marketing

Ranch Dressing Is America's Only Condiment

Hamilton Nolan · 04/05/12 08:56AM

Unwrap your lips from your processed Cheez-Delivery Snack'm Tube-Brand Corn Snaxxx and pay attention, America. This is important. Sure, you've been doing your best to consume your annual 137-gallon allotment of high fructose corn syrup, and your 92 pounds of Cheez annually. But do your standard condiments contain a sufficient amount of saturated fat and artificial flavors? Or could you be doing more?

Sellouts These Days Are Nerds

Hamilton Nolan · 04/04/12 08:43AM

Kids these days are sellouts. As you know. As soon as they set foot on a college campus, boom, they all want to become a "brand ambassador" for some energy drink company or casual clothing brand in order to bless the brand with the hot sexxxy "halo effect" that their young, nubile, innocent bodies offer. Sweet innocence of youth; thou shalt be the biggest generation of corporate sellouts ever, forsooth. Even worse: sellouts these days are nerds.

Japan Loves Pizza So Much

Hamilton Nolan · 04/03/12 09:09AM

In Japan, your average Domino's Pizza outlet has 50% higher sales than a U.S. outlet. Why? Because Japanese people are weird. From Ad Age:

Do Not Go Into Advertising

Hamilton Nolan · 03/26/12 10:45AM

Advertising is the industry that people who were not lucky enough to get actual "creative" jobs end up in. These people—creative people whose artistic or literary dreams did not work out, often due to economic forces far beyond their control—find themselves in a position in which they are obliged to use their creative talents for purely commercial ends. Selling soap, so to speak. This causes quite a bit of cognitive dissonance. These people therefore expend quite a bit of time and effort justifying the position they find themselves in, in life. (As do we all!) Having justified their position to themselves, they seek to bolster their justification by attracting others like themselves into their same field. The more creative artists who do advertising for a living, the more of a real, justifiable, creative career it must be. They therefore use their considerable creative talents to sell the field of advertising itself, to their peers.

PR Dummies: How the Big Deals Get Done

Hamilton Nolan · 03/23/12 05:01PM

Public relations encompasses a multitude of skills: audience analysis, persuasive communication, business savvy. There are those who do all of these things poorly. These are the PR Dummies. The dumbest of the dumb, every week.

Nascar Welcomes You, Hispanic People

Hamilton Nolan · 03/20/12 11:11AM

Hey, non-white Americans: Are You Ready for Some Nascar™? You will be exclaiming ¡si! as soon as Nascar gets this big new multimillion-dollar ad campaign underway. The folks at Nascar have big plans to "attract a multicultural fan base (specifically among Hispanics)."

'The Choice of a New Generation' Is Now Malt-O-Meal

Hamilton Nolan · 03/12/12 08:30AM

Heady development from the cutthroat world of slogan trademarking: Pepsi is officially not "The Choice of a New Generation" any more. Pepsi Co. poured countless millions into promoting the slogan, but stopped using it 20 years ago. Now, Ad Age reports that it has been scooped up by Malt-O-Meal! Which is called "MOM Brands" now, apparently. Don't act like yall don't eat that cheap-ass Malt-O-Meal cereal and shit! Shout out to Malt-O-Meal! You cheap bastards.

When Corporate SEO Consultants Attack, Ridiculously

Hamilton Nolan · 03/06/12 11:56AM

When a blogger writes a blog post about something, that blogger will often put a "link" in the blog post that "links" to a related page on the internet. This is just part of blogging. Works pretty well. Until a massive corporation decides to actively get involved. Then, it becomes amusing.

McDonald's Assures Chinese: Our Food Is Not Poison

Hamilton Nolan · 02/29/12 03:17PM

China: the "Far East," where four thousand years of cultural evolution has culminated in a battle to see whether The Mighty P'zone™ or the Big N' Tasty™ will become the national meal of choice. McDonald's has an outside-the-box new advertising strategy to woo the wary Chinese: telling them that McDonald's food is not a monstrous blight upon the concept of dining.

How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet's Favorite Spambot

Adrian Chen · 02/23/12 04:15PM

Horse_ebooks became a bona fide internet celebrity when organizers of ROFLCON, the premier conference on internet pop culture, asked in January: "Anyone know how we might be able to get in touch with @horse_ebooks?" Horse_ebooks has 40,000 Twitter followers and a wildly passionate fanbase, but you're unlikely to see public appearances any time soon. Because Horse_ebooks is a robot.

People Don't Think McDonald's Has Good Food

Hamilton Nolan · 02/20/12 01:15PM

Huh, hmm, strange, inexplicable: although lots of people purchase food at McDonald's, it turns out that they don't think the food at McDonald's is very good. Buh, wha, guh, WTF? Explain, Ad Age:

The Velveeta Cheesy Skilleting of America

Hamilton Nolan · 12/29/11 09:35AM

There comes a time in the life of every freedom-loving person when he is forced to stand on his own two feet and make a very fundamental choice: Velveeta Cheesy Skillets, or Hamburger Helper? That time is now, Americans. Will you rise to the challenge?