This week, there were more than nine thousand Diggs for this Youtube Vid, “Why every guy should buy their girlfriend a Wii Fit.” The vid itself has over 780,000 views at the time of this posting, and no wonder, since it primarily consists of a t-shirt-and-underwear clad girl gyrating in time with the Wii Fit’s hula hoop game.

It’s a simple construction: sex sells. And I’m sure that any boyfriend would be proud to post this. Except that, on further inspection, this looks like it’s just another viral ad - albeit a somewhat edgy one for otherwise child-friendly Nintendo. Shoemoney lays it all out:

The first clue to me was the username on YouTube: tinsleyadvertising

Then a quick search on the Tinsley Advertising site lead me to the employee page where I found 1 guy who looked very similar to the guy in the video. His name is Giovanny Gutierrez.

From Gio’s Bio:

Giovanny Gutierrez
Director of Interactive Media

Gio comes from the future. He is perfectly versed in most programming languages, dreams in code and can’t sleep when his pixels aren’t in order.

As Tinsley’s Director of Interactive Media, he creates web, e-mail and interactive marketing solutions that perfectly integrate with television, radio and print campaigns. Gio is a master of e-commerce, having created web portals for scores of businesses. He was founder and creative director of web-design firm Ionic Studios, teaches digital web programming at Miami-Dade College, is a certified Macromedia Developer, an Apple Certified System Administrator and a Certified Internet Webmaster. He’s also won numerous awards and accolades in the web design circuit.

Gio will be your point man on anything even remotely futuristic. Be nice to him or he will hack into your bank account.

Then doing a quick search on flickr with those tags we come across some interesting photos also tagged as tinsley which also give us clues as to who the girl is in the video. It appears to be another tinsley employee named Lauren Bernat.

If you want to see photos of Lauren and Gio fooling around at what looks like an office outing, head on over there. What is the internet coming to if you can’t even believe that a hugely popular web video with a gyrating female is honest and sincere, instead of some devious capitalist plan?

Christine has the Wii Fit in DC right now, or we could try a more honest substitute.

Update: The Consumerist is all over this.

This little icanhas-friendly banner was inspired by the announcement yesterday by the McCain campaign that you can create, for a mere $250, a banner expressing your unique satisfaction with John McCain. I’m not sure what to say to this idea, but it reminded me about how aesthetically unappealing presidential campaigns tend to become - their logos the product of hours of debate and committees populated by people who’ve never designed anything worth emailing.

If you want a sign of how conventional politics is, and how the innovation of the Obama campaign really is finally catching up a national campaign with the design trends of the ’90s, check out this collection of presidential bumper stickers, 1960-2008. I particularly love how Fred Thompson’s sticker is crowded, illegible, and the color of prune juice, as if designed for the Law & Order-watching retirement communities of Florida in which he put so much hope.

The best part of any designed branding, though, has to do with the font choice of a campaign. Ah, these are some doozies. And 2008 is no exception - as one of my favorite typography blogs Ask H&FJ recently pointed out. The originators of the Gotham font so famously used by The New Adonis, they even mocked up graphics with the Hillary and McCain fonts in their proper place:

Nor were these designers alone in their fascination with these choices. The New York Times hosted a roundtable on McCain’s font, the overused 90s relic Optima (which nonetheless still has some gravitas, since it’s the font displaying the names of so many heroes on the Vietnam Memorial). The descriptions can get a little silly, but there’s truth in this ridiculousness:

While it is not the most robust sans serif ever designed, it is not entirely neutral either. It embodies and signifies a certain spirit and attitude. And if a typeface is not just an empty vessel for meaning, but a signifier that underscores personality, then it is useful in understanding what the candidates’ respective typefaces are saying about them and their campaigns.

The designers questioned have some interesting thoughts - some like the selection, most hate it, but many concede that it’s a choice that has a good deal in common with McCain’s personality. The newest entry in the presidential stakes, Libertarian Bob Barr, has a font that seems like a solid midwestern pro-American creation, suitable for a beer can or a local sports bar - neither of which, I think, would meet the approval of the Prohibitionist candidate for President (yes, there still are those). Chuck Baldwin, the televangelist Constitution Party candidate, has a logo that looks as if it should grace a can of Play Doh or silly putty. Over at the Green Party, the colorful logo of Cynthia McKinney pits an offkilter insurgency against a staid old Nader logo that looks not unlike his original presentation more than a decade ago. It’s honest, at least - even his logo looks like dried-up ’80s-era socialism.

Asking whether this odd grabbag of out-of-touch designs are any more a sign of what lies within each candidate than Obama’s famous O logo illustrates how foolhardy this talk is: football players don’t pick their NFL team based on the logos on the helmet, or pick a sport based on whether they want to wear Nike, Reebok or adidas. All that Obama’s campaign has done is recognize that they should start abiding by the rules of a different game - not the tired old design choices of prior candidates, with the same color arcs and blocky typefaces, but with the attitude of tried and true corporate ad agencies. Sell a candidate like you’d sell a good pair of shoes, and the same people tend to listen and react.

Of course, if you want to see real font-leveraging in action, you have to go back to the good old days, when things were cool and slick. Yes, the glory days, before everything had to be grungy and worn-in: the 1980s. Watch this first. Read this second.

The digs here have changed, as you might have noticed. Improved even. This should not be considered in any way as a sign that the writing will follow suit.

>> Sometimes, it’s easy to forget about who the true heroes are. Yes: they’re the people who create bacon salt, the zero calorie, vegetarian, kosher seasoning salt that makes everything taste like bacon. And they have a blog.

I love America. And also xkcd. (h/t Christine)

>> An extremely accurate piece on why web advertising so often = fail. Scott Karp writes: “We need to invent new forms of advertising on the web. But it’s more than that. Facebook introduced Beacon as a new form of advertising — but it didn’t create a lot of value for users. Online advertising must create value for users or it will create little or no value for advertisers. This would seem self-evident, but it has not been the case with traditional advertising, which was developed for CAPTIVE audiences, and web users are increasingly anything but captive.” (h/t Ruffini’s FriendFeed)

>> Only in California.  Only at the LA Times. The text: “Times Poll: Californians narrowly reject gay marriage” - By bare majorities, Californians reject the state Supreme Court’s decision to allow same-sex marriages and back a proposed constitutional amendment aimed at the November ballot that would outlaw such unions, a Los Angeles Times/KTLA Poll has found.” Four paragraphs before you get to the numbers: “Either way, the poll suggests the outcome of the proposed amendment is far from certain. Overall, it was leading 54% to 35% among registered voters.” Yep, 19 point margin = barely there. One wonders what they would’ve said if it had the same margin in the other direction.

>> The Washington Times redesign has several interesting elements. You can see them all in a slideshow, posted here. Count me a big fan of the new Sunday edition in particular.

>> Emily Blount of Gawker bares all in her new article over at the NYTimes magazine. I wish I felt differently about this, but the question I have to ask is: why does the internet horde produce such similar reactions, regardless of the point or purpose of the blog in question? I think this is just another example that the Green Blackboards effect is all-encompassing, regardless of topic area. (h/t Trevino’s FriendFeed)

For a presidential candidate who has based so much of his message on an appeal to a new generation of voters thirsty for hope and change, Barack Obama said something a few weeks back which almost seemed – dare one use such an epithet – uncool.

Speaking to an audience in Indiana, Obama talked about the latest national ill he hopes to cure from the Oval Office: the scourge of video games, embodied by the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV. Admitting that he was only prompted to make the remark based only on a morning news report about how the game will “break all records and make goo-gobs of money for whoever designed it,” Obama spoke in the stilted, uncertain tone politicians tend to use when they’re describing a subject with which they have little familiarity. Here’s a hint to listening: it has the same false certainty of Republican Senator Ted Stevens when he infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes.”

“These video games are raising our kids,” Obama said. “Across the board, middle-class, upper-class, working-class kids, they’re spending a huge amount of their time not on their studies, but on entertainment.”

Obama’s remarks don’t come from out of the blue – they’re just the latest in a series of steps that set up video games as an opportunity for him to bolster his “values” street cred for a general election. In February he urged University of Texas students to “turn off the TV and stop playing GameBoy,” in another dated reference. And in 2006 Obama rather rudely returned a donation from Doug Lowenstein, then-president of the game industry’s Entertainment Software Association.

Obama isn’t alone in his dislike for gamers – during her time in the Senate, Hillary Clinton introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act, which would’ve expanded the regulation of game sales and imposed heavy penalties on stores who accidentally sold the game to underage customers. And more than a few politicians in both parties took to the airwaves in anger in response to the release of one of Rockstar’s previous iterations of the GTA series, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the “Hot Coffee” mini-game that could be unlocked within modified versions. But it’s clear that when it comes to video games, there are far fewer Republicans who have a problem – this is a Democratic issue.

What is it about video games that infuriate so many Democrats? What is it about these games that make them emulate ambulance chaser Jack Thompson, the ever-present clownish Florida attorney who would probably find a way to blame video games for acne and crabgrass? And why is it that these political leaders refuse to acknowledge the plain truth: that the video game industry as a whole has undergone a massive change for the better in the years since Tipper Gore’s crusade against the evils of Ice Cube?

Over the past eight years, the Federal Trade Commission has significantly stepped up their monitoring of the video game industry. The unspoken message: shape up, or we’ll start cracking down. And to their credit, the industry responded as we would hope responsible members of the marketplace would: they stepped up their support for self-regulation, they made the rules clear for gamesellers, and they made a sustained effort to educate parents on the ESRB game ratings that are now the industry-wide standard.

According to the FTC’s 2007 report on their “mystery shopper” monitoring program, the area of greatest improvement over the past eight years has by far been the video game sector. In 2000, 85% of underage customers teens were able to purchase Mature-rated games – today, that number has been more than cut in half, down to 42%. By comparison, 39% of underage customers were able to buy an R-rated movie ticket – and that’s comparing a purchasing system with a stagnant model that has been in place for more than thirty years to one that has expanded drastically, rocketing to $18.8 billion in sales in 2007.

It’s not just the industry that’s matured, either. Gamers themselves are growing up – according to research by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, over 35% of parents American play video games, and 93% of their children, numbers that will only increase in the future. Engaging systems like the Nintendo Wii and the vast arena of online play have taken video games from a pursuit for teens alone to a cross-generational platform for group entertainment. And as Harvard psychiatrists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson find in their new book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth about Violent Video Games, the overwhelming majority of young players use games not to play out violent fantasies, but to relieve stress and relax.

Obama’s tired anti-gamer rhetoric about slacking and laziness starts to sound particularly silly when you consider the creativity, ingenuity, and strong social conscience at the heart of the grown-up gamer community. For an example, one need look no further than Child’s Play, a charity founded in 2003 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of the webcomic Penny Arcade, which has given over two million dollars in donations from video gamers of toys, games, books and money delivered to more than 40 children’s hospitals worldwide. Not bad work for a bunch of underachievers.

If Barack Obama wants to take on video games as his latest straw man for America’s manifold problems, that’s his business. But he should be smart enough to recognize that gamers can’t be caricatured anymore: too many people have played these games without being inspired to do violence and mayhem. Gamers look increasingly like America as a whole, and they want to take responsibility for the upbringing of their own children. The same Hart study found that 85 percent of voting parents say that they – not government, retailers or game creators – are responsible for monitoring their children’s exposure to games. Sorry, Clinton and Obama – that’s one less area where voters want the government to play daddy.

Let’s give the Illinois Senator a pass on this one, though. It could be he’s just stressed out from the campaign trail. If he wants a break, he might consider a trip to Liberty City to blow off some steam. At least it’ll take his mind off of whatever Rev. Wright is up to today.

originally published at Right Side Politics

>> You can read my latest Washington Times oped here: it’s on the continued mistakes of the House Republicans.  Surprisingly, it’s less than 40,000 words.