Power Ideas
Italian Tourism
One good way to create a website is to pay a single agency just enough money to do the job, put them on a tight deadline, fact check the content, and then publish it. Easy! Many people who are incompetent in several vital areas of life—human interaction, for example—have nevertheless managed to start and run successful websites with few start up costs at all. But the nation of Italy decided, hey, why don’t we do the opposite of all that, and see how much money we can burn through in pursuit of a conceptual online fiasco? So they did!
Italy wanted to build a website to market the nation to prospective tourists. The cost so far: $66 million over five years. And it doesn’t even exist yet!
Among the problems: Too many cooks in the kitchen (“Several government ministries — in two administrations — and each of Italy’s 20 regions were involved in creating the portal”), a product that went live in 2007 full of embarrassing errors, databases that weren’t compatible with each other, and a logo purchased for $150,000 that was eventually discarded for sucking too much. A consultant tells the WSJ that the government could have had an agency complete the entire project by now for around 2% of what’s been spent.
Have you heard about Flugtag (pronounced floog-tag)? It’s the latest promotion from those crazy kids at the Redbull company who seem to always come up with the fastest, hardest, most ridiculous ‘sports’ to promote the Redbull brand.
For Flugtag, a team of everyday people (yes, just like you) get together to build human-powered flying machines and pilot them off a 22 foot tower.
How do you win? Putting on a good show and traveling the furthest before splashing down with style into the water below help you to rank at the top.
Redbull may not give you wings, but it sure brings out the crazy in you!
Samsung (in collaboration with Telus) and Fido launched street marketing events last week that caught the attention of passersby and media. At the beginning of the week Fido placed two 30-foot-tall white figures called “Fidolls” at opposite ends of the city to promote Fido Sessions, a quarterly series of art and culture events sponsored by the phone service provider. The two inflatable figures shaped like paper doll cutouts have texting instructions written across them and are being moved together to meet at the Burroughes Building on Wednesday for the first Fido Session. Other Fidolls have appeared around the city in the form of chalk art and tree hangers.
Click photo for an article about Polish wireless store that hired actors to create the illusion of a line when they introduced the iPhone.
Color is the ultimate tool a designer has at his or her disposal to communicate feeling and mood. Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.
Vote on the color that you think best represents “Brooklyn” or “Expensive” and check out the colors that others associate with vague concepts.
