Altered State Don't restrict your ads to the same clichéd images. Break away with visual special effects to create more bite.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of handsome, even hip,advertising sameness on display in the nation's periodicals, soyou have to wonder how much of it gets passed over because of itsmonotony and, thus, invisibility. No, not every car ad displays itssedan against a backdrop of the desert, mountains or sea, but mostdo. Not every inkjet printer ad shows a color print of a cockatooor clown sliding out, but few don't. And let's be honest,the predictably stylish fashion, liquor and fragrance ads do abetter job of promoting the cheekbones and chest hair of theirmodels than the products themselves.

Where's the originality out there? Where's the "tryharder" mentality that's needed to grab the attention ofthe indifferent readers who typically breeze through a magazinewith little regard for the ads it contains?

Theanswer is in advertising efforts like the one shown here, developedfor Computer Associates, a data management and applicationdevelopment company in Islandia, New York. The challenge was tocharacterize how losing one's PDA doesn't necessarily meanlosing the data it carries (assuming, of course, you use ComputerAssociates' enterprise management software).