BREAKING NEWS -- FREE SUBLIMINAL AD LINE

Having observed today that the price of fuel seems now to be stable in the UK, which by itself is not so bad news for Ebusinesses and might signify price drops for the consumer, but the climate has hardly changed for the businesses.

-Competition just for the sake of survival is stressing itself to the limit.

-Product range offers seem to be reduced, out of need rather than organization or trends.

-Business reputation and credibility is increasingly affected, and prestige brands are slowly becoming images for unreliability and catastrophic management.

So, if at this stage your business is shaking, and the odds are if its not, you probably filed for bankruptcy recently, or simply gave up trying to stay in business. Seriously you are probably waiting for a miracle - and this is where I come in - if you tried everything else and basically spent your money for some very decadent publicity from a local graphics business perhaps (sounding any bells?), and probably got an hour or two of demonstration, explaining you why the leaflet/billboard or annoying leaflets are just right for your business for all of those appropriate colours elegant image composition etc, yes it would probably pay more to buy some wall paper and print it yourself on you home printer.

So you left the graphics house with the feeling you just visited your local DIY store, have all of these materials that explain very well why your business and products are just the same as all the other businesses that purchased similar publicity.

You might have also paid for an advert in your local/city paper, and congratulations for learning that they placed it just next to any economical catastrophe news article (that reminds the public to spend less), or maybe even those dodgy adult phone lines or "personal services", in the worst case next to a direct competitors selling off products at half price from yours. Yes you paid for an advert, never specified where, or next to what. If you don't get some direction, you will be advertising your own car for sale next...

So the media are advertising enough bad news to discourage any purchase of what you intend to advertise, you could have figured that out without having to go through all that spending.You are saying? Don't know what to do, and where is that subliminal ad thing?

Well be patient, after all, it is free !!!


OK, fine there it is:


(your company name) RECRUITING NOW !!!


Some sort of joke? Not at all, how on earth do you expect to gain credibility if you are sacking workers? Do you think half a dozen (OK about 12000) of leaflets and stickers are going to do anything for the prestige of your brand? Do you think it will give your products any credibility to put your workers careers in trash can? If you care that much about the people that make your business, do you think customers will think much of the concern your business put on providing quality products and/or services?

If you were so lucky as to see you adverts just next page of the article mentioning your company's redundancies and the disappointment of the ex workers etc.. ( I have cut some of those off and pinned them in my office walls ha ha, unbelievable ! I never thought I would see that in a lifetime ha ha)

The point is, no leaflet will give your image a reputation of quality, stability concern etc... A strategy to win the customers respect is very influenced by your business values, yes such thing as core values definitions ringing any bells?

OK, you got it and its free. The reason for me to give it for free? Its not to get the money you don't have in offering services, you see its something to do with my core values...

Gday !

Hackers, the ILLUMINATED artists, or how social engineering is the ultimate advertising tool

So you would like to know how to hack?

If you are a traditional artist or designer, the answer can vary, but surely you wont have a clue of the real direction of the question.

If you are an IT guy, you either do or don't depending on your skills being sufficient or not.

If you are a fraternal advertising person, you would love to know what I could teach you, but the thing is, nobody shares lifetime quests. Empowering knowledge and skills are like women, a true headache to manage, but like cars, they are not to share.

The great difference between social engineering in hacking and advertising terms, is a matter of proportion. Advertising has a huge potential in engineering the trends of the masses, but this is not easy business, very few and far in between have the mutable vocational learning required. Putting it simple, you have to be the results you want to produce. Keep in mind that rumours and mentions are not the best publicity, controversy is, but it requires a stomach, huge risk taking and no fear.

Closing the open source versions of Sublimis written in C, and slowly approaching complete redevelopment, I have learned a few things in retrospect, a lot of what concluded can be defined in the paralels between hacking and advertising.

I have recently tested S3Zero, and it worked as I expected, generating top 10 results 48 hours after submission to Google (XML). The best of it is, it is 100% "white hat", or as some define "organic results", this proves that not all thourough elaboration is necessary based on deceit, its beyound "black hat", but requires all SEO hacking knowledge to make sure ITS ETHICAL, believe it or not, it is. This methodology actually works with the search engine to display relevant spam free informative content.

The point being: these two examples represent clean and yet powerfull tools. Not saying that deceit doesnt work in some cases, but its short lived.

Having tranfered my latest project to the clients servers, and having left it that way without demonstrating the methodology in action at 100%, I am afraid that the client didnt understand the full power of the methodology. At this point I must say that this project was a sudden request for SEO skills, and I agreed perhaps too fast, but I never had enough time to put to the proof and demonstrate it in time, not by my fault, but by the fact that the page was crawled only two days after the project deadline. I guess that the best thing is that a third party will not be able to re-create my methodology, and that way the client will go down the adwords road. As I explained, the methodology depends on onpage and offpage optimization, the impressive results as they described, were only half of it, the actual status of the page is extraordinary, and about to be compressed, stored and out of my server. Not my loss, AND I kept my part of the contract.

That said, this client is kept in high consideration by me, the best team I have ever worked with, great people. Anyone who knows mw well, will by no doubts confirm that I never said this about any client, so I really mean it.

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For the last 15 years or so, and I dont say it out of badness, I have found advertising very predictable. I dont say this without any backup, many professionals of level agreed with me on this, these are very strange times: Advertising has never been this expensive, and yet the quality has never this cheap.

A lot has been said and tried about audience profiling, even with the involvement of fields like Sociology and Psychology, a lot of justifying paperwork has been assembled as evidence for the industry, and yet the results are simply absent.

Hacking in IT is about the capacity of invading an external system in stealth mode, Social Engineering is about invading social/work groups and assimilate usefull knowledge/connections also in stealth.

I propose advertising as a hacking tool capable of invading the most intimate emotions and thoughts in the target audience's colective mind.

N Lopes

It is not invasion of privacy or consumers rights because it does not hack into a single consumers mind and/or privacy, it works as a census, a very intimate census.

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Two things that matter for me when I employ designers/graphic artists:


-Its not just your portfollio, it doesnt really matter for me that you can present a good portfolio, its more the matter of you being ready to burn it after you present it.

-Its not just about you can tell me about the work of Bruce Barton historically, is what you can demonstrate that you have learned it personally.



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Dont take it wrongly if you cant get this at first, just keep in mind that everything in this industry is colective, and nothing is personal.




All the best

Catch 22 or predictions for creative industries for 2009, if you dont have any speckles of dust in your shoulders

Happy Hogmanay !!!

There is a lot of presumptions for this year, with the crisis hitting Europe, and recession setting in most of the European Union, its not surprising at all for people that deal with edge funds, or even for the more modest investor that deals by etrader, to put simple, it is true, and it is here.

Job losses are intense in Great Britain, and several small enterprises are falling like a castle of cards. Christmas is over, and if its true that the creative industries were blessed with fierce competition between retailers, it is true that its over now, and with savings to be put in place by companies, if its true that firms took the unpopular step of issuing redundancies, cutting costs in staff, they also cut costs in everything considered unnecessary, the adage:

"All art is useless."

Might not be true, but nevertheless seems to be popular like one of those pieces of popular wisdom that preys at the background of a thought, well you guessed:

Costs are being cut in advertising, and with that all related industries, this is dreadful news for printing businesses and similar specialities, I am not proud to predict that many of those businesses will go bust this year.

Things will be on the edge to traditional graphic designers, and all the art related disciplines, I believe it will be difficult to thrive this year for most professionals and graduates.

Things will be less bad for established advertisers, that have history with the same clients, but they can count on money owed to them and/or late payments.

Gaining of this will be IT or IT related designers, such as interface designers, and technology "problem solving" related variants, I dare to guess if web designers ( The PHP/ASP programmer type, not the "arty" ) will benefit from the crisis, E-business depends greatly on the price of fuel (delivery costs).

Closing this year my latest project, and finding it hard to part with working with the best team I have worked till today, really great people to work with (C D and G). Until the next project, I am taking a couple of nights to put my feet up, and do basic tidy-up tasks, where strangely I am finding a sort of meditative peace, yes, my servers are my bonsai.

I am also amazed to find myself programming again, taking a very light approach to Flex, which I was curious about for a year or so, until the end of the month I will be back to ASP, PHP, and since I have no Flash to do, I will be re-installing SUSE in my test box.

Programming took in the past a great deal of my time for image creation, I would like to do that, but all the non-profit "arty-farty" type of work, is not a priority, in reality, it is not good business at all for these times, the increased popularity and ease of use of industry leading software packages, makes any wannabe into a graphic designer with a couple of tutorials, since I never worked for a couple of £100, I tend to sub-contract while busy with the Tech side, editing myself everything I don't approve in the end, and sometimes reinventing the concept if necessary well ahead of time for the deadline of the brief. Times change, and so must designers, it is not easy to accept this for the more purists, but understand that capital always has the last word, and unless one wants to work for less and less as time passes, skills must be improved, some of us decide to follow computer science as the ultimate leap of faith in self challenging, others get a job in print business for whatever they pay, or get into sign making.

The days of image generation are over, I always suspected these times would come, with Home Pc peripherals taking all the photocopying retail business away, and also the digital photography defeating the photographic film development and photo print shops, it is not hard to see that with better computer spec at lower prices, the advances in processing power and the decrease of the price of RAM and several other devices, it is fair to say that digitalisation is not only changing things and making graphic services and even related businesses obsolete (such as electronic repairs, image editing, airbrush retouching...you get the picture...), it is even more true that digitalization is here to stay.

Now, this does not intend to be an attack against traditional designers and photographers, that is simply not my style, and I do respect those professions greatly, and believe me, few people consume and appreciate design like me and my close friends, but I think its safe to say that anyone working in those industries must have felt a decrease in demand and in the price the client is wiling to pay. Nor do I intend to insinuate that the current industry circumstances are a sort of proof to separate the best from the mundane, I cant stress enough my respect by professionals of the most classic forms of design, in which I work sporadically and even have very good credentials on, please note that I often rely on these professionals myself when I manage a project, so I couldn't have any lack of consideration for them.

Not wanting to be bad news to anyone, and wishing anyone reading this a very good year, yes I too hope that I am wrong.

Cheers