marketing

Brandbowl

Of the commercials I didn’t see beforehand, I’d have to say this little pug was pretty funny. Even better that it was done for about $500.

Honorable mention also to the Doritos resurrection spot. I still think the VW Vader ad was the best, though the version they showed on-air was shortened and not nearly as good (though about $3 million cheaper to air).

The most tone-deaf was easily the second Groupon ad. I’m not easily offended so I won’t pretend that I was, but seriously? Mocking oppressed Tibetans? Who thought that was a good idea?

There were many bad or mediocre ads, but probably the most pointless and misfired, in my opinion, was the Stella Artois spot with Adrian Brody. I kept waiting for it to get funny. But it never did. Plus, he’s not that great of a singer. The Moto Xoom ad was technically very well done, but was another where the marketers thought the best way to sell their product was by mocking those who buy the competitors’. I just don’t understand that approach. It clearly isn’t working for Windows Phone 7.

marketing

Super what?

I’m with Gruber. That fantastic Darth Vader VW commercial hit the YouTubes on Wednesday with no way to know it was destined for the Super Bowl. Less than 24 hours after it hit, it had 900,000 views. Right now, about 4 days later, it has nearly 11 million. I bet at least a dozen of my friends have shared it on Facebook. A rare example of a truly viral video.

So I have two questions. One, if you’re spending about $100,000 a second for Super Bowl air time, why do you spill the ad to the internet days before? Isn’t that (minimally) half the reason anyone watches the Super Bowl? For the ads? (Case in point: Today, while checking out at the grocery store, I heard the cashier in the next lane telling a customer which her favorite ads from last year.) Two, why in the hell are you spending $3 million for a 30 second spot in the first place when YouTube and Facebook (among other things) allow your fans to target the ad far better than your media buyer could?

 

random

Let’s do this (again)

My fist blog was started in 1998 and was meant to chronicle the impending birth of my son. According to the Wikipedia, the term “blog” had been around for almost a year at that point, but I don’t think I had ever heard it. I didn’t call my site a blog. I didn’t really call it anything except by it’s URL which was eweasel.net. Yes, it’s true, even then you couldn’t get a .com URL.

Anyway, I eventually moved to the slightly less weaselly URL pixelfish.net (again with the .net). I blogged off and on until the 2002ish, then I stopped. Then I started again under the aegis of my company, ideapark, but that petered out a few years ago, too. Seems blogs do that kind of thing. They start, the stop, they start again.

Today, I’m starting again.

I have a lot of options in 2011 for blogging platforms. In 1998, it was all hand-crafted HMTL. Now, there are all these fancy WYSIWYG editors and the sites are built using code I can barely recognize, let alone create. For some reason, I’ve chosen to start with Squarespace. It looks pretty cool. Probably has more firepower than I’ll need. We’ll see if it sticks.

What will I blog about? I suspect there will be a large quantity of posts about media, popular culture, technology, marketing, design, video games, politics, and my family. Essentially, everything. I’ll also be trying to dig up old posts from one of my previous blogs just if for not other reason than to prove I actually have been a blogger for a ridiculously long time.