High Five New York City

HeadOn! Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn! HeadOn! AHHHH!!!

Crowell Advertising, out of Salt Lake City, has come up with yet another advertising award. BUT this isn't another chance for advertisers to pat themselves on the bat.

This award is called "The Tracy's-Crap Advert Award."

They had me at "Crap."

Their press release starts with:

Ever see advertising that's so horrendous, you wish you could somehow get back at whoever made it by burning down their house and nominating them for an award of some sort for bad advertising?

Nicely done Crowell. Nicely done.

Users are asked to submit crap advertisement to their website, here, and vote on the crappiest of them all. (You can submit up until mid-October.)

On the homepage now is that delight of an ad for HeadOn! pain reliever, Vermont Teddy Bears, and no joke, an AIDS awareness ad that has Hitler having sex with a naked woman with the tag: "AIDS is a mass murderer."

Seriously. Someone gave that a green light.

So HeadOn! (gotta love bad jokes) over to the "Cream of the Crap" page and click away. If you're as sensitive to ads as I am you'll really appreciate this site.

P.S.

Crowell have branched out to make some really cool greeting cards you can buy that aren't "your average grocery greeting cards." Funny stuff.

Eight years after, "What now?"

I wasn't sure what to post today.

Anyone who was alive eight years ago can still see those images whenever some one says "9/11." To me, posting a video/pic would just ad to the ad nauseam that surrounds the over exposure of that day.

Instead, I'm going to post one of the positive memories I have surrounding that awful/akward few weeks that followed 9/11/01.

Nine days after the attacks, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show came back on the air. Stewart was visibly shaky and didn't seem sure how to get the show back on course.

Peppered with his self-depreciating humor, Stewart's opening eight minutes were some of the most honest and touching moments of any TV personality I've ever seen.

This was the beginning of my adoration of TDS. Take the time to watch.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
September 11, 2001
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

Miracle Whip, condiment of the hipsters.

It's easy to see why advertisers want to get into our faces. We've grown up as the TV generation. And that's not without incident.

The fact that we're impulsive and have a reputation of being terrrible with our money might have something to do with our vacuum-tubed babysitters. That and the Ritalin.

But because of this upbringing, we've had 1,ooo's of ads shoved down our throats, everyday, since we've been able to sit-up.

One benefit of this is that we've learned how to smell a rat.

I present our rat:

Do you feel it? That nasty, nauseous feeling in your stomach? That's a natural reaction (from a human being) that comes about when old people try to sound like/relate to "the kids."

It's similar to the feeling that you get when your mom sends you a friend request on Facebook or when you see that middleaged woman getting down to the Pussy Cat Dolls at the bar. It just feels WRONG.

Another ad from this campaign here. (Read some of the comments.)

In the event of an ad executive hitting the "Random Blog" button on Blogger.com and the stars align to cause them to land on MY site, this is my attempt to avoid some of this multimillion dollar foolishness in the future: I've found an article from Tom Humbarger on SocialMediaToday that gives some insight on how to behave in the very-easy-to-look-like-an-idiot realm of Twitter. Original article here.

(BTW, SocialMediaToday gets special props from me because they have a story on their front page about the A-MAZING new blog People of Walmart. A-FREAKIN-MAZING.)

Humbarger: "Here is a short list of best practices for corporate Twittering that I compiled for one of my clients. Most small-to-medium businesses should be able to achieve results with a couple of hours of effort per week."

Getting Started

* Pick a Twitter name that matches your company name or alternatively a name that includes your company name such as @companyteam
* Build up a level of tweets so other users will see you as credible and relevant – the minimum number of tweets that you should accumulate before you start promoting your account is somewhere in the 50 to 100 range (most users will ignore you if you have few tweets or haven’t been tweeting for very long)
* Fill out your profile completely including a URL as most people will not follow anyone with an incomplete profile
* Create a customized Twitter homepage (that matches your corporate brand as much as possible) to provide additional information about your company and products

Getting your message out

* Try to tweet 5 to 8 times per day, and you should space them out throughout the day if possible
* Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message – the others should be tweets about related topics that provide value to your followers or show a more human side of your company; people will stop paying attention to you if you use Twitter exclusively for self-promotion
* Most of your tweets should contain a link to a website, blog post, article, etc. – these are the types of tweets will establish your Twitter account as being a source of great content and worthy of being followed back
* Use HootSuite’s to schedule your tweets and to track your tweet clickthrus and their Hootlet app to easily tweet the URLs of content at the source – Hootsuite also lets you include multiple users on the same account which can help to spread out the Twitter workload

Following people

* Use one or more of the Twitter directories (WeFollow or Twellow) to locate potential users to follow based on their interests and geography
* Follow anyone who mentions your company or keywords that important for your business
* Periodically do a Twitter search on your company name or click on @yourname from right panel to see who is re-tweeting you or mentioning your name
* @reply people to thank people or to just reach out to them
* RT or re-tweet posts that you think are worthy – generally these people will notice and start following you
* You don’t want to grow your Twitter following too quickly – steady growth is better and a goal of growing 100 to 200 per month is a good start for most businesses

And finally as noted in The Guide to Corporate Twittering, you should:

* Be honest
* Be responsive and human
* Be nice

I really like the last three. Very important to sound like a human. Happy Twittering.

Derby della Madonnina

This wouldn't be MY blog if I failed to mention what went down this past Saturday.

FC Internazionale, or Inter Milan, squared off against their city rivals AC Milan in the 200th edition of the Derby della Madonnina.

Translated for American audiences: it's a game between two of the biggest soccer teams in the world that's been played twice a year for the last 100 years. And just to make things a little more tense, the two teams have shared the same stadium for the last 62 of those years.

This game has moved beyond rivalry to a spectacle that catches the attention of the entire world of football.

With the series tied at 37 wins apiece, the stage was set for a colossal clash.

Inter got the memo. Milan didn't.

It took Inter 6 minutes to get their first shot on goal. It took Milan over 60.

What resulted was an ass kicking of a magnitude that Milan hadn't suffered in 11 years.

All of this comes after a transfer window where Inter sold one of the top 5 players in the world and still came out on top.

And for that all I can say is: Grazie Moratti. Grazie Mourinho. Grazie Nerazzurri.

"The Conscience of American Journalism"

Now days, there is so much pre-interview prepping about what you can/can't say, what the current talking points are, and how to keep the interviewer "on topic;" it's usually a effort in futility to try and get the guests to say anything interesting or, god forbid, honest.

For that reason, I love when interviewers get the tables turned on them. They seem to have so many opinions bottled up, when asked, they come rushing out.

That was the case last Friday when Bill Moyers, an ex-White House press secretary under LBJ and 38 year veteran of PBS, sat down with Bill Maher.

The topics ranged from what to do in Afghanistan to comparisons of JFK's & Obama's oratory abilities. But the bulk of the time was spent on health care reform. After his interview with Wendell Potter a few weeks back, you know Moyers was chomping at the bit.