To paraphrase a old saying, reading about beer is like dancing about architecture. But Bill Yenne's Guinness: The 250 Year Quest For The Perfect Pint makes a fun read, especially when you're sitting at a bar on a Sunday afternoon and the Falcons are playing like a Pop Warner team. From the beginnings of Arthur Guinness, an Irish brewer in the mid-1700's, through the present day, Yenne talks about how Guinness has …
A Two-Fer Of Columns
Looking for some very light reading for the weekend? Check out A Carbon-Neutral Pile of Manure, my new column on Talent Zoo which takes a look at brands desperate to greenwash themselves. Why? Money is green. Or vice versa. If you live in Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, or other Midwest cities, you can head to the bookstore and grab a copy of Create Magazine, whose Sept/Oct Midwest edition has a column of mine entitled …
Bob Garfield’s Not Feeling Comcastic
Ad Age critic Bob Garfield has taken his personal crusade against Comcast into the blogosphere with a new site called Comcast Must Die. Here's part of the site intro: Actually, I have no deathwish for Comcast or any other gigantic, blundering, greedy, arrogant corporate monstrosity, What I do have is the earnest desire for such companies to change there ways. This site offers an opportunity -- for you to vent your …
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Tangerine Toad Teaches The Teachers
Our friend Tangerine Toad has kept his perch on The Toad Stool but has branched out to post on Marketing Profs Daily Fix, a site aimed at bringing together marketing professionals with college marketing and advertising professors. Toad's first post is a perfect summary of his argument that Your Brand Is Not My FriendTM: Now there are some brands—I call them Prom King Brands—that people don’t mind “conversing” with, …
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An Oily Jerk-Off
That's pretty much the only way I can describe the 2:30 Chevron commercial that premiered tonight on 60 Minutes. Click on the story and you can watch the spot. Ad Age has more of a breakdown: The commercial shows a montage filmed in 13 countries, as a voiceover from Campbell Scott (son of actor George C. Scott) tells the audience about the debate over oil, energy and the environment. "It is the story of our time and …
Can You Hear Me Now? Not If You’re Pro-Choice
Businesses have the right to choose who they do business with to a certain extent, but this is a little creepy. From The New York Times: Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program. The other leading wireless carriers …
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Take The “Mad Men” Pseudo-Reality Tour
Lots of ad folks are dumping on AMC's "Mad Men," but Gridskipper has your Google-mapped guide to all the hotspots (and approximate locations) of many of the scenes on the show so far: Don Draper and Rachel Menken have their first tête-à-tête at a lounge with distinctive zebra-print wallpaper. This almost has to be a visual mini-tribute to the zebra-print banquettes at the legendary El Morocco. The Citigroup Center …
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Happy Advertising Week!!!
Alas, there will be no parade of icons, as The New York Times reports: Since 2004, consumers have been asked each year to vote for their favorite characters to join a “Walk of Fame” on Madison Avenue. Among the nine icons elected so far: the Aflac duck, Mr. Peanut and Tony the Tiger. The first three years, organizers of Advertising Week also put on parades in Midtown that featured costumed versions of the nominated …
