iPhone and non-Flash Version

About me

My name is Ian Venskus. I am an Advertising professional working in the Boston, MA area.

While I haven't been in the professional Advertising game for long, I've become well versed in the discipline. My main focus is creative and I have been writing HTML, designing and building websites for over 10 years. I've been fortunate enough to see web design go from a Microsoft Paint bitmap converted to a gif using an MS DOS prompt to the most powerful of PNG 24's rivaling that of Print Design.

While my focus is on creative you may ask, why am I an Account Manager? Well to answer that simply, I wanted to know how to run a company and I felt as a designer, it would take years to learn how to do that. Whereas now, I feel very comfortable addressing all issues that may occur in agency life. Also because I am currently an Account Manager, there's times when I assign myself projects. I didn't exactly want to assign myself the development of BaskinRobbins.com, but when agency resources are short I'm capable of putting on many different hats.

As you progress through my portfolio you will see the work I've done throughout my carreer. It will clearly demonstrate my abilities as well give you a sense of my creative style and production capabilities.

Below is a list of the clients I have done worked for:

Currently I work at an interactive agency called MNET on Boylston St. in Boston. There I manage, produce and design for the ESPN, Cumberland Farms and the Dunkin' Brands accounts each day. My job changes daily, as I wear many different hats within the Advertising realm. My biggest accomplishment so far has been my work with redesigning the Baskin-Robbins website.

I've had two internships. One at Imagewest a student-run agency at Western Kentucky University. There I learned that using the Help button wasn't as evil as I thought. It was actually... Helpful!

My second internship was at Paramore | Redd in Nashville, TN. There I learned to work at a fast agency pace while still producing quality results.

While Creative is King, Production is the Crown Jewels

Everyone knows, that in the Ad biz if you have stellar creative going into a pitch you'll probably win. However, if you are unable to produce that creative properly, that client might not stick around very long. Now this is extremely important in Interactive Media these days. All too often, I see amazing Flash creative ruined, because the producer didn't convert the JPGs to PNGs or at the very least up the JPG from 80% default quality to 100%. By not doing this, it is equivent to printing a high quality print ad for Maxim magazine on newspaper.

Projects like this come across my desk every now and then, but during the W9 Subway banner release in 2007 a very interesting case came up.

The client was unhappy with the agency's performance on this project and felt that we had not delievered on what we promised. Which to everyone's eyes appeared obvious. So I'm brought in to the project because I had done many banner ads at Paramore | Redd with success, and I inherit this:

iPhone and non-Flash Version

Ok so you probably thinking, this is a pretty decent banner ad, it fits the 35k banner ad size requirements and it's designed well. But there's a problem. While doing comps, the client was shown high quality Photoshop banner ads, so the client expected, high quality Flash banner ads and was disappointed that the ads were very pixelated and did not show the art work well.

I've inherited a disaster. The first mistake was the banner ad was designed in Photoshop, not in Flash. So right from the start I am working with pixel heavy bitmap images from a designer who didn't understand that when you design something for 35k, that bitmap images should be few and far between. Also the character art (Stewie) was provided as a low res gif file to use in the banner ads, instead of a vector Illustrator file.

iPhone and non-Flash Version

Stewie had to be solved first. I could not allow my love of the Family Guy to be tarnished because I was provided with a low res gif. So I popped open Photoshop and went to work. I added a stroke to graphic to create the black outline and then saved Stewie out as a PSD. I imported PSD Stewie into Illustrator and used the live trace tool to smooth out the outline around him. I then layed a duplicate bitmap version of Stewie ontop of the vector. This provided a nice crisp outline. From there I exported Stewie out as high res PNG. I opened the exported PNG in Fireworks, because Fireworks and Flash like each other, resized it to the exact size I wanted to use it in m Flash movie and exported it out as transparent PNG 8. Stewie was about 8k, so I had used about a 4th of my file size alloted.

Then came the background. After struggling for an hour or so, on how to properl optimize the background, I realized that blue boxes repeated horizontally. This was great! So I cut a small piece of the background out and saved it in Fireworks as a gif with 24 colors, about 3k. Once inside of Flash I created a movie clip and duplicated the movie clip and tiled the background by hand. While this was pain staking, I knew that once Flash saves a movie clip it can duplicate that movie clip as many times as you want without increasing the file size, now I had my background.

From there, everything else was either vector art or was very easy to optimize in Fireworks. The production took approximately 12 hours as everything had to be recreated, but the client comment when she saw the final ad made it all worth it, "Awesome!"

YouTube Hell in a Santa Monica Heaven

Schools over, I'm graduated, and a freelance opportunity comes up that I couldn't believe. This movie producer/director I know named Stu Pollard wanted me to fly to Santa Monica, CA and put 16 of his videos on YouTube and myspace, as well as get them ready for podcasting. It was a pretty sweet deal, all my expenses were paid for and I came out of there with $500 in my pocket, an Apple Airport and a digital audio converter. So with that said let's get back to the title of this thing and what I learned from it.

When it comes online video, everything is different. There are a ton of different conversion types out there and most of them look good on your computer, but than are crappy when they are played back on YouTube or myspace. So after a ton of different tests using Sorenson Squeeze, Compressor and QuickTime, I found that there was a best format type and that was the M4V by Apple, which can be converted using QuickTime Pro. The reason for this is because the M4V is a 3 for 1 deal. It works great on YouTube, myspace and it is also the standard for podcasting.

Now there is one problem with this golden conversion, the M4V has the aspect ratio of 1.5:1 which is standard for the iPod, but it will put black bars on the top and bottom of the YouTube and myspace players because they use a 3:4 aspect ratio. So after pounding my head and trying to figure out how to get rid of the black bars an Apple hit me and I decided to use some math. I divided 720 by 486 because it is the standard export size from Final Cut and amazingly it comes out to 1.48:1, close enough to the 1.5:1 the iPod uses. Guess those guys at Apple really do know what they're doing. So with that out of the way, I was happy with the black bars at the bottom and top because they are being shown at the correct aspect ratio online.

Then it was on to podcasting. Now everyone knows that I love DailyMotion, but they lost big points with me last week. DailyMotion says their service is able to podcast, but don't be fooled because when you try to get it to work in iTunes, it doesn't work at all, and they do not support uploading M4V files very well. After some in-depth research I found a company called Podbean that specializes in hosting podcasts. They cost about $20/month for their best service, and oh boy! are they worth every penny! Their service is so intuitive and straightforward, it made me want to podcast everything I've ever made. It also became very clear to me that podcasting is definitely the way of the of the future. The quality is far superior to anything you'll ever see on any of the popular video sharing networks and makes people like me who really care about quality very happy about the future of podcasting.

In closing here is Stu Pollard's myspace page, it's pretty cool and is able to integrate both sides of online video, with it's myspace video player and podcasting link.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

I was reading my text book for my Cross Cultural Psychology class called Culture and Psychology by David Matsumoto and Linda Juang and I came across the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This states that people think differently when speaking or reading in different languages. Now this interests me because of the large Hispanic market that is increasing on a daily basis in this country. If Hispanics relate their home life to Spanish and they relate their out-of-home life to English then depending on the product you are marketing, would also depend on which language you would use to market it. So if I was marketing a vacuum cleaner to the Hispanic market, it might make more sense to market using the Spanish language. Though if I was to market a can of Coca-Cola I may want to use English because I want that demographic to drink Coca-Cola with their friends while they are out and about.

Now what I also found, was this really cool list of things that can be used by designers, which is taken directly out of my text book on page 271. To set this up the list is talking about how many terms their are for different colors in different languages.

  1. All languages contain terms for white and black.
  2. If a language contains three terms, it also contains a term for red.
  3. If a language contains four terms, it also contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
  4. If a language contains five terms, it contains terms for both green and yellow.
  5. If a language contains six terms, it also contains a term for blue.
  6. If a language contains seven terms, it also contains a term for brown.
  7. If a language contains eight or more terms, it also contains a term for purple, pink, orange, gray, or some combination of these.

I thought this was really interesting and I'd love to find out more about it and actually do some research on it. Maybe something I could do if I ever decide to get a master's degree. In closing the thing that keeps me thinking about this was on page 272....thought is not just made up of words and languages, but is also visual and nonverbal.

Occam's Razor

My favorite T.V. show is House because it is always exciting to see how House solves the problems at hand. His method of problem solving is based on Occam's Razor: make as few assumptions as possible and find the simplest answer to explain all symptoms. Recently I've started using this principle in the computer lab where I work in the School of Journalism & Broadcasting and it is amazing how much faster I've been able to solve problems now. On most nights I have to figure out problems other students are having with software such as the Adobe, Microsoft and Apple suites, idea generating, writing plans books or just problem solving in general and by using the razor everything seems to solve its self.

While I have a chance I'd like to talk about this weekend's crazy problem. We were at the 5th District's NSAC in Cincinnati where we took second place in the Coca-Cola Campaign, and while we were at the hotel we ran into a problem at 11 pm the night before the presentation. The problem was we had a sweet cinema ad (which will be online soon) and there was an announcer talking through the ad explaining the campaign to the audience which our head professor hated and made his displeasure known to everyone. So after a vote the announcer had to be taken out of the ad. The big problem was we didn't have the computer that had the original sound on it because it was back in Bowling Green, Kentucky. So after trying to figure out the best way to edit the audio for 30 minutes we decided we had to call our semi-intoxicated friends in Bowling Green to help us out.

So after getting our friend Byron Fanning on the phone we finally found someone who was sort of familiar with Final Cut named Binh Ly. I then had to give Binh directions on finding the file and how to edit it inside of Final Cut over the phone. We weren't even sure if this solution would work and the atmosphere was so intense I don't even think I can explain it. I can only say that it was probably comparable to disabling a bomb. Ok maybe not... After about an hour on the phone we had our audio. The next problem we had, was that we didn't have internet at the hotel. So Megan Lother, Mandy Mullin's and I went to Megan's house 10 minutes away and downloaded the .aif, burn it to a CD, bring the sound into Final Cut edit it, export it, bring it to Motion and export the video. We then had to compress the file because it was bogging down the computer and we got it working just before the presentation at 2:45 pm. The great thing was the presentation went great and no one knew the difference.

Ok so you may not think this was a very simple solution, but the alternatives would have been even worse. We would've had to edit the sound in Final Cut or Sound Track, maybe audacity to try to take the audio out, or we would've had to rip out the sound and just use the music file. All solutions would've taken away from the cinema ad drastically and we probably wouldn't have been able to pull it off in time, luckily we were able to. After all this I would like to thank our amazing broadcast team especially Megan Lother and Mandy Mullin's who made the cinema ad and stayed up with me all night.

Content, Research and the Internet

Throughout the time I've spent on the Internet I've realized two things that work. They are, great content and a way to find content that is fast and user friendly. Kidd Redd wrote an awesome article on why content should be great and I'm going to extend on that. What he basically said was that "the novelty of YouTube is going to wear off eventually." Now it's always fun to watch people doing stupid things,but I'm not about to sit on my couch and eat a big bowl of popcorn watching YouTube. User-generated clips are usually funny, but lack substance whereas professionally produced clips by companies like Captains of Industry in Boston, MA are creating viral videos that are fun to watch over and over again.

Now when it comes to research, Google is king, and after touring their New York office with Ad Fed I really don't think anyone will beat them. Their search engine usually comes up with the best results and you can find anything you are looking for, especially when you use tips from GoogleTutor.com. The only problem I have with Google is that they put advertising ahead of the actual site you are looking for. I believe they should make advertisers responsible in making landing pages that are relevant to what the user is actually looking for. This will help users find relevant content and at the same time see an ad that they are interested in. I think search engines are here to stay, but there needs to be a better way to find things. StumbleUpon is a great example of a way to find content you didn't even know you were interested in. If there was someway of using StumbleUpon and Google together the world of research would be a great place. Maybe that's where Wiki will come in.

Search Engine Marketing

I just read a great article from iProspect, a search engine marketing company in Boston, MA. In the article Christopher Wallace writes about using a key word search with Michael Jordan as the key word. I found what he wrote interesting because he talked about the four levers of keyword search: keywords, creative, bidding and landing page. I always knew what all four were, but he explains it simply and it gave me a much better understanding of SEM. So if you get a chance read his great article by clicking here.

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