It’s April Fool’s Day. In the first few hours of the day alone:

• the Motley Fool has announced they are done with dishing out financial advice,
• Techcruch is suing their crush Facebook,
• YouTube is hijacking some content and redirecting you to a Rick Astley video (Rickrolled, it’s being called), and the one I enjoyed uncovering the most
• Google Docs has a new item under the File menu, after New Document, it now has New Airplane and opens a page with an outline that when printed and followed will make a paper airplane. Ha!

In the end does taking the time to pull a prank on your website move the needle? Well, perhaps. They certainly can start a one-day movement that will drive the curious traffic to their sites and get their names spreading across the internet in a “did they really do that?!?” viral style. But more lasting, it reinforces the idea that these companies are fun places to work with a good sense of humor, and I am sure their HR departments are happy to see that message being sent to the masses.

The Super Bowl advertisers pay for the opportunity to speak to an exceptionally massive and captive audience. Let’s take a look at how excelled and who completely missed the mark.

Best in Show:
The Coke ad with the parade balloons
This was just a feel-good commercial from being at the parade to seeing the essence of toddlers wanting the Coke to good old Charlie Brown finally winning something. Just great.

Best Montage:
Hank the Clydesdale
It was a Rocky montage, that’s the hands-down winner every year, no matter what the commercial is.

Best Single Line: (tie)
“Knock it off” when everyone was doing the Night at the Roxbury head bob and “I under-estimated their creepiness” by the baby talking about the clown he hired. In both cases the commercial were edging close to being unremarkable, but the line at the end ascended them into deserving mention at the water cooler this morning.

Best Cross-Media promotion:
GoDaddy “exposing” Danica Patrick
It was actually cheap and gimmicky (and misleading) but it was the only company that really transfer the massive Super Bowl audience to their website, so they get the nod.

Best Actually Selling of their Product:
DELL Red
They played on some pretty base desires, acceptance and attractiveness, by essentially saying this DELL will make you popular and hot girls will want to make out with you.

Worst Single Concept:
The “I Quit” heart
When that heart leapt of out of that woman’s body and held up a sign that says “I Quit”, we thought it was announcing the woman had died.

Worst Direction:
The down-on-his-luck drug dealer.
The director missed the mark and gave the guy some pathos, I had to remind myself not to feel sorry for him, he’s deals drugs to kids.

Worst Interference:
LifeWater with Naomi Campbell doing the Thriller dance.
This reeks of meddling by upper brass not in marketing. The scenario that played through my head was that the executives decided they have too much money invested not to micro-manage the creative process. So, it starts with the insistence that they use the commercial to brand their “I’m-not-theGIECO-gecko” mascot. Then someone with “C” at the beginning of their three letter title decides a Super Bowl ad needs a celebrity, never mind what for, and gets Naomi Campbell hired on. Then a different “C-blank-O” watched a viral YouTube of a Thriller dance breaking out at a wedding and decided that was both cool and funny, and aren’t those the qualities they are looking for in a Super Bowl ad? End result – too many unrelated ideas, all just slapped together.

Worst of the Worst
SalesGenie with the animated Panda
This ad was horrifically offensive. It was a parade of up every negative stereotype of Chinese people. I have to imagine someone is going to get fired for these.

Anyone who designs emails knows that the current landscape of compatibility and rendering from the many different email clients makes the Netscape/IE browser wars of the late 90s look like a sandbox skirmish. Many of us have come to terms with having to continue to use antiquated <font> and <table> based HTML to get a consistent rendering in email, and with the regression of Outlook (now using MS Word for rendering instead of Internet Explorer), that consistency is becoming less and less reliable.

Thankfully, someone has stood up and said enough. An advocacy group has just launched a site to follow in the footsteps of the Web Standards Project, to try to educate designers about best practices and to reign in the multitude of email clients (Outlook, Eudora, Hotmail, Gmail, YahooMail, AOLMail, etc.) to agree to support these common standards and practices.

Best of luck Email Standards Project, you have my support.

Editors can be so easily overlooked when talking about creative types. It is often forgotten that amidst the scanning for spelling or punctuation errors, they have to creatively synopize and sell the article in only a handful of words.

I really enjoyed this article headline from The Motley Fool (circled below), it made me click through to an article I would otherwise never have read, which in my book means it triumphantly succeeded.

I have a cell phone, iPod, portable DVD player, and PDA that are all quivering because they are about to become paperweights as soon as I finish serving the second year of my current Sprint contract. If the last day of the contract is October 1st, then come October 2nd I will be in line at the Cingular store for my new iPhone. I’m drinking the kool-aid on this one. I can see how it will suddenly change everything. Not convinced, try watching this video.

I can’t think of any Olympic logo that is really good, excepting the five rings themselves. What is this one? Is it a map? Is it numbers? Is it indecently displaying a bloke on the left and a woman on the right? This abstract mess is the new logo for the Olympics. Seth Godin pulled the quote in defense of it, and it sure doesn’t sell me. I keep wondering how this made it to the public. Isn’t this exactly why there is so much red tape in creative design?

Check out the new billboards going up in Orlando International Airport (MCO) in preparation for Star Wars Weekends and MGM Studios. I want to believe I appreciate this for being eye-catching creative advertising, but who am I kidding, I am simply marking out because I’m, at heart, a huge Star Wars fan.

At the Avalonstar Bowling Tournament at SXSW, the new web development company nClud surprised everyone by picking up the entrance fee. This was a terrific promotional opportunity as they were able to put a smile on the face of each of (on average) the six people on the 43 teams in the tournament. This was exteremely effective, albeit costly (approximately $2500).

Now for a promotion that cost nothing: the wifi in the convention center doesn’t reach the 3rd floor conference rooms (8, 9 and 10). You’d be otherwise out of luck for getting online, except look who saw this deficiency as an opportunity:

I hooked on through their peer-to-peer and make the point to go see their site when I did. A really remarkable and innovative way to get the word out from emurse.com.

March 12, 2007

On a very full Metro ride into work this morning, the driver chided us riders in the typical fashion as he drove to the next stop.

Attention customers, when you hear the chimes the doors are closing, please do not block the doors, if you block the doors this train with be unloaded.

Every time I hear this threat, I recognize its futility. We, already on the train, are not blocking the doors, and have no motivation to do so. We, like he, wanted to see those doors close and move on with our trip.

The right audience is the people on the platform waiting to board, they are the ones who would be blocking the doors; however, addressing for them this is the wrong incentive. They selfishly are not concerned if the train de-boards. If they do not push their way onto the full train, then they are forced to wait for the next train. If the push on and cause the driver to unload, they, again, are forced to wait for the next train. But if they are able to squeeze on, and the doors still close, they get to ride this train, and get where they are going sooner.

In over a year of Metro riding, I have heard this threatening tactic again and again. Only once did I hear a driver give an incentive that actually made sense. Once, while at the station, a driver announced to those on the platform.

Attention passengers boarding this train, this train is full. There is another train directly behind this one. The sooner you let these doors close, the sooner that train can arrive to pick you up.

Surely enough, the people did not try to cram on, the doors closed and the train moved on without incident. Right audience, right incentive.

There were many years there where I thought that Sixers GM Billy King was the best manager of the four Philly sports. Andy Ried was continually missing the boat with first round draft picks (how’s Freddie Mitchell doing for ya); Bobby Clarke was still wearing the black eye of his vendetta with Eric Lindros and family; and Ed Wade was reaching new levels of ineptitude with his management of the “small-market” Phillies. Yes, at least one mover and shaker was making things happen, thank goodness for Billy King.

But time distorts, and forces us to look under some rocks that we hadn’t overturned before. Billy King was signing big name players because he was signing big dollar checks. He continuously overspent on mediocre talent which subsequently killed their trade potential as well as the team’s agility. Unable to move the dead weight, the team was forced to accept substandard expectations, and all the while Allen Iverson was not getting any younger or healthier.

I am going to miss having Iverson in Philly. He has been the icon of the Sixers for my entire adult life. I do not begrudge him moving on, he’s seeing the end of his career on the horizon and would like to see another shot at glory before he leaves the game. The Sixers are not only nowhere near giving him that ring, they are not even close to formulating a team that has playoff potential in the gawd-awful Eastern division.