Good Sony. Bad Sony.

We're really not digging the Sony Foam City ad. We won't show it here, because it's boring, and will just summarize that there is lots of gray gooey foam floating around streets until finally the camera cuts to Sony products. Yeah.

Instead, let's rewind three years to review the sheer-genius original Sony spot by Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig, in which he bounced 250,000 tiny colored balls down the streets of San Francisco. That Sony spot won universal praise due to the incredible imagery and slow build. It feels like you're watching a child being born.

At 16 seconds, we see more than one ball bouncing. At 1:21 the growing tide strands a dog; at 1:41 a frog leaps for his life, and by 2 minutes the colors merge into a perfect metaphor for modern TV. The music by José González didn't hurt, either.

The foam ad, by comparison, gives the story away in 5 seconds, and then bores us with more foam, floating, floating, for 55 seconds more.

It's the difference between tickling and snoring. Good Sony. Bad Sony.

(Fallon London, the agency behind both spots, did pull off another nice version with stop-motion plasticine bunnies in NYC last year. Can't wait to see what they do with Gummi bears.)

The open market niche: Profiting from environmentalism

Here's a feel-good idea for the New Year: What if you could make money by saving the planet?

Recycling gadgets will get more attention in 2008, as 70 million TV sets go obsolete. By February 2009, the FCC will force all TV broadcasters to convert to digital signals, turning millions of old cathode ray tube sets into pretty black glass boxes. Many of these old TVs have 4 to 8 pounds of lead in the screen. You better believe recycling gadgets will hit the major news wires by next fall.

Consider the 500 million used cell phones in the United States, with a combined total of 312,000 pounds of lead. Dump them all in local landfills, and that lead heads for groundwater ... and we were worried about Chinese toys? Cell phone batteries also contain cadmium, a human carcinogen that causes lung or liver damage.

Wouldn't it be interesting if a company had the foresight to profit in advance of an environmental concern? What if a Sony or Apple or AT&T repositioned themselves as a national resource for gathering old gadgets, beyond their own products? We bet they'd make a boatload of money in new gadget sales.

Until then, we offer four ways to clean out the junk drawer for the New Year.

1. Drop off old cell phones at a cell phone store. Most carriers will recycle them, or even donate the old phones to victims of domestic violence. Verizon, for example, has a HopeLine recycling program that has kept 200 tons of electronic waste and batteries out of landfills.

2. If your old gadget seems to still work, punch it in to secondrotation.com. This web site will give you a quote to actually buy your old technology, and if you accept, it will send a free shipping label for you to drop it in the mail.

3. One of the best things you can do is find out where to take old batteries. About 3 billion batteries are sold in the U.S. each year. Call to Recycle offers locations for battery recycling nationally.

4. For general information on recycling, the web site Earth911 lists local resources that will accept batteries and all forms of electronics.

DVD sales horror is a wake-up call for online video

Sales of movie DVDs are expected to fall for the first time ever this year, pointing to the rise of online video. After all, there are only so many hours in the day. Marketers who are not already testing online video ads need to get aboard. More than half of YouTube users, for example, are in the attractive 35-64 demo -- online video is no longer just for kids.

Sony tells Forbes that it is jumping in feet first, but even they find the formats confusing. Sony's Sean Carey sums up the trouble:

There is no consistency around the ad units today. So when an advertiser buys an ad on YouTube, they get an overlay, when they buy an ad on MySpace, it's an eight-second pre-roll, when they buy an ad on Crackle, it may be a sponsorship that includes some pieces of all of that. And it's difficult for an advertiser to get a handle on what the delivery is in that sort of environment--not only what the delivery is but how to mass the creative to all those different ad opportunities.

Pre-rolls, overlays, pop-up videos in banners ... the best way to sort this out is to take 5% of your ad budget, set up a testing plan, and start using online video to pull consumers to your sites. We've found careful use of behavioral targeted ads with video can jack up click-through rates 5 times higher than national banner averages. The future is coming. Don't be scared.