I love when activists use creativity to sell their message, rather than relying on outdated notions of enlightenment ideology to affect chance.  We’ve known for decades that the truth will not set us free—and that people make decisions based on both the rational and irrational.  And yet, we still get campaigns that focus on the negative, are boring and easily ignored in a sea of countless messages.

Folks like the artist Khaled Jarrar, who created an exhibit space at the Berlin Biennale’s where he stamped visitor’s passports with a specially-designed ‘visa’ for the State of Palestine. The stamp he created featured a Palestine Sunbird surrounded by flowers and encircled with the words State of Palestine in English and Arabic. And it essentially meant nothing—except that it beautifully and symbolically told the story of Israel Occupation of the Palestinian Homeland.

I especially love it when it involves my husband, the activist and media studies professor Stephen Duncombe.  Along with The Yes Men labs, his organization The Center for Artistic Activism has launched actipedia.org, a hub for people who use interesting, playful and artist strategies to help build a more just society. People like Jarrar and others can share ideas and document what they are doing, in an age where few mainstream media outlets cover this type of work.

I produced a piece on actipedia for Word of Mouth.  Listen.

Last month a gave a talk at the Copy Lab, which is a creative collective for copywriters. (I am thrilled that Kim and Kelley started it—NYC writers need an association in order to learn new skills and advocate for our profession.)  For my event, I focussed on tools and tips for creating content for web sites, social media and digital devices.  Read a summary of the talk on The Copy Lab Blog.

Also, be sure to check out the Copy Lab.  They have lots of great events coming up.

In my copywriting for the web course, I cover banner ads.  Bannerblogs.com/au is the source that I use to show interesting work.  However, when I tried to find live examples of old-school rotating banners, I came up empty-handed.  Now, I am sure they still exist—but they are certainly not as ubiquitous as they once were.

But really.  Who ever like banner ads anyways?  It was a print/TV approach to interactive marketing that never quite worked.

What this means:  the industry is finally getting smarter about engaging people in meaningful conversations via social media.  I can already imagine a time when we will say: remember when we had to create all those endless banner ads?

lego hotel

Tweet