Men Vs. Women

Here's a snappy poster campaign that appeared only in men's bar restrooms. Very well done. Any ad that compels you to spend extra time at a urinal trying to figure it out and then snicker is a positive brand contact.

Black Light Tattoos

I'm not a fan of tattoos, but there's a new breed of black light tattoos that are.....well.....what's the word? Interesting? A handful of cutting-edge tattoo artists invented the technique and it's quickly growing virally.

With this, you'll look really cool at the club or riding the Snow White ride at Disneyland.

This concept might make interesting street campaigns where billboards and posters contain "secret" messages painted in black light ink.

Nightmare Jell-O Clown

Another bad idea from a marketing department in the 1950's. One look at this Jell-O sampling clown will haunt your dreams the rest of your days.

Just me, but somehow hulking, toothless, hunchbacked clowns in Devo hats are probably the wrong way to build the Jell-O brand among kids. Then again, as a child I had frequent nightmares about Grimace the purple McDonalds blob, but I still occasionally eat at McDonalds so perhaps there's some psychological counter-brand strategy at work here.

Now is the Time to Win Market Share

Opportunities abound, even during a down market.

Back in 2000 I was working at a web start-up when the market gave us a huge gift...the dot-com crash. Thanks to that crash, we recognized that web advertising CPMs were quickly descending from outrageous highs and it was now affordable to acquire customers with web advertising. With fingers crossed we poured everything we had into new customer acquisition campaigns, and after 12 months we had acquired enough new customers to become profitable. That couldn't have happened so quickly without the dot-com crash and resulting lower ad rates.

Here is a beautiful presentation from The Economist about the opportunity recession gives you to increase market share by investing more in marketing now instead of cutting it. Sure, some of it is self-serving since they obviously want to keep selling ad space, but they present many insightful points and it's worth your time if you're a marketer.

Ads on Edge

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: branding recession)

Been a Tough Year?

Leading companies updated their logos to reflect their experience in 2008.