The Greatest TED Talk Ever Sold

in his TED talk, Morgan Spurlock discusses why advertising agencies weren't too interested in getting involved in his new movie, "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." I have lots of thoughts about this, but... Just watch. It's pretty enlightening and entertaining.

Makes me want to see the film!

For the Love of Old Spice

Happy Valentines day!

Love is in the air. Can you see it? can you feel it? Can you...smell it? To celebrate, I wanted to take a moment to highlight the brilliant ad campaign that is the Man Your Man Could Smell Like!

Here's the newest spot.



Now, while the spots follow a very standard formula of witty writing, clever visual trickery and light sexual innuendo coming from the smooth-talking former football player, Isaiah Mustafa. But the best thing about the campaign is that it doesn't stop at TV.

The promotion famously went viral last summer when Old Spice took social networking into the next frontier. Primarily using Facebook, Reddit and Twitter, fans made comments, to which individually-tailored responses were produced and uploaded to YouTube--in many cases within moments of the original tweet.

But did you know they're still putting videos on YouTube? They Are! Check it out!

Now I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't say something about the ROI (return on investment), so I'll reference a story in Adweek discussing those very numbers from the time after the YouTube extravaganza. 107% is not too shabby at all.


So there you go. Have a great Valentine's Day, and keep it fresh!

Day After Ad Bowl Thoughts

Confession: I missed the big game. I do not have cable service, and did not leave the house. Hulu is just so much cheaper, I can watch it through my PS3, and really don't mind catching up on shows a day or two after the original air date. (Case in point, while others were watching the football game that NFL won't allow anyone to say, I was getting caught up on SNL.)

But I digress. More important than missing the game, I missed the commercials. So, in order to see all these fantastic (?) spots about which everyone is talking, I've got to find them on the interwebs. And, since many people have already done the work I've not had to look too far. Here, we have a collection of all of the commercials, and for the film buffs among us, IGN has put together a collection of all the movie trailers that aired during the game.

I will only say one thing; that I am surprised that Volkswagon chose to release their brilliant spot days before the big game. Seems like a careless thing to do with such an expensive ad buy, but then again, the fact that it has over 16,000,000 on YouTube shows that perhaps it wasn't that careless at all.

On a side note, should I regret not having seen the half-time show?

Camel SNUS Advertising FAIL!

As a former smoker -- now over 1-1/2 years without a cigarette -- I know how hard it is to stop. I still have momentary cravings. And, while I vowed to never become one of those judgmental, preachy former smokers, I do feel the need to call shenanigans on RJ Reynolds.

So, Camel is trying to get you to stop smoking in 2011. Great, right? WRONG! This ad seems to be selling not smokeless tobacco in little white packages, but rather appears to imply that the little metallic can of tobacco is some sort of aid for quit smoking.

Now to be fair, the ad copy DOES offer SNUS as an alternative to smoking, but that does not change my first impression. And I have got to imagine I'm not the only person out there who misread the marketing message.

What do you think? Clever headline or advertising fail?