In fact, the active minds at Cracked have given the marketplace quite a bit of thought. They’ve also had a peek into in-venue techniques. Don’t miss the comments.

Twice in the past few days I’ve received genital spam, but I happened to notice this time that they purport to be from small ad agencies. One from a shop in Wichita, Kansas, and another from a shop in Florence, Alabama. The unblocked footers claimed the spam was copyrighted by those agencies. Right. IP checking showed they came from overseas, of course.

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I went to renew a domain today and ran across this video from Bob Parsons of GoDaddy fame. I’m wondering if the reactions of others, general or specific,  are similar to mine after watching this vid. He also offers a list of 16 rules,which I’ll paste at the end. Though I think some of his generalizations don’t apply, specifically in cases of image and branding, the guy is obviously a character. I like characters.

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I noticed two spots lately with interesting approaches to music in commercials. The first is a spot for allergy relief med Zyrtec. The character asks at the open “You know that song Time in a Bottle?” Then she proceeds to make make a connection with the duration of relief in the bottle of Zyrtec. Now that’s cagey — just mention a song title and let the viewer fill in the musical blanks. That’s bound to make licensing simpler.

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Those who remember the internet bubble might recall what some considered a small renaissance in TV commercials, spots that were quirky, entertaining, and sometimes even memorable. And when the bubble burst, most of those spots disappeared in an instant. In doubtful economic conditions, advertisers reign in the dollars, demand and expect concrete results from what they spend, and forsake what they think of as luxuries in strategy and message, much as consumers behave with household budgets.

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Make the Logo Bigger found this MSN spot from last year, and at a minimum it’s thought provoking. Happily, it’s also pretty entertaining and very nicely done, I thought.

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J.J. Abrams, delivered a thought-provoking TED talk (as most TED talks are) on the subject of mystery. Considering his role in the creation of the TV show Lost, he’s obviously qualified to speak on the subject. As I listened I was struck by how profound some points were, worthy of book-length (or at least New Yorker-length) elaboration, but he had a lot of ground to cover, so I resorted to note taking as if I were back in college. Scrawled on my index card after listening was: [Read more →]