Exam brain drain

I'm sure all the undergraduates are feeling the crunch, and halfway through my exams, I get tired of memorizing decade-old facts of measuring the probability of factories being successful. So here's my retaliation to the brain drain.

A quick visit back to everyone's favorite fruit. Apples? Blackberries? Ever thought that actual fruit wars would get literal AND aggressive? This ad was prepared by the New York Ad Agency Guava, and was apparently too much for rim to handle. The video here:

[Side note: Doesn't YouTube HD rock?]

Personally, I love it. Freeze a blackberry, shoot it through an Apple. This is all beside the fact that the Blackberry Storm hasn't been selling as its prospective fruit. The two aren't even direct competitors on a corporate marketplace, but the personal marketplace has already been too saturated with Apple for something like this to take off at comparable levels.

Branding beat to death

Branding has been given a lot of attention recently, especially now that the recession is giving companies the perfect opportunity to re-launch their whole product and marketing perspective once the money starts flowing again. However, there's an inherent concern that everything, right down to our staples like toilet paper and canned corn is being branded to death. The question that brand pessimists pose is: do these companies have the goods to back up their newly introduced image? Books such as OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder are sitting on the lonely side of the fence with this perspective...for the time being.

Combating brain drain

Accounting getting your morale down?

Watch this video:

Not taking a marketing course is kind of frustrating. It's nice learning business staples such as accounting, but it'll be a welcomed change next year when I can stop being trained to be a CA in a cubicle. Marketing in my opinion boils down to the following:

Consumers with Dollars -> Marketing -> Companies with Dollars

So, what better way to beat the brain drain then with some nice reading on this fundamental consumer-company chain?

There are two trends breaking into the marketplace right now:

1. Brand Experiences and how such builds into creating brand value (think walking into an Abercrombie store)

2. Brand Sense --> billboards and print ads are slowly becoming the dinosaurs of touchpoint marketing

On the reading block:

So a little message of hope to all the BBAs and IBBAs out there: consolidating income statements and the difference between a group and a team aren't the most important things in the world. Learn something you're interested in for once.

TED is a motivational speaker company that has just recently launched almost all their full-length videos on-line for free. It's worth watching as many as you can, as truly some of the best and brightest divulge insights worth every penny for paying audiences. Of particular importance is how schools are killing our creativity:

One of my favorite clips ever that really addresses a huge issue swept under the rug.

Also, the magic behind Benjamin Button. A real jaw-dropper at how a movie that may have seemed to have little to no digital animations beat out every glitzy action film at the Oscars:

Enjoy.