About a year ago, Mr. Charlie Sheen began one of the most awesomely bizarre meltdowns in modern celebrity history. Here’s our favorite recap.

So it is with an odd sense of pride that we announce #winning the 2011 AAF Mobile Bay “Best of Show” ADDY®. For a beer glass. A beer glass that allows one to carefully gauge where one falls on the Sheen scale.

Yeah. There you go. Anything can be an “ad,” right? If you’d like to purchase one of these award-winning™ glasses, please visit our store.

Oprah. Love or like the gal (who can hate her?), I doubt you’ve spent more time thinking about her than I have. I also doubt that anyone besides someone selling something has spent so much time lobbying her for a favor.

Full disclosure: I am Red Square’s Oprah guy. Even before I worked at Red Square, I was their Oprah guy. I wrote the first 100 tweets for its @YoOprah Twitter project. Don’t know about Yo?

@YoOprah is one of our many internal projects. More than any other, it’s strictly a publicity project. Its purpose is to solicit a #FF from @Oprah for @redsquareagency (her first ever, as far as we know). The thinking goes: If only half a percent of Oprah’s followers followed us, we’d have 45,000 new followers.

So far we have written about 400 tweets at her (270 by me, 130 by Nick Ewertz). They have ranged in style from direct petitioning to word play to prose to sending @YoOprah on soul-searching adventures into the American west. Each tweet is treated as if it were a client-facing headline.

Now we’re adding line extensions. Last week saw the genesis of @DearestOprah, the high tea and croquet-playing, butler-mistreating aristocrat whose May 13th #FF Masquerade Brunch is, at least in her mind, the day on which the much sought #FF will be literally served to us on a silver platter. So how much do I think about Oprah? Here are some other @YoOprah spinoffs anticipating launch in early 2012:

@CiaoOprah (Bringing much needed ragu and ravioli to the #FF quest.)
@HowdyOprah (If Oprah won’t give up a #FF, @HowdyOprah’ll wrangle it herself.)
@NuqnehOprah (“Nuqneh” is Klingon for “hello.” Coming 2364, if we still have #FFs.)
@AvastYeOprah (Pirate Oprah. She’d walk the plank for a #FF.)
@BraaaaainsOprah (“Braaaaains” is how zombies say “Hello, could you spare a #FF?”)
@KupoOprah (Part Moogle, part Oprah. If you thought a Star Trek Oprah was nerdy, think again.)

Why so many Oprahs? There’s a chance she blocked @YoOprah a long time ago. And we still want a #FF. Maybe it’ll secure us a small place in Twitter history. Maybe it’ll help us leverage our brand into a new market. In the meantime, if you need me, I’ll be working on @你好Oprah, but first I need to learn Mandarin.

There’s been plenty of coverage on Facebook’s IPO, specifically on the riches soon to be distributed to various early investors in the company.

More interesting reading on the subject exists, and it comes directly from Facebook’s S-1 registration statement. A close study of the filing reveals insight into the company’s culture, their revenue model, the value delivered to end users and advertisers, and their view of the future. It’s the best read on Facebook yet.

Conventional thinking in regards to Charlie Darwin’s theory of evolution is that biological change is the cumulative result of slow, continual and incremental processes. Think of changes happening in several, barely-perceivable units.

Another change model, punctuated equilibrium, states that species exhibit little change for long periods of time (stasis) interrupted by sudden and radical clusters or bursts of change.

Punctuated equilibrium has been applied to explain how change occurs in economics, organizational behavior and politics. And while an esoteric thought, it certainly seems applicable to the advertising business right now. Technological advances are revolutionizing the way people consume information, and those tasked with creating content for consumption are having to figure out how to adapt. Profoundly and at lightning speed.

Just a thought.

When it comes to a symphony, I prefer the playfulness of Ravel or Debussy to the ponderous progress of a Beethoven Symphony—like No. 5’s DAH, DAH, DAH, DAAAH. (You know, the heavy stuff.) But whether our hearts flutter to the flute or the sudden drop of an imposing bass note, I am captivated by the seamlessness of great music.

The difference between good music and great music—true for all art forms—is the attention paid by the creator to the details which illuminate the whole. Effect and affect are both in the details.

The quick, playful interactions between the fingers of a pianist and the keys. The harpist’s hands tracing back and forth over the strings like they were skimming water, appearing to do nothing. It’s a kind of behind-the-scenes magic happening right in front of you. And every piece of it determines the whole.

Think of the Traffic Department as the agency maestro. Except we’re not ensuring that every piece is played in the right chord. We leave that to the players. (Also, there are ACDs and CDs for that.) We don’t tune anyone’s instruments or clean anyone’s spit valves. What we do is move the creative parts to the players to let them apply their expertise before returning it to us where it can be exchanged for the next motion. Some people say their door is always open to the agency. Ours is always revolving. The process has to be seamless. God forbid it moves like DAH, DAH, DAH, DAAAH.

The mobile revolution is upon us. We all walk around with these devices practically sewn into our hands, and smart marketers are beginning to realize implications of the tectonic shift happening in the digital world. According to Gartner Research, by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

So when Full Sail University, one of the most prestigious entertainment-media schools in the country, picked us to design and produce the mobile site for their mobile development program, we ran around high-fiving. Then we sat down and got serious.

The site’s purpose is simple: generate prospective student interest. But in order to attract the minds that will architect the future of mobile, we needed to innovate rather than simply build.

The result is a mobile site that performs like a native application. Clean iconography, sophisticated navigation movement and sliding infographics deliver a fresh experience. However, the feature we’re most proud of is the “content shift.” We designed the site such that the content changes upon shifting from portrait to landscape mode. Why not create an alternate path of information that the visitor can discover? The landscape mode also allows us scale to flow in additional content, such as graduate profiles and videos, as the site grows.

Here’s a little overview of the project. Results have been great so far—we’ll share some stats soon.

We’re very excited to announce that we’ve been selected to work with Hilton Hotels & Resorts on a global creative assignment. The work will cover more than 550 Hilton properties in 78 countries across six continents.

Red Square is honored to be partnering with one of the most famous hotel brands in the world. We’ll share more soon. In the meantime, you can quote us as saying this.

We’ve recently been privileged to work on various e-commerce sites. The fundamental purpose of these sites is to transact business, so a cardinal rule must be: make the payment process as painless as possible. Conversely stated, each hoop a user must jump through lessens the probability of purchase completion.

Usability expert, Paul Rourke, may have said it best, “Provide the visitor with all they need to know for them to be happy to progress to checking out, without any un-answered questions.”

We think ASOS does shopping carts justice. According to their e-commerce director, James Hart, one small change to the first step of their checkout process resulted in a 50 percent decrease in abandonment of shopping carts. What was this magical change? Simply allowing the user to continue unimpeded to checkout without having to create an ASOS account.

“People talk about the number of steps they will have to go through, all the extra information they will have to provide, and the fact they haven’t got time to be creating an account. What I find most fascinating is the response I get from people when I ask them ‘what additional information do you expect you will need to provide if you create an account compared to a guest checkout option?’”

The only additional info required is a password. ASOS asks users to create accounts in the checkout form, by including “password” and “confirm password.” The new UX design cuts out steps that waste the user’s time and makes account creation way more approachable.

The definition and use of traditional shopping carts still apply online. The cart should be a tool, provided by the shop, for transporting the user’s merchandise to the checkout counter for purchase. It should help users, not delay them. Spending time upfront on usability and focusing on the sole function of the shopping cart will aid customers in completing purchases without distraction.

New Year’s Eve is the Ron Burgundy of holidays. It’s kind of a big deal. As such, we work with our gaming and hospitality clients to go all out for the big event. This year, we’d like to share two projects that were especially fun.

For Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Biloxi, which is having a rockstar/superhero themed party, we created an elaborate comic book for the invitation. Our creative team concepted the characters and storyline, art directed, wrote fantastic dialogue, and storyboarded. Then our production team partnered with a talented comic illustrator to deliver the final goods. Have a look at it here.

Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa is having a 70s themed party, so we wanted to produce something authentic to the time period. We licensed the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” and cut records for the invites. Check this bad boy out.

It would be fitting to close this post with the words of Mr. Burgundy: “we’ve been coming to the same party for years, and in no way is that depressing.” All thanks to our great clients.

“Short and sweet.” It’s a cliché. It’s also a condition which everything from wedding vows to Academy Awards acceptance speeches should strive to be. To a copywriter, headlines are the supreme articulation of shortness + sweetness. That said, the quest for the right headline is almost never short or sweet. It’s long. It’s painful. It’s the copywriter’s crucible.

Some just think of the process as headline writing—the scribbling out of a small batch of lines and picking the winner. Others practice a more formal approach to finding the ideal headline. It’s known as the “100 Headlines.” It goes like this: you need a headline. Ideally, it will be a headline that can raise a brand’s sales by double-digit percentages and define it through future decades using fewer words than you find on a Surgeon General’s Warning. For this, you will need to write 100. Then junk 99 of them.

If you went to ad school then you know the 100 Headlines as the process popularized by Luke Sullivan, but immortalized by Sally Hogshead (She would want me to point out that yes, it is her real name). Hogshead’s “800 Headlines” were for BMW Motorcycles. Her agency needed eight ads. You might say, “Well, it’s easy to sell motorcycles to men.” And it is. But, writing copy that defines a company like BMW when you’re simply a junior copywriter—not so easy. So, why 100? Why not scribble out 10–15, hand ‘em off and jump back on Facebook?

Because your first 15 are usually junk. And so are your first 30, 40 and sometimes 50. Like rock music, greatness doesn’t even become possible until the mid-50s.

Let’s say I am writing headlines for a car insurance company. Chances are they aren’t my insurance provider; I’ve never been to their office; and I am unable to tell their policies from those of their competitors. Odds are good that my first shot at a headline will not make its CEO invite me over for dinner. Indeed, Hogshead wrote those 800 without so much as ever revving a motorcycle—let alone a BMW. Let’s choose an everyman’s car insurance company and go with State Farm. In just over one minute, here are five headlines:

- Life happens fast. State Farm happens faster.

- You’ve been there for others. Now let us be there for you.

- Some auto insurers claim to have your back. We’ve got your front too.

- Take some of the risk out of turning the key.

- It’s funny to think that such a small piece of plastic can cover so much ground.

Bleh. Blah. Yuck. People turn mountains into gravel looking for diamonds scarcely bigger than a pencil eraser. It’s a lot of work for such a little thing. In the process: people die, limbs are lost, and countries tumble into civil war. All of this when we have labs making diamonds so stunning that no one except an expert can tell them from the genuine article. So why not get by with imitations? Why do so much for so little? Because it’s a diamond, and people have gotten divorced for much less. And most headlines suck. Next time, write 100. It won’t be short. It won’t be sweet. But if you survive, your boss and your client will thank you. They might even invite you over for dinner.