I was too young for Punk, but still, seeing Johnny Rotten push butter on TV does seem a bit odd. The Guardian has more:

One-time punk pin-up and sometime anarchist John Lydon has mellowed further into middle age by starring in a £5m TV campaign for Country Life butter.

The campaign, available to watch exclusively at MediaGuardian.co.uk, marks the first time the 52-year-old has appeared in a TV commercial.

"People know I only do things that I want to or that I believe in and I have to do it my way," said Lydon on deciding to appear in the TV ad.

"I've never done anything like this before and never thought I would, but this Country Life ad was made for me and I couldn't resist the opportunity."

See the commercial here.

So who's left in the "I'll never shill for a product, ever, ever" club? Anyone?

Sarah Palin is a hunter. But she's far from the only one.

That's the message in a feature story from The Wall Street Journal today.

As the number of male hunters has declined, the sport has targeted women with everything from pink guns to gender-specific hunting courses. Now, they're seeking out spokesmodels and pushing weapons tailored for women, such as lighter crossbows.

About five years ago, the outdoor-equipment industry began slapping pink paint on weapons, including handguns, and downsizing camouflage. "Initially their attitude was, 'Pink it and shrink it' and women will buy," says Beth Ann Amico, an Oklahoma hunter and dog trainer who notes that pink defeats the purpose of camouflage. "We're savvier than that."

Now, arms makers are offering shorter gun stocks and barrels for women and crossbows requiring less upper-body strength. Apparel makers such as SHE Safari and Foxy Huntress LLC are marketing camouflage expressly to women. "The Foxy Huntress knows she's dressed to kill in more ways than one," says that three-year-old company's Web site, touting "well-designed pieces cut with a female's unique form and needs in mind."

Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins is sometimes called "The Next One" by fans. It's a flattering reference to "The Great One," a.k.a. Wayne Gretzky.

“He’s their LeBron,” said Bruce Jacobson of Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency that created the N.H.L.’s new star-centric campaign. In addition to Crosby, ads will feature Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks, Henrik Lundqvist of the Rangers, and Dion Phaneuf of the Calgary Flames.

Television spots will begin appearing today as part of a campaign valued at more than $15 million.

[via The New York Times]

How many of you get excited when a brief comes across your desk asking for a loyalty program?

Don't all raise your hand, at once.

Okay, we all want to foster brand loyalty. That's a given. But how?

TrendWatching.com, which has dedicated its October trend report to "Perkonomics" has some answers.

It's must reading for anyone in relationship marketing. And aren't we all in relationship marketing?

"The 504" needs help. And since I live in "The 503," it's important to give it.

One of the things New Orleans needs is to keep its future leaders engaged in the rebuilding of the city, and generally speaking, keep them in the city.

To that end, The Idea Village is conducting a competition for entrepreneurs with business ideas that will help the city "retain and engage" the 23-to-35 year-old demographic.

Visit 504ward.com for more information.

I remember interviewing at Grady Britton in 1995. Marianne Banke, like many CDs in the Portland ad community, offered me a mix of encouraging and critical words.

Now that I'm back in Portland, I'm looking closely at all the shops again. Thankfully, there are many new ones, in addition to some old stalwarts. Which brings me to Grady Britton's website and a meditation on their logo.

Griffins are the mythical offspring of the lion and eagle; part predator, part guardian. The ultimate combination of do-anything, get-anything-done creatures you want on your side, because they bring it with nobility, fearlessness and guts. They come from a time of knights and damsels, but they are beasts built for advertising today. Advertising with honor.

That's an icon we can get behind. That's our mark, for the way we believe advertising should be. We want those griffins in our castle.

I like to see that kind of thinking in a logo. But Grady Britton has more than thinking, they also have merch! Or I should say they did have merch, before selling out of this finely crafted belt buckle.

I'll tell you what, let's show some support for a new round of belt buckles. Are you with me? If so, say you'd like to purchase a Grady Britton belt buckle in the comments here. I'm confident they'll meet our demands. That's what good marketers do.

All an ailing brand needs is some social media to help it out, right?

That's what GMnext is for. Information Week has the story:

GM, like many automakers, is faced with declining sales as credit tightens and gasoline prices rise. The company lost $15.5 billion in its second quarter. Johnson hopes the new media efforts will, at the very least, create a loyal base of potential customers who will be inclined to choose GM when things turn around for the auto industry.

"We're creating the opportunity to interact directly with consumers," said Johnson, who called GMnext.com "a landing page" that will act as an umbrella site for GM's numerous Web 2.0 initiatives. The page features links to blogs, wikis, photo- and video-sharing tools, and messaging areas where car enthusiasts can engage each other and also communicate with the company. "We want to be able to talk to our customers," said Johnson.

Maybe they want to talk to their customers, but do the customers want to talk to them? And will GM listen to what the customers have to say?

Over a leisurely lunch at a Sellwood Public House yesterday, Tom Bennett, Digital Strategist for The New Group in Portland, said blogging is a selfish act. That got my attention.

I babbled defensively for a moment before proposing that we debate the proposition on our respective blahgs.

Last night, Tom typed his opening salvo. It's well written and disarming, but for the sake of argument, I'll see what I can do with his main premise.

A couple of years ago I impulsively blurted out the fact that Blogging is an inherently selfish act. This occured about 2 feet in front of James Keller, who at the time was working at YRG. This elicited a shrug and perhaps a bit of a sneer, because this of course could have been construed as a criticism of a sort.

Things have changed for everyone in the last couple of years. Blogging is ever more prevalent and an accepted outlet for many. But I still feel we are all in some way “selfish” in what we are doing. It now just becomes a matter of defining selfish, as it may mean vastly different things depending on who you ask.

Oddly enough, it's the word "selfless" that comes to mind when I think of all the content being created by bloggers for FREE. Granted not all of it's worth paying for, much less reading. Yet, there are now tens of thousands of blogs that do provide excellent FREE content.

Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media, is Portland's search engine marketing expert. More than one source has shared this insight with me since arriving on these mossy shores. It's not a topic I know a great deal about, but its one that a bunch of clients with tightening budgets want to understand.

Kent shares his take on the Portland Ad Fed blog:

For agencies out there that are struggling through the economic downturn, I encourage you to shore up your client relationships by taking a deeper look at online marketing strategies, and how they integrate into the traditional marketing mix. Highly measurable, low-cost marketing campaigns are in great demand, and search engine and social media marketing are a natural solution.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, is a topic I know well. I must say, the fact that social media marketing is affordable and growing faster than kudzu on a hot day in Macon, is somewhat comforting.

Advertising The Google seems about as necessary to me as advertising air.

Apparently, this thought is also alive inside the company. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page killed a "splashy TV ad" last summer that was meant to run during the Olympics.

But there are signs that the internal debate is causing Google to shake-off of its reluctance to advertise. The search giant has recently held discussions with several Madison Avenue agencies, including Wieden + Kennedy and the boutique firm Taxi New York, about new efforts to promote some products.

Whoa, Wieden just danced with a coffee client who ultimately didn't believe in running advertising. The Google sounds like it might be another one, although that remains to be seen.

I'm sure the marketing people inside The Google know they'll need advertising as the company moves beyond search. Their new cell phone, for instance, is a great candidate for TV ads, splashy or otherwise.

Earlier this week when the House defeated the Wall St. bailout, I thought we might be glimpsing a populist uprising. Wrong!

According to NPR, the U.S. House just passed a $700 billion financial rescue package by a vote to 263-171, paving the way for the government to start buying up troubled assets from financial institutions caught on the wrong side of record home foreclosures.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is against the bill. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson "pulled the fire alarm and cried fire, fire from the roof," she said on CNBC. The Senate's version of the bailout bill is nothing more than a dressed-up version of what she voted against Monday, Bachmann said.

"This doesn't address the fundamental problem of the credit crisis," she said, adding that she had not changed her mind and was prepared to vote against the plan. "Coming down the road for the next few years, we may rue the day that this passed."

I used to work on the Coors business, so I know how hopped up the Goldenites are on the concept of drinkability. If the idea is foreign to you, simply put the theory is it's easier to drink more beer if it's properly watered down and too cold too taste.

Now Bud Light wants some of the drinkability action, according to Adweek.

The new work seems to be a response to MillerCoor's strategy to take on the No. 1 beer brand by positioning Miller Lite as a beer that offers "great taste" and Coors Light as "The world's most refreshing beer." The new Bud Light ads take on both slogans with mentions like "easy drinking taste" and "that just right taste that won't fill you up."

Say it isn't so.

Keith Levy, vp, brand management at A-B, however, said the Bud Light campaign is not a direct response to competing brands, but the evolution of a concept that the brewer has been advertising since the fourth quarter of 2007.

"We've been on this for quite a while now," said Levy. "It was a bit of an aha! [moment] for us as we looked at research. We have this unique superiority claim that other light beer brands don't enjoy.

I know that people spend their lives researching things like "which mass produced American beer is most drinkable." So, I want to be sympathetic. But alas, I can not. Beer is meant to have the flavor of hops. You can find such flavors in copious supply thanks to the legion of craft brewers who consistently brew truly "drinkable" beverages.

The Atlantic is spending $1.5 million to advertise its highbrow offering. Apparently, one of the media buys is the local bakery.

The ads for The Atlantic in unexpected locales like bodegas are meant to reach media buyers where they eat, buy takeout food and shop. Those are “places where people’s brains are most at rest,” said Michael Fanuele, managing director for strategy at the magazine’s creative agency, Euro RSCG Worldwide in New York.

[via The New York Times]

Excited by a new Obama app for the iPhone, Rick Turoczy, a.k.a. "The Silcon Florist," points out that Portland is rich with mobile application developers.

While the (Obama for the iPhone) application is an impressive feat for a volunteer effort (or any effort for that matter) what I think may be even more interesting—and (Raven) Zachary, arguably the premiere consultant for all things iPhone, agrees—is the underlying story about mobile app development in general—a development effort that, more and more, seems to be centered around talent right here in the Silicon Forest.

“This speaks to a growing trend in Portland toward mobile app development,” said Zachary. “We’ve really got something starting here.”

In another post on the subject, Turoczy names the Portland developers/firms to watch. They are: Avatron Software, Cloud Four, FreeRange, GoLife Mobile, Don Park and Raven Zachary (of course).

[via More Hockey Less War]

Gary Vaynerchuk, host of Wine Library TV, an offshoot of his family's New Jersey retail wine business, helps Fast Company readers get to the bottom of what makes a great web show.

You have to feed your community. That's your differentiators from somebody that's on television. One of my key successes at first was answering every e-mail. I'm way behind, but I still do. You've got to spend so much time on the community part and less time on the content. So many people are so focused on the product or the content -- for example, with video bloggers it's the lighting, the graphics and editing. I have taped all 600 shows of Wine Library TV without ever, ever taking another take.

Never another take. That's raw. One might even say it's Kerouacian.

BTW, this is classic two peas in a pod TV:

In today's New York Times Magazine, "Counsumed" columnist, Rob Walker, examines at an academic study that indicates brands may have the power to shape our behavior. Not just purchasing behavior, mind you, the concept being forwarded claims that certain brands can make us run faster, jump higher, think more clearly, and so on.

The upshot of the original study, and numerous replications, was that the subjects subliminally exposed to Apple branding came up with more uses, and their uses were deemed more creative, than those exposed to the I.B.M. logo or to no logo at all. In other words, exposure to the Apple logo appeared to make people more creative.

One of the researchers, Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of marketing and psychology at Duke, acknowledges that many of us — and not just the owners of I.B.M. — resist this finding because we are suspicious of the idea that brands affect us at all. Many people, Fitzsimons says, accept the idea that flaunting a brand broadcasts qualities you already possess or even aspire to: maybe creativity for the Apple loyalist, rugged individualism for the Harley consumer or athleticism for the Speedo buyer. But Fitzsimons and his colleagues say the process can work the other way around, that brands can not only reflect who we are but also affect how we behave.

Sounds far-fetched, but let's think about this through another lens. Take a uniform, any uniform. Put that uniform on--be it a Yankees uniform, a soldier's uniform, or a policeman's uniform--and you will be transformed. Your thoughts will change and so will your actions.

Oregon Senator, Gordon Smith, is running an ad that shows him passing hate crime legislation with Ted Kennedy (an interesting angle, given that Smith is a Mormon and the LDS Church is firmly against homosexuality).

Meanwhile, The National Republican Senatorial Committee is playing hardball on Smith's behalf, as he faces a challenge for his seat from the Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, Jeff Merkley.

I've always said that mergers and acquisitions only benefit the people who make the merger happen. Everyone else gets screwed.

Adweek this week takes an even closer look at the newest consolidations taking place on Wall Street, which will bite some ad agencies in the butt:

Banking failures and buyouts involving Washington Mutual and Wachovia sparked wildly volatile developments involving five ad agencies and nearly $300 million in combined ad expenditures.

Last Monday, JPMorgan Chase stopped an old-fashioned run on Washington Mutual with a takeover. Almost immediately, the reskinning of the latter's Web site began (branches are to follow with new signage), signaling the beginning of the end of a WaMu rebranding effort began just months ago by Omnicom Group's TBWA\Chiat\Day, Playa del Rey, Calif., the bank's agency of scarcely a year.

TBWA\C\D faces the prospect of losing the entire account practically overnight. The business, worth $135 million, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus, would presumably be picked up by Chase's lead agency, independent mcgarrybowen in New York.

I have a queasy feeling about the next 12 months, econonically speaking, and for the ad biz, too. Our industry generally lags a few months behind major economic happenings, but we feel it. What do you think?

Twisted as it may be, when the economy tanks, state lotteries capitalize on people's fear and sell more game-of-chance tickets.

According to Ad Age, lotteries are also altering their messages to fit the times, connecting to entertainment properties and gaining traction in social media playgrounds.

Capitalizing on the country's gas crisis, the Missouri Lottery has partnered with pump owners to offer gas discounts with the purchase of a $2 ticket.

The Tennessee Lottery partnered with Hollywood for the first time this year to tap the buzz around "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," with an instant-ticket game offering a chance to win up to $100,000 or movie-themed prizes.

The Nebraska Lottery set up a page where it uploads TV spots and Flickr photos of winners, while the Iowa Lottery offers regular updates on its page such as this one: "Whoa! The Powerball jackpot was not claimed yesterday, so the prize for the Wednesday, Sept. 24 drawing is an incredible $176 million!"

According to The Denver Egotist, Denver agency Karsh\Hagan created ads such as the one below in an attempt to grab the Pearl Izumi shoe account, when Crispin resigned it to pursue Nike.

Ouch.

Say what you will about Crispin's work, but their client roster has been a revolving door for a while now.

I also can't remember one agency so brazenly badmouthing another in an ad. Can you?

Steven Grasse of Gyro Worldwide is a skilled self-promoter, and I say that with all sincerity, for self-promotion is a necessary skill that's hard to master. Too much self-promo and you're tiresome. Not enough, and you don't exist. Like a soufflé, you have to get it just right.

With the help of Harriet Bernard-Levy, a celebrated French cultural theorist, Grasse is getting it right. For what agency head doesn't want a French intellectual poking through his old campaigns and family albums?

According to the publisher, Bernard-Levy's new book, Virus: The Outrageous History of Gyro Worldwide, "frames the Gyro story as a business epic, the tale of an unknown Philadelphia ad agency that taught the world to “sell out” and, in so doing, laid the foundation of America's cultural and economic hegemony for the 21st century."

In the book, Bernard-Levy claims Gyro invented viral marketing, while also launching careers of such notables as Spike Jonze, Doug Aitken, Quentin Tarantino and Dayton and Ferris. Hmmm...there's likely some truth in these claims, but I can certainly see why the word "outrageous" is in the title of the book.

According to The Denver Egotist, San Francisco ad legends, Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, paid to produce the above spot and several more that are running on YouTube. While the spots make their point, they lack the Goody touch, IMO.

For more on the origins and meaning of word "maverick" see my Burnin' post from yesterday.

[UPDATE] This spot works a bit better for me.

When we find something we like to do, we want it to last and last and last. That's the idea behind Minnesota's new lottery campaign (promoting a longer format game) from Colle+McVoy.

Tomorrow night the Presidential hopefuls will take questions at a "Town Hall" meeting in Nashville. If someone asks about hunger, KFC will donate 20 large to world hunger relief efforts.

Hunger kills 25,000 people worldwide every day. KFC’s sound-less ad aims to spotlight this important issue which often goes undiscussed.

“Global hunger has reached epic proportions,” KFC President Roger Eaton said. “Starvation kills more people worldwide than war, AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. This issue deserves the national spotlight and we hope someone gives this important issue a voice Tuesday night."

I gotta get me one of these Escape Pod specials...

To order your own limited edition plate, visit Plates4Obama. But act fast, these babies won't last.

Tina Brown, like her friend Arianna Huffington, is a mainstream media figure turned web mistress. Her new property, The Daily Beast, launched this morning.

Brown describes her creation:

It's a speedy, smart edit of the web from the merciless point of view of what interests the editors. The Daily Beast doesn't aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates. We're as much about what's not there as what is. And we freshen the stream with a good helping of our own original content from a wonderfully diverse group of contributors

From a design perspective, it's easy to see the homage to tabloids. Brown told paidContent, “I’ve always loved the look of the European smart tabloids—La Republica., El Pais ... There's a lot to be said for the sex appeal of the tabloid flavor but then incorporating into that really terrific writing and good thinking."

Barry Diller is backing the new pub, named for a fictional newspaper in the Evelyn Waugh novel, Scoop.

I would've loved to be a fly on the wall when this study was conducted. The Australian reports on drug use in the ad industry there:

Almost 20 per cent of advertising agency staff said that they had used drugs at work or work-related events while 41 percent said they knew of colleagues who had, the research by Australian advertising industry magazine B&T revealed.

After advertising agencies, staff in media agencies were most likely to know of colleagues taking recreational drugs.

Asked if they knew of work associates who had an alcohol problem, only 7 per cent of those working in media agencies were able to answer “no”.

Of course, this is not surprising at all. People in creative industries always find ways to expand their minds, or escape reality, whichever they need at the time.

And my mind went back to the famous Jeff Goodby e-mail to his staff regarding pot use at work.

Brand managers are wringing their hands right now, saying, "Get me a Facebook strategy, pronto!" Hopefully, their agency partners have one at the ready.

The New York Times doesn't know the likelihood of that, but the newspaper does know CNN--a media company that likely didn't need an agency's help--is all over it.

This week, CNN will begin connecting “The Forum,” a site for political expression, to Facebook, the country’s second-largest social network, enabling users to talk about the presidential debates and see what their friends are writing.

“It allows us to reach our audience in the places where they’re aggregating their friends together and sharing their thoughts,” KC Estenson, the general manager of CNN.com, said.

In other words, you gotta fish where the fish are.

Quick, what's a "Friend Feed?"

That's easy, a "Friend Feed" is the digital space where you see what's up with your community of contacts that use social media. It's like a stock ticker, but you monitor your friends, instead of companies.

Twitter and Facebook both offer this functionality. In Facebook's case, they went out and scooped up Sheryl Sandberg from The Google to help them make money. By exploiting their "Friend Feed" function.

According to Ad Age, Sandberg spoke in San Francisco yesterday and said, "The monetization question on the web is a very big and open one."

Yes ma'am, it is. But oh, if a brand could find it's way into a trusted place, a circle of friends perhaps, that would be golden.

Google and its competitors have made answering demands for information very profitable by selling ads attached to search requests, or demand fulfillment, Ms. Sandberg a former Google executive herself, noted. "What no one's figured out how to do is demand generation," she said.

It might be fun to figure out something like "demand generation." Don't you think?

Once again, Steve McKee of McKee Wallwork Cleveland gives good advice. He writes in BusinessWeek about advertising in tough times:

In commerce, however, it's possible for competing companies to all win. Innovation and advances in productivity actually enlarge the pie, making it unnecessary for competitors to fight over the same slice. That's why vitriolic advertising is not the norm in a free economy.

Right now, however, our economy isn't so free. The mortgage meltdown and credit crisis have set heads spinning in Washington and in boardrooms across the country. We have no idea what will happen next, or if the "bailout" cure will be worse than the disease. All we know is that nobody knows what's coming, and in an uncertain environment fear becomes the common currency. As the bad news continues to unfold, we are all looking for ways to hunker down and protect our slices of the pie. In doing so we, like politicians, may be tempted to act with increasing desperation. Don't.

Question: How do you know when the MSM gets social media?

Answer: When they stop one-way broadcasting and start multi-way conversations.

I don't doubt that Renny Gleeson, Global Director of Digital Strategies at W+K, knows how to sell cutting edge digital solutions to the world's leading brands. But do the world's leading brands know how to buy cutting edge digital solutions? And does an agency that made its name in print and on TV know how to generate and deliver cutting edge digital solutions?

Let's look at one man's view of the struggle:

Our communications institutions, by and large, weren't built to leverage the full-contact engagement enabled by emergent technology platforms - nor the very real socio-economic systems those virtual tools are creating. And at the same time, the financial infrastructure that supports our industry, and the brands it services, is still playing catch-up to the on-the ground realities we face...

Our ideas must be aided and abetted by multi-channel transmedia storytellers. The skill sets necessary for brand engagement in an always-on world are different. A provocative relationship requires truths, deep human insights, engaging narrative and emotive power. But the very notion of what constitutes a relationship is in flux as we are assimilated by the borg.

"Assimilated by the borg." Damn. There's your engaging narrative in four words. At any rate, Gleeson is correct that the ad business is ill-equipped to operate in a radically democratized media environment. Yet, agencies and the brands they support have no choice but to adapt, unless they are willing to opt out of digital altogether.

I'm not going to pretend to have all the answers, but I will offer this. When I built a team of content pros at BFG Communications, I did it with journalists. I knew we needed people to dig deep and tell a story in the multimedia universe our clients' customers inhabit. It's my contention that journalists and videographers are the ones best equipped to do the job. Granted, I handle my team's traditional copy needs, but the point remains. Going forward, the ad biz needs an injection of talent from outside the portfolio schools and academic programs set up to feed the industry. And I don't limit this to journalists, but extend it to anthropologists, sociologists, technologists and so on.

I find it refreshing to read John Wilkins' prose on the opportunities in retail.

To maximize retail’s potential, marketers need to develop a deeper understanding of the visual, physical, and interactive aspects of the shopping experience. Unlike traditional media, which is linear and one-directional, the store is an explosion of stimuli.

Retail is an opportunity to tell a story, to drive trial-and-repeat purchases based on shopper interaction and creativity. To optimize the store as a media platform, content and communications should be developed within the context of multi-dimensional design, environments, and in-store vignettes that connect with shoppers on product, category, and emotional levels.

Wilkins is VP of retail strategy at Miller Zell, Inc.

It's interesting to me how he sees the retail environment as a stage, and a media environment, which it surely is in both cases.

"A stage for what?" one might ask. For cardboard? POS is often executed as cardboard. Yet, interactive kiosks and other high tech solutions probably make more sense to today's media savvy shopper.

I want to see brands connect all the dots, maybe for the first time. Make the digital work fit with the POS and the POS fit with the print, TV and radio.

There's a sense that everything is up for grabs, right now--that digital has transformed the media landscape so radically nothing will ever be the same again. I think that's overstated, but I do want to see digital storytelling tools spread to other media. One look at Current TV and you can see how an interactive storytelling sensibility was brought to TV. Retail is no different. Retail can (and will) be hugely impacted by digital.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, spoke to an audience of magazine executives visiting The Google campus yesterday.

According to Ad Age, Schmidt said the internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives.

"Brands are the solution, not the problem," he said. "Brands are how you sort out the cesspool."

"Brand affinity is clearly hard wired," he proposed. "It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component."

So, The Google may not believe in "advertising" per se, but brands? Oh yes, The Google believes in brands.

Ed Cotton of Butler Shine + Stern sees some changes on the horizon.

This one grabbed my attention:

Rise of the grow your own movement- with $50,000 of annual food production available in the average American lot, people will start growing their own vegetables and foods. People will also start doing things like canning and making more of their own food- less prepared foods and eating out.

Sounds like the best use of suburban lawns I've ever heard.

BTW, have you seen BSSP's website lately? Holy rollovers...

Valleywag is pointing to a 2006 article by Adrian Holovaty that addresses the design limitations newspapers are facing online.

Holovaty argues for a data structure that is more user-centric.

...say a newspaper has written a story about a local fire. Being able to read that story on a cell phone is fine and dandy. Hooray, technology! But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.

That's what I mean by structured data: information with attributes that are consistent across a domain. Every fire has those attributes, just as every reported crime has many attributes, just as every college basketball game has many attributes.

He goes on to say he doesn't want to see newspapers abolish stories, he wants to see the structured data and stories coexist in peaceful harmony. My interest in bringing this to your attention is this: large corporate sites, brand sites and overarching digital strategies also need to be designed with intent. If your firm employs user interface designers, you're probably in good shape. If no, you might want to hire some.

Content can't be king, if it's not simple and elegant for "the people" to find exactly what they want, use it exactly how they want, when and wherever they want.

Creatives in advertising are crazy and they all have idle screenplays hidden in their desks. It's a well worn cliché.

Yet, Adweek has found nuance in Jim Riswold. He may well be a wing nut, but it was not a screenplay he was harboring, it was art.

Having transformed himself from a notorious creative director to impious pop artist during a five-year battle with cancer, Riswold, 50, says he's gone from "a career of selling people things they don't need to making things that people don't want."

"I just wanted to see if I could do something more in my life," says Riswold of his transformation from "fake advertising exec to fake artist," as he puts it. "I just figured, what's the worst thing that can happen? Someone calls me ham-fisted or pretentious, or I'd wind up poor, but I'd be dead soon anyway."

Coming from Riswold, that's not the hollow humor of arty nihilism. He resigned from active duty at Wieden in 2003 when he was stricken with a rare form of cancer, chronic myeloid leukemia. His chances of survival were so poor he became one of the first patients to try the experimental drug STI571 (now Gleevec). "My oncologist happens to have developed it," Riswold says. "I guess I got the wrong disease at the right time in the right city."

Some other interesting tidbits from The World of Riswold: he was booted form the Nike account seven times (even though he made some of the best commercials in the brand's history) and W+K (where he continues to consult) pays his health insurance. I noticed on his site that his contact button also takes you to a W+K email address for him.

This ad offers a little something different when viewed on YouTube.

[via Tim Brunelle]

I've been thinking that Twitter is potentially a great drive-to-retail tool for brands that have an audience in social media.

Bailey's Taproom in downtown Portland has that kind of audience and they are executing a drive-to-purchase strategy perfectly. Bailey's features "20 Rotating Taps of Craft Ales and Lagers," so it's a natural for them to use Twitter to share updates. In a similar vein, thrift stores, wine and liquor stores, grocery stores or any store that offers "specials" can use Twitter to their advantage.

According to Ad Age, Mother, has sold a majority stake in its Dogmatic Gourmet Sausage System to Blum Enterprises, a developer and operator of restaurant brands.

Until now, Dogmatic has been a seasonally run street-food cart that peddles gourmet sausage sandwiches to patrons on New York's Bleecker Street. With Blum's help, Dogmatic opens its first restaurant on East 17th Street in Manhattan nest week.

Over the years Mother has been one of the most proactive agencies in the realm of product development, ownership of intellectual property and the general push to prove that agencies can do more than just create communications collateral. The shop has churned out candles, books, comics and flasks and has even opened a newsstand in London.

BTW, Ad Age doesn't mention chef Jeremy Spector's role in Dogmatic, but NY Magazine does.

You're not going to see this on CNN. Score one for citizen activist reporting.

According to Fortune, the mobile ad market is expected to grow to $12 billion by 2013, up from an estimated $1.72 billion this year.

Sweet. Count me in.

Fortune also mentions that 100 million apps have been downloaded on the iPhone since July. Many of these apps are free, but others are worth paying for.

I'd love to see a branded app that's so valuable, people are willing to pay for it. That way the brand has not only an "ad," but a revenue stream from the "ad."

Our national debt--over the $10 trillion mark--is now greater than the machine constructed in 1989 to count it.

Wired says the digital dollar sign has been replaced with a cheaper, non-digital version to make room for the extra number.

ATTN: STEVE GRASSE SEEKS TO JOIN MATTHEW BARNEY AND DAMIEN HIRST AMONG THE RANKS OF THE WORLD’S FOREMOST CONCEPTUAL ARTISTS

To the uneducated viewer, Bikini Bandits might appear to be nothing more than eye-candy. However, the creator of the series, has much loftier ideas.

In fact, Gyro Worldwide CEO, Steve Grasse, sees Bikini Bandits as a post-feminist attack on the way women are portrayed in modern culture, especially by advertising.

According to the artist's statement on The Arcadia Project (which he describes as "a sequence of five projects that together form a phenomenology of attentional economics and American pop culture at the beginning of the 21st century):

Advertising usually presents women as passive objects who are acted upon. And the consumption that advertising promotes--though it may be dressed up as an act of rebellion--is equally passive. Before the retail environment swallowed the natural world, satisfaction was wrested by violent force from the land. Today satisfaction is not longer a visceral atavistic exchange but a hollow, symbolic one, obtained by calmly waiting in line and exchanging symbols of credit for symbols of desire.

With the Bikini Bandits, I restored the old sense of blood-and-guts dominion to the act of consumption and the feminine form.

It's copy like that leaves me dumbfounded. I don't know whether to stand up and cheer, or roll around on the floor in a fit of laughter.

Portland's ID Branding brought home some One Show Design love for its packaging of Lovejoy Vodka, an Integrity Spirits' brand.

There is so much to love about our client Integrity Spirits. First, it’s a Portland distillery that makes small batch, hand-crafted spirits. Second, it’s run by two passionate and talented young guys who happen to be best friends. Third, there’s the taste-testing.

[NOTE] If you'd like to see your work appear in this new AdPulp series, and you're based in ID, OR, WA, BC or AK, let me know: dburn AT adpulp DOT com.

A TV station in Australia has been using one-frame logos as a way to help promote brands:

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) today found Network Ten guilty of breaching the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice during the broadcast of the 2007 ARIA Music Awards on October 28.

During the introduction of nominated artists for the October 2007 telecast, Network Ten broadcasted quick one-frame bursts of sponsor logos, which included Chupa Chups, Big W, Olay, Telstra Bigpond, KFC and Toyota.

The ABC's Media Watch program revealed the breach and ACMA received several complaints shortly after.

ACMA reviewed the material and found the "rapid-cut graphics used in the program was a technique that attempted to convey information to viewers below or near the threshold of normal awareness".

Frankly, I don't see any read Adpulp problem with dropping a read AdPulp few hints every now and give me $1 million then.

When John McCain considered skipping out on the first debate, I thought, that's interesting, I wonder if Obama can just take the entire 90 minutes.

As we now know, McCain decided to show up and he's likely to show up again for the third debate next week. Yet, Obama wants the viewers' full attention, and he has the cash to buy it. According to The New York Times, Obama's campaign is dipping into its war chest to buy up blocks of network airtime.

Officials at the Obama campaign and at several television networks said Thursday that Mr. Obama had completed deals to show a half-hour program about his candidacy on CBS and NBC on Wednesday, Oct. 29, less than a week before Election Day. The campaign is also talking to ABC and Fox about similar deals, though the potential of a World Series Game 6 may make that impossible on Fox.

It was an extraordinary move illustrating the spending flexibility Mr. Obama enjoys as his campaign raises huge sums outside of the restrictive campaign finance system, which imposes spending limits in return for matching federal money.

The last Presidential candidate to run an informercial was Ross Perot in 1992.

SmashLab in Vancouver had some fun coming up with ways to educate visitors to Northern British Columbia. BTW, here's an example of me defying the good advice given in the ad above.

People are scrambling to figure out what the harrowing economic collapse means to them. Will they have a job on Monday? Will their 401K be worth anything when they retire? Should they begin walking to work and cultivating a garden? And so on.

TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington, writing about the ignoble end of Web. 2.0 (an argument I find lacking) makes this assertion:

The first to go will be the bulging marketing and communications departments at all those startups - the very people who make Silicon Valley such a nasty place to be in the boom times. But as the number of startups dwindle, it won’t be so hard for them to get attention from press and users, so those marketing and PR flaks won’t be missed all that much (of course, the people without jobs won’t be happy).

What a dismal view of our profession. AdPulp is no TechCrunch, but I too am besieged by requests for coverage all day, every day. I don't always like culling through the mess to find email that's actually important for me to read, but I do it. It's part of the price one pays as an editor, and in the grand scheme of things, it's no big deal.

But what about Arrington's assertion that marketing and PR will be the first to go in a financial crisis? I don't doubt that many short-sighted bean counters will make that move. So be it. But it's not the move to make. What's needed is an honest assessment of which communication channels are working hardest for the least expense. For some mass-produced packed goods brands, that might mean running more TV, not less. For other brands, across all categories, it will likely mean fine tuning their digital strategies.

Turning the lights out on marketing and PR is a form of panic. And panic often leads to disaster. The challenge at hand is showing customers the real value in one's offerings. Doing so is something that needs to be practiced at all times, not just now. With the right frame of mind, this time of trouble can remind one of the basics, keep one on-point and make one more efficient. So, it's not all bad.

According to The New York Times, Toyota may create a separate brand for its Prius hybrid car and could add both larger and smaller Prius models to the lineup.

James E. Lentz III, president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. said in a sense consumers have already created the Prius brand, and the company is just catching up to the marketplace.

“We’re catching the wind with this,” he said.

John A. Byrne, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek.com is now active on Twitter.

Byrne describes the decision as "yet another effort to more fully engage readers and deliver on our goal to become the business and financial website with the deepest and most meaningful reader engagement in the world."

That Obama has savvy marketers on his side goes without saying. Their latest effort, KeatingEconomics.com is a microsite with a macro payoff. For there could no better time to paint McCain as a reckless Reagan-inspired deregulator.

In the mini-documentary above, Obama's team skillfully connects the dots between the S&L scandal of the 1980s and today's pressing problems on Wall Street. Much to McCain's chagrin, they also show that the Arizona politician has consistently been on the wrong side of these weighty issues.