Once again, marketers have taken the lead in the quest to discover extra-terrestrial life. As NASA’s Phoenix Lander pitifully fumbles and pants, trying to scoop dirt into an oven on Mars, Doritos broadcasts a 30-second spot into space. A few months back, the brand challenged the British public to create a spot that summed up life on earth. The winning entry, as judged by popular vote, is called Tribe and was …
Bay Area Brethren Stick Together
Ad Age, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and just about everyone else is writing about the Yahoo/Google get together (and what a poke in the eye it is for Microsoft). From The Times: Google and Yahoo said Thursday that they had reached an agreement under which Google would deliver ads next to some of Yahoo’s search results and on some of its Web sites in the United States and Canada. The nonexclusive deal …
Dreaming of a GTI
Shot in Cape Town, South Africa - the commercial was made by Gordon Ray and Jamie Mietz of Ogilvy and shot by Greg Grey of Velocity Africa. [via Cherryflava] …
Traffic Has The Drive
According to Ad Age, an aptly named but relatively unknown Los Angeles agency just landed an important car account. Mitsubishi Motors America handed its $155 million U.S. creative account to a relative newcomer, Hollywood-based independent agency Traffic. Less than a year old and largely unknown, Traffic is part-owned by The Cimarron Group, but still has car credentials: The shop is led by co-chairmen Robert Farina …
Ball of Brand Confusion
“Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age.” - Albert Einstein We are presently witnessing an unprecedented drive for perfection in the field of marketing. Each and every day a plethora of new emails, articles, case studies and blogs promise to help us optimize everything from search engine rankings and viral video awareness to ad campaign engagement and direct mail response rates. …
News Flash
We all know how important it is to have an ironic t-shirt or two. According to The New York Times, even CNN has this trend figured out. T-shirts as a buzz marketing tool for CNN.com video were the idea of the Barbarian Group, an interactive advertising shop. …
Drink Coca-Cola
In 1894, an industrious Coca-Cola syrup salesmen named James Couden put down his order pad and picked up a paintbrush to create the first-of-its-kind sign. Today, you can see this this "Main Street, USA" attraction at Young Brothers Pharmacy in the north Georgia town of Cartersville. According to Not Atlanta, 25 layers of paint were removed during the 1989 restoration to reveal the original design. …
Pack Less. Weigh Less. Pay Less.
Here's an argument for being a lightweight. Philadelphia's Derrie-Air is charging customers based on a sliding scale. The more you weigh, the more you pay. After all, it takes more fuel—more energy—to get more weight from point A to point B. So we will charge passengers based on how much mass they add to the plane. The heavier you and your luggage are, the more trees we'll plant to make up for the trouble of flying …
