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For media inquires, please
visit our
HIRE/CONTACT page.
World Creative Supply
has been praised by The Wall Street Journal,
ADWEEK, CNN, Entertainment
Weekly, TV Guide, The
Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Hollywood
Reporter, The Los
Angeles Business Journal, New
Times, The Las Vegas Mercury, and The
Arizona Republic.
We have also been honored with numerous
promotion and marketing industry awards,
including several
Promax Gold Medallion Muse
statuettes, a Broadcast Design Award
(BDA), and special recognition
at Houston's
One Show.
Below are a few articles
about World Creative Supply.
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ADWEEK Magazine
I.Q. Interactive Report "Bullet Points"
by Erik Gruenwedel, June 2000
When several California state assemblymen were in need of jokes for a
roast of Gov. Gray Davis, they called Mark Jonathan Davis at World
Creative Supply. When NBC wanted a jingle for its summer
reruns, it, too, called World Creative Supply. And when
Nick-At-Nite needed a tune to promote I Dream of Jeannie, it called
World Creative Supply.
Whether it's an ad campaign, catchy slogan for a website or clever name
for a theme park attraction, now anyone can request humor or a tune from
Davis's archive of talent at the Los Angeles-based World Creative
Supply.
Davis said that most good ideas usually write themselves into a joke or
tune with little effort on his part. Yet, for the most part, being
able to "think outside of the box" has its limits. "Now, people
are calling looking for someone who 'thinks outside of thinking outside
of the box,' " he said.
For example, when Davis was called to help create a fictional lounge
singer named Johnny Chimes for NBC, he thought he'd only have to pen a
few lyrics. Soon he developed the entire persona of a cheesy,
swinging, lounge singer. "It was fairly successful, so we must
have been doing something right," he said.
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Los Angeles Business Journal
Talk Website Of The Week
by Laura Dunphy, June 2000
You're not funny? Pay someone to be funny for you. Hey, it's
L.A.
Los Angeles-based World Creative Supply is a creative services
firm offering everything from advertising/copywriting, to joke writing,
to song parodies, to developing product names, to punching up that
screenplay.
Graphics are virtually nonexistent on the company's site, but it
otherwise offers a perfect balance of professionalism and wit.
Click on "frequently asked questions" and you get, "Why is the sky
blue?" "Where do babies come from?" and "Donde esta la biblioteca?"
Almost as an afterthought, it also includes frequently asked questions
about the company itself.
World Creative Supply even offers sample slogans for its company,
such as "Sliced bread? That was ours" and "Big brains at bargain
prices."
As for whether the company delivers what it promises, users can listen
to sample promo jingles and admire a client roster that includes KROQ-FM
106.7, NBC Television, Nick-at-Nite, and even President Bill Clinton
(the company has written jokes for some of the president's annual
dinners, not his testimonies).
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Los Angeles Times / Entertainment
"Some Successful Hollywood Careers Take Place Outside Spotlight's Glare"
These artists found niches in the industry by relying on their voices,
writing talents and imagination.
by Michael Knight, September 1999
Beth Wernick's parents live in Houston and they wonder why, if their
daughter has been in more than 200 episodes of "Melrose Place," they
have never seen her on television. Mark Jonathan Davis helps dream up
ways to make theme parks more fun. Former NBC page Mark Efman is a
comedy writer working on high-profile promotional projects for which he
gets little or no credit. Steve Mackall talks into a portable black box,
recording commercials all over the country without getting out of his
pajamas.
Each of these artists makes a living doing an odd job that people in the
real world rarely hear about. They are part of an increasingly
specialized category of artists with unusual talents that can be sold in
the entertainment business. They have created their own market niche and
make a living below the glamour radar in Hollywood.
. . .
Mark Jonathan Davis is the proprietor of World Creative Supply.
He sells ideas, concepts, solutions. Although he has sold jingles
to television networks and parody songs to radio networks, and would
like to sell you a suggestion for your vanity license plate, most of his
work right now is with the Walt Disney Imagineering crew.
Davis is helping put the creative finishing touches on Disney's
California Adventure, a new theme park due to open in Anaheim in 2001.
"I thought these people just built rides and roller coasters," he says.
"It never occurred to me there was a writing and conceptualizing
component that comes first."
But before Davis was allowed to play with the Imagineers, he had to
survive the crucible of Disney testing. His initial examination:
come up with a name for one of the new "lands" in the California
Adventure park. The land was a tribute to early 20th century beach
amusement parks. Davis suggested "Paradise Pier." The Imagineers
liked it. Next they wanted to know, can you name this ride, this
restaurant, this food stand?
As a consultant to the Imagineering gang, Davis helped create copy for
set decorations, new signs for the Midway and clever menu items.
His favorite is "the San Andreas Malt."
He also worked on a park basketball game where the backboard is a
surfboard with the brand name "Frankie." Next to Frankie, an arrow
points to the hoop with the sign "and-a-net." "That," says Davis,
"was a big day."
Once everything had been named, Davis thought he had worked himself out
of a job. But fortunately Disney is expanding its park in Paris,
getting ready to build a new facility in China, and opening a series of
interactive virtual arcades called Disney Quest in San Francisco,
Chicago and Philadelphia.
"Also, I'm the voice of a security guard who is chasing an escaped
dinosaur in the new 'Countdown to Extinction' attraction [at Walt Disney
World Orlando's Animal Kingdom]." You'll know it's Davis when you
hear him say, "Sector Two, do you see him yet?"
One day Davis' boss was looking at a scale model of California Adventure
and showed Davis a model of a two-story hamburger stand. "He
needed an idea of 'why' it was there, what was the story behind this big
hamburger?"
"We pitched a lot of suggestions," Davis says, including "The CHP--the
California Hamburger Patrol," with an animated officer commanding
visitors to "Stop...and eat!" But ultimately the giant hamburger
became an alien spaceship, with little exhaust pipes and French fries
for landing gear. The two-story alien burger stand is now being
built. "Soon to be serving Martian Mustard and Cosmic Catsup," Davis
says. "Take me to your eater!"
"I love it here," he says. "I'm surrounded by creative and
hard-working maniacs who think up theme parks--it's the coolest thing."
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The Arizona Republic
"The Major-Domo of TV Promos"
NBC'S 'Jingle Boy' Got Start In Valley
by Dave Walker, January 1998 (exceprt)
Mark Jonathan Davis sings for the largest TV audiences of our time,
although lots of listeners likely hear his distinctive musical stylings
from several rooms away.
As the syrupy voice of "Johnny Chimes," Davis, a Valley expatriate,
writes and performs pop parodies that fill the credits-squeezing promos
linking NBC's prime-time programs.
Visit the bathroom between "Seinfeld" and "Veronica's Closet" and you
could miss Davis singing a zany Tea Leoni tribute to the tune of "La
Bamba." Grab a cold beverage before "News Radio" and you'll
probably miss his nutty "Born to Be Niles" (sung to the tune of
Steppenwolf's "wild" open-road anthem, of course), or his inspired
series of "3rd Rock From The Sun" promos, featuring that amazing,
we'll-try-anything-for-NBC cast.
It was hard to miss Davis's lengthy "Jurassic Park" promo, which aired
Thanksgiving eve. Actually a rerun from previous airings, the spot
was scored to corresponding clips from the movie. A zippy medley
of tunes including "Hava Nagila" and "When The Saints Go Marching In"
("When T. Rex goes chompin' in!"), the original piece won multiple
awards from PROMAX, a trade organization of promo professionals.
In fact, Davis's voice was heard repeatedly over the long Thanksgiving
weekend, singing the promotional praises of a string
of NBC holiday movies. More recently, he has sung a parody
promo--to the tune of "You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch"--for David
Spade's "Just Shoot Me" character, Finch. Davis also called
the oft-heard square-dance hoedown spot for "Caroline In The City."
Delivered in a comfortably cheap, Bill-Murray-at-the-ski-lodge voice,
the Johnny Chimes song parodies help provide NBC's
between-show promotions an off-the-wall edge, combining left-field
rhymes with power-alley gags.
One memorable Leoni moment, for example, schooled viewers on how to
pronounce the star's name. "Tea--rhymes with Princess Leia."
"He's very much like one of those writers you'd see in movies about TV,
like My Favorite Year," said Galen Herod, a former
promo alchemist at Channel 15 (KNXV) in Phoenix who has worked with
Davis at NBC 2000, the network's in-house promotions department, for the
past year. "He has his own rules of comedy. When he throws
in something that's unrelated to what the spot is about--that makes it
stick in your head."
Which is, after all, what the promo business is really all about.
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