May 25, 2010

LYNTC: 5/25/10

Tuesday’s links of note for your clicking pleasure.

Oct 19, 2009

LYNTC: 10/19/09

Here’s today’s short list of links that are of interest. I’ve got more links, but a lack of time to share. More later this week.

  • For the ad lovers out there, check out today’s Q&A w/ Stuart Elliott in the NYT.
  • The Yanks are out playing the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, California, USA, North America today, but you can still go to Yankee Stadium, if you were so inclined, to watch the game. I remember doing this during the New York Rangers’ 1994 run to the Stanley Cup, while the team was out in Vancouver. Kind of fun, but it wasn’t like 42 degrees in Madison Square Garden.
  • Andy Beal writes about the news that social networking via mobiles has doubled in the last six months. Wow. [via Chris Thilk]
  • Dave shared a solid Friday Heh this past week, with the payoff of a Facebook conversation having its way with the “Fresh Prince” theme song and balloon boy.
  • Ben Wagner shares some personal perspective and a great way of spelling out what the film adaptation of “Where The Wild Things Are” means to a lot of people.
  • This is awesome. That is all.
  • Broadband is a privilege, not a right, right? Wrong, if you’re in Finland.

Sep 28, 2009

LYNTC: 9/28/09

These are links. You should click them. Here are some reasons why.

  • In this week’s edition of “What Exactly Is Gawker’s “beat” These Days” news, I point to their recap of last night’s “Mad Men” and turn my head like an RCA dog.
  • How fast is Usain Bolt, really? Some ESPN staffers found out.
  • In case you missed this one, check out some fun that the New Yorker had with a recent NYT review of The Beatles: Rock Band.
  • Could the “Tribute in Light” that graces lower Manhattan every year around September go dark in 2010?
  • Gruber points to William Safire’s favorite New Yorker cartoon.
  • If you were a digital Robin Hood, apparently you’d start at Facebook and head back to MySpace with whatever you’ve got. Or something like that. Or maybe you’d just sit on MySpace all day and post updates to Twitter.
  • The amusing thing about this computer tumor is that it’s probably totally representative of the RAM bloat that your applications are chomping on, and will give you a good idea when you need to reboot.
  • Trash your coach on Twitter, no Twitter for you, says Texas Tech coach Mike Leach.
  • No coverage, no problem, say the Los Angeles Kings.
  • OMG “Star Wars” bathrobes! [via Gizmodo]
  • Dabitch seems to feel the same way that I do about the latest Windows 7 commercial.

Sep 25, 2009

Phoenix’s “1901″ Makes This Cadillac Spot, IMHO

A lot can be said (and already has) for an ad that contains great music and the effect it has on potential customers for the advertiser, and in this case I find myself not only loving the song in the first place, but thinking it’s one of the better ad / music matchups I’ve seen in awhile. Check out this spot for the new Cadillac SRX, featuring Phoenix’s catchy “1901.”

Music supervision for the win.

Aug 24, 2009

Links You Need To Click: 8/24/09

Man, it sure is easy to batch up stuff and share it with everyone. If more people I knew used something like Google Reader, I’d use that, but this lets me throw some spin on stuff that’s of interest.

  • Looking for a solution for people who park all douchey around you? This is probably it, and partially NSFW given its…title. Thanks to my West Coast pal Lauren for throwing me that a few weeks ago.
  • Doers. You know, the people who aren’t out there all day talking about all the cool stuff that you COULD be doing, but are doing maybe 1/20th of that, and spending the rest of the time…doing. Seeing a lot more throws their way of late than we used to. Thank goodness.
  • Some news showed up that reality show participant Ryan Jenkins had committed suicide, and it appears that there was a bit of a dilemma as to whether or not to “like” the news on Facebook. I “liked” it before I “unliked” it, I must admit.
  • Leah Jones makes some good points about ethics in social media consultancy, and whether timing is key in at least one situation currently making the rounds. Interesting debate, to say the least.
  • The sheer concept of the Dow Jones indices going up for sale is almost too hard to get my head around, but then I realize that we call something the “Dow Industrials” and I’m able to check out what “industrials” make it up, and feel better.
  • Rework is probably my #1 business hate. Except when it’s the new book from the 37signals folks.
  • I’ve been sitting on this one since March, and just couldn’t figure out what to do with it. What do you think about online ads having “icons” that when clicked, would tell you what they “knew” about you? Saul Hansell described that scenario in this Bits blog article.
  • Given the issues that NFL players continue to get into, I’m not sure that the League’s efforts to sneakily check out what future players, currently in college, are up to on Facebook is going to matter, a few months after word came down that this was going on. Or maybe it’ll only get more intense.
  • OMGzors. I totally want one of these cassette tape USB hubs. [via Gizmodo]

Some part of me sits on these until I have something interesting to say, another just feels like there’s SO much good stuff out there that I’m filtering so we can see what sticks or not, rather than that instant-gratification that you get from flagging items in an RSS reader. It’s free and all – too easy for me to just spam the heck out of all of you here. Hopefully these are enjoyable for those of you who actually read this.

Aug 19, 2009

Ironic Obama ad placement

On Wednesday night, I was scrolling through my RSS reader and checking out some articles of interest when I came across this post on ReadWriteWeb where Sarah Perez discussed a copyright infringement issue on photo sharing site Flickr. The issue at hand was a “Jokerized” photo of President Obama – “Jokerized” meaning made to look like “The Joker” in “The Dark Knight” flick – being pulled off the service for copyright concerns, namely that the familiar TIME magazine cover layout was built around the photo. Now I’m certainly not going to argue that particular issue here, but a main point in Perez’ article was whether this “transformative” photograph / artwork was something that would make it past a legal review. What happened next is the fun part.

As I continued reading the article – I typically read my posts in RSS if full feeds are available and click through to comment or read comments – I found a fascinating advertisement that took me to a poll on NewsMax.com, a well-known news organization typically identified as being on the conservative side of the political spectrum. The ad, as you’ll see below, might be considered a “parodied” look at Barack Obama with a medical cap on, with the link taking you to a poll focused on his health care policies.

So while we’re here, I think it begs us to ask the question as to whether this item (transformative or derivative – you decide!) would pass the same legal “test” as the “Jokerized” image.

May 22, 2009

Fun with ad ratings on Facebook

I’m sure this isn’t what Facebook had in mind when offering the opportunity to rate advertising. If you wanna get all contextual, then I don’t think it’s outlandish for me to have said this – I don’t like the Lakers, have never said I did, and so on. Just sayin’. =)

Fun with ad ratings

In other news, I *really* love M&Ms. No, seriously. And yes – it’s Friday, and I’m a little bit slaphappy.

[update: 5/25] It’s an epidemic!

Super Bowl ad buzz, where did you go?

A couple of days ago, I received my daily AdAge newsletter, and it included a link to this survey, which asked about whether or not pre-Super Bowl buzz for advertisements during the game was down. After seeing it, I immediately pinged Chris Thilk, and he responded with the same resounding (if anything can be resounding on IM) affirmative that I had thought in my own head. I’ve gotta say, it was strange to me that buzz had actually dropped down this year – and no, I’m not kidding.

The funny thing about marketing during a bad economic time is that you don’t stop doing it. Sure, you might make a point to make those dollars “go further” than they might have during a less risky time, but you still do it. Did NBC land some pretty good ads that cost millions of dollars to place during the game? Most certainly. Did anyone do a truly outrageous job of sharing those ads with bloggers and the public in advance of the game as they had done (with great success, if you ask me – and yes, I’m biased, having done this for a couple of years prior to this one) in years past? Nope, well that’s not totally true. I’d say the movie industry did a bang up job, but that’s about it.

Why would it work this way this year? My first inclination is that companies, especially some that had been heavily criticized for taking private jets to government hearings, for one, wanted to take a low(er) profile. Others, such as perennial USA Today Ad Meter winner Anheuser-Busch did indeed place their ads online, but I certainly didn’t see the almost two weeks of buzz about specific ads that I’d seen the previous two years. Of course, I was super close to it as the aforementioned Mr. Thilk and I had been a part of the work surrounding ad previews for the company during the 2007 and 2008 Super Bowl seasons. Was A-B’s merger with InBev part of a change in strategy around the game? One industry executive Larry Novenstern, executive vp, director of national electronic media at Optimedia made such a suggestion that if it hasn’t started happening, it could in the future in a recent ADWEEK article.

Now again, I have some understanding of the “cost” – and I mean that in dollars and sense, along with time spent – of creating some buzz about your efforts around something like the Super Bowl, and in a time when you’re cutting back on other things, the fact of the matter is that most social media efforts continue to be relatively inexpensive compared to other public relations / marketing efforts. And, if during that same timeframe, you’re aware of possible criticism of your strategy changes and how shareholders might react (buying less ads sounds good at face value, but if the continued support through branding / advertising of major events were to add value or create a baseline for your brand’s worth in the community, sometimes those dollars saved might not pay off long term).

But what does it all mean? It’s not certainly as easy as just picking a brand or two and saying “howcome they didn’t get some branding?” It was just a couple of years ago that it was a GOAL to get people to talk about your whole ad, punchline and all, and now we’re not even generating buzz at all, until two or three days before the game? To me, it seems like such an easy mark to go after starting this discussion a couple weeks out. Two weeks out, the NFC/AFC championship games are finished, and there’s a whole week (some would argue two, even counting media week at the Super Bowl) of nothing but “my team is better than your team” on sports radio going on, especially within the football set. Why not take advantage of that?

I could go on with this post, but instead I’ll just stick to that last question – why not take advantage of that?

I may actually *watch* the Super Bowl this year

For the first time in a number of years, I might actually end up watching the Super Bowl, rather than sorta watching while typing furiously online to cover the ads in one place or another online – and I kinda like it. Of course, I’m sure I’ll have the laptop open because it’s fun to watch the buzz over things, but I might just save my online time for after the game, to discuss a few things.

One of the things I’m definitely digging on is the batch of movie trailers that are going to run. It’s not the “most” in any game, but it’s certainly a lot, and I think a number of these flicks will pull big numbers this year. Either way, checking them out on a 50″ plasma is going to make me happy.

Enjoy your Super Bowl this year, all, and don’t blog too much.

Apr 17, 2008

DirecTV’s “We Go Viral” spot

I caught up with DirecTV’s latest ad spot that has been all over the airwaves but unfortunately not present on the company’s site just yet. Check out my current favorite, which I’m calling “We Go Viral” because it just so fits what plagues the world of PR and media relations these days.



Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. You can find out lots more here.

[update] Uh oh, Vodkafish thinks that “If Firefighters Ruled The World” might be the spot of the moment, it would seem. GREAT ad from Sprint / Nextel, but it’s not better than blogging it out!