Kentucky Fried Cruelty: Deciding to make a statement every time he’s asked for or signs his name, a 19-year-old PETA staff member—formerly known as Chris Garnett—has legally changed his name to KentuckyFriedCruelty.com, the same name as PETA’s Web site that gives the lowdown on KFC’s refusal to eliminate the worst abuses of chickens raised and killed to fill its buckets. The former Dover Plains, New York, resident …
On The Road Again, This Time In A Biodiesel Car
From The New York Times: While Bono tries to change the world by hobnobbing with politicians and Sir Bob Geldof plays host to his mega-benefit concerts, Willie Nelson has birthed his own brand of alternative fuel. It is called, fittingly enough, BioWillie. And in BioWillie, Mr. Nelson, 72, has blended two of his biggest concerns: his love of family farmers and disdain for the Iraq war. BioWillie is a type of …
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Click Fraud Competes With SPAM For Title Of “Most Heinous”
Wired: Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Last year, Yahoo! alone ran more than 250 million individual listings, according to Michael Egan, the company's search-marketing director of content strategy. Yahoo! doesn't break out PPC earnings separately in its financial statements, but Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto believes that keyword …
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Talk Radio 2.0
Washington Post: XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. plans to introduce new technologies next year that will allow users to switch stations using voice commands. XM, working with Kirkland, Wash.-based VoiceBox Technologies Inc., is designing a system that allows the driver of a car to control the radio by asking it to search by genre of music, for example. The system will then reply to the driver with several …
Intel’s Not Inside Anymore
USA TODAY: The world's biggest chipmaker said Thursday it will scrap its 37-year-old logo and well-known tagline as part of a major rebranding that will emphasize its shift away from its core PC business and into consumer products. The original Intel logo featuring a lowered "e" will be replaced with one showing an oval swirl surrounding the company's name. The phrase "Leap ahead" will supplant "Intel Inside," which …
Alaska Airlines Debacle Made Worse By Attack Dogs
Jeremy Hermanns of Tribal DDB was on Alaska flight #536 from Seattle to L.A. when twenty minutes after take off the MD-80 airplane tore a hole in it’s fuselage at 30K feet. Jeremy writes about it on his blog. It's an interesting account, but what is hard to understand are comments on his blog like this one: You come up with some very imaginative terms to describe the smell and what was happening. Can you explain to …
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What We Really Do All Day
Alex Bogusky refuses to be cynical (see December's Creativity, or take my word for it). George Parker, on the other hand, does not entertain that particular daydream. Many years ago, when I used to work for a particularly crazy woman in California, she made a statement that has stuck with me ever since... "Our job is not to create ads, it's to manage the process." I thought she was nuts, but as the years have passed, …
I Want My CA, And I Want My MTV
To be honest, I wasn't blown away by the work in the new CA. And I blame Huey Lewis and Bryan Adams. You see, I’m a huge fan of music—and I started buying records when I was 7 years old. To me, nothing will ever replace the music I heard in the few years when I was 13, 14 or 15—smack in the middle of the 80’s, which many older people considered to be a musical wasteland at the time. But damnit, I wanted my MTV, and I …
How Does He Do It?
Court Crandall has creativity oozing from his pores. He runs one of the best agencies on the left coast, writes (and sells) popular screenplays and now he's got a new children's book to his credit. According to the book's publisher, "Hugville is a town full of unusual hugs. If you come to visit, learn how to squeeze a friend with the Octopus Hug, twist him with the Tornado Hug, and tickle him with the Monkey Hug! …
Baking Up Some Mighty Fine Market Disruption
Hugh MacLeod on his South African wine client, and how blogging helped move the needle: Blogging doubled Stormhoek sales in less than twelve months. I have been saying this for years, and still not everybody believes me: "Blogs are a good way of making things happen indirectly." No, bloggers and their friends didn't start suddenly descending on supermarkets, buying the wine in large numbers. That's not how it …
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