I did a sales meeting this morning for one of our automotive clients and presented this question to the sales staff. "Are you the CEO of this Dealership"? Everyone answered "NO"...think again I said!.

I believe to be successful you must have a CEO mentality. All successful sales people view themselves as a business within a business. Never forget that the dealership writes and signs your check, but you fill in the numbers. Always take responsibility for everything.

You are the CEO!

Is this the latest trend to get the punters attention - blood guts and gore?

Seeing as these ads are the only things to make us crane our necks and check it twice these days, the hit and run bloodied bus complete with dead body still hanging on, the dead guy in a trunk for Sopranos, and the murder scene for court TV on a wall.

Bugmenot is the place (or toolbar widget) to turn to when you want to read the news at some far away newspaper site the insists you have to login to read anything. At least that is the basic idea, to circumvent those painfully long logins at major newspaper sites where you have to declare your age, income, gender, interests, email, car model, height, weight, number of pets and people living in your household before you can get a login pass. Those long winded forms were getting out of hand, so I see where they are coming from with the idea of bugmenot.

However, this isn't the only way to use bugmenot. You can use it to list community logins. This is not good for a number of reasons. Check out Plastic.com, Fark.com, Everything2, Livejournal, Blogger.com, and even Typekey your "protected" identity on the web. There is even a few Gravatar logins.

Why is this bad, apart from messing with the fragile sense of identity that people have in online communities? Well, I can picture astroturfers and other buzz agent types sharing login community identities via bugmenot, so that their 'campaigns' don't always look to be so obviously coming from a brand new n00b account - which is usually the quickest way to spot their kind. This is, if they have learned to share.

From the Wall Street Journal: Videogame Ads Attempt Next Level

Advertising in videogames, dominated in the past by static ads such as billboards and signposts, is beginning to look more like TV commercials.

For the past few weeks, Massive Inc., a New York company that distributes ads in videogames, has been testing an ad with full motion and sound in a science-fiction game called Anarchy Online. Today, Massive will roll out the full-motion ad capability to advertisers generally.

It won't be long until nowhere will be safe from advertisers.

Anne Holland at Marketingsherpa has been writing about blogs and copyright lately, more specificlly the practice of some exited people to copy an entire article and re-post it elsewhere. That's not cool. See her pieces here Blog Copyright Theft On The Rise and Blog Copyright Theft on the Rise Part II.

The worldwide 'fair use' idea is pretty simple, if you like what someone has written, or hate it even, you can quote from that piece to critique it or review it or simply highlight it. Quoting from a piece doesn't mean copy the entire piece though. But y'all knew that. Anyway, part of MarketingSherpas story focuses on those fake blogs that scrape RSS feeds off other blogs, sorting themselves after topics like "Google adsense", "Britney Spears" and even advertising - we wrote about the phenomenon in May: "Faux blogs live off RSS feeds and AdSense". So what does Google plan to do about it? Nothing much it seems, as this is what they told Marketingsherpa.

Here's what Barry Schnitt in Google's PR department said in response to my query about this problem:

"Copyright violations are against our policies. We ask that the owner of the copyrighted material comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the text of which can be found at the U.S. Copyright Office website: http://lcWeb.loc.gov/copyright/) and other applicable intellectual property laws. In this case, this means that if we receive proper notice of infringement, we will forward that notice to the responsible web site publisher. To file a notice of infringement with us, you must provide a written communication."

My take on this? It's not awfully reassuring. Google seems to want to put the policing ball in the copyright owner's corner despite the fact that few of these stolen content sites would exist if it were not for AdSense revenues.

In short, the only way to get rid of those faux blogs is to report them, following the US DMCA (even though you and your work might be French), one by one it seems. Can anyone be bothered?

Hot on the heels of last years Ubisoft PR creation, the Fragdolls, who game and blog and look great doing it, as long as it's Ubisoft games, comes another femme clan: Les Sueles from Sweden. This counterstrike clan will be touring on a telly near you soon, as the production company Reveille just signed to produce 12 episodes with the ladies.
Ben Silverman CEO at Reveille said to Resumé: "The series Play Us will make these girls rock stars within gaming."
See more about the show at Play Us tv and the girl gamers at Les Sueles own website.

"In French their name means 'The Outsiders'. But in the world of "Counterstrike", a first person shooter PC game, Les Seules have moved to the forefront, thanks to their virtual machine gun and grenade wielding techniques, and, well, their good looks" ABC News.

Ah, I thought meant something like "lonely" which explains why I flunked French. Quelle surprise. (read more)

As with the X/Xtreme/eXtreme x-fever the i-fever has run high for too long now. Please, someone make it stop!

Frome Apple alone there's iMacs,iPods, iChats, iMovies and so on. Outside of the Jobs-cult there's iRiver, iName, iNet, iBank, iBus, iListen and good old ITV which had it's name long before the iHype. Not forgotten is the iRabbit vibrator, not to be confused with the irabbit from i-mockery.

These i-names are becoming as dated as the X-names, soon they'll remind us of an era long gone like the K-names of the sixties, Kwik, Kleen, Krispy & "Kremy", Krunchy etc. Or the seventies era "2000" names on any and all household appliances, or the 50's fascination with "o-rama", as in bowl-o-rama and swing-o-matics. It was an era when the stuff in the tack-o-rama was cool rather than camp. iRestmycase.

Last week, the NYTimes reported that before a deal was inked for Lee Iacocca, the retired Chrysler chairman, to pitch cars in ads for Dodge for their employee pricing for everyone (following on the footsteps of General Motors), the 3 ads had already been shot. A bid odd. The ads also feature Jason Alexander. A deal must have been reached as I saw one of the ads last night.

Anyway, today I saw this banner ad:

I had to shrink the size down a bit to make it fit for AdLand, which makes it look a bit better. So here's a snippet at actual size:

Why, oh why, would you let something like that get on the net? Did they not have any photographs or better quality screengrabs that they could have used? Geez. Talk about making your work look totally unprofessional. This might have been ok back in '99 but come on.

After all the press Carl's Jr. got with the spicy Hilton commercial, the Hardees chain is picking it up. The chain is also hoping a new spot for their Hand-Scooped Ice Cream Shakes & Malts, this time without the help of Ms. Hilton, will milk some attention from their 18-34-year old male target as well.

Aint this sweet, Claymore went to wonka.com to check out how Nestle was doing with the Golden Ticket promotion, and happened upon a little symbol that said "Ad Buzz" on it.

Curious of course he had to click it, and a little window popped up saying:

"Kids: From time to time, you will see this Ad Buzz symbol to let you know that you are now viewing an advertising message that is designed to sell you something."

Wow, full disclosure. That was nice of them.

More than ten years ago a group of bright eyed students in London watched Dave Trott pace up and down in the front of the room ranting ever louder as he got himself all worked up about the world bank, and the poverty in the world. He was animated, he was agitated and most of all he had his name on three ad agency doors so we gave him our complete and undivided attention. It was at the end of the lecture, and he'd been dropping hints all along. "There's nothing stopping you guys from having a book full of creative things printed now - If you were creative enough to do it." soon followed by : "See I'm your target market."

The subject of the world bank was close to his heart, as he was convinced that the situation could be resolved by smart advertising. In broad strokes he briefed us of the scenario; four of the UK banks are in it, they lent money to the third world. The third world paid it all back already, but are now stuck paying back on the interest and making bad economic decisions in order to make the payments. If the four banks just walked away from that interest one day, the poor countries money could be used on medicine, water, and food for their own impoverished populations. But, one bank won't give up their interest unless all four banks do it. How do you make four different banks march in tune? Why advertising of course. Turn their customers against them, and they'll drop their claim. Those paying attention understood that this was to be our live brief until next time Trott came to lecture.

USA Today talks about viral advertising spreading thorough marketing plans. It was a tie-in to their reporting on the Cannes Cyber Lions awards, and apparently is one of the "hot topics" being chatted about during the Cannes Festival this year.

"People have grown increasingly skeptical of packaged, canned, Madison Avenue-speak," says Russ Klein, Burger King's chief marketing officer.

A new advertising campaign for Crest Whitening Expressions "mocks the great political ads of the past few elections." How original. One :30 and three :15s show people supporting the different toothpaste flavors and at the end viewers are directed to Crest's site to vote themselves. After these three air there's a fourth spot:

"Man of the Street" imitates exit poll coverage in which a news reporter interviews people on street about their choice of toothpaste flavor. "I thought voting for president was really important, but this is really something," a man states. Another woman reveals that she's a Lemon Ice supporter, but her husband backs Sweet Berry Punch and "that's why we have separate bathrooms." A Hispanic man proudly states that he's the first person in his family to be able to vote for toothpaste.

Read on for more...

We all know (but don’t necessarily love) Paris Hilton. Goofing up on “The Simple Life”, attempting to survive “The House of Wax”, and being so ‘blond’ it’s frightening. It’s a rarity to find her doing something that has helped this world move forward (of course, that depends on what you think moves this day and age in that direction). Did she finally find her purpose in…of all places…Carl’s Jr.?

Man fired for drinking the 'wrong' beer. Ross Hopkins, former supervisor at the Budweiser distributorship American Eagle claims he was fired for drinking the wrong beer after work. He was fired after the son-in-law of the distributorship owner saw him drinking Coors in a Greeley bar.
The court filing does not directly challenge Hopkins' claim that he was fired, at least in part, for drinking Coors in public.
Not the first time something like this happened, mind you.

Reebok, known lately as RBK, is adding more star power to their "I Am What I Am" campaign, created by New York advertising agency mcgarrybowen. Monday they announced they will be adding actors Christina Ricci and John Leguizamo, Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, and NFL Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb to their campaign.

The "I Am What I Am" is the company's largest advertising spend in nearly a decade. The concept behind the campaign is to encourage young people to embrace their own individuality by celebrating their contemporary heroes including music icons, athletes and entertainers.

Our buddies Researcher and TextURL have both noticed the strange story of the Louis Vuitton markings on Yale schoolyard.

Lawmeme posted: "Yale's Louis Vuitton® Sidewalk" april 26, with images of the drawn on sidewalks. The poster Rebecca Bolin asked students who were doodling on the pavement what it was all about and got the reply: "to raise awareness".

If you haven't read Bob Garfield's "Chaos Scenario" you might want to head over to adage.com and have a read. It does bring up quite a few good points and although some might say his arguement is one-sided, he does take a look at both sides of the mania over the death of TV, the rush to new media and ponders where we might be heading.

One of the things that bothers me the most about this whole arguement, and I'm sure I've brought it up before, is the claim that viewers are now in control. Viewers have always been in control. If they hadn't been, then all those TV shows that the network executives loved but the population hated would have continuted to air, and not be killed after less than 10 shows getting to air.

Anti-Wal-Mart group Wal-Mart Watch took out a full page ad in Friday's New York Times bashing the sales giant for its treatment of workers. Interestingly, while most people who attack Wal-Mart based on this come from the viewpoint
of stopping the unfair wages paid to the workers, this campaign doesn't try to touch upon the benevolence of people but rather their selfishness. The ad claims that due to low wages and bad healthcare, Wal-Mart employees are forced to "resort to Medicaid, food stamps, and public housing" which they call the "Wal-Mart Tax" that adds up to $1.5 billion extra per year. They also claim that on top of this tax payers have to pay more to support the costs of public services such as roadways and electricity lines that Wal-Mart uses. Their truck fleet especially tears up roads but doesn't have tp pay for it. This is a rather interesting tactic and it should produce results. People will always talk about seeing the suffering of others but they are much more likely to actually do something if they feel personally affected.

In the highly competitve razor sector, Gillette is currently the leader. And soon with the possible sale to P&G, they'll have more money and resources behind them. So what are the rest of the shaving industry to do? Come out with new products and use technology and innovation to climb to the top. This month Schick (owned by Energizer) has launched an advertising campaign for a new women's razor, the Schick Quattro for Women.
Schick's press release states:

By simplifying the shaving process with the unique skin conditioning solid, Schick has proven that women respond to a product that truly addresses their lifestyle needs.

But the bigger question is will they respond to the advertising for the product?