This time of year it’s great to breathe in the Spring air and keep your eyes peeled for all kinds of babies. Here are some of our favorite new additions in Montauk and the Hamptons. Jill captured these little foxes, Lynn lives just up the hill from these baby goslings. And, Amanda (who we miss terribly) introduced her boy, Dylan, to the world. Of course there are new businesses popping up all over MTK, too. New in MTK: Neesa Peterson is bringing her Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls (N’Awleans style shaved ice) to Montauk this summer. Look for her truck at Ditch!…
Radio Radio
SFX: LOUD CRASH! Lynn: Jill! Look there’s an alien space ship and it just landed in our office. Wow, check out those strange luminescent eyes peering at us. SFX: SCI FI MUSIC UP. Jill: Wait! Look over here! There’s a band of wild horses thundering through the back yard. SFX: NAY. WHINNEY. STOMPING FEET. SFX: LYNN SNEEZES Lynn: Man that kicked up a lot of dust. I love radio – it’s theater of the mind. You don’t have to pay for an animal trainer or a lot of special effects to create incredible drama. Jill: Yeah, but we might have…
Super Bowl 2013
How about that game? And how about that power outage? (Rumor has it, it was caused by Beyonce’s curling iron.) It didn’t stop us from watching the commercials! Especially in the automotive category since b+f was just awarded the Porsche, Audi, MINI, and BMW of Southampton dealerships. This year a thirty-second spot cost about 3.8 million dollars (or roughly $126,000 a second). So here’s our rating system: WAS IT WORTH IT??? WINNERS: Dodge Ram: “God Made a Farmer” God knows we watched every second. Why? Because it didn’t sound, look or feel like anything else on TV,…
Our new website.(Giving birth to an elephant.)
We did it! It took more than two years to give birth to our new website, and yes – as you can imagine – it was PAINFUL. Why? Well, when we’re deciding about how to promote our clients, the strategic direction is clear. The vision is focused. We know (or have developed) the branding. But when we have to please ourselves (and more to the point, two highly opinionated people) it’s another story! What was the hardest thing to agree on? Design. Tone of voice. Color. How serious, how casual, how blue, which blue? When you’re people who make a…
Ch-ch-ch-changes in MTK!
With all the noise, we mean news, about our hometown in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and even London’s Tatler Magazine, we thought we’d write a blog about what’s going on in Montauk, New York. Coast, opens in the Luigi’s location the first weekend in May. Owned by Tony & Sue Berkhofer (he was the chef at West Lake Clam & Chowder House). Ronjo got a bronze job and is becoming a swanky hotel called Beach House. Gosman’s Restaurant has a new chef! Dave Piacenti, who’s worked at ENE and 1770 House. Goldberg’s Bagels is opening where…
CALLING ALL GROUPIES!
Do you love the fact that you can swim in our bays? Do you appreciate our beautiful trails, the osprey nests and wildlife out here? Wonder who fights developers and encourages lawmakers to make decisions that protect the environment? And who do you think is in the classrooms and on the fields turning students into future stewards of our environment? Group for the East End! We’d heard of the Group, but honestly didn’t understand how profound an impact they have on the quality of our lives. After meeting with their president, Bob DeLuca and a talented and committed team,…
Giants Win! Advertisers, Not So Much
OK, true confession. We don’t love football. In fact, pretty much the only football game either one of us has ever watched is the Super Bowl (unless you count Friday Night Lights). Now here’s a real shocker, even thought we both make TV commercials, we rarely watch them. Just like millions, we’ve invested in technology that allows us to fast forward – but once a year, we can’t wait to watch commercials! Why do people get so excited about Super Bowl commercials? Jill asked me this question just the other morning and Kris, a designer who works with us called…
There’s no place like home!
We just received an email from CRAIN’S NY. It’s OK to love your work, screamed the headline. The folks at Crain’s went on to explain that they’re going to unveil the best places to work in NYC. Here’s a (not so) secret – you couldn’t pay us a million dollars to work at one of them. Sure, there were days, even months, back in the day on and around Madison Avenue, when we loved where we worked. We enjoyed shooting in LA, we didn’t mind hanging out with Drew Barrymore at the Sunset Marquis. But at this point, we think…
Today, we’re thinking the same
I didn’t want to take computer science class at Emory. The giant, unwieldy, ugly beige box intimidated me. When Jill and I got our first real jobs in advertising at Young & Rubicam and Lord Geller in the early 80’s, copywriters typed on word processors, art directors hand-set type, and commercials were shot on film and spliced together with tape by editors. In 1984, Steve Jobs changed all that. Click here to watch comercial. His Apple was built for us “creatives”. Design mattered. Fun mattered. Music mattered. Art mattered. Macs were intuitive, Iphones were smarter, and Ipads turned octogenarians and…
9/11 + 10
Ten years later, you still know exactly where you were. Who you were with. Who you knew who might be in danger. I moved here on September 1, 2001. The morning of September 11, I was living in an East Hampton rental with no TV. A friend instant messaged me saying a plane had hit the WTC. I assumed it was a small Cessna, until my phone started to ring like crazy. Jill was editing a TV spot. When she got back home to Montauk there was great surf, but she couldn’t bear the thought of enjoying it while so…