A few months back, I had the occasion to meet some dude named John Gall who invited me to speak to his students at his SVA book design class. The students were treated to an hour long oration of my adventures in design from the past five years in addition to multiple sidebars where I cataloged some of my bigger public mistakes and snafus (complete with slides, no less). John, in turn, let me take a stab (or 20) at a cover in the form of ex-advertising executive James P. Othmer’s polemic: Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet.
The book is a self-effacing, first person account of Othmer watching the advertising landscape transform around himself over the tenure of his career in the late ’90′s and early 00′s. It reads as one part memoir and one part exploded diagram—charting the efficacy of modern advertising between television commercials with multimillion dollar budgets and catering all the way down to spam.
The chosen cover above was my attempt at visualizing multiple competing messages (which Othmer examines at length in the book) and arranging them into a cover that can actually be read.
Half of the killed comps below (and there were many others) have a preoccupation with chickens. This is because Othmer has a preoccupation with chickens. Throughout the book, he measures success in advertising with the chicken as his yardstick. Specifically, the rote, stockholder-dictated constraints of the KFC commercials which he’s obligated to visualize as their creative director, versus the groundbreaking and wildly successful ‘Subservient Chicken‘ campaign produced by Burger King in the early 2000′s which contributed to thousands upon thousands of untold wasted hours on the internet typing in outrageous commands with which to exert supremacy over a man in a chicken suit. In the comping stages, the chicken became this perfect conduit that lead me through Othmer’s narrative.
Comically, despite the chicken’s virtual omnipresence inside the book, the covers in which I attempted to use them were killed largely because they wouldn’t have made much sense to anyone who hadn’t been prepped with the preceding paragraph, thereby proving the rule once again that while chickens are still very funny, they can’t sell you advertising.
KILLED COMPS:
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