You know what’s also contagious? Flower-shaped carbuncles. Those look painful. But she’s taking her condition in stride and probably smells nice, or nicer than staphylococcus pus.

I was in Teaneck, New Jersey today for a real estate conference when I saw an 18-wheeler pass by on the road adjacent the hotel. The entire side of its trailer was illustrated by a giant color photo of a bunch of Marines standing at attention in full dress uniform in what was obviously an official government recruitment ad. But in the vein of how the illustration on a container usually suggests its contents, what I thought of first was that the trailer was packed full of rigid Marines and that the armed forces are really scaling back their troop transport/deployment budget.

By now, you’ve probably heard of this study from the Stanford University School of Medicine in which preschoolers overwhelmingly declared that McDonald’s food tasted better than the same food placed in plain wrappers. I await the follow-up study in which preschoolers declare poster paint “delicious” and reveal that the Gorton’s fisherman hides in their bedroom closet at night.

Of course most kids are going to say McDonald’s food tastes better. They’re also going to claim Coke tastes better than Sam’s Choice Cola and that Honey Nut Cheerios taste better than the store-brand equivalent (“Sugar-Shellacked Oat Tori”), because they believe commercials, because they watch too much TV and because their parents buy them the scrapple they clamor for.

I recall junk food advertised more heavily when I was a kid, but I think I escaped most of its charms because, at the risk of making my family and I seem even more like colorectal Family Values politicians, my parents laid down the law, reserving fast food meals for special, occasional treats, and limiting commercial television consumption.

As hinted here before, as an impressionable youngster, mainly I watched commercial-free shows on PBS such as All Creatures Great and Small, 3-2-1 Contact, The Electric Company, Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, as well as cuddly family-fare sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Murder, She Wrote, which may explain why I didn’t have many friends as a child, seeing as I was unable to chime-in on playground conversations about who shot J.R. or the coolness of the newest Duran Duran video. And although I did get my fair after-school share of G.I. Joe and Transformers, I also got a healthy jolt of classic Warner Bros. cartoons, which opened my eyes to cross dressing rabbits, pigs that sing “Moonlight Bay” and shotgun-toting hunters with speech impediments. (I must say, I’m a more confident New Yorker having been educated early by Looney Tunes about life’s grotesqueries and idiosyncrasies.)

My TV intake was leavened further by reading. Oh, I was a precocious youth, reading as a Kindergartner, volunteering at the local library in grade school, and plowing through perhaps hundreds of books. At home, in addition to Highlights (“Fun with a Purpose!”), my magazine reading included my Dad’s copies of Consumer Reports, the theme of which is that food and other objects in name brand packaging is not necessarily as good or as price-effective as similar items in other packaging.

But enough about me. This story has a happy ending in that, as most parents will tell you, it’s easy to play off preschoolers’ small minds in a positive way, like how you can tell them that their dead hamster is in heaven and that cursing is “wrong” because “I said so.” For you see, the Stanford study found that fruits, vegetables and milk in McDonald’s packaging also tasted great to kids. Under fire for peddling crap to kids, McDonald’s, realizes this as well, and now only heavily promotes Happy Meals that contain fruit and food with fewer calories and less fat. Now all the company needs to do is brand exercise with its golden arches so kids think that’s cool, too, and we’ll have the Childhood Obesity Epidemic licked.

To promote The Simpsons Movie, 7-Eleven has temporarily transformed a dozen of its stores to resemble the Kwik-E-Mart convenience store from the animated series. What’s more, those 12 stores, plus most of the chain’s 6,000+ other North American locations, are carrying products previously available only in Springfield: Slurpees have been redubbed Squishees and customers can also buy Krusty-O’s breakfast cereal, Buzz Cola and donuts with pink frosting and sprinkles.

At the Kwik-E-Mart I visited tonight, on 42nd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, the decor is well done, from the striped Kwik-E-Mart logo covering the store’s original external signage, to the show-quoting signs and giant cutouts of the series’ main characters posted inside. The clerks even wear lavender and green shirts inspired by Apu’s own uniform. On the donut case I noticed a small sign referencing Apu’s rebuff to Homer’s overzealous self-service donut-topping that “A Mounds bar is not a sprinkle. A Twizzler is not a sprinkle. A Jolly Rancher is not a sprinkle, sir.”

The level of Simpsons fandom is such that a reference to the show cannot be obscure; it can only be slightly less-referenced. My favorite among these is the life-size image of Jasper trapped in suspended animation inside a freezer case. (See ““Lisa the Simpson.”)

I realize 7-Eleven chose to develop the most-recognizable and multi-referenced food/beverage items from the show because they can’t afford to be too obscure with stuff that’s taking up valuable shelf space. But I spot at least three missed opportunities.¹

1. Duff beer. “Can’t get enough of that wonderful Duff!” That shit would’ve flown off the shelves and instantly appeared on eBay and at frat parties nationwide. The reason for its non-existence, according to an Associated Press article today, is that 7-Eleven and Fox felt that selling Simpsons-themed alcohol to promote a PG-13 movie may very well have been “a tough call” but “didn’t seem to fit.”
2. Cheers for Krusty-O’s. Jeers for not including a Jagged Metal Krusty-O inside each specially marked box. C’mon, it could’ve been just a plastic jagged metal Krusty-O.
3. My background in the candy business requires me to ask: why no Krusty Klump Bar and Krusty Klump Bar with Almonds? Get the lead out, private-label chocolate manufacturers.

Yet judging by the crowd of nerds taking pictures for their blogs and judging by the Kwik-E-Mart-style gouging on the Simpsons merchandise (I bought a 12-ounce can of Buzz Cola for 96 cents), this could be a profitable publicity stunt for the chain.

¹ Among readily conceivable foodstuffs, that is. Because, yes, as a white male, age 18 to 49, I would like to buy some Nuts and Gum and Skittle Bräu. But let’s be realistic. [back]

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, that day when ad agencies thrill to have taken a break from promoting products and services to do whatever they want for half a minute, providing bloggers and white-collar workers grist for excited chatter upwards of 24 hours later.

A theme of physical violence ran through the commercials this year. Characters were struck in the head by a rock, stepped on, slapped in the face, incinerated by comet and felled by office supplies. They leapt off a cliff en masse, tripped into a closed car door and were yelled at for more fries. Great stuff. As comedians such as the Three Stooges proved, insult, injury and death are funnier when they happen to people other than yourself.

My favorite commercial overall was the one by electronics manufacturer Garmin International for its GPS navigation system. In it, a motorist gets lost and unfurls his map, only to have it expand, engulf his car and transform into Maposaurus, a lumbering origami villain.

GPS to the rescue! Another motorist turns into a Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger-style hero in a silver bodysuit who battles Maposaurus in the style of a bad Japanese monster movie from the ’60s. They lunge at each other and knock down the flimsy scale-model trees and buildings. A death metal band provides the soundtrack and appears briefly at the end of the spot over the tagline, “Grab your Garmin/Take on the World.” (Sample song lyric: “GPS power will save the day/Grab Your Garmin, blows maps awaaay!”)

The game had its moments, too, although it got off to a bad start. When Gloria Estefan appeared on the field, I assumed I’d have ample cause to shake my body, baby, and do the conga, but instead she got stuck introducing the surreal stylings of Cirque du Soleil.

During the game, incessant rain added a wildcard Slip ’n Slide element resulting in exciting turnovers and other blunders. Grossman showed off the youthful looks and approximate skill of an eight-year-old Pee Wee player while Manning exhibited post pass-play emotions ranging from angry to very angry.

The highlight of the evening was the halftime extravaganza, during which Prince proved he’s still a sexy mf and The Shortest Working Man In Showbiz. Fireworks and dancers going off all around him, he strut out a fabulously staged medley, the centerpiece of which was “Purple Rain,” in the rain, naturally. In closeup, he appeared to have not aged one day since he last wore ass-baring chaps. Our party enjoyed the Michael Bay fireball that engulfed the stage, the Tron costumes of the marching band and the lingering shot of Prince’s shadow backlit onto a rippling silk banner, dampened by the rain with a humorously unfortunate blot resembling a giant erect penis.

A news item on Pitchfork today notes that Tom Waits has won another lawsuit brought by him against a consumer goods company for appropriating his voice or music for an ad. That makes a total of four such suits won: two against auto manufacturers (Opel and Audi), one against Levi’s and the first and most infamous against Frito-Lay.

Forget the fact that from day one, Waits has made it plain that he will never license his songs or his voice for advertisements (though his songs have appeared in movies and TV shows). What junior ad execs out there think the man’s voice could shill anything to a Kelly Clarkson-loving public short of an ineffective new brand of cough lozenges?

Bless him, but he sounds like that guy in the rusty white Econoline who tricks kids inside with promises of popsicles. He’s got the mug, too. A jury member in Waits’ suit against Frito-Lay took a look at him in court and assumed it was a criminal case. (“[W]hen he left the court the first time, we thought he was getting away,” the juror recalled.)

It’s sport among the Waits faithful and record reviewers to describe his voice. Feel free to select one word or phrase each from column A, B and C to make your own descriptor.

Or just listen to this 1.3 MB mp3 of his song “Anywhere I Lay My Head” from his 1985 album Rain Dogs. Ah, Tom. Your voice doesn’t make me hunger for Fritos and for that I am indebted to you and your pugnacious lawyers.

I had high hopes for what would have been the first use of scented outdoor advertising in the United States, the campaign that was announced in November as part of the California Milk Processor Board’s “Got Milk?” campaign. If it would have succeeded, the scent of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies would have flooded select San Francisco bus shelters, under the assumption that commuters and the homeless would suddenly have a hankering for the scent of a tall, cool glass of milk. (Better yet, they would buy milk. Also, possibly, some cookies.)

But because of public outcry over “potential allergic reactions to scented products,” the Municipal Transportation Agency ordered the cookie-scented strips removed a day after they were adhered to the shelters.

I learned of this news reading one of those “well, duh” Times trend articles (“Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Now Likely to See an Ad” by Louise Story) about how public advertising is as pervasive as pollen in Spring. We now have it printed on eggs (CBS TV shows), subway turnstiles (Geico), Chinese food cartons (Continental), the trays used in airport security lines (Rolodex), those paper examining-table covers in doctors’ offices (Disney and Tylenol) and barf bags on airplanes (no one will admit to this one).

“Ubiquity is the new exclusivity,” quips one spunky ad agency jerk interviewed for the article.

Makes me wish I’d kept better track of the Public Displays of Advertising I’ve read about and experienced here in New York. The city’s of course home to some of the country’s most powerful ad agencies and one of the most diverse target markets, so the number of marketing stunts here are unsurprising. Even Kurt Russell couldn’t escape.

During the winter of aught-five, for example, HBO promoted Deadwood by plastering the seats and walls of an entire subway train with adhesive decals to make it resemble an Old West saloon. Granted it was the shuttle running between Times Square and Grand Central Station, the shortest train on the shortest route in the city, but it still made a splash.

We’ll take nearly anything; the city nearly agreed to allow advertising on its toll plazas, then figured its citizens had enough distraction driving angrily while checking their voicemail.

Other than the recent public-crapper campaign by Charmin, other local greats I recall since I’ve lived here are skywriting to promote some forgettable TV show, Marriott plunking down a bed on the sidewalk right outside the Marquis on Times Square, Snapple launching hot-air balloons in Bryant Park and Ocean Spray recreating a cranberry bog outside Rockefeller Center.

Why can’t people claim allergy to this crap? I am often amused by it but just as often it makes my head hurt.

That’s right, it’s finest quality menthol, not that low-grade shit. Treat yourself to the best, dammit.

I never find more helpful salespeople in chains such as Sephora, Origins and The Body Shop than I do during the holidays. I like to imagine these outfits ramp up their help for confused gentlemen such as myself, who flood the stores this time of year to buy fancy bath products for ladies as Christmas gifts but end up stymied by the array of liquids, scents and packaging.

I must give a shout-out to the helpful and courteous saleslady tonight at The Body Shop on the Upper West Side who answered my most pressing question: What’s the difference between shower gel and body wash?

Ready? There is no difference. They’re both meant as substitutes for glycerin bar soap in the shower. I didn’t get into it with the saleslady why this name game is necessary, although I assume it has to do with marketing.

To over-generalize using the examples in my photo above, the Bergamot Body Wash seems positioned more as a masculine item. Citrusy and strong, the fragrance is an element of the original eau de cologne. Plus it’s in that manly dark-green bottle with a black cap. The Vanilla Spice Shower Gel, sparkling honey-gold in a transparent container, seems more of a stereotypically feminine scent.

So perhaps “Body Wash” was chosen for its descriptive bluntness, kind of a dumbing-down of the language for guys: Whatdaya do with this stuff? You wash yer body with it, just like Lava, only fancy-smelling. Whereas “Shower Gel,” like a lot of those mysterious cosmetic items ladies store in the bathroom, is more vague, positioned for experienced users only.

In what’s being heralded as the first outdoor ad campaign in the U.S. that’s scent-based, the California Milk Processor Board is extending its “Got Milk?” ads to be posted in five San Francisco bus shelters with aromatic strips that will release the scent of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

Will it work? I like the prediction quoted in today’s San Francisco Chronicle from a 16-year-old high school student: “It’s going to smell like cookies and bums.”

Late to the Bob Dylan game, I recently bought his three-CD set of unreleased material, The Bootleg Series 1961-1991. The included booklet of photos, song descriptions and credits features a scanned brochure of Columbia Records’ marketing suggestions from 1965, the year Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone” and went electric on Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. It’s bracing to remember every popular musician is coveted first by the biz for his “artist product,” but really this list is just funny.

IDEAS . . . IDEAS . . . IDEAS . . .

We have all tried “different” avenues of exposure in promoting our artists and artist product. You have probably done some of these “different” types of promotion on Bob Dylan, but have you tried. . .

• Getting your accounts to position Bob Dylan product in other areas of their stores besides in the folk music section, such as with The Byrds, Sonny & Cher, etc. This will afford the customer a better chance to do some impulse buying.
• Contacting musical instrument outlets and persuading them to use Bob Dylan display pieces in conjunction with their guitar, harmonica and sheet music displays.
• Contacting radio personalities in your area that have “Americana”-type shows and pointing out to them the merits of featuring Bob Dylan in an American Heritage theme.
• Getting in touch with the casual wear buyers in department stores and men’s stores and convincing them to use Bob Dylan display pieces in their clothing displays. His dress may be considered “kooky” by conventional standards, but kooky or not he is a motivating force of the youth of today, and they like to emulate their leaders.
• Contacting the little theater groups and drama groups in your area to convince them that readings of the lyrics of Bob Dylan songs would be presenting modern poetry in its finest form.
• Getting in touch with the local newspaper culture editors and showing them the merits of doing a piece built around Bob Dylan, using a changing times theme.
• Putting your ads in your local newspapers on Bob Dylan is [sic] unusual areas of the paper such as on the sport page, the women’s section or even the financial section...after all, he does mean money...for us at least.
• Putting Bob Dylan displays with displays of men’s boots (he wears them all the time), sunglasses (he wears them all the time) or ANYWHERE that they will attract attention.

Be Different—He Is!

I found this handcrafted advertisement on the sidewalk near my apartment building after work tonight. You can click the scan above to view an extra-large version in a separate pop-up window. Here’s a transcription of the text:

Scarlett Peña          7/18/06

Class 205 will have a
cup cake sail. At the in door
gym. Come to my cup
cake sail.

[drawing of a cupcake?]

At 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Itis so good because itis a
chocoleat cup cake. For ¢50

So if I’m understanding the marketing message here correctly, these cupcakes are superior because they are inexpensive, they feature chocolate icing topped with sprinkles, and they have a miniature rainbow baked inside. Well, I’m sold.

Jimi likes technology and feature-laden gadgets and although I poke fun at his conspicuous consumption, I think it’s to mask a whiff of jealousy. Jimi’s newish waffle iron, for instance, a gleaming masterwork of Bauhaus economy that cost more than my entire necktie wardrobe, is mounted on a gimbal and double-sided, so it can make two giant Belgium waffles at once.

Tonight I was over at his apartment, bemoaning that I could never keep the lenses of my glasses clean and streak-free, especially in sweaty weather like today. What happened next I can only describe as “informercial.” Without taking a step, Jimi reached over and grabbed a small device from a shelf in his kitchen and placed it on the counter. It was an Automatic Eyeglass Cleaner from Sharper Image.

This thing takes the cake. It’s mostly a plastic reservoir of cleaning solution that you change every so often. You open a compartment on the top, clip your glasses by their bridge to a little clamp, snap the lid shut and press the start button. Cleaning solution whooshes around inside. After a spell, the lid opens automatically as an electric-blue light ignites and beams through the water, making it resemble a scene from Cocoon, only instad of a youthful Wilford Brimley rising from the liquid, it’s your glasses, lenses transparent as the day they were ground. Then the machine hums as it gently quivers the glasses dry.

You know, I could further mock this spectacles spectacle, but my glasses were squeaky clean. And what a show! I’ve seen off-Broadway productions with less drama.

Not only do we in New York City get all the movies before most of the rest of the country, we also get customized advertising for nationally sold products.

I’m partial to Volkswagen’s new campaign for the Rabbit, which the company is “reintroducing” this week by relabeling its Golf car, which has been selling poorly. (“Volkswagen customers want a relationship with their cars. Names like The Thing, Beetle, Fox, and Rabbit support this,” explained Volkswagen’s Director of Brand Innovation in a press release.) I like the campaign’s play on two of the most ubiquitous animals in the city, after people.

Aren’t you annoyed at all the charger cords and electrical adapters you need to keep track of and/or lug around for all your electronic devices? Each device—cell phone, laptop, digital camera, mp3 player, PDA—has its own proprietary charging system. Wouldn’t it be easier to have a universal cable/charger?

It would, but it’s not going to be developed any time soon by major electronics manufacturers, for the simple reason that they make a lot of money on those cables and adapters tangled around your life.

The Wall Street Journal’s Water Mossberg asked Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony, about this at a conference last month, and the executive replied:

“I have a sneaking suspicion it’s because the last three years, the most profitable business at Sony was the component division,” which makes such accessories. When the crowd laughed, he said: “I’m serious.”

Not only can margins on these cables and batteries top those of the devices themselves, Mossberg adds, many companies believe the varying designs of the items offers a competitive advantage.

“It seems to me,” he writes, “that the majority of common laptops, cameras and phones could evolve toward using a few standard battery and charger designs that could be made by third-party battery companies and sold at drugstores.”

It’s a great idea, but wishful thinking.

The audience for the performance tonight of Stomp at the Orpheum Theater in the East Village was treated to a commercial, billed as the first before a theatrical event in the U.S.

True to the venue, it was a live pitch, and the audience clapped when told they’d be watching, in essence, a one-act ad. It was for the “Visit London” campaign and consisted of a conversation between a mother and daughter, as well as a married couple, who namedropped limey tourist attractions. This was followed by, The New York Times noted dryly, a disembodied voice chiming, “Whatever you like doing, you’ll love doing it in London.”

Whether any of this was digested is uncertain; the Times reported the audience’s pre-show chatter continued on through the commercial, just like during the 20 minutes of slides, commercials and trailers (which are commercials for movies) before the typical film shown in Manhattan.

So the video/live-action admen now have us hooked on multiple fronts. There’s still TV, of course, and they’re working overtime to make sure we can’t TiVo them out of existence. They’re making new strides online; Google announced Tuesday that it is rolling out click-to-play “video ads,” which in the olden days were called “commercials.” They’ve still got us snared in most airports, and on airplanes with TVs. Not to mention at the movies, and now at the theater.

And where should I read this Stomp story initially, but on a tiny television screen mounted in an elevator in my office’s building, which handily displays a weather forecast and breaking news items, but is also rife with conflicting pitches for online poker and money management firms.

Since the lengthy delay activating my home DSL service, Verizon has been showering me with reminders that I’m getting my first two months of service free. I think I’ve received a half-dozen brief form letters stating this fact. I wasn’t getting this much attention during that two-month span between ordering my DSL service and getting my DSL service. Maybe Verizon could cut its junk mail budget and fold some of that money into its wretched human-based customer service or its apparently too-small blue-collar workforce.

Today I received a Hallmark Business Expressions card in a pale violet envelope.

Inside, a scripty typeface thanks me for choosing Verizon Online DSL and that the company looks forward to serving me, by which I take to mean “sending me more misty-eyed notes.” A small single-sided card inserted into the thank-you card reminds me for the umpteenth time that “Due to the overwhelming demand for our high-speed internet, you experienced a delay in your DSL service installation” and that, once again, they’re sorry and are crediting my account two months.

This repetition is irksome. Maybe they think by blanketing me with thanks, my view of the company will shift and instead of badmouthing their poky service and terrible support at every opportunity, I’ll say with a far-away look in my eye, “Those Verizon guys aren’t so bad. They can admit it when they’ve made a mistake.” No deal, Verizon. I still hate you. There’s no apology for a two month delay in any service these days. What is this, Communist-era Soviet Union, where it takes a year for me to receive my refrigerator after I order it?

I’ve read that some cities, Los Angeles among them, have succeeded in pressuring Paramount to remove billboards for Get Rich or Die Tryin’, the semi-biographical film starring rapper Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. They depict his well-muscled bullet-scarred back with arms outstretched, gun in one hand and microphone in the other. Compounding the self-aggrandizing nature of such imagery, I saw that one of the billboards still existed a block away from my apartment and was topped with more fine messaging for urban youth: a Dewar’s whisky billboard.

Serendipitously, a day later, Fitty had been replaced by a Spanish-language billboard for Chase.

Walking to work today, I noticed that a bodega at the corner of West 37^th Street and Ninth Avenue had been tagged by some not-so-thrilling graffiti: didyouseethelights.com, spray painted in neat lowercase black letters at eye-level.

I immediately smelled a guerilla marketing campaign and when I got to work, I went to the site. It’s a promotion for the new series, Invasion, and it’s really lame. ABC half-assed what could have been an awesome ramp-up to their show.

First, if you’re gonna go though the trouble of tagging a building, at least give that shit some style.

Second, why couldn’t the web site resemble, say, the “low-tech” personal site or blog of some alleged graffiti artist who had been abducted by aliens (or whatever the premise of this show is). They could have posted shaky lo-res video clips or designed it to mimic a conspiracy theorist’s site, chock full of rants and 1995-style animated GIFs and flashing text. But instead, you’re merely directed to what’s like ABC’s “generic new show template” page, complete with embedded Windows Media format commercial and “Premieres Wednesday, September 21^st 10/9c” tag right up top.

A quick Google search shows there’s a separate isawthelights.com site that sort of fits the bill of a conspiracy site, but not really. It still has a prominent banner ad for the show, some obviously Photoshopped “sighting” photos, and no particular flair of the real.

This could’ve been something really cool, particularly if you’re going to go through the trouble of spray-painting buildings in New York City and, according to one blogger’s report, Los Angeles. But the sites don’t live up to the thrill. ABC should take some viral marketing notes from two of last year’s most amazing examples: Burger King’s much-loved Subservient Chicken and the I Love Bees site, which is presently “dead” but last fall was a constantly warping Pattern Recognition-like scavenger hunt that ultimately tied-into Microsoft’s Halo 2 videogame launch.

My cell phone contract must be expiring soon because T-Mobile has been barraging me with an increasingly frantic stream of letters promising more benefits. The one I got today trumpeted 50 More Whenever Minutes at no additional cost!.

The odd thing is that all the letters are signed by the company’s Director of Customer Marketing whose name is nearly the same as mine: his last name is the same, his middle name is Jason (eh?), and the initial of his first-name is “T.” I can’t decide if this really is this guy’s name or if it was generated by T-Mobile’s form-letter generation program to instill me with camaraderie and inspire me to renew my contract.

In search for my dental floss, I was rooting through the bag that I took on my trip to Boston earlier this week, and I came across the crumpled American Airlines survey that I had left there. I didn’t fill it out because I wasn’t given a writing implement to fill it out with and, let’s face it, I didn’t want to fill the damn thing out.

It’s a long survey, with detailed sections on the Check-In Process, Boarding, In-Flight Service and Overall Satisfaction. There’s not one but three questions asking to confirm and rate the presence of smiles upon the glowing faces of American Airlines’ staff. With some pruning, I think they could have made space for some relevant survey questions that passengers would relish answering.