Amid announcements of mass layoffs (around a third!), AOL revealed that it’s now “Aol.” to you, punk.

Arigato, running man.

Industry News

This on-point video from Method soap portrays scrubbing bubbles as sleazeballs and encourages everyone to help the Household Products Labeling Acts.

Sounds like a good idea to me. For some idea of what they’re talking about check out Wired magazine’s What’s Inside series.

Creative

Creative

The problem of making money on Internet video isn’t any closer to being solved but Google just took one step towards a better user experience on its YouTube website by adding a skip button to pre-roll advertising. The company says is wants to learn which ads users decide to skip as a measure of quality. It would make sense that this development is a step towards performance based pricing.

Industry News

George Packer in the New Yorker has written his take on the appeal of everyone’s favorite advertising soap opera, Mad Men. The attraction, Packer says, is in looking at our own society, not that long ago, with a completely different moral code. Things forbidden then, e.g. homosexuality and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, we are open about now, while they get to smoke inside, drink to excess and sleep with their secretaries.

Middle class American men were, in Packer’s words, little kings. And in Mad Men we get to watch these little kings at the end of their reign.

Trends

Peep this funny spoof of creatives and their “proprietary brainstorming solutions”.

Creative

So this ridiculous Cocoa Krispies Box implies that eating sugary cereal will protect your kids from H1N1 aka Swine Flu. Obviously this is a dubious claim but the fact is, of course, that H1N1, while scary, is a only a minor threat to the well-being of America’s youths.

This fact did not deter USA Today from publishing an article resulting in Kellogg’s removing the claim from their box. Perhaps a compelling argument for self-regulation?

I’m reminded of this cartoon by xkcd which serves as proof that marketers will always find a way to irritate me via cereal boxes.

Industry News, Trends

The Texas Tribune, a non-profit news website, launched this week. It’s hard not to be cynical about the future of a such an organization while traditional journalism is struggling to define its raison d’etre to the YouTube generation. It’s made especially difficult for the Tribune after it gets called out by the Austin Chronicle for paying its top 5 employees a total of more than $800,000 per year, a hefty sum for a nonprofit startup.

Industry News

Ad Age is reporting that this spot will run 190 times tonight. This is the first spot produced by Dallas-based Richards Group and the VO, apparently, may be the work of founder Stan Richards. Anyway, its solid work from a solid agency, here’s hoping it can move the needle for Chrysler.

Creative