Defense Tech: Breaking: Double the Troops in

Defense Tech: Breaking: Double the Troops in “Surge”

This is shocking, unless you take into account all the times Bush & Co. have mislead us in the past.

New songs from Billy Joel and The Eagles

First, Billy Joel is going to release his first pop single in 14 years after saying he was abandoning the genre for classical music. The single will be released on iTunes but there’s no word on whether it’s part of a larger project coming down the pipe.

Second, Don Henly told a concert crowd that The Eagles are just a couple months away from completing their first album of new material in nearly three decades.

Ad round-up: 2/1/07

I’ve got all these stories and no where to put them.

• Cyndi Lauper agrees that the best way for aging rockers to get some mass exposure is to sell themselves to advertisers.
• My buddy David Armano loves the one word ads that are popping up around Chicago.
• Blockbuster will be bringing back the talking animals Carl and Ray for their Super Bowl advertising.
• Pizza Hut is offering a $30,000 prize to the winner of the “Cheesy Hunt” contest they’ll kick off during the big game.
• Yet more talk about how the personalized ads from Minority Report have turned into actual devices.
• The Wall Street Journal has launched a print campaign to try and attract readers who are younger than their usual demographic and/or female.
• Apple sees the launch of Vista from Microsoft as just another soft spot to target in their ongoing “Mac vs. PC” series of spots.
• Advertising still rules the MarComm roost becaause the benefits are more immediately quantifiable, which makes everyone in the conference room feel nice and warm inside.
• Snapple is launching a premium tea during the Super Bowl.
• Click fraud is up. Everyone who’s shocked stand on your head.
• Yes, Google is now and will be for a while ruling the advertising world. Thank you.
• iMediaConnection has a special Super Bowl issue.
• Coke is running a contest that some say takes way too much time and is logistically impossible for anyone to actually win.

AdAge In 60 Seconds

• Google tripled its profit on revenue numbers that rose 67% in the fourth quarter of 2006. A presentation by CEO Eric Schmidt also focused on how the company was progressing with YouTube and their various offline initiatives.
• Glad, maker of garbage bags, has had a good deal of success by advertising on New York garbage trucks. So much that they’re looking to expand the garbage truck advertising in other markets. Now that’s contextual advertising.
• It’s shocking that big pharmaceutical marketers don’t care for reports that direct-to-consumer advertising isn’t the best thing in the world. Only it’s not.

LOTD: 2/2/07

Oh sweet crikey, it’s February already? Wasn’t it January just a couple days ago?

• Looks like former Weblogs, Inc head Jason Calacanis is starting a new company but it’s unclear as to what that’s going to wind up looking like. Knowing Jason it will certainly be interesting, though.
• Joe Jaffe is showing off two potential book covers for his upcoming book, Join the Conversation.
• Yes, the more mainstream media adopt RSS and other new technologies the more that will spur widespread adoption by users.
• I would probably be more excited about the Technorati WTF new feature if it 1) Didn’t look like just another blog platform and 2) I weren’t thinking about how much the search got neglected during the development of this.
• Another story on how Hollywood is looking to people creating their own stuff as a pool of potential talent.
• A lot of people are on the web while they have the TV on in the background. This, as much as anything else, is leading to the problems with TV’s current advertising model – no one’s paying attention when the ads are on.
• A bunch of smaller Web2.0 companies have created their own Super Bowl-type ads that will run on a branded YouTube channel.

More nice thoughts from the ad community

Thanks to Jaffe and BMA for their posts about the demise of AdJab.

I promise a more full accounting soon-ish.

Tracking RSS disintegration

Here’s an interesting idea from David Singer, the guy who runs the VodkaFish blog. With AOL shutting down a number of the Weblogs, Inc. blogs (including AdJab, which Tom and I wrote for regularly) it would be fascinating to see the downward curve as people unsubscribe from the RSS feeds for those blogs. Not everyone, as he says, is going to automatically go and delete their subscription, it might take months before people get around to it. After all, there’s no additional cost to subscribing to a feed so it doesn’t really matter. I’d love to see this kind of report since I think it, as much as anything, would show how regularly maintain their feeds.

What were they thinking?

OK, I kind of think this is a cool, if poorly executed idea. I don’t really have much to add about the guerilla marketing/hoax/scare that happened yesterday in Boston for Aqua Teen Hunger Force so let me instead just link to some of the other coverage it got. This is in no particular order.

• “It’s not guerilla warfare, it’s guerilla marketing.”

• Cartoon Network Outdoor Ads Set Off Terror Alert

• Flipping off an entire city

• Ann Handley: Dot Bomb: Lessons from News Headlines

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the Bomb T-Shirts

• Boston Cops Make Arrest in Devices Ploy

• TV show’s promo sparked bomb scare

• Boston Hoax

• Boston crippled by Aqua Teen Hunger Force

• LED ad campaign ignites terrorism scare in Boston

• Makezine and the bomb scare in Boston

• Boston hoax bombs have an Aqua Teen Hunger Force connection