"Make the logo bigger! I hate you! Waaaaaaaaaaah!"

OK, clients. We promise never to complain again.*
While we have gotten some wacky briefs in our time, we've never gotten anything like author Bill Zeman gets from his client daughter, 5 year-old Rosie: "A sick crocodile." "A bone dinosaur eating a baby." "A cat killing a rat." "I don't even want a drawing.  Do whatever you want." It's genius, and it's called Tiny Art Director, and you can buy it from Amazon, or check out his blog here. 

Via Boing-Boing.

*Offer not valid in the continental United States, Canada, Israel, or on the Mysterious Island Of Open-Minded Flight Attendants. All rights reserved. May cause the gum disease known as gingivitis.

"The Wilmer Shields Rich Awards Program for Excellence In Communications recognizes and encourages excellence in communications by foundations and corporate giving programs."

Looks like they recognized excellence when they saw Marin Community Foundation's shiny new Mortar-built website, since they gave it a Gold Award. Are we surprised? Not really. Good clients = good work = good results. Are we happy? Deliriously. But then, we're always kinda delirious.

Now this is why we miss the days of three-martini lunches. (Besides the martinis, that is.) How hammered would you have to be to write this?  And how schnockered would the client have to be to approve it? "Yeah, "Chubby." Let's go with that."  That must have been the best brief ever.
Anyway, that's actually one of the less horrifying examples of the bad old days you'll find in this post: 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time, up on RetroComedy right now. Check it out.

   WE SAID "CHECK IT OUT!" NOW!

Via Boing-Boing, as usual.

Remember about three posts down how we were asking you what you thought of the Microsoft/Seinfeld effort from Crispin? And remember how we said it was The Ad Campaign About Nothing? And how they didn’t actually have anything to sell?

We would have liked to have been surprised.
We would have liked for the whole thing to make sense.
We would have liked Microsoft to have had a rationale.
A rationale that goes a little something like this:

STEP 1: Take One Or Two Of Those Dusty Pallets Of Cash We Have Lying Around, And Make Ads That Show People We’re Not Evil.

STEP 2: Now That People Know We’re Not Evil, Let’s Sell Them Something That, For Once, Does Not Suck.

Nope. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. So something as relatively simple as the Mortar Two-Step Plan becomes as complicated as Parking With George. They went and killed the campaign. According to Valleywag,

"Microsoft flacks are desperately dialing reporters to spin them about "phase two" of the ad campaign — a phase, due to be announced tomorrow, which will drop the aging comic altogether. Microsoft’s version of the story: Redmond had always planned to drop Seinfeld. The awkward reality: The ads only reminded us how out of touch with consumers Microsoft is — and that Bill Gates’s company has millions of dollars to waste on hiring a has-been funnyman to keep him company. Update: In a phone call, Waggener Edstrom flack Frank Shaw confirms that Microsoft is not going on with Seinfeld, and echoes his underlings’ spin that the move was planned. There is the "potential to do other things" with Seinfeld, which Shaw says is still "possible." He adds: "People would have been happier if everyone loved the ads, but this was not unexpected.""

We’ll see. Perhaps they’re smarter than we give them credit for. In the meantime, enjoy some classic Seinfeld.