The ABCs of Landing Pages

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Graffiti Police Force Artist to Buff Owner-Authorized Mural

Dad illustrates kids’ sandwich bags with imaginative drawings

Love and art: necessary components of a balanced lunch.

Some ideas are hard to shake (and with good reason) ! The NW Pet Club is something that got set aside, despite wild enthusiasm from businesses and pet clubs and pet people. In fact, over-enthusiasm led to over-reaching geographically and over-spending on phone lists, telemarketing hours and “advances” to a dishonest salesman. By switching to a virtual directory (we cut costs and save trees) and the idea of splitting profits with nonprofits (like schools) rather than a sales force will allow the project to grow organically. As quickly or slowly as need/demand. Send us your happy wishes. Check back (after summer/back to school) to check on our progress.

NW Pet Club

Northwest Pet Club was created to put “Unity into Community”. Our business model is designed to put people before profits. Our goals are simple. We find and promote ethical and affordable local businesses, services, businesses and organizations that improve the lives of pets and pet owners. We provide discounts to our members to make it easier to use those services, products, businesses. We help keep those terrific businesses IN BUSINESS: by providing a loyal and diverse customer base and an avid word of mouth “buzz”. We allow schools and similar nonprofit groups to sell our memberships and related products for fundraising purposes.

For our pets

For their people

For students

For the future

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Art by subscription: Art in a box (dot) net

Cool idea. A novel and surprising way to interact with a SF gallery and create an inexpensive “grab bag” art collection. Check out their gallery for some stunning pieces. This also appeals as I’ve been looking at ways to support the USPS and strike a blow against the (no longer so) secret attempts to privatize the Post Office. Perhaps you are living in one of the under-represented states. Check out the map on their Trans-American Art Campaign link.

 

http://artinabox.net/

• News
• The Great Trans-american Art Campaign
• Artists
• Gallery
• About 
• Subscribe

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Subscribing is simple, just give us three adjectives to describe your art taste and tell us what media you like or dislike!

What is Art in a Box?

Established in 2009, ART IN A BOX is an art subscription service created by The Compound Gallery in Oakland, CA. Operating on the model of a wine subscription service, Art in a Box offers amazing original works of art instead of wine. The Subscription cost includes shipping!

Our Artists

Our artists live or work in the San Francisco Bay Area and are hand selected because of their professionalism, quality, and dedication to the arts. You can be sure that not only are your pieces amazing to look at, they will be an investment for your art collection.

Cat and Girl: gifts that keep on giving

Work for a cause

About Advertzine

The purpose for this blog is to create a community and a template for a new way of being. Whether you calling it infiltrating from within, subverting the dominant paradigm, smashing capitalism or reforming it or simply wrestling/wresting/resting/arresting control of the runaway train that is local and global economies and business practices from the deathgrip of corporations and slicing the strings off some golden parachutes.

This is to create safe, environmentally and social sound ways of being and partnerships. What we want are mom and pop businesses who open their doors and stay open. If we accept the participation of angel investor networks or shark tank tv hucksters, it should be to recognize them for what they are: a short term solution. A quick fix. Get them in and get them out. What investors like this want is antithetical to GOOD business practices. They want continual spiraling growth. What is good for communities is the store stays open, provides goods at the same or even less price while sustaining a living wage for the workers in the store, the workers that supply the products or make them etc. This cannot be done and continue to give “investors” more and more bang for the one buck they invested.

The current modality is to shoot someone to provide that blood money: mom and pop, union workers, whoever gets in the way of the “shark/angel” and the best bang-for-buck increase in profits. This has led to poverty, recession, the collapse of banking, housing and markets that were once considered “risk free”. Yesterday’s financial advice seems quaint and naive: Invest in real estate and you’ll always have something or at least some place to live.

All sharks want is to eat. They will tear anyone, anything, including each other if they smell blood in the water. Angels don’t live in the real world and have real world concerns like not enough cash to put gas in the car or milk in your kids cereal.

Any marriage between Big money and Small town sustainability, should be a Brittney Spears style event: all flash and paparazzi, sexy, huge and over before the honeymoon. Get them in and out. Thank you very much for your seed money or participation or stopping by and here, as promised, is the nitty-gritty, quick return on the investment, warm fuzzy feeling, high fives from colleagues for having scored in the press and all the other goodies of a celebrity marriage. Sign the annulment papers on your way out. There’s nothing left but exit interviews and checking to see how high you’re trending on twitter.

Everyone gets what everyone wants.

Lasting marriages are arranged by matchmakers like me, and the socialists and environmentalists and mothers and all of us who want a paycheck you can count on and the feeling of honor and joy that comes with working closely with and supporting organizations and individuals and industries and businesses that have earned that support and who are genuinely building lasting communities.

Advertzines are one of the ways I have considered doing and creating that. Getting the money from thems that’s got it all and those who need it… in a way that is mutually satisfying.

Some organizations will always need money. Schools, for example. Or anything that has “making money” no where in their mission statement. Boys and girls clubs, free clinics, food pantries, churches. The list is actually endless.

There is nothing new about suggesting to business “partners” that what exists there are untapped consumers or sales force. What is new is to turn the tables and say we are not begging gods of commerce for the opportunity to exploit us, the weak and needy. We are offering them instead the opportunity to be exploited by us, to serve, to evolve (if they can) or to get in/get out before the greed they pride themselves for (and which WE can no longer allow) makes those corporate bullies completely redundant.

This blog will showcase who is doing what to make change, transitions, green business strategies, advice, links to similar, interviews, news snips etc and analysis. Also it will evolve into a series of Advertzines (advertising magazines etc similar to the coloring pages the waitress gives your child that show the restaurant mascot juggling hamburgers… or the balloon with the logo on it.)

Semi-Game review/reflection on Games as advertizing

The following comments are about the FB game MyVegas

 these are comments I posted about how the game might improve, what I found frustrating and disappointing. I have included also the comments of a fan who was offended on the game’s behalf and leaped into defend its honor. I addressed my comments to this quixotic Don Q, but realized that as always I’m talking over his shoulder, pitched to the crowd behind him. My audience is always much larger (myself) and the like-minded world (like you, beloved readers.)

Comments

G.l. Morrison

If your intention as a game designer is to sort out the real higher rollers who will just spin and spin and spend a couple of hundred dollars because they spend enough time in vegas anyway… well good on you.

 

For the rest of us, which in this economy is MOST people, playing games is a way to be fantasy millionaires. Games with real world benefits like WeTopia which gives money to charities and this and others which give POTENTIAL rewards to players are appealing because they make us feel that time spent playing games isn’t wasted. (Not entirely anyway.)

• The MyStrip should be more than a place to chip farm (and if it’s a chip farm then sit down with your game designer and ask yourselves WHY SO STINGY?)
• The Casino marquees show real events/shows. Why not let us earn points by clicking on them and going to off site pages. Add a level where we can enter the casinos and browse through stores, websites, etc. Too glitchy on FB? Take it to another server… like Zynga. Where we click and are actually exiting FB and its code dramas. But our scores, points, etc are sent back to FB so nothing is lost.
• Give us a third set of currency that can be used to fantasy shop for SIMs like items to decorate our “high roller suite”.
• Partner with Zynga or EA or the sims. You can either be one of their favored/temporary business partners who they then write an adventure for us players and we get virtual swag for playing in both MyVegas and Sims. Or just buy some code from them to make an inside casino thing for MyStrip.
• Slots could be a lot “looser”. One would think these perks and coupons were coming out of your pocket. You just make us feel stupid for playing and losing and losing. (Or are anti-gambling addicts involved in the code writing and it’s a lesson we’re supposed to learn in there somewhere?) All I learn is that the developers seem to be greedy little people who either don’t play games or don’t respect those of us who do.

Seriously this is too boring to play and too long to wait to earn chips. It’s actually making me feel hostility not just for the game but for the city and businesses its modeled on.

December 08, 2012 08:20

Greg Marquez

I would really love an app version for Android where we can sign in from our phone and play.

December 08, 2012 15:26

Raja Bettis

WOW G.I. Morrison. You sound like a PROFESSIONAL GAMER! Although some of the suggestions are kinda cool, I happen to think that for the average person, like myself, this game is alot of fun. As far as them being stingy… they are letting you earn VIP points for FREE stuff for FREE ( if you don’t want to buy chips) most of the other slot games on FB don’t give you ANYTHING, even if you purchase chips.  Maybe you should just NOT PLAY THE GAME if you don’t like it.  I LOVE IT!!!  Keep up the good work guys!

December 09, 2012 11:35

G.l. Morrison

Raja,

As I said above, I don’t play the other slots so I can’t compare. I am a professional GAME REVIEWER. As such, I thought and continue to think that my opinion (as it includes the hours and experience, if you include interviews with other gamers etc, a beejezus number of lifetime hours spent playing games) is valuable.

 

All games, including this one, wouldn’t survive without their hardcore fans. They have found one in you Raja and are lucky to have you. Good ‘on you, both for finding each other. Nothing wrong there.

 

However, I am assuming that the game also represents a real investment of cash and man hours by the casino and the games developers. They have created this forum and intend it to be used to better the game. I hope that they do so rather than simply troll for self-congratulatory back pats.

Casinos and other business are looking for adventurous and SUCCESSFUL ways to invest their advertising money. FB games is a new cutting edge way of doing that. There are dozens of other game only sites from Neopets to Zynga that do fun stuff to woo those ad bucks. Some of it results in more fun for gamers, loyalty rewards some tangible and some intangible.

 

You can offer me points toward getting a free car from a car lot in Kalamazoo.

 

WOW! How can they afford to give us each a free car? They don’t have to. Because how long will it take to earn those points and how many of us will give up before then? So they get an enormous amount of “eyeballs” on the ads and valuable buzz about the car/products… because basically by offering us a car or show tickets or a Las Vegas vacation we are drooling for it. We have been offered a forced choice and reclaim it as our heart’s desire.

Example: I was planning on taking my gf to Hawaii or the US Virgin Island or the fringe festival in Victoria British Columbia but playing this game has caused me to surf around thinking about when/how soon I could take a weekend getaway for two or a later family gambling vacation.

Oh yeah, I am suggestible. Very open to advertising. I am in that way a completely different, but equally prized, demographic.

 

What I plan to do is to keep playing the game. Even if it means just checking in and chip farming and spinning the chips into loyalty points. I will give myself a deadline such as family vegas trip next year at xmas. I will blog my progress. I will spin the experience into a variety of articles, funny blurbs, etc that I sell and resell because that’s what professional writers and gamers do. LOLz.

Hopefully I’ll have patience to play and actually cash in on some great goodies. (I’m also signed up for M life before I mark off the dates on the calendar, I will have signed up for every reward site and Las Vegas city council/tourist board swag bag known to man… and some fairly obscure ones. I’ll arrange to visit somethings with a travel agent pal and get their swag and how-to-sell vegas info. I’ll probably arrange to do quickie interviews with cooks and do food reviewing.) Cuz you’re right. This is my life. And my job. And both of them I treat like a game. A game I’m really good at.

 

I’m easily bored tho. So… Hey, Life! Wake up and fix the glitches and keep me entertained or I’ll go play something else.

Note to self (from sickbed to later to do list)

being trapped and drugged up means my mind goes a million miles a minute… new idea for a tarot series forming… in which the suits are pirates, gypsies/belly dancers, fairy/fey for air, mermaids and aquatic cosplayer or drowned heroines, or… or maybe some focus is required and do each as separate decks: ie modern elementals (dancers with fire, water-flashdance/wet-tshirt cannons/bursting water balloons etc, with air-aireals-trapese-tightrope, earth-grass,dirt,mud and trees), and then focused on a specific elemental mythos such as dryads (with proceeds to cascadia forest defenders), single mothers/hipster moms/ and a corresponding for single dads one… there are not enough single dads swag. must copy and paste this to my revolution through business ie money is the tool of evil not the source of it blogs.

done. posted. pasted. Others can offer suggestions. Ask me if you want to be a model, a photographer, contribute content, ideas, or just get on the mailing list to be informed when its done. (BTW drugged up genius artists want to know just how done does something have to be to safely offer preorders and use the funds to print/finish etc. And how long out is someone willing to wait for a preorder?)

(Note to anxious self: money is a tool, whether its a toy or a weapon or a hammer to rebuild a community in ruins… it’s not money specifically that does harm its assholes with money that do.) Use money to make more things and people free. Liberate with money, liberate from money, sort of like getting grant money from a bloodsucking corporation to fund a free (no barter) everything’s free event. Strange bedfellows. but it could work. Just remember that while they are trying to corrupt you toward taking the easy, cheap product that is made with chems, nonfood foods, no oversight, invisible labor force… we work as hard to corrupt them toward good. Not just because it’s the right thing to do. It’s the only thing to do. This is a cake or death offer.

Evolve –capitalism has shown itself to be slippery and adaptive– if it can stop fighting socialism, we could reform it (while strangling the unreform-able parts). But understand, oh ye captains of industry. We are not beggars with a hand-out saying “please Mr., won’t you help.” We are the lifeboat off the sinking ship. You can stay on the titanic and listen to the band play on and drink champagne martinis served by suicidal waitrons until you all slip into the icy depths of arrogant, mammoth blunders of history and greed. Or you can convince us with your actions, your money in supporting these and other green businesses, communities, etc and with your actions in being accountable for everything your money touches, don’t launder the blood off your money… stop the source of the bleeding. Stop paying warlords and sweat-shops and slavers.

Basically prove you deserve a place in the life boat. But we, me here/those who join me here, we don’t have time to adjudicate your worthiness. We’re busy finding places and squeezing everyone into the boats. Hurry. Sit over there. Grab an oar.

We are the cake in the cake or death equation. Insert Eddie Izzard. But be aware, we are not the church of england who never runs out of cake.

Time will tell if WE are the vanguard of the revolution or just canaries in the coal mine. We are the diplomats. The peace-wishers. But behind us is a bloodier revolutionary army. The tribunals. The vigilantes. The mob of angry villagers and disenfranchised voters and wage slaves that have come to tear the castle down and drag the king and his court (let them eat cake advisers) off to the guillotine. So if you have any sense of self preservation, Sir, turn the castle into a soup kitchen and start distributing cake to the poor so when their brothers arrive they may sit down and eat beside you. Judge you harmless or at least useful to the revolution and not an enemy of it. The enemies of change. The enemies of progress and sanity and justice… they will not fair well. Their lives are not more valuable than those of garment workers burning alive in locked factories. Your life is not. My life is not. By your works shall ye know them. Make ’em good ones, Sir or Madam. Make it count. Save yourself. Save your community. Save your planet. By any means necessary.

A revolution and a business plan you can dance and sing to and that keeps schools open and children fed and artists art-ting… that’s my wish and my plan and I will stand head held high in front of the tribunals when they ask me what I have to harm or help in this world. I hope to judged fairly as doing my best. I hope to have corrupted rather than been corrupted by alliances.

I better make those tarot decks so I can read on the possible outcome.