vivid shining brands

From the NY Times this morning : “TV is not dead,” said Michael J. Boylson, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at the  J.C. Penney Company  in Plano, Tex., which is returning to the Academy Awards for a ninth consecutive year with six commercials during the broadcast. This is one of my favorite nonsense arguments. Radio was dead. Radio is not dead. Print is dead. Turns out print is not dead. Not so long ago, I wrote about how Sir Richard Branson predicted the Death of TV. Heck, folks, even writing on stone tablets is not dead, although it certainly is not a currently-preferred advertising medium...for the living, anyway. However, despite the rise of social media and self-serve advertising on Google and Facebook, it turns out the advertising industry isn't dead, either. Thankfully so, as I have three kids to put through college. As the writer for the Times notes: SOME months back, with the national mood more “Up in the Air” than “Up,” there were ...

From the New York Times today : Odd Web ads, like the dancing women promoting mortgage brokers, are not new. But on social networks like Facebook, where people go to communicate with one another, advertisers seem to be trying especially hard to intrude on the conversation. Rank amateur advertisers , the writer should have noted. Bad advertising, done through "self service" channels, has always fallen flat. In the old days of print, there was clip art advertising that was just as bad, though not as weird, as the templates were actually created by skilled creatives. These days, the opportunity to create ads that are weird and bad have multiplied, thanks to digital tools and advertiser access to all that personal information we've provided platforms like Facebook, so we all suffer the creepy results: “When it works, it’s amazingly impactful, but when it doesn’t work, it’s not only creepy but off-putting,” said Tim Hanlon, a principal at the consulting firm Rivervi...