|outside the lines|

This is a great read - and probably the best that has come from the industry for a while… if you got some time to kill, work in PR or Advertising read this:

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New York. 1922.

The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The buildings were higher, the parties were bigger, and the liquor was cheaper. I found myself at a party at a grand mansion. I didn’t know how I wound up there, but the acid I was tripping on gave everything a brilliant neon polish like a Baz Luhrmann movie.

“Who is this Gatsby that everyone keeps talking about?” I wondered aloud.

“Do you know him?” a girl in a horse mask asked me. Or maybe she was a horse wearing a girl body suit.

“I’ve never met him. Have you?” I said, shouting to make myself heard over the thumping Jay-Z and Kanye West track.

“Gatsby is—” she started, but was interrupted when a debonair gentleman in a three-piece Tom Wolfe approached us.

“Well if it isn’t Daisy Buchanan,” the man said with the southern drawl of a plantation owner. “I’d recognize that shapely ass anywhere.”

“Speak of the devil,” Daisy said three-dimensionally, removing her mask. “I’m certainly glad to see you again.”

“I’m certainly glad to see you as well,” the man said. “And I don’t believe we’ve met, Mr….”

“Parker,” I said, shaking his hand. “Peter Parker.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Parker. They call me Gatsby. The Great Gatsby.”

“Mr. Gatsby…. I’d like to know, exactly who are you anyhow? What makes you so great?”

“My money, numb-nuts.”

“Inheritance?”

“If only. About ten years ago I was on a boat that crashed into an iceberg.”

“The Titanic!” I said.

“The unsinkable RMS Titanic,” Gatsby said. “I met Daisy onboard and when the ship went down so did we. It was all very romantic until she wouldn’t scoot over to make room for me on this floating door.”

Daisy rolled her eyes.

“She left me for dead in the freezing northern Atlantic Ocean waters,” Gatsby continued. “After I was finally rescued, I received an enormous settlement from the boat manufacturer in a class-action lawsuit. I’ve been squandering the money ever since on fast cars and fireworks.”

“You and your damn toys,” Daisy said.

“You never used to complain about my…balls,” Gatsby said, smiling at her with wicked intentions flashing behind his eyes.

“Oh, Gatsby! I was a fool to leave you. I don’t want to go home,” Daisy said.

“Then don’t,” Gatsby said.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to her rapid breathing. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower—

“Um, guys, I’m still right here,” I said, feeling very much like I’d become a secondary character in my own narrative.

“Sorry, Parker,” Gatsby said, breaking their liplock. “We’re going to make sex now.”

He took the horse mask from Daisy’s hands and slipped it on his own head. Daisy leapt onto Gatsby’s back. She was a fine woman but no small girl, and Gatsby struggled under her weight. “The poor son-of-a-bitch,” I thought, wondering if a door really could have supported their combined weight in the Atlantic Ocean. Probably not.

I waved goodbye to them, and Daisy slowly rode Gatsby off into the sunset as some Beyoncé and André 3000 cover of an Amy Winehouse song played….

Iconic businessman and original “Mad Man” David Ogilvy. On September 7th, 1982, Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all agency employees, titled “How to Write”…

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize,demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

This, and much more of Ogilvy’s timeless advice, can be found in The Unpublished David Ogilvy: A Selection of His Writings from the Files of His Partners,

Found here.

1. Hear about the word Twitter. Hmm
2. Hear the word again from somewhere else. Hmm again.
3. Hear about famous celebrity who is “On Twitter.” Hmm. Making mental note to take a look.
4. Sign in on Facebook to comfort self.
5. Create a Twitter account to try it.
6. Gives up. Twitter seems boring and stupid.
7. Talks down on Twitter.
8. Follow @barackobama, @aplusk, @LadyGaga @jtimberlake @KimKardashian and @oprah, and two other people you actually know.
9. Tweets something like: “Trying this Twitter thing.”
10. Attempt to dig a little bit deeper into Twitter.
11. Finds our some new words: “Tweet,” “Twitter,” “Retweet,” “Tweetdeck,” and something random called “RT.”
12. Hmm again, this time in real confusion. Trying to figure out what “favoriting” a tweet means but no one knows.
13. Tell the people you know that you “tried the Twitter thing, but did not get it. It’s boring and stupid anyway.”
14. Sign in on Facebook because that site at least makes sense.
15. Read story about Twitter somewhere.
16. Sign in on Twitter to give it one more try.
17. Try to avoid saying Tweet, Twitter, Retweet, Tweetdeck, and RT.
18. Respond to a celebrity thinking that they will actually read your tweet.
19. Curse self for fanning out.
20. Log off for 4 month
21. Come back, just to see.
22. Post something relatively funny.
23. Get RT’d.
24. Discover that RT means ReTweet.
25. Make it your life mission to get RT’d.
26. Install Twitter app on your phone.
27. No longer ashamed to say “I’ve gotta Twitter that.”
28. Attend events with the sole intention of “Tweeting” them.
29. Pray to get RT’d.
30. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.
31. Close computer.
32. Open computer. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.
33. Think in 140 character sentences.
34. Compulsively check phone all day every day.
35. Tweet that you compulsively check phone all day every day.
36. Alienate actual people in your life in an attempt to impress ones you don’t know.
37. Lose weight because you forget to eat.
38. Place phone by bed so you can check first thing in the morning.
39. Defend Twitter to the death from detractors.
40. Hear self, and vaguely recognize that you have become “That Guy.”
41. Feel like you should stop spending so much time on Twitter for real.
42. Vow to quit Twitter to preserve sanity.
43. Read this and change mind.
44. Think to self, “I should tweet this.”
45. Recognize irony.
46. Tweeting it.

That’s all for today, thanks!

Being a man of few words on Twitter a few days ago he dropped a date (literally just a date) for his next album out in June. He then followed it with a projection debuting his single ‘New Slaves’ across America… videos went ‘#viral’,and now Kanye is going global with the flash stunt.

In the UK the projection will only be happening in Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester – a big shame as I would have loved to go and see it in London. And it’s rumoured to be the new single ‘New Slaves’ and ‘Black Skinhead’

NEW PROJECTION LOCATIONS TONIGHT WWW.KANYEWEST.COM

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest)

May 24, 2013

Here’s one of the videos projected in Chicago…

What’s amazing is that it’s such a simple thing to do, and requires little to no permission as you just turn up like they did for the stunt originally with a projector and speakers in a truck, and blast onto a public building for a few minutes like a flash stunt.

The worldwide projection seems a little more planned though, so maybe America was a tester to see if it would work.

Head to KanyeWest.com as it will be in Manchester on Saturday and hopefully more places added.

UPDATE:

Here’s one of the projections in Manchester:

Here’s one of the projections in Birmingham: