tactics, it would have been better for the world. Why do they not use a glass made or a carton made bottle so that it can be 100% recycled?

In recent years, with the developing technology and globalising world we have all become people who live in a turbo-consuming society. We all consume something during our lives; we buy dresses, cars, holidays, escapes for weekends, services on health, education and entertainment and whatever else our minds can imagine. However, with the strike of financial crisis, we all felt the effects and drawbacks of too much consumption. In this post, I wanted to discuss the consuming sickness; a sickness to consume more and its effects.

Consumption can be defined as the act of buying something, and consumer can be defined as the person who buy or consume something in order to meet their needs and fulfill happiness.

Although all the basic needs (such as food, shelter, clothing and security) are met by many people in this sociocultural order of 21st century that the world provide us, most people now have been consuming more and more to gain high status and respect from people around them as well as to feed their own emotions and egos to satisfy themselves.

Multi-million dollar companies like Proctor & Gamble keep working everyday quietly with advertising and marketing professionals at Research and Development departments in order to prepare the most effective advertising and marketing campaigns to touch the hearts of us all. They sell us anything, even the things that we can have without paying any money; they sell us freedom (Hazır Kart: I am free), connection to life (Turkcell: Connect to Life with Turkcell), togetherness (Phillips: Together, Better), being different (Selpak always different), love (Cornetto: Would you melt with my love?), taste of life (Coca-Cola: Taste of Life) - in brief, everything!

We now on live in the age of turbo consumption; we pay money for all the experience we get from life and every day we must buy something in order to be happy. Our happiness is defined by the unhappiness of the people around us¹. If we have got a car that is better than the neighbour’s then we feel happy, if we have got a worse one compare to the neighbour’s then we ask ourselves why we don’t have the better one and we work more to have that better car. Although a mobile phone can be used at least five years, we change it frequently, want to wear new dresses, want to have the latest technology and brand new products every day.

Actually, as many economists say, the initial reason that the world was hit by the financial storm was due to the banks in America which gave out loans as if they were giving chocolates to children in Easter. Majority of the people who got loans could not afford to pay back. Though, not only was it the banks’ mistake of course, but it was also the mistakes of people who took loans to make their dreams come true and to satisfy their egos even though they did not have the finance to pay it back. There is an endless demand of consumption; we all love the idea that the more should be mine, the better should be mine. Advertisers do anything to encourage people to demand and buy products and services. They focus on the weakest sides of people’s problems, and offer better ways to solve these weaknesses; a better smile, a better bank, a better holiday, house, car and even a better relationship and love is sold by influencing people through subliminal messages and frequent advertising.

Consumption is endless and it is time to be aware that the economic growth model that the west has followed till now does not make people any happier. It seems to me that the happiness levels between the rich and poor and between the high status owner (rich) and the low status owner (poor) is not great at all. Several scientific research also have proved that being financially rich does not mean being happier. A rich person works more to protect their social status therefore cannot have enough time for themselves due to hard work, therefore feel unhappy. On the other hand, a poor person also continues to live an unhappy life due to too much free time and no money to buy something to be happy. Too much consumption may bring happiness just by satisfying the current wants and needs of people for a limited time. It is just a desperate vicious cycle.

Consumerism and sustainability which derive from consumption does not seem to be the right solution for a better and happier living. With new and alternative ways, people should find their way to live better lives – it is not me who says so but the financial crisis does. From the beginning of our lives, we are all educated as the consumption machines and we will continue to do so for the rest of our lives.

Here is what I believe at least to be done to slow down the turbo consumption process and make societies consume for only their needs;

• Consumption should be done but only as we need; as the vice president of TEMA (The Turkish Foundation for Combating Soil Erosion, for Reforestation
  and the Protection of Natural Habitats), Hayrettin Karaca who has been wearing the same red jumper for more than 10 years, says “I may have the money to consume but do not have the right to consume“
• Government should limit the advertisements; and then as a result the desire in people to buy continuously will be limited as well. For example; Junk food ads to children in England is %100 prohibited.
• To make going to work as good as going to shopping; it would be good if we could have the same pleasure of shopping when we were working.
• Material we own should not be the way to show our status among other people; in order to have a high status, instead of buying latest brands, wear branded shirts to show one’s social status, better ways should be found and people should be encouraged to follow those alternative ways.

This is it for now.

P.S.: Guardian‘s commentator Neal Lawson’s latest book All Consuming encouraged me to write this post. 

Although it is a bit early, the logo of the 2012 Summer Olympics that is going to be held between April and August in London has already been released. The designers of the logo mainly targeted the young population who are aged between 11 and 20. Even though the target may have been chosen as the youth, according to the article in Guardian newspaper, the logo has been heavily criticized.

According to the research done between people aged 11 to 20, the majority (70%) do not like the logo. Among the criticisms, most of the youngsters think that the logo does not represent anything about London nor the United Kingdom. Another ciriticism from the young people was the claim that it is hard for older generations to understand the logo easily. A further argument was that while the designers thought it would attract MTV audience, youth said the opposite and thought it looked as if a kid made it.

Despite the early release of the logo (as there is even so much time for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing), as an amateur designer, my opinion is that the London Olympics logo is totally different from the rest of the common and boring Olympics logos and will definitely encourage the youngsters around the world.

Don’t you also think that 2012 London logo saves the olympic games from its common, boring image? Then, have a look at the other olympic games logos.

As most of the advertisers may know, ‘branding’ process started and spread all around the world when the making of products increased throughout the Industrial Revolution and therefore companies needed to differentiate their products from the competition by using different colours, signs and symbols on their products.

Almost all of the products we consume in the 21st century are designed to be a brand and have an identity. Brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Adidas or Sony are all giant brands of our century which are easily recognised by any society. Customers know what they can buy from all of these brands (such as buying a coke from Coca-Cola, hamburger from McDonald’s or a piece of technology from Sony). However, it does not mean that being a giant brand indicates they were always successful in the past. If we consider the mistakes of these companies in their branding process, we can definitely learn some lessons out of it. In the next couple of articles, I will be sharing the failures of brands in their ‘branding’ processes.

The first brand failure I would like to share in my first series of posts is as can be understood from the title; Harley Davidson’s failure in extending its brand.

As we all may know Harley Davidson is a brand that is mostly loved by wild boys who wear leather jackets, sun glasses, have tattoos and piercings. Harley Davidson’s customers are in love with their motorcycles and attached to the brand with deep emotions. In England or the United States of America, it is even possible to see Harley motorcyclists who have the brand’s logo or slogans as a tattoo on their arms. Even in a middle-east country like Turkey, Harley Davidson fans and owners meet up in groups to ride their Harley Davidson motorcycles together. Harley Davidson has been the leader brand for years in the motorcycle industry. However, about a decade ago, due to the company’s passion to earn greater profits, the brand was extended into other markets and got away from the real target audience which therefore resulted in the brand to cope with some difficulties.

After Harley Davidson brand gained worldwide popularity in the early 90s, the brand’s managers wanted to extend the brand to other markets. The brand was extended into grooming industry with stuff like perfume & after shave lotion but struggled to survive in such new areas. Harley addicted customers accused the Harley Davidson company of expanding the brand to unrelated areas that customers were not interested as well as accusing the company of using cheap tactics for more profitability. I remember my middle school years, where one of my friends had an original Harley Davidson pencil box and pens. He was such a naive & geeky person that when you imagine him standing next to a real Harley Davidson driver, you will get that funny picture. Another example was from my high school years. When I was at high school, almost most of the students, both boys and girls, were wearing a pair of Harley Davidson boots. I am not sure if it is still current trend these days but what I want to say here is that when Harley Davidson was trying to brand itself, it went astray by targeting the wrong people and became a brand that addressed everyone – which in my opinion is a wrong marketing tactic and gave harm to the company, its brand image as well as its loyal customers due to the brand’s magic being lost.

The lessons we can take from the above article can be;
- Focus on brand’s values. If a brand’s values are as strong and wild as Harley Davidson’s values, then extending that brand into soft categories like perfume or pencil industry may not be the right choice.
- Target the right audience. Of course a ‘hard rock’ centric target audience with tattoos, leather jackets, long hair and beard would not want to buy a soft smelly bottle of perfum, an after shave lotion or a pencil box.
- Do what you are good at. Harley Davidson is the best brand that produces big American motorcycles and if a brand goes to another market apart from the markets in which it is best, then we should all be aware that it might be getting into huge trouble.

People who know me very well are all aware of how sick I am about the high tech brand Sony. After watching their latest advert, you will see that I am really right to be a sick Sony lover. In my opinion, one of the best advertisements in recent years has been ‘the Paint Ad’, an award winning advert that was produced for Sony Bravia in 2006. This ad definitely increased my loyalty to the brand.

Creative development process of this ad which was made in Glasgow, Scotland took 10 days. 250 people worked behind the camera. But all the hard work was seen just after the ad was finished; as all the paint you see sprinkled in the air like a paint firework was able to be cleaned up by 60 people in 5 working days. Safety was also an important issue during the filming that they used a non-toxic paint, that can even be added into food we eat, in order to prevent any possible harm that may occur on people’s skin.

To me, Sony achieved a great job and gained my heart once again. You can watch the advert here. By the way, if you ever wondered about behind the scenes, you are lucky!

This is a short animation film which was produced and directed by my friends, Selçuk Ergen and Muhittin Bilginer, for their student project at Bournemouth University. I think their great work really deserves some attention.