Effing Turnaround...

Going to the great VCU Adcenter (#1 ranked ad school by Creativity Magazine, take that Creative Circus, booyashaka!) you learn a lot of great things, such as "The Screw Theory", the peace and quiet of a 3rd floor bathroom, how to make your teachers fight each other in Fight Night, and every now and then some advertising. Actually, a lot of advertising, it just about dominates my life. However, while there's a lot of great concepts and campaigns we work on, projects are just that... projects. Things can always look great in theory, but it's the moment you put them in practice that you realize if it'll work or not. Even if it doesn't, at least you learn the mistakes which you made and how you could do it differently. The problem is, a lot of people don't take the initiative to actually take a theory and put it into practice. It's frightening, it's risky, and nowadays, who has the time? I don't. Jenny, Adam, Frank, Derek, and Stephanie certainly don't, but... we make time. We have a desire to try something risky, crazy, different, and to see how it'll all play out. MoonPie Madness is the product of that.

Besides being an awesome eating contest, MoonPie Madness is an experiment in advertising with no budget. No funds were outright given to us, and no company asked us to start this. We just had an idea for something fun and decided we were going to do it, whether we had the support or not. Fortunately enough, when we made the first call to the MoonPie company to try and score some free MoonPies for the event, Tory Johnston (much thanks btw!) was ecstatic about what we were doing and did what any agency would die for; leave the ideas to us, and provide any kind of support we needed when asked. From there on out, it's been a roller coaster ride visiting dozens of sponsors, writing documents that make us seem professional, staying up in the wee late hours of the night concepting, and basically figuring out how we're going to pull this off. In a sense, it's like throwing a huge party with a lot of media hype, and having no specific invitations to send. It's mind numbing. None of us have done anything like this before, but we keep going, confident that we'll work something out. We're committed to this, so there's no room for dropping out and saying, "I'm sorry." We're a family.

Cherry's Popped To Date:

- Adam's first website
- Adam's first MoonPie
- Jenny & Adam's first ad to have more than 500 hits on youtube (I'm guessing this, but let me know if I'm wrong!)
- Dave's first media buy
- Dave's first time asking for sponsors
- Derek's first "flier the city date"
- Adam's first time spanking an Asian ass with a belt
- Dave's first time eating 1,000 year old eggs (3 of them in fact!)
- Frank's first time actually applying his brand managers skills to something he cares about.
- OUR first time being called hero's by another student.