Category: Puzzlers
November 29th, 2006

Brand Quiz: Is your brand a sucking, swirling eddy of despair?

Brand_o_meter We launched our much-anticipated Mortar 360 brand quiz today.

Click through to test your brand management prowess against the Web’s most advanced (and we might say pithy) brand analysis tool.

November 2nd, 2006

Name our new receptionist.

Mortarreceptionist

Our latest hire needs a moniker. Suggestions?

November 1st, 2006

New puzzler! Submit your ridiculous agency emails.

Inspired by the truly inane (but no doubt true) posts of actual idotic agency and client comments on Adverbatims.com we are pleased to announce our new puzzler.

Send in your inane agency and client messages and the winner will receive, yes you guessed it, $50 in Fandango tickets. Contest starts now. And it closes a week from today. Judging will be by an independent party, most probably not me but definitely a Mortar employee.

To get you started here are a few choice items from Adverbatims:

“They loved it but the want to change the pictures, headline and design.”
(Agency, Account Executive)

“Can you ask the announcer to produce a whispering scream?”
(Client, Area Manager, during the recording of a radio spot)

“POS? What the fuck is that, another word you made up?”
(Agency, Account Executive)

“Make it wild but conservative!”
(Agency, Account Executive, to Art Director)

“Before negotiating something, I practice in the shower“
(Client, Marketing Assistant)

“There’s an X crossing the photo. When you send me the final art, it’s not going to be there, is it?”
(Client, Area Manager)

“Can you change the word ‘exquisite’ on the ad? Words including the letter X are way too complicated.”
(Client, Marketing Manager)

“It’s amazing how well you interpreted the brief. This piece is exactly
what we wanted, you could not have made it any better, I love it. But I
also think it’s too good. This is for a bigger client, a more
international one. We’re not like that. See if you can do something
shittier that we can use.”
(Client, same Marketing Manager)

“This is a picture of how I want the ad. I had to draw it in a napkin.”
(Client, same Marketing Manager)

And my absolute favorite:

"You’re going to rape every piece of crap on the shelf.”
(Client, Marketing Assistant, optimist about a colleague’s future product launch)

Enter your entries below or email them to me.

October 23rd, 2006

Fun with stationery.

Picture_26_1These are stills from a new promotional site for an office supply company, Viking (no relation to the cooker company we suspect).  The first two were a snap, but I’m buggered if I can figure out number three (below).

Click through here to see the site and wonder at the possibilities of stationery art.

Picture_25_1Picture_27_1

 

July 27th, 2006

Google seeks smarties

GooglebillboardMortar’s Communication Planner, Nick told me about this billboard for Google.

Not content with straightforward help wanted ads, Google designed its own promotion for eggheads in Boston and Silicon Valley back in 2004.

Apparently, the solution to this puzzle is a URL address for an an even harder problem.

I’ll save you some hassle, the answer of course is  7427466391 (yeah, I looked it up, on Google of course).

Its nice to see an advertiser have the confidence to challenge its audience.