Sorting through some old, slightly damp boxes in my mother’s lock-up garage in England last month, I came across a huge billboard poster. I acquired it in the 1980s through a letter-writing campaign to several ad companies and couldn’t believe my luck when a man in a van showed up one hot day and asked which poster I was actually looking for. He left me with ads for Levi’s and Heineken, but returned a few days later with the ultimate prize: a Perrier ad illustrated by Gray Jolliffe. Then the fun started: being a roadside poster, it was massive. Any ideas I had about sticking it on my wall – maybe even papering my bedroom with it – were out of the question. So I resorted to hanging choice sections, one at a time. The line reads “Once you discover Perrier, nothing else will do.” No mystery why I ended up in advertising.

I subscribe to a promo newsletter from the folks who produce RESFEST and RES magazine; the newsletter is called, appropriately enough, RESalert.

The whole RES family is a sort of digital media, cooler-than-WIRED, glossy, eye-candy kind of enterprise, but often includes mildly political content that reflects, I imagine, the generally liberal-to-progressive tendencies (however inchoate) of its very cool audience. Hence there’s an annual theme issue of the magazine called RESistance, focusing on digital media folks doing cool, quasi-political stuff. Of course, it’s also got corporate sponsors and advertisers up the ya-ding, but only the cool ones: Diesel, Nike (Nike?), Apple, etc.

Consistent with this general orientation was their RESalert newsletter from October 29th, that included links to various pre-election mash-ups centering on Bush and Kerry. Unsurprisingly, given the aforementioned leanings of most creative types, and the hubris of the currently elected President, most of this stuff had Bush in its sights, rather than Kerry. So did the editorial, which went like this:

Election Day Reminder

Halloween might be scary, but it pales in comparison to next Tuesday, when we’ll all be waiting with bated breath for the outcome of what many have called the most important election in a generation. Let’s just hope we know the results on Wednesday morning, and not many weeks and legal battles later. We screened a program in RESFEST this year called Bushwhacked!, so we’re obviously not all that concerned about being accused of partisanship, but we’ll let the artists do the Bush-bashing. We just hope and pray you’ll make your way to the polls next Tuesday — unless you’re planning to vote for Bush.

Nothing earth-shattering here, right? Well, yes actually. Here’s the very next (post-election) issue of RESalert:

AFTERMATH

We’d also like to say that RES is a publication for and about creators, and its extended community of talent includes some of the smartest communicators in the world. Communication seems particularly poor these days, between various factions within the US and between the US and the rest of the world. Let’s all look for better ways to communicate with one another, and demand the same of those around us. There’s no surer path to progress.

Eh? And we’re supposed to believe that this groveling apology is the result of a ‘few’ letters? Perhaps not. After all, among the many corporate sponsors RES relies on for its survivial is Fuel TV, which happens to be owned by Fox Entertainment Group, which is itself part of Rupert Murdoch’s oh-so-progressive media conglomerate News International. Oh, now I understand.

I couldn’t quite believe it when I heard that our local gas station pumps up its prices from Thursday to Sunday to take advantage of people heading out of town for the weekend (or who are just too busy to fill up their car during the week). Hence Gas Watch (also linked at left).

Dear Mr. Brenneman: As President and CEO of PetroCanada, please either keep your prices over-inflated all the time, or at least advertise the fact that you like to raise them arbitrarily. That way your attendants won’t get verbally harassed all weekend long.

(In case you’re wondering, there’s usually four of us in our minivan every weekday morning; other than that I cycle or catch the bus.)

I took this snapshot yesterday at a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada. The art director clearly wanted to avoid giving Apple a gratuitous plug, especially since the logo on the laptop falls directly in the middle of his/her breathtakingly generic poster. So why not airbrush the logo out, rather than sticking a big piece of white tape over it? (It also doesn’t help that the tape is the same size and colour as the logo it’s ‘hiding’.)