Plaid agency moves into van, extends carbon footprint

The interactive branding agency Plaid is once again going nuts, packing their leading designers into a rented Avis van and driving 2,246 kilometers from Vancouver to San Diego all to meet potential clients with whom they want to work. The video above shows them wrapping up the previous "brand aid tour" in Texas last summer.

Which begs the question -- why don't they just use the phone or internet? Haven't these people seen gas prices lately? Well, this is an experiment in mobile technology. Plaid, for this second year, is using cameras, GPS, wireless and all forms of social-media broadcasting tools to turn two weeks of work and business development into performance art at www.plaidnation.com.

Last year Plaid's tour, from New England to Texas, won them several accounts including the gyro-balanced Segway scooter. It is ironic that a shop that made Janet Jackson go viral is now making real-world cold calls; perhaps pressing human flesh will never go away.

We just hope this year they don't place the cameras low on the van floor pointed upward at female account reps. Just saying.

Full disclosure: Plaid sent us a T-shirt. We've had beer together. We hired them to design our agency web site. Darryl could use some nice dress shoes.

Pandora kills 180,000 radio listeners

Pandora, the free online music streaming service that recommends songs you may like, has become the hottest app for the new iPhone. About 3.3 million songs were streamed this week to 180,000 Apple fans wearing earphones. Nearly 1 in 5 new iPhone buyers have signed up for Pandora accounts.

1. Advertisers may have a new way to reach the young demos, if Pandora expands ad formats in its next user interface.
2. Until then, that's a lot fewer people listening to commercial radio.

Via Adweek.

Sojern puts ads on airline tickets

U.S. airlines' fuel bills will soar $20 billion dollars this year and they're passing costs on to travelers every which way. So let's all thank Sojern, a clever company, for opening a new frontier of advertising on boarding passes.

This is such a no-brainer we're surprised no one has thought of it before. About 250 million boarding passes are printed from computers each year, and until now have been blank slates. Sojern's ads appear both on the computer screen (where consumers can click through) and in printed form, and include updated weather and timely coupons to minimize the grousing from fliers who may not like advertising clutter.

And the target demo is sweet. On Delta, for example, 64% of fliers have household incomes above $75,000, 62% are working professionals, and about 20% are executives. We see affluence, flying your way.

Via Adbroad.

Why Twitter's lifespan is limited

Social media researcher Danah Boyd notes the iPhone may be the tipping point for social media in mobile, creating cluster effects in which groups of people can step beyond 1to1 interaction to all do the same thing. In simple terms, mobile devices today are hamstrung by being one-on-one devices -- I can call or text you, and you me, but there are very few ways (other than Twitter) for groups of like-minded people to harmonize together.

The iPhone will change that because it is the first mobile device to build critical mass as the same software platform with the same wireless carrier.

So where does this lead? Expect to see a series of social media "hubs" emerging on your cell phone:

1. Faux web. Initially, we'll get rough translations from current tools on the internet. Think Twitter on the your cell, followed by Facebook.
2. Mini hubs. But mobile hubs will then open the doors to entire new social media platforms. Think of cab drivers creating their own SM hub to share news and traffic in major cities.
3. Wireless locks. Wireless carriers will sniff an opportunity to, yes, try to lock you in. The wireless industry has battled customer churn for years, and just as today's "rollover minutes" and termination charges are all positive or negative attempts to stop you from switching from Sprint to T-Mobile, wireless social media hubs will be irresistible tools for carriers. Expect to see AT&T and Verizon launching social media mobile portals, and trying to fill these walled gardens.
4. More ads. Advertisers, having difficulty with poor mobile response rates, will try to leverage emerging mobile hubs as a new ad format.
5. Unexpected success. Eventually, some kid in a garage will break through with the new killer app. Mobile devices have vastly new potential, especially location-detection services today and two-way video transmission tomorrow. GPS and video create a much more personal way to communicate; today's stars, Twitter and Facebook, use neither and so will not win on mobile.

We can't wait to see where this goes. As Danah Boyd notes, we're all growing a bit bored, so please, carriers and developers, don't screw this up.

Photo: Thomas Hawk

Why mobile advertising may not work

A new cell phone with a mirror: it's a perfect analogy for why mobile advertising is being ignored.

You've probably heard that mobile ads will be the next big thing, with some analysts predicting the market will grow from $900 million in 2006 to $19 billion by 2011. Yet observers like Thomas Curwen, director of planning at Publicis, note that marketers are still just testing with small budgets despite the fact that 58% of Americans have used cell phones for non-voice activities such as texting or watching videos.

What gives? Why has half the United States already used cell phones for internet-type services, yet internet-type advertising remains stagnant on cell phones?

Curwen suggests it's because brands have not yet created good content for mobile, but we think it's the mirror. People using mobile have different modality -- they are creating and receiving content that reflects themselves, not hunting for the world's information on computer screens. Just as social media sites such as Facebook have some of the worst performance in internet advertising, social tools that fit in your pocket underperform because you use them differently. When you make or receive a Tweet or text message or phone call, you do it entirely for you.

With mobile, we're not looking at content and ads. We're looking in the mirror.

Tiny devices are by nature selfish instruments, and that is a wall for advertisers who exist solely to take your mindset offtrack to their own message. Sure, some GPS-served ads that point to coffee shops may work. The fluid iPhone, emerging video transmission and flexible interfaces may unlock ad doors. But the combination of small screen sizes (which hold less ad inventory) and a different mindset among mobile users (who are moving fast and creating snippets of content) mean mobile advertising has a stiff uphill battle ahead.

We're not saying mobile ads won't grow. We're just saying, if half a nation's population has used a communications medium and advertisers haven't yet made it work, something is amiss.

Facebook thinks we're Hugh Hefner

A lot has been written about Facebook's advertising potential, from the anticipation last year to the Beacon blowout and Zuckerberg apology to the hangover that FB may never monetize ... to the final recognition that, yes, you can target Facebook users based on nuances like sexual interests, place of work, education and whether they like dogs.

So why does Facebook think we're Hugh Hefner?

This week we tracked the targeted ads FB sent us, based on our extensive profile. We got: yacht rentals, restaurant nights out in Manhattan, currency trading, luxury watches, pool installation, diamond rings (for only $1!), hair solutions and yes, the "get-ripped-if-you-are-too skinny" ad.

Sounds like an old, rich guy who likes babes, boats, and big spending. Aw, shucks.

Soon, you can muck with Google search results

Google is testing a way for users to personalize search results. This is revolutionary, since up to now Google has relied upon the wisdom of crowds to give you the highest-ranked web pages based on how popular they are with the rest of the world.

With Google personalization, you decide what's important -- and edit results for frequent searches by removing pages you don't like, adding comments, or viewing comments from others. Note that paid ads ("sponsored links") are missing from the demo video; Google obviously has the good sense not to mess with its advertisers.

This personalization misses one angle -- most people "search" for things they don't know how to find, so customizing a search is like changing your commute route after you've already arrived at the office. How do you personalize results if you don't yet know the results you want? If Google could find a way for people to pre-edit search preferences, and then have new search results tailored based on those preferences, it would be on to something.

Expect to see it at Google Labs soon. Via TechCrunch.

Florida bikers ride proud, dress loud

Atlanta media planner Michelle Marts has launched a killer campaign to teach motorcyclists in Florida that dressing in dark black is a good way to, um, get killed. The campaign, for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, encourages riders to "dress loud" and get visible on the roads.

We admire this, because (a) it's a noble cause and (b) frankly will be a tough sell, fighting decades of ingrained coolness from James Dean and Dennis Hopper in black leather. More than 500 riders die on Florida roads every year, but teaching bikers to wear orange chaps will be revolutionary.

Still, Austin Powers pulled it off. Come on, men. Show your true colors.

Google and NYT knock out software by watching you

Last fall we came across Google's image labeler, a little game that invites you to race a stranger (somewhere out there) in tagging photos with titles that make sense. We got served Drew Barrymore and typed "knockout."

Turns out Google and other companies are using your personal down time to improve how computers recognize photos, video and scanned text. Humans are better than computers at image recognition; but if millions of humans say an image is X, the computer begins to get it too. In the cleverest move, the twisted-word Captcha codes you type to gain access to Twitter or Facebook are being monitored by The New York Times to improve computer recognition of printed words ... in essence, using 10 seconds of your brain to refine software that will scan back issues of NYT from 1851 to 1980.


Both ideas, the image play and "ReCaptcha," are brainchilds of Luis von Ahn -- a Carnegie Mellon guru who created the fuzzy password tests for Yahoo in 2000, and is expanding to use downtime to solve problems of artificial intelligence. The average U.S. consumer spends 1.1 hours a day on electronic games and 1.7 hours using email, all input-heavy interactions that could conceivably be leveraged for broader computing tasks.

Just think of what he'll do with the 17 minutes you spend in the bathroom.

Tip from Brad Ward.

4 marketing lessons from death on stage

Live theater is dying. The sweet blue-haired ladies who once filled theater seats are moving on to the big stage in the sky, and as younger generations fill basements with big-screen TVs, the arts community is reeling. Pay attention, because shifts in demos and consumption are rocking industries from automotive to zoo attendance, and you too will need to respond.

Eric Smith, marketing director at Westport Country Playhouse, has launched a new blog that pinpoints the challenges of the entertainment industry as audiences shift and change.

"For many theatres the answer seems to fall on 'we need to bring in younger audiences', writes Eric. "... but here is the thing: younger audiences are merely a demographic that we have identified who are currently not attending theatre in large numbers. It would be like saying, 'there are a billion people in China who don't come to our theatre, how do we get them here?' "

Eric suggests a deeper look at the marketing process is required, beyond just shifting the demo target. To build upon his post,

1. Reframe the goal. First, your business target has to reflect the new reality. Has the recession or oil prices changed your customers' behavior? Does your basic business goal reflect what new level of success is required? How would GM do next year if it maintained a goal to sell X number of trucks as the metric of success?

Theater marketers can do this by refocusing from subscription sales, the past ideal goal, to "multi-ticket buyers" -- a nod that consumer behavior has changed, and that people now need more flexibility.

2. Map common pathways to sales. This means analysis: reviewing customer account histories, looking for patterns among the best customers, and then defining the touchpoints and needs that can increase such behavior among future prospects.

3. Target diversity, not demos. It's not enough to shift advertising to working female professionals age 35-44. Advertising media plans can target multiple audiences, say, professionals who commute, stay-at-home moms, long-time loyalists, and new movers into the market.

4. Test, refine, redeploy. Advertising plans almost always have unexpected results. Tracking performance by media channel is critical (say, the cost per inquiry from Newspaper A vs. Insert B). As lower-cost lead generators emerge, shifting funds can yield 30% to 40% more customers from the same advertising budget.

Footnote: Eric is a client of Mediassociates. We usually avoid promoting our clients on this news blog, but the thought process he presents is worth watching.

Surviving by obedience to authority

Two fire trucks showed up in our driveway tonight, lights blazing, so we walked out front to see tall men in yellow uniforms rushing toward our neighbors' house. Our first thought was to ask, "what's going on?" Our second was, "stay out of their way."

The firemen quickly found a leaking propane tank, attached a hose, and set a 5-foot flare to burn off the gas before it could spark.

What interested us most was our reaction to the alien arrival of strobe lights and officials in uniform. We expected them to tell us what to do, and we were ready to comply. It all reminded us of psychologist Stanley Milgram's classic experiment on obedience to authority, in which volunteers were told to administer shocks to hidden people (really actors) and readily complied, even as the actors grunted and groaned. Milgram expected most people to stop giving shocks when the "recipients" screamed; instead, 65% of volunteers followed instructions to increase voltage all the way to "danger" levels. Volunteers didn't do it to be mean; they did it because an authority, the instructor, told them it was the thing to do.

We don't mean that firemen do anything wrong; we're pretty happy they saved our neighbors' house. But we think about the people who follow authority based on instinct, and are surprised to find the same response inside ourselves. Perhaps human evolution ingrained response to leadership as a survival skill. Perhaps that is why so many organizations, from military to police to schools to churches to soccer clubs, use uniforms to guide packs today.

The instinct to obey is strong, whether the cause is right or wrong.

Damn that iPhone battery

In Vermont farmers say that if you let cows loose in a giant field filled with grass, they roam immediately to the edge, stretching their necks for more, causing their tails to get tangled up in electric fences.

Reminds us of the iPhone. Consumers always have to rush to the edge of technology, demanding more, and so technology often stretches and fails. The new iPhone 3G model is faster than the 2007 version, but alas sucks energy MUCH faster from the poor battery. Apple didn't include a removable battery, which would have allowed you to swap in fresh batteries but harmed the sexy interface. (That probably would have hurt sales of iPhone upgrades next year, too.)

So Apple, having seeded 2009's product obsolescence, has posted 13 tips on how to extend the battery life by basically turning off all the things you bought the new iPhone for: stop using the zippy 3G connection; avoid checking email frequently; don't use GPS. Heck, dim that gorgeous display.

Uh-huh.

Apple pushed too far too fast, and consumers are daft if they buy a sexy piece of glass with speedy wireless only to turn off that feature. The most frustrating thing is despite these obvious flaws, we're tempted to buy the Apple gizmo -- because our Darwinian evolutionary genes demand that we gather pelts and nuts and shiny glass objects to prepare for the next Ice Age.

So here's a free tip: Turn off the iPhone's power, too. Then you can show off the shiny toy for hours without harming the battery.

Tip via Steve Rubel. Photo: Nathan Borror.

The girl effect

Brilliant copy. Go ahead, try not to be moved. Via Darryl. Complete story here.

The New Yorker to Obama: Shock, then awww...

You've probably heard that David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, is in hot water for approving a cover that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as Muslim militants, complete with an American flag burning in the background.

Perhaps you also heard The New Yorker defend it as sympathetic satire, skewering the Right's take on the Left.

What we hear is a lot of people talking and talking about The New Yorker. Well played, Mr. Remnick.

Coors reminds you, use a wide mouth

Thanks to the ailing economy you now can drink beer faster.

Let us explain. Imported wine prices are up 10% in the UK and expected to rise in the States, due to high oil prices and a crumbling dollar, creating a sweet opening for domestic brewers. Coors Light has made aggressive strides in the past two years to return to its advertising "mountain" roots, leaving blondes in bikinis and the Freudian Silver Bullet train behind. Sales in the past 12 months are up 8 percent.

To build momentum, Coors is pushing its product packaging into look-at-me territory. Colored ink in labels turns blue when the temperature is just so. And if you've ever worried that your beer can did not provide a "smooth pour," rest easy, because Coors Light now comes in "vented wide mouth cans" that use a trick of air to unbubble the beer flow. The billboards proclaiming this are damn ugly, and damn noticeable.

It's all good for Coors. Finally, something to ease the pain of the SUV depreciating in our driveway.

Photo: Richard Kelland

The U.S. Postal Service masks its direct mail

Sometimes design can save your product. Say, the new USPS presorted mail indicia that mimics a stamp ... and hides the fact that the envelope is direct mail.

Why such subtlety? The United States Postal Service is under severe threat from diminishing mail volumes, especially bill presentment and payment as many companies encourage customers to pay online, so continues to push direct mail as an important marketing channel. USPS needs mail volume from marketers to help offset the cost of delivering cards to Aunt Virginia in Montana. (Hey, you make the drive for less than a buck.)

Alas, consumers often avoid "junk mail" by not opening it. They do this by scanning the envelopes and looking for those telltale "presorted standard" indicias -- printed markings used instead of stamps on bulk mail. If it looks like junk, it goes in the trash.

So let's examine the new presorted design. Clever -- full color, with "USA" and stars looking very much like a stamp. The "presorted standard" message is dark gold, practically invisible against the blue. Glance at the envelope in a blur and you can't tell if it's a stamp, or not.

Hmm. Consumers won't notice. They'll open more envelopes. The direct mail response rates will be higher. Marketers will like this, compared to other media, and divert more funds to direct mail. Which will push up mail volumes. Clever, USPS. Very clever. But that's cool, cause we still need you to deliver to our Aunt Virginia.

The word of mouth for Stephen King

As the battery drains from a loaned laptop in our northern Maine vacation, we realize we must bid the web and this blog farewell ... until next Monday, July 14. We leave you with the image of Stephen King's front gate, and the tale of his second "brand."

You know Mr. King as the prolific writer of horror books. But talk to people within 20 miles of Bangor, Maine, and you get a different story -- about a guy and his wife who started out small, always remembered their home, and gave back in the form of charity and building baseball fields and cracking jokes at local bookstores or movie theaters. Seems Stephen King has built a word-of-mouth brand around goodwill.

We drove by the water park he built for the community, which doesn't have his name on it. We drove by King's house, saw a relatively modest home for a guy who makes millions. The gate was open, we were tempted to drive in, knock and say hello. The wrought iron gates were a little goth, but didn't fool us. We hear he's just a nice guy.

Funny thing, word of mouth. Changes your entire perspective of the official brand.

Photo: Silver Starre

Forget privacy. Your IQ told us it needs help.

Consumer privacy groups are upset that ISPs (such as your local cable company) are designing tools to track web viewing habits and to sell this information to advertisers. Web tracking has been around for a decade by individual sites, and then by collections of hundreds of sites known as ad networks. But Internet Service Providers give you the modem by the wall and thus see everything you do. If they could mine all that data, think of the targeting potential ... and privacy risks.

Except all these concerns have a single flaw: You now actually need people to track things for you.

Think of it. What would happen if your computer crashed, you lost all your bookmarks, all your contacts, all those emails with distant relatives or colleagues cc'd? Memorization has become an obsolete skill set; most U.S. consumers now have cell phones, and so the number of phone numbers in our heads has fallen from hundreds to perhaps a handful.

If you protest, please answer two questions:

1. Who was the second president of the United States?
2. What is your mother's cell phone number?

You don't know. You don't need to know. The answers are lodged in Google and your smart phone.

We hit the memory brick wall ourselves this week, while on vacation in Maine, when we realized the friends' computers we borrowed didn't have all our saved passwords and bookmarks. Suddenly pulling information from the web was hard -- so many breadcrumbs were stocked in our home Mac computer, the trail to knowledge was now fogged.

Do humans now need others to remember things on their behalf? New Zealand professor James Flynn has found that human IQs are rising, but our newfound intelligence is now focused on abstract reasoning. Old pragmatic knowledge skill sets such as rote memorization are falling away, as we learn to search and make cognitive leaps but require information tools to fill in the gaps.

So perhaps the ad targeting privacy people have it all backwards. We are all leaving click-streams in almost any device or store we touch today, so thinking we have privacy is a myth anyway. We all use Google, which invades other content sites, scans their knowledge and posts results without a please or thank-you. We all pay bills; skip a few and then apply for a loan, and you'll see how carefully organizations are tracking you. And it is all a good thing ... because after all, someone else has to remember what we want.

Photo: Tokyo Lunch

CD Baby puts a song in your heart

Michelle Marts over at Media Artist notes that too few companies do something original with their standard customer communications. Here's a nice email she found from CDBaby.com:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet ...

Over the top? Yes. Memorable? Definitely. Such prose won't work for every business, but it's a wake-up call to start doing more with your standard customer touchpoints. A little humor goes a long way.

Photo: NguyenDai

Did Clay Aiken kill these magazines?

Kids these days. Six magazine titles with more than 400,000 circulation bit the dust in the tail end of 2007, meaning they either stopped publishing or having their circs audited (which means hey, they were really, really embarrassed by the reader count). The newly deceased included Child, Jane, Junior Scholastic, Nick Jr., Success, and Teen People.

Hmm. Seems like most targeted young people. Not a good trend for mags, given that people tend to take their media habits with them as they age.

Maghound: 7 Lindsays in your mailbox for the price of, um, 7?

Magazines aren't dying like newsprint, which has circulation numbers off the cliff, but mag circs are down as well -- about 11% since their peak in 2000. Reading on glossy paper is fast becoming a habit of senior citizens; the top 5 U.S. magazine titles include the AARP bulletin, Modern Maturity, Reader's Digest, TV Guide (seniors remain the heaviest consumers of TV), and National Geographic.

Which is why we dig Time Inc.'s new Maghound.com, a Netflix-like subscription service where for a set fee each month you get access to as many rotating magazine titles as you like. The service will launch in September with 300 titles. $9.95 a month nets you access to seven titles at the same time, which you can mix and match or cancel without annual commitments. And yes, the magazines arrive in the mail on real glossy paper.

The model behind Maghound is still nascent and a bit unpredictable. Will this boost demand for in-the-mail pubs? Or will readers quickly switch gears, creating no net gains? Or will readers, seeking savings, shift from traditional mag subscriptions to the seven pubs for $10/mo model, cannibalizing existing subscriptions?

Or will readers say, hey, I can find most of this online for free now anyway?

If the past trends of emerging media are any clue, we vote cannibalization. No matter. We're signing up as fast as we can. Internet hooey aside, nothing beats a well-edited glossy magazine in the hands for an enjoyable hour of reading before bedtime. We're getting older, and these backlit screens hurt the eyes.

Supercooking your July 4th

Search engines are getting more helpful and more intrusive. On the obliging side, Supercook.com asks you to type the ingredients in your kitchen and then finds gourmet recipes using your foodstuffs from around the web. Only have beef and mushrooms? Supercook suggests BBQ Cottage Cheese Stuffed Mushrooms, and cues you to check if you have the extra needed ingredients.

Summize.com is a quasi-helper, digging through Twitter chat to see if your name or key topics are popping up. Brand managers can use this to check chatter about their products, or competitors and your arch enemies can swoop in to listen on conversations.

As the world goes digital, everything touching the web becomes transparent. Bad if you want to hide a secret. Good if you like Bacon Wrapped Mushrooms.

Via Swiss Miss. Photo: Elephant.

Time to satisfy a hungry woman

This holiday weekend think about sex, food and shelter. We know you will, because Angela Natividad points out today's advertisements have not really migrated far from the sexist assumptions of the 1950s. Women's magazines, for example, remain filled with food ads showing women how to cut meat, bake pies and sneak snacks -- especially if their husbands leave them unsatisfied.

Which makes us wonder: In an efficient marketplace, advertisers will choose messages that generate the highest response. The women and men who respond to food and sex messaging are thus, well, responding in quantities high enough to keep this stuff coming. So do we still fall into the same old homemaker / sex-seeker roles?

In the millions of years of human evolution, the Western culture shifts of the 1960s to 2000s are a small aberration. Beneath our new, open, fair-minded facades, maybe we still want the same thing. Something hot from the kitchen.

Faceless in the crowd

Finally, a way to see and not be seen.

Masked figures are showing up on the UK glamour circuit, couples with strange hoods that look like something out of a Pink Floyd film. Scientology protesters? Guerilla marketing for Lotus? Or just celebs who want a little privacy?

We don't know what this stunt is, but we admire how the new echo chamber of internet news and blogs takes a single obscurity and launches it to fame. Such good PR, and so wasted. But then, that may be the point.

The warmth of 'Social Objects,' or why you care about Twitter

If social media will soon be like air, why are we still huddled around brands? Think of the irony. While everyone is hyperconnecting via wireless internet, we still use 1950ish big brands to deploy ourselves. MySpace. Facebook. YouTube. Flickr. If something new comes along with slightly better features, we're not sure we want in, cause man, we love the Twitter brand.

Hugh MacLeod suggests that humans may need brand focal points to begin social conversations. MacLeod calls these points "Social Objects," or devices similar to a bottle of wine or campfire that people tend to gravitate around ... objects that somehow begin the social process.

MacLeod writes, "Social Networks are built around Social Objects, not vice versa. The latter act as 'nodes'. The nodes appear before the network does ... granted, the network is more powerful than the node. But the network needs the node, like flowers need sunlight."

Maybe there's hope for Facebook monetization yet.

(Photo: Jeff Casillas)

Well, at least he drives a Prius

This spring a series of fake Prius ads began flooding the web, showing naughty drivers dumping bodies or making out with daughters or picking up prostitutes. We hear art director David Krulik had something to do with it.

But we wonder, are all these "fake" ads really so fake? Toyota is no stranger to edgy; its Scion brand, with help from ATTIK, launched the creepy Little Deviants campaign last year in which X-faced demons lopped the heads off sheep people. Creative director Simon Needham was quoted as saying the spots were "bound to entertain." Silly us. Our kids saw it before bedtime and thought it was people killing each other.

There is a growing undercurrent of rule-breaking in advertising in which ads with sex, nudity, violence or shocking material are released, but somehow absolved from any formal affiliation with the product. J.C. Penney's stripping teens come to mind. Are advertisers really not behind this? Or are people pulling strings behind the scenes to get a second standard of risqué messaging out, certain to get noticed?

And advertisers: If you aren't involved, wake up. This new fake channel seems to work.

Tx David Griner for the catch; the demon-lop-headed campaign was for Scion, of course, and not Prius. We corrected it above.

Did Starbucks stop being cool?

We think something more than recession led to Starbucks announcing it will shutter 600 stores in the U.S. Two years ago Starbucks was the darling of Wall Street, with management-guru books out almost every day, expansion into music and DVDs, a stock pumped to $39.63 per share (up from a split-adjusted $0.53 back in 1992), and brand partnerships with everyone from Apple to Jim Beam.

Today, Starbucks' stock is off more than 60% from the height, like the cresting bell curve of a consumer fad. Some have criticized Starbucks for over-expanding stores, or stretching its products too far into dishware, CDs and breakfast sandwiches, or even rethinking its logo.

We think competitors caught up. Starbucks shook an entire industry by making the consumer experience part of the food buy. But soon McDonald's launched gourmet Newman's coffee and redesigned its stores. Dunkin' Donuts added wood paneling and gas fireplaces. Heck, our local Stop & Shop grocery now has oak floors.

It's a puzzle for competitive design: You can copyright a logo, but how do you copyright a customer experience? The sensory delight of the fragrant, earthy, green point-of-purchase environment became just another commodity. Sort of like a cup of coffee.

Photo: Dan LaMee. Via Bill Green.

Why false hopes for Twitter and Facebook are fine

Speculative bubbles can be a good thing. The fiber-optics laid down in the 1990s telecom gold rush created the high-speed backbone for today's internet. The 1960s space race gave your kitchen a microwave oven.

So it’s swell that the business world remains gaga over social media – because we’ll have to pass through the valley of silly investments with little return before we achieve the future of free worldwide connectivity.

Social media will never be monetized. Here, we explain why.

First, understand the bubble.

Google the phrase “(social media site) valuation” and you’ll see scores of articles talking about Facebook being valued at $15 billion, potential returns for Twitter – and none are based on reality. Investors or big software companies want a piece of social media because they think it will attract advertisers, who in turn hope for exponential returns on their ad media dollars.

But ad media dollars will never drive huge returns from social media sites. Valleywag noted recently that Facebook is consistently one of the worst performing sites for advertiser response, with CTRs well below the 0.14% national average. In April, Bloomberg reported that MySpace's abysmal ad performance was turning News Corp. into a toxic stock. Brian Morrissey at Adweek wrote that social media metrics are still a work in progress. And we've noted that Twitter's millions of users, if you predicted profits generated from advertising results, are worth about 72 cents each.

Social media will never generate acceptable response, because the users are looking elsewhere. They are playing, not reading; socializing, not searching. Widgets don't work because the user modality has changed.

So where will social media go to survive?

In the near term, social networks must partner or be acquired by larger entities who can make money elsewhere from sources other than advertising, such as their broader communications or software portal. Google could pick up Twitter and play it forever as a freebie, hoping to pull 1.7 million users into more Google ad searches. Microsoft is intrigued by snapping up Facebook's chatting audiences, even if they don't pay attention to third parties, to bolster the branding and awareness of other services. We'd hate to see a FacebookVista, but who knows? The Facebook online operating system may someday marry Vista, to make it all work better.

Then, freedom arrives … and no one makes money.

In the long term, Charlene Li will be proved right: social nets become like air. Then the functionality that enables communication will break off from major portals and become standard utilities attached to everything ... and no one will make money off them.

Imagine a 2011 iPhone with video and internet and GPS that allows you to push and pull content anywhere in the world for free. Why do you need to access a socialmediasite.com portal? Play this forward to the time when the cost of providing networking services is so cheap, it's almost zero. Social media becomes a tab on every device; you become the center; no portals are necessary; advertisers can't intercept you, but then, their third-party funding has become irrelevant.

To fund the transition to the future, we need unrealistic hopes.

Which brings us back to speculation. We won't get that future technology for free, so people will fund it along the way with false hopes on social media return. And thus, the hype machine is necessary. Speculation leads to innovation, and innovation leads to future solutions. Tomorrow's future translucent 3-D video glass pod is in a garage somewhere, and the 12-year-olds putting it together do so only because they want a piece of the action.

Jacob Freifeld noted back in 1996 that most speculative bubbles have an underlying truth: a "permanent advance" that causes unreal hopes initially, but remains after the frenzy abates. Social media is such an advance in how people create and connect.

It will come. We'll all be connected with telepathy for free. But it's going to take decades and a lot of bad initial funding to get there. So advertisers and marketers, stop complaining about poor Facebook results. Throw your budget in, and hope for the IPO.

Photo: Neil Piddock.

Humans behind the lights

Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke of the Lightmark Project create stunning images with long-exposure camera settings and hand-held lights. You've seen similar work in the recent Sprint branding campaign, which began with beautiful human-powered flashlight animation and came off the rails when computers took over the illumination.

Why does one design conceit work and the other fall flat? Illusion is stronger when you sense the humans that create it.

In case you missed it, Google just killed the portal

What if all those banner ads you see on web sites were little video screens, offering free TV programming that you really want to see?

Naughty, naughty Google just announced it will shake up the entire communications world this September by pushing free entertainment video instead of banner ads to hundreds of web sites as part of its AdSense network. Google will provide raucous humor clips by Seth MacFarlane, creator of TV's animated "Family Guy." The videos will include embedded ads, but the focus is on the entertainment with the ad being the trailing party.

Play this forward a few years and you may see the end of online portals altogether. Who needs ABC or iTunes or YouTube or Break.com or Hulu.com as an entry point, if personalized entertainment comes and finds you?

Photo: Joe5ho