Grow a pair and say what you really mean.

What is Penguins on the March?
Woodland Park Zoo and The Greenwood Collective are inviting artists to participate in Penguins on the March, a community art project designed to celebrate the zoo’s new penguin exhibit, spotlight Seattle’s arts community and benefit Woodland Park Zoo’s field conservation projects around the world.

Artists are invited to paint, embellish and decorate 22-inch fabricated penguins by the end of May. Penguins on the March will be unveiled at the Space Needle on June 12. The artist decorated penguins will migrate throughout Seattle neighborhoods (including Fremont and Ballard) landing at The Greenwood Collective during the July 10th monthly art walk for a silent auction to benefit the zoo’s field conservation projects.

Skiilight is proud to be a part of this great art project throughout the city of Seattle.

Tinker is complete! You can see his flight patches and the jetpack is firmly attached. The base is painted like the ground from high in the sky.

Tinker is coming along nicely. Shown here is the original mold and the chest coloring as well as the beginnings of his WWII-era “bomber” jacket and flight hat and goggles.

What is Penguins on the March?
Woodland Park Zoo and The Greenwood Collective are inviting artists to participate in Penguins on the March, a community art project designed to celebrate the zoo’s new penguin exhibit, spotlight Seattle’s arts community and benefit Woodland Park Zoo’s field conservation projects around the world.

Artists are invited to paint, embellish and decorate 22-inch fabricated penguins by the end of May. Penguins on the March will be unveiled at the Space Needle on June 12. The artist decorated penguins will migrate throughout Seattle neighborhoods (including Fremont and Ballard) landing at The Greenwood Collective during the July 10th monthly art walk for a silent auction to benefit the zoo’s field conservation projects.

With this new look, comes a new tagline: “The Now Network.”

In addition to the great new commercials concentrating on “nowness,” Sprint has rolled out banner ads that receive (or appear to receive) data in real time, showing things occurring “now.”

The Sprint microsite also “receives now”- which is just a branded way to say gathers aggregated content.

The Sprint commercials remind me of one of my favorite commercials of all time, this Areva spot (shown here in its french version)

While Sprint appears to be moving in the right direction, we have another company dropping like a hot potato no one wants to touch. With consumer confidence in all things GM at an all-time low, reassurances from Saturn simply don’t hold water. All major news outlets report that GM is trying to sell Saturn and if there are no buyers, look for closure of the brand and a GM bankruptcy. “We’re still here” just isn’t going to cut it.

Meanwhile, a very plain-speaking video explaining what GM plans to do to save itself is buried on its corporate page.

So, the question is, which GM do you believe? The one who still thinks Saturn will be around in a few years or the one that says they’re closing nameplates? Honesty is always the best policy, especially when no one will believe that the “still here” Saturn will be that way for much longer.

Headline: “Yahoo Sports Slams Foes”

The story: “Yahoo Sports reeled in 14.4 million and 12.7 million weekly uniques during the tournament’s first two weeks (per Nielsen), versus ESPN.com’s 12.8 million and 9.8 million uniques.” (Uniques in this sense are visitors)

The Reality: “John Kosner, ESPN’s senior vp, general manager of digital media, said ESPN.com draws a more passionate fan base, one that visits more regularly and stays longer than Yahoo’s does. Kosner argued that because Yahoo can funnel casual sports fans from its home page and e-mail pages, its audience is less valuable. He points to ESPN’s huge edge in total minutes (216 million versus 144 million in the second week in March) as a truer indicator of engagement. “ESPN.com’s users are consistently more valuable than Yahoo’s,” said Kosner.”

This is a great example of how quality metics and knowing how to interpret them helps you identify your place in the world. Taken at face value it looks as if Yahoo really took ESPN behind the woodshed. However, as John Kosner eloquently explains, the unique visitor metric does not hold as much value as time spent, especially when the total visitors number is as close as theirs are.

Heineken’s Original Commercial

“Return on investment is easy to measure. You put money in, you measure money out, divide and prosper. But return on design?

I think there are four zones of return that are interesting to think about.

Negative return. The local store with the boarded up window, the drooping sign and the peeling paint is watching their business suffer because they have a design that actually hurts them. The same goes for their identity and/or website. If the design actively gets in the way of the story you tell or the utility you deliver, you lose money and share.

No impact. Most design falls into this category. While aesthetically important, design in this case is just a matter of taste, not measurable revenue. You might not like the way the liquor store looks, but it’s not having any effect on sales. It’s good enough.

Positive return. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in this category. Everything from a bag of potato chips to an online web service can generate incremental sales and better utility as a result of smart design.

The whole thing. There are a few products where smart design is the product (or at least the product’s reason for being). If you’re not in love with the design of a Porsche 911, you would never consider buying it–same as an OXO peeler. The challenge of building your product around breakthrough design is that the design has to in fact be a breakthrough. And that means spending far more time or money than your competitors who are merely seeking a positive return.

Knowing where you stand and where you’re headed is critical. If you have a negative return on design, go ahead and spend enough money to get neutral, ASAP. But don’t spend so much that you’re overinvesting just to get to neutral. Watching a local store build an expensive but not stellar custom building is the perfect example of this mismatch.

If you’re betting the whole thing, building your service launch on design first, skimping on design is plain foolish.The Guggenheim in Bilbao would be empty if they’d merely hired a very good architect.”

-Seth Godin, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/03/return-on-design.html