Illusion McAds Books Wheel

Wouldn’t it be really amazing if people shared photographs of your business online all the time? Well, there’s a museum that has harnessed this idea and has been incredibly successful with it. Talking about visuals, there are a bunch of ads by McDonald’s that are so creative. I’ll also tell you how to get free library books, which I’ve been doing for years. There is also a very cool add-on for wheelchairs on the market, which is a random topic, but it is so impressive what they have done.

Let’s talk about the Museum of Illusions. When I was in Istanbul, I saw this museum but I did not go inside but it stuck with me as an interesting idea. It actually started in Croatia in 2015 and has grown to more than 30 cities all over the world with this same franchise model. From the website “Enter the fascinating world of illusions, which will trick your confidence in your own senses but also amaze you by doing so. The world that will confuse you completely but also educate you. They promise you will be thrilled because nothing is what it seems, especially not in the Museum of Illusions.” that’s a great intro!

Not only is it interesting because illusions are just really cool, but the whole museum is set up for you to take pictures of yourself in these crazy positions, which, of course, they must know that people will post on Instagram and tag the Museum of Illusions. I think this is one of the primary ways they have grown so much because of people posting pictures on social media. If you’re a museum, what can you come up with for people to take an interesting selfie in front of and post online? You just have to make a room or a wall or anything one time and give visitors a reason to snap that selfie. Then they’ll go home, and more than likely, if it’s very cool, they’ll post it on social media and tag your museum. It’s all about free promotion!

I really like well-designed ads and especially these ads by (of all companies) McDonald’s, but they’ve done a great job, probably because they have a huge budget! I’m just going to show you a few of these that I thought were really clever. 

There’s this picture of this house with a garage and the garage has yellow-ish wood like a hamburger bun and then two rows of brown glass that are supposed to be the burger and then there’s some foliage that’s supposed to be the lettuce and then what looks like a letter, I guess that’s supposed to be the cheese but overall this garage door looks like a cheeseburger. It’s very clever.

Here’s another ad, it looks like they took a few French fries and laid it out in a Wi-Fi signal shape. Clever! And then there are stacks of phones, but the phones are different colors like a light tan and then a dark brown and then green and then light tan, dark brown, yellow, green. It looks like a Big Mac, but made out of phones stacked on top of one another! Genius! And then there’s one, two, three, four, five, well, they look like fries, but they’re phones lined up along the side of it. It looks like fries and a Big Mac. Very smart.

This ad is kind of funny because it looks like a man kissing a woman but it’s not, it’s actually just a guy about to eat a cheeseburger and just where the light is coming from and where the camera angle is makes it looks like something else completely, and it has the words “I’m loving it.” 

And here’s a Halloween ad. Basically they took one of those red McDonald’s fry cups, turned it upside-down and there’s two fries in it on either end and one of the fries has a little bit of ketchup on it, kind of looks like fangs with blood, and it says “Happy Halloween.” Clever!

Then there are these three billboards that are probably on the side of the highway. If you zoomed in on the middle part of the McDo犀利士 nald’s arches and it kind of made a V, and it says “next exit,” that’s very smart! And then the next one, if you sort of zoomed in to the arches and moved it to the left a little bit, it kind of looks just like a curve to the right and it says “on your right.” And then the last one it kind of has just one arch off to the side and it says “just missed us,” like to do a U-turn. So they took the McDonald’s arches and zoomed in and took various pieces of it, and it made these really clever ads. It doesn’t even say the word McDonald’s anywhere, but you know it is because of the colors in the arches.

This last one actually uses the sun to bring it to life. They must have figured out the angle that the billboard was placed on the street, and then they put what looks like a pitchfork sort of thing, but it makes a shadow of the McDonald’s golden arches on the billboard and it has a few times on it (like 6,7,8, et…). At six o’clock it’s a cup of coffee, and then at seven o-clock it’s a breakfast sandwich and then bagel, stuff like that, and it goes from six to eleven. Very well-designed and very smart use of the shadows!

All right, let’s talk about books. I like to read books all the time but I don’t pay for them (for the most part). I can’t even remember the last time I paid for a book, and I’m gonna show you exactly how I do it.

So there are two books on the screen right here. One’s Fahrenheit 451, and one is Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, which is Matthew Perry’s biography. My wife, Amy, wanted to read that one. If you purchased these on Amazon, the Kindle version, that would be $14.99 for Matthew Perry’s book and then Fahrenheit 451 is $12.99. That’ll be a total of $27.98 for two Kindle books. Of course, if you get the hardcover book, it’d be even more expensive, but I’m going to show you how I get all these books for free.

The first thing you need to do is to go to your local library. I’m not sure if it’s every single library, but a lot of the libraries in the USA are participating in this digital book lending program. Go to your local library and get a library card and you don’t have to check out any books while you are there, just get the library card. You have a unique number and your name on it.

Once you have that, on your phone, download the Libby app. It’s L-I-B-B-Y by Overdrive. And then when you launch that app it’s going to ask you for your library card number. Type all of that in and then what it’ll do is it’ll give you access to all of the digital library books that your particular library offers (and it’s probably going to be thousands of books!). Now you just find the book you want and you can download the book right to your phone (Amazon Kindle app). It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, like I said, I’ve been traveling for years and I download books to my phone from the library in Tampa all the time, and it’s all free. 

You can check a book out for twenty one days at a time and the app tells you how many days you have left. If you can’t read the entire book in that time frame you can always check it out again and then just continue reading it. Your library (and Libby) probably have all the latest bestsellers and classic books that you can check out digitally and download.

Okay, the last thing which is an add-on for wheelchairs is basically a powered unicycle, but it’s not a unicycle. You actually attach this device to the front of a wheelchair and you turn your wheelchair into a little electric motorbike. It looks like there’s maybe some sort of attachment in the middle of the device to attach it to the front of the wheelchair, and then there’s a place to put your feet.

Overall it looks like something that Apple would design. It’s very modern, all-electric and when the person gives it the gas (okay, gives it the electric!) they go flying down the street. It’s so fast, it actually looks like it would not be safe. There’s a speedometer on it that says 20, I’m assuming that’s 20 miles per hour. I don’t know if that’s a safe speed to go in a wheelchair. It’s going off-road, hits the curb, and does a little jump in a wheelchair. It’s really amazing that he just attached this device to his wheelchair and he is zooming around and even going through water, it’s very impressive. I know nothing about wheelchairs, but if I had a wheelchair, I probably would need something like that. 

That looks really awesome, it basically turns a wheelchair into a little car.