Jaffe Juice

No words for the stupidity of this

The cover story of this week's Ad Age documents (in my opinion) inarguably the dumbest moment in branding history...and a continuation of the worst branding moves ever made by one of the worst companies to date:

• AT&T will dump the Cingular brand name and replace it with...yes, you guessed it, "AT&T wireless"

Cingular is one of the branding success stories of our time (right up there with the Targets of the world) and how a monolithic, staid, lethargic and bureaucratic company like AT&T could ignore Cingular's swooping courting of a younger and more progressive consumer base, is beyond me.

This stinks of ego, close-mindedness and an out of touch mindset, which belongs in the Ark.

I for one will proudly trash my Cingular account in favor of anything other than A + T + & + T, which should be renamed F + U + C + K!

No cows were harmed in the making of mootube...

...they were eaten! (that was a line from an old Nando's commercial)

Peel Interactive sent me a heads up about their bovine promotion, aptly called Mootube.

Sitting somewhere between the boobtube and youtube, is this strangely compelling opportunity to see things from the perspective of a cow (hint: there's a lot of grass and I'm not talking about the good kind)

It's all part of PBS' promotion of their upcoming reality series, Texas Ranch House, which begins May 1st.

I don't know what exactly to make of this. I'm sorta impressed this came from PBS of all places. I guess I'd be more impressed if I saw some footage of a cow taking a dump or the view from the piece of steak on my plate, but hey I'll take the grass for now.

On a related note, Rupert Murdoch put in a bid of $800 million to purchase MooTube!

Firefox 1 Tahoe 0

Ben Rowe posts that Mozilla's Firefox has announced its winners of the Firefox Flicks competition.

He makes a few really strong points about why Firefox trumped Tahoe, including:

• The existence of a Creative Brief
• Firefox is a great product
• ...with little negative downside (e.g. doesn't guzzle bandwidth)
• ...with an immensely passionate consumer base
• Creative control - which was handed carte blanche to the community

We put the board in boardroom

So the results are in....after I received my "come to the boardroom and while you're at it, how can I sell you a Chevy" e-mail from Ed Peper, Chevrolet's General Manager, I get another another mail to announce the winner (note the url string when you click on the first hyperlink...them crafty weasels are tracking our every move!)

Personally thought they were a big yawn, but at least they followed through and completed what they started.

Anyway, Steve on my blog expressed his outrage at the results. He took this seriously enough to bring to my attention that - with all the lengthy and contrived rules set out in this "competition" - the top 5 did not in fact abide by the terms & conditions laid out.

Ben Rowe asked if Chevy will use the winning ad for real. I'd be highly surprised if they did...for starters it would have to be a good ad to even think about using and in reality it's mediocre at best. But for the most part, I just don't give the architects of this mess the credit to see that far ahead of their noses.

Perhaps they'll prove me wrong.

ATS #30 - The New Marketing Podcast with guest Ross Cairns from Erasmus Partners

Food for the brain...it's this week's episode of Across the Sound, with a top-class thinker in the driving seat, Ross Cairns from Erasmus Partners.

Link to the ala carte episode here.

Subscribe via iTunes here.

Shownotes:

A Taste of Portugal

I'm trying to be more dilligent in terms of trolling my bloglines RSS subscriptions on a more regular basis.

This morning, I stumbled upon adland and found a great tie-in between Coke and the company I started my career at, in South Africa - Nando's Chickenland. Nando's and Coke have had a long standing partnership and relationship and seeing it manifested like this brought a smile to my face...good memories.

15 seconds of life

Is there life after the 30-second Tahoe-spot? American Express seems to think so, except that they've shortened the time by half and they've appealed to sense and sensibility, with a less clunky and contrived brief AND Scorsese and M. Night as judges (and in Scorsese's case, probably jury and executioner!)

Clips asks consumers to to create a personal slice of their lives (their card)...and this authentic approach is in a much better camp than the infamous Tahoe attempt. This is CGC, as opposed to CGM.

In addition, the RSS feed of submissions is not only a nice touch, but it also puts the creations in the public domain. Implication? You'll find out if you're hot or not...and this will inevitably put a little more (constructive) pressure on submitters to take this seriously (if Martin and Night weren't incentive enough!)

Via MicroPersuasion

Jaffe Juice is 13th top Marketing Blog

Mack Collier did a hybrid Alexa/Google ranking of top marketing blogs and Jaffe Juice came out 13th. Here's the full list. I originally was looking in the advertising list, but I'm pretty relieved I was put into the right camp :)

We can all get along

Via MediaPlannerBuyer, the unprecedented announcement of a different kind of sharing/simulcast: Opie & Anthony will be shared between XM (where they currently live) and CBS (where they will live in a neutered fashion as replacement for David Lee Roth who himself was a replacement for Howard Stern)

fyi - Opie and Anthony were the infamous "shock jocks" who were fired in 2002 after a sex stunt in St. Pats Cathedral

Will it work? Who knows..Opie + Anthony have history with Howard Stern and have proven their ability to be fired (twice) Their success (at the unenviable task of being a Howard Stern replacement) will probably end up being their demise (again)

You'll have to tune in to find out.

Blog Purge

I had over 3,000 unread posts in my bloglines from only 30 feeds....finally gave up on being able to catch up, so I purged the whole damn thing and will start fresh today.

Thought 1: amazing testiment to CGC

Thought 2: we should do the same with our e-mail in-boxes. If it ain't read within x time, delete the whole damn thing (although Google Desktop might disagree with this reasoning)