So Google counts over 23 billion pages on the Internet — who cares? Nothing's really online until it's been "Dugg," "Farked," and "Boing Boinged." And when your new quirky blog post ("Meta-Katamari George Bush MacBook Pro Naked") gets passed around the memepool, it'll be surrounded by John Battelle's ads.
AdAge reports today that Katie Couric's goodbye isn't just massaging her ego; it's also giving a healthy rub and a happy ending to NBC, which has more than doubled its ad rates for today's episode of the Today show. 30 seconds of air time went for $110K, with the network selling off the last of its available space sometime last week.
We realized we'd heard of this product before, the new Philips Bodygroom razor. But we'd never given it much before last night, when we found ourselves standing at a urinal and staring at this ad, which — and apologies for the crappy cameraphone pic — depicts two strategically positioned kiwis, one with its fuzz intact and the other freshly shorn, above the tagline, "Now you can shave wherever you want." We were more than a little bit repulsed. Naturally we were at a bar in Chelsea.
Last week brought the TV networks' upfront dog-and-pony shows for advertisers, and this week's coverage makes clear that the most successful shtick came from ABC Entertainment president Steve McPherson, who after weeks of training did some Dancing With the Stars-quality hoofing on the Lincoln Center stage, accompanied by a professional dancer. What's less clear, however, is what that pro-dancer partner was wearing. Up top is Mediaweek's chaste version of the publicity shot. Below left is Ad Age's seemingly unexpurgated version of what otherwise seems to be the very same image, and below right is Newsweek's take — idtentical but, curiously, with a bit of added shadowing. We got no idea.
Today Valleywag slogs through Techmeme so you don't have to, to cover the chatter about Google's video ads. The official story: Google's adding click-to-play video ads to its AdWords program (on host sites, not google.com). The takes: It's either doomed, perfect, or the first step toward AdWords TV.
Never mind the Burkle/Jackson re-relaunch; at Port Authority — at least as of Saturday afternoon — it's like Radar never went away.
One of those tiny ads on bottom of the Times front page today:
Beginning Sunday, the Times will expand its Automobile section, introducing three new half-pages of editorial content. Come Monday, the expansion will hit online; the dot-com complement will include "additional car reviews, added video features, a national directory of car clubs and an interactive events calendar."
The Beeb reports on Yahoo's new ad system (brilliantly announced when Microsoft, Google, and E3 can overshadow it).
We saw these new Apple ads on TV the other night. They're cute, and they've got that irritating/charming dorky kid who used to be on Ed, which is nice. They also have John Hodgman, which we suppose is nice, too. But we're trying to figure out: So the guy's a TV actor now, too? Huh.
Sixth borough advocate Jessica Pressler has abandoned her dreams of legitimizing Philly and instead turned her attention to the revival of the zine, those lovingly crafted obscure magazines with miniscule circulations and offbeat content. While the zines of old were likely pasted together in basement bedroom (or Krucoff's apartment), nowadays they're high-design productions with significant cover prices. There's also heavy advertising, which defines the difference between these small, independent publications and their bigger counterparts. Swindle mag's Shepard Fairey explains:
Microsoft's new ad program is broken right out of the box, according to one user:
Guge, the Chinese-branded Google service, recently released a pansy-ass watercolor ad. Shanghai blog China Snippets posts a translation (here's the SWF with sound). The ad copy includes wannabe koans like "One piece of information is like one blade of grass. Together they build up a big, green, endless lawn."
