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.

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.

Advertisers don't like crazy.

After a long list of bat-shit-crazy things Glenn Beck has said, the conservative talk show host has apparently pushed advertisers too far.

So, which crazy straw broke the camel's back?

Joking about poisoning Nancy Pelosi? No.

Screaming/shrieking at a radio caller who disagreed with him? No.

Beck actually saying he believed our mixed race president was a racist? Yahtzee!

Ad Age has picked up on the story that many online discussion boards and aggregators, like Reddit, have been talking about for weeks.

ColorofChange.com has been leading the calls for a boycott of GB's prime-time show on Fox News because of his "racist" comment. So far, 36 advertisers have demanded that their ad spots won't appear on Beck's show.

And these aren't no-name companies like the Extenze male enhancement guys but big wigs like Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, S.C. Johnson, Clorox, and Sprint.

Clorox has gone as far as to say not only will they be pulling all future ads from GB but they are also avoiding all "inflammatory" political talk shows, right or left, for the foreseeable future.

This raises an interesting problem for advertisers.

The political talking heads like Beck, Hannity, O'Reilly and Olbermann have made a name for themselves by being incendiary. Which is bad. But they have the highest ratings on cable news. Which is good. So what's an ad buyer to do? Can't be sure but this consumer is hoping they'll choose the high road.

These are a few of my favorite things...

A person I consider a mentor once told me, "People always say they hate advertising. But what they really mean is: they hate BAD advertising."

This is a picture of Ecuadorian team Barcelona Sporting Club's stadium Estadio Monumental Isidro Romero Carbo.

With a little black paint and some manual labor, Sony grabbed themselves 180,000 eyes staring at their logo for 2+ hrs. In the ad world, that's damn near priceless.

Modern day soccer is so dominated by advertising (ever heard of Red Bull New York?), it's easy to become jaded. So, it's nice to see an original idea.

I think the reason I love this so much is because it manages to be subtle, while it's punching you in the face. Like your girlfriend telling you a story about how she broke her new pumps today, while going through your wallet.