There's been a lot of talk about TV ads over the last few weeks. I think there was some kind of popular sporting event where people like watching the ads. I did watch some of the Super Bowl ads, but nothing really struck me as all that interesting. The Sobe lizard ads have never been even remotely compelling to me...quite the opposite, my insticnt is to run for it. The entire series is just jagged and jarring, with zero flow or composition. The follow-up ads have been worse than that horrifying mashup of 3D that was on for the game.

I like the "tiny cowboys" spot for Jack in the Box, but the "hangintherejack.com" spots are just obnoxious. Trying to go a little too far with it, I think.

One spot that's been running for a while is the "two shampoos" spot for hotels.com. I thought it was the one really disruptive spot out of a series...they've been able to run it quite a lot without it losing it's appeal, so good job there.

This was pretty interesting to see, as we'd worked with Sanyo for 15 years while they were here in San Diego.

Panasonic announced Friday it plans to acquire Sanyo Electric in a deal valued at 800 million yen ($8.9 billion), giving the electronics giant a leg up in the rechargeable-battery business.

I feel that rechargeable batteries are going to be one of the biggest bedrock industries in the world in upcoming decades, and as Sanyo is the worldwide leader in Li-Ions, that makes sense for Panasonic. And any time two leading companies merge it's pretty interesting. Panasonic seems especially interested in the HEV market, which is going to do nothing but grow in the future.
Of course, they'll grow faster if recent changes in consumer behavior (less gas consumption, more public transit, more interest in alternative energy sources) become entrenched. Should be an interesting next few years for Panasonic if this deal goes through.

Slashdot has a fascinating article up titled "Censorship by Glut", discussing the results of a social-media/consumer preference/market efficiency type experiment run recently. The experiment featured analysis of user choices of media (in this case songs) in separated "worlds". In most worlds, users could listen to songs, and see how many of a given song their peers had downloaded, but not what people in other "worlds" had chosen. A control "world" had no access to download results from any world.
Apparently the conclusion that underneath a certain quality threshold (or above it, for the bottom of the scale), the results are basically random.

The authors summed it up: "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible." They also noted that in the "social influence" worlds where users could see each others' downloads, increasing download numbers had a snowball effect that widened the difference between the successful songs and the unsuccessful: "We found that all eight social influence worlds exhibit greater inequality -- meaning popular songs are more popular and unpopular songs are less popular -- than the world in which individuals make decisions independently."

The indication that in the larger "middle" section quality has little to do with success throws cold water on the alleged Internet "marketplace of ideas" which many have hung their hats on for years. The self-referencing belief that success indicates quality turns out, in a world where niche markets can number in the millions, to be not so true, should data like this continue to come to light.

Over here at the Enemy of Good Enough we seem to be finding ourselves working on a new type of project every week.  Soundproofing a room for audio recording?  Check.  Building a light stage for video shoots?  Check.  This week?  I found myself needing some high quality shots of some small drill battery packs (for PowerGenix Battery Corp.) without a decent camera or lighting setup on hand.  Shots will only be as good as the camera, and our usual DSLR was out of the shop so I had to use the dinosaur (Nikon CoolPix E990).

So what is the best solution?  Build a lighting box that can deal with the shortfallings of the camera.  I'd found some instructions for a light box online months ago (unfortunately I couldn't find and reproduce them here) so I recreated it from memory.

Tiger Woods wants time for his second child, and GM is citing the troubled economy (but not the failed bailout attempt) in ending a nine-year-long endorsement relationship. Tiger has basically been the face of the company for quite a while. I'd imagine the poor guy is hurting for cash, seeing how poorly he did playing some kind of game or another, can't recall.

GM certainly isn't looking like much of a captain of industry these days. I wonder if we're going to end up paying for their failures too.

We decided to build our own lighting stage in the office in order to shoot some DVDs for Sport Science Lab.  Check out the setup in the first photo.  Three 1000W Work Lights difused through some semi-opaque sheets positioned about 6 or 7 feet from the subject.  We were able to find the backdrop at a store up here in oceanside called "Photo Backdrops".  Who would have thought they carried backdrops!

How did it work you ask?  We got plenty of light on the front of the subject.  Perhaps a bit too much on his right side.  We ran out of lights (there are a couple of office lights above him) so we had nothing to light the backdrop with--resulting in fairly apparent shadows when he jumps.  All in all though, pretty successful for our first attempt at building our own lighting stage.  We're planning to reshoot the footage we captured on this shoot, next time with some color-gel equipped lights lighting the ground and backdrop to help us minimize moving shadows.  We're all looking forward to round two of the experiment--all in a day's work at the Enemy of Good Enough.

Pepsi names TBWA/Chiat/Day their new brand marketing shop, and the Arnell Group, which did their dopey new logo, their design shop. BBDO loses Pepsi after an almost 50 year long working relationship. Pepsi's been losing share and volume for a while, so they're no doubt looking for a goose from a new marketing agency. Hey! Give us a call Pepsi! We'll think of something cool.

I had the distinct pleasure of designing the new Sport Science Lab Tshirts last week.  Terry was driving to work and happened to see a truck with a "Warning: Explosives" sign on the side of it, and thought it was a terriffic symbol to associate with Sport Science Lab.  I agreed wholeheartedly, and gave him some designs to look at. Most of them looked about like the one to the right. A pretty sweet shirt, in my humble opinion.  In fact, this is the one I cast a vote for (in a variety of colors).

I went ahead and made a grungy version, however, just for kicks.  Whenever I'm comping up something for someone I usually try to make seven or eight version that I think they will like then one more that sticks out like a sore thumb, in this case, it was a grungy version.  Lo and behold, when Terry passed around a sheet of options the grungy one was picked three or four times as much as the next option.  So, we now have a rockin' new Sport Science Lab tshirt.  Click the thumbnail below for a full size version.  It is available now from the Sport Science Lab Store.

From Blogads founder Henry Copeland. It is pretty darn clever. What could I do better...

Over at Conversation Marketing Ian wrote up a post about 38 things he wished he knew when he started marketing.

I'm not exactly the pro marketer in this office, more of a guy that gets things done--but it was an interesting and informative list to flip through.