I was in the line at Wal*Mart and noticed this crazy little packaging change on a Snickers bar. Awhile ago I blogged on how Starbucks was using their original logo this year on select drinks to help celebrate their anniversary. It would appear that Snickers is doing the same from the look of it (from what I have heard it sounds like it is their 75th anniversary). Apparently radical marketing like this works- I bought a bar just to show my wife when I got home… I didn’t even want the candy bar.

Well… it appears that a very promising graphic design entity, Create Magazine, just bit the dust. I received an email today saying that Jupitermedia Corporate Inc purchased the magazine and is merging it with their magazine, ‘Dynamic Graphics’.

I remember when Create Magazine first came out. It was so full of promise, it had a great design sense to it, and it was locationally relevant by publishing region-specific issues that contained news specifically going on in my neck of the woods. We’ll see how this all pans out, but if this new homepage is any indication then I’m not going to hold my breath (man that design is nasty… granted my blog has seen better days, but if you own a domain like graphics.com you’d think there’d be something more to show then ads, ugly banners, and unnecessary columns).

Que sirrah, sirrah…

As a graphic designer, I really appreciate a good marketing campaign when I see one. Epinions.com has a really great one going on right now- write 10 reviews and get $10. Why is this so great from a marketing standpoint? Namely- users, as well as Epinions benefits from this.

This campaign does three things for Epinions from my point of view: 1) increases traffic to their website, 2) provides incentive for users to get invested and integrated, 3) costs them VERY little to boost traffic and user interaction. The rules stipulate that a max of 30,000 reviews can be received to qualify for this promotion. Hmmmm… let’s see, 30,000 divided by 10 equals 3000. Yep- a promotion that, at the most, costs Epinions (a company valued at $30.5 million in 2003) only $3000 to generate massive user interaction and interactivity. Not only that, but it is more than likely that Epinions will receive excess entries over and above the 30,000 qualifying ones.

I’m a dork I know, but I couldn’t help but admire a well-thought out promotion like this that saves money and maximizes business productivity. My goodness, did I just give free advertising for a promotion? What a dork…