Hasta La Creative!

There’s nothing new here, and no high bar to clear, but I like the Cubs and this is a well done ad (from Fallon).

Need a brainless diversion? Visit Choose the Champion.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Except for flour.

According to The New York Times, The J. M. Smucker Company, bought the White Lily brand a year ago, and is now producing White Lily at two plants in the Midwest, instead of in downtown Knoxville, where it has been milled since 1883.

Maribeth Badertscher, a spokeswoman for the company, said the new White Lily was the result of thorough product testing and promised that customers “won’t know the difference.” But in a blind test for The New York Times, two bakers could immediately tell the old from the new.

Fred W. Sauceman, author of a series of books called The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South, From Bright Hope to Frog Level, said, “It means something to have been made in the exact same spot for 125 years, and it’s unconscionable not to respect that.”

This spot has been around awhile, but I hadn’t seen it until this weekend. On Father’s Day, actually. Maybe it was the mood of the day, but this just jumped out of TV and slapped me around a little in terms of relevance. A great example of the right spot placed at just the right time.

Creating spots like this seems deceptively simple. Oh, hell you just take a quote from an interview Earl did a few years ago and cut together some old footage. But crafting a spot this tight and this on strategy out of found material is, in no way, as easy as it sounds. WK is just so damn good at this stuff. The Magnificent Bastards strike again.

File under: marketing to men.

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 directed by 25-year-old Matt Bowron of the UK. According to Science Daily , “the message is being pulsed out over a six-hour period from high-powered radars at the EISCAT European space station in the Arctic Circle.” The message is aimed at a solar system in the Ursa Major Constellation, one that the EISCAT Director believes could, in fact, “harbor small life-supporting planets similar to ours.”

Tribe will air June 15th on ITV in Europe. But who cares? The real question is: do aliens TiVo?

Your move, Pringles.

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]

“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. Business books are popping up like weeds in a field (more than twenty new titles each day) expounding on how to be authentic, influence through social networks, create compelling blogs, spread sticky messages, and tell persuasive stories. There’s only one problem: Trying to perfect this growing assortment of marketing means is causing brand confusion, and thus a negative effect on the enterprise ends.

The end, the goal, of any organization, of any brand, is to create customers (or clients, users, members, donors, fans, etc.), and you accomplish that goal by continually innovating to add value to their lives. Everything the organization invests in, and works on, should be laser focused to that end. That may sound ridiculously evident, but I can assure you that it’s not. For example, ZenithOptimedia predicts that worldwide advertising expenditures will grow by a little over 6% this year to a whopping $473 trillion! That’s not to say that all advertising is valueless in the eyes of customers. But I can assure you that most of that $473 trillion is worse than valueless; it’s a drain on people’s time, attention, and sensibilities.

The Invisible Cognitive Force

So why do they persist? Why do marketers continue to fritter away their organizations’ valuable time, attention and money trying to keep up with, and optimize, activities that most customers find little, if any, value in? And I’m not referring simply to advertising: I’d toss most direct mail, sales calls, brochures, “branding” projects, and pr in the heap as well. What keeps people grounded to their outdated mode of thinking about marketing and branding; thinking that creates nothing but inertia, waste and confusion? I believe that I may have finally figured it out, and it’s so simple that it makes me wonder why I didn’t pick it up sooner.

It became apparent to me during a recent conversation with a passionate, yet utterly confused, executive about what marketing “means” to employ to achieve her particular business “ends.” See if you can pick it up: “So, here’s my most confounding question,” she began. “What message should we create to influence potential customers, and what are the best vehicles to use to deliver that message? What works today?” There it is! Do you see it? It’s staring you right in the face! But, much like fish are unaware of the water in which they live, you’re probably completely unaware of it. It’s as omnipresent and invisible as gravity, and just as powerful in keeping organizations bound to their great big balls of brand confusion.

Last week, AdAge revealed the invisible force in a 1,352-word marketing exhortation by the venerable marketing pundit Al Ries; an article that is all about the strategic imperative of slogans. Here are a few pieces of wisdom from the article: “If you want an effective, long-term rallying cry for your brand, you need a slogan that sticks in the mind. A sticky slogan can live forever.” And, “A sticky slogan is only half the battle. If you want your marketing program to be exceptionally effective, your slogan should contain words consumers can use to pass along your brand’s message.” There it is again. Do you see it now?

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.

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 you from place to place.

By the way, the Derrie-Air campaign is a fictitious advertising campaign created by Philadelphia Media Holdings to test the results of advertising in our print and online products and to stimulate discussion on a timely environmental topic of interest to all citizens.

Philadelphia Media Holdings–the parent company for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com–is run by former ad man, Brian Tierney.

I’ve been cheating on Diet Coke with another soda lately (the worst one you can imagine) and feel just awful about it. With the amount of DC I go through, I am sure the Coca-Cola company has noticed. To make up for some of my lost volume, some of you might consider this shenanigan.

Thanks to Paul Jarret.