ErinIs.com

I am not one of the advertising folks who lusts after Madmen. After trying to watch the show, I just got bored. Yes advertising was funny back in the day, alcohol and sexism were rampant. They also wore cool clothes.

However, I am vein enough to enjoy the MadMenYourself website by AMC. This is how the ad business should be done – with a martini in hand!

I don’t understand why everyone is so against behavioral targeting. If a cookie can tell advertisiers that I have no interest in Viagra ads over every page on Time.com I would give every ad group permission to track me.

F’ing brilliant. ToysDirect.Com goes ambient in the UK by Robson Brown.

Via Guerilla Communication and Ads of the World.

A moment of silence please – Clippy has been deleted. All you microsoft fans know who I’m talking about. According to the promo video for Office 2010, he has been killed off by some sort of Microsoft nemisis. Cool promotional video and yet still soooo Microsoft.

More details on Techchrunch.

I’ve resisted the urge to write about NutriSoda but the door-hanger I received this morning pushed me over the edge. I first noticed the advertising a month or two ago, on one lonely billboard on my way to the gym.

Seems basic and harmless enough, but there is no f’ing flying pig! I get that its just a saying, but the saying is that when Pigs Fly, X will happen. I don’t see a flying pig. You weren’t creative enough to have one perched on your billboard or tethered to the fly in the air. So if I don’t see the pig flying, then your soda is not really nutritious.

I could forgive them for the bad copy in the one lonely billboard. But the copy on the door-hanger makes me cringe. Check out the front and back here.

Front copy reads

Forgot your keys again, did you?

Back copy reads

No more losing your keys or forgetting to wear pants to the big meeting. Nutrisoda Focus has 11 vitamins and nutrients like L-Tyrosine to help you concentrate on the task at hand. Boost your brain with black cherry and apple goodness.

Ummm…forgetting your keys is one thing but who the hell forgets to wear pants to a meeting? Nutrisoda is for people so incompetent they don’t know how to get dressed? But wait its supposed to help me on the task at hand? So I’ll have to drink it while getting dressed so I can have the mental capacity to do it properly?

Oh and this appeared on my door sometime between 10pm and 6am….creepy.

Then there is the website, GetHubbly.com, where they compare themselves to the Keytar, an El Camino and a Mullet because apparently their target demographic is middle aged trailer trash?

Bus shelter ads have also started appearing, but I refuse to look at them.

Infomercials are amazing spectacles of creative genius. Not only in the creativity of the products but in the profound awesomeoness of the actual ads.

How did I not know about the Hawaii Chair?

I’m totally asking for one at work.

If you love infomercials as much as I do check out the YouTube Channel for the Infomercial Reviewer.

SEO is tricky. I deliver elements of SEO for a variety of clients, without any formal training or instruction I always feel like I’m missing something. There are so many black hat tricks, “experts” who guarantee page rank and frequent changes by search engines its hard to keep track of what works and what is a waste of time. Which is why I really appreciate it when someone comes along and breaks it down as succiently as @CorreyCreed. It really is as simple as it sounds.

This presentation by Corey Creed is a perfect breakdown of link building.

SEO is complex and it takes well though out strategy, metrics and a lot of time, but it is not as mysterious as some make it out to be.

Klondike has recently stepped up their advertising. They’ve sponsored Diggnation for the last few weeks and as an ice cream hater I actually find myself craving a Klondike when Kevin and Alex devour one.

But when I stumbled on the Klondike video game they totally lost me. The game blows. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing, and it is ridiculously stereotypical. It features a nagging wife and a guy who just wants to chill in his man cave; she gets to put the kids to bed and he gets to play his electric guitar and watch TV. On top of all that, there is just way to much text to read. You click your mouse once and you get something like this which I refuse to read.

I tried to give them a second chance by the rest of the site is equally lame.

You can visit it here. Dude, you’re trying to hard.

Go straight to the man cave here.

Duuuuddddeeee.

United Airlines broke Dave Carrol’s guitar. He spent over nine months trying to get the airline to take responsibility and pay for the damages; they refused. So he took to the interwebs and created this incredibly catchy and entertaining video “United Breaks Guitars” with his country music band Son of Maxwell.

The video currently has 12,559 comments, 5-stars by 19,750 ratings and 2.3+ million views.

When will companies learn that poor customer service + internet = horrible reputation destruction? It took the man more than a year to get completely rejected by United claims, write the blog post and create the video. Which means United had a year to make things right, they had a year to pay $1200 to fix the guitar that the airline workers broke, they had a year to make Dave Carrol a fan of United.

How hard is it to train your employees to be nice to your customers?

Why is it so difficult for companies to do right right thing?

According to United’s Twitter the airline contacted Dave, donated $3,000 to Thelonius Monk Institute of Jazz 4 Music Education 4 Kids and is working with Dave for some positive songs. Too late? What do you think?

I don’t know what he is singing about and I don’t care. The video is brilliant and the song makes me smile.