TurboTax Blows Up the Interweb

It's a heavy-up weekend—our TurboTax creative will own several homepages - check them out . . . Most will be live at 9pm PST tonight!

MSN (Sat & Sun)
AOL (Saturday only)
Yahoo (Market Place Text link) (Sat & Sun)
YouTube (Saturday only)
Myspace (Saturday only, live at 12 midnight)

Click on them, people!

Live Design Battle: Cut and Paste Los Angeles

If you're in LA this weekend and you'd like to see something spectacular, you should stop by the Los Angeles show of the Cut and Paste Digital Design Tournament. It's like a cross between a concert, a breakdancing battle, and Project Runway, and it's all live.



Check out the video below:


Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament 2007 from Cut&Paste on Vimeo.

Kelly Nichols, one of our motion graphics folks at Dailey, was instrumental in developing this global tour with events worldwide in Hong Kong, New York, Amsterdam, Tokyo, San Fran and more.

Contestants are put through several rounds of design challenges, where they must create concepts in realtime in front of a massive crowd. Categories include 2d design, 3d design, and motion graphics. What ensues is a voyeuristic social experiment where what is usually a solitary pursuit becomes an electrified community experience. The contestants themselves are part rock star, part reality show contestant—and for anyone who has ever worked in Photoshop, the idea of having a crowd watch your every mouse-move is no doubt a galvanizing experience.


The tour has garnered sponsorship from major brands including Diesel, Adobe, Wired Magazine, Autodesk and more. Congrats to Kelly for helping launch this interesting confluence of design and global culture.

Cut and Paste LA
Saturday Feb 21, doors open @ 5:00pm
The Avalon, Hollywood
1735 Vine Street
LA CA, 90028
323-467-4571

Social Media May Cause Death

People's health could be harmed by social networking sites because they reduce levels of face-to-face contact, an expert claims.

Dr Aric Sigman says websites such as Facebook set out to enrich social lives, but end up keeping people apart.

Dr Sigman makes his warning in Biologist, the journal of the Institute of Biology.

A lack of "real" social networking, involving personal interaction, may have biological effects, he suggests.

He also says that evidence suggests that a lack of face-to-face networking could alter the way genes work, upset immune responses, hormone levels, the function of arteries, and influence mental performance.

This, he claims, could increase the risk of health problems as serious as cancer, strokes, heart disease, and dementia.

intrigued? read the whole article

Welcome, City National Bank!

Dailey is excited to be part of the development of some new and innovative digital projects for City National Bank.

Unlike many other financial institutions, CNB has no sub-prime mortgages, is well-capitalized, and is a Double-A rated company.

CNB offers a full complement of banking, trust and investment services through 62 offices, including 15 full-service regional centers, in Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, Nevada and New York City.

Its 3,000 colleagues deliver specialized and highly personal service and complete financial solutions to entrepreneurs, professionals, their businesses and their families.

We're thrilled to be a small part of the City National story.

Dailey/Intuit Small Business United Campaign Gains Momentum

Some nice press for our Small Business United campaign.

“…But the Federal bailout trough seems reserved for corporate giants, and it makes you wonder, where can a small business go to catch a break? Intuit has stepped up to the plate with an initiative called, Small Business United …” – Small Business Computing

“Typically, these kinds of promotions are mostly gimmicks. But with Intuit's stimulus plan, the value is certainly real and worth checking out.” – AOL BloggingStocks.com

Umm. Uncle Frank, did you really need to take your shirt off?

Custom Hybrid Promotional Spot on NBC's Heroes

Yesterday evening, we ran an innovative custom “hybrid” promotional spot during the first commercial break of the season premiere of Chapter 4 of Heroes on NBC. This is another component of a major alliance between NBC Universal and TurboTax that we developed with our partners at Initiative, and it's another way we’re getting inside the minds of tax software users in non-traditional ideas. This promo links to our SuperStatus.com contest—where players answer challenges by updating their Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter status with their most clever answer.

Note to Self: Move it!

If you were here today, instead of out there, reading this post, you would see a frenzy of Dailies lugging computers, files, photos, and yes, stickie pads, from one place to their new home.

We're rearranging the entire seating strategy, to physically integrate teams into smarter, more mobile and flexible client-based pods. So, if you're a client partner, in most cases your media folks will be sitting next to your creatives who will be right next to your account friends who also happen to be within shouting (striking?) distance of your interactive guys and gals.

It's a simple but profound move that we think will service the pursuit of great ideas. Good ideas are everywhere if you're open to them, but they're especially concentrated when divergent disciplines share close quarters—there is literally no barrier to a creative absorbing the latest in say, media possibilities with an advanced rich media expandable ad, or a (gasp!) account lead getting deep down into a creative expression.

If this were baseball, we're all sitting in teams now, rather than all the pitchers hanging out on one side, and all the catchers somewhere on the other half of the world apart from all the second basemen. Yeah, and the idea is the . . . um, ball.

Bad analogies aside, these little adjacencies and overlaps and hall meetings are where a lot of inspiration sparks—even more so after today. Drop your Dailey people a line and help them figure out where to put the beanie babies.