Parisian Oops

You knew it was coming. Spoof of Google's "Parisian Love" that revises the story, throwing in a search for "unplanned pregnancy options." Conceived (sorry) by Upright Citizen's Brigade, an NY/LA based improv troupe whose grads go to SNL and other comedy enterprises. Would that, for our sake, they'd end up in advertising.

mad ave vs. main street

Another reason I'm enthusiastic about BrandBowl, I suppose, is that its robo-pollsters confirm (at least as of this writing) my choice of Google for Superbowl 2010 winner. No half-naked men (or women), no pyrotechnics, no appeal to base instincts. Just the most powerful form of salesmanship there is: a simple story well told to dramatize product benefit. Nice play, Google. But, to demonstrate dispiriting chasm between Mad Ave and Main St, the spot ranks a measly #43 on USA Today's ad meter.



Brandbowl and I part ways on E-trade, however. Call me a sucker, but I love E-trade's talking babies and admire that Grey New York, hard as it must have been to rail against change artists, stuck with a concept that's charmed people for years into handing over their lucre. It's #15 on Brandbowl, but #7 on USA Today. Which I prefer to think means I'm not totally out of touch with mainstream consumers.

sorry. security check may take a few minutes

I'm honored that AdBroad was Friday's pick for Blogger's Blog of Note. You'd think Blogger would notify you of this, but they don't. You notice only that your statcounter is going ballistic. My normal 3-digit daily readership shot up past 5,000 and I was dumbfounded that so many visitors were drawn to the mad men dispute. I thought maybe Mad Men viewers were crazy for 60s content in the off season, until someone congratulated me in the comments.

I'm thrilled, of course, to see graph bars shoot up (a nice contrast to 401.K graphs I've been watching) but the downside of newfound popularity is spam comments. Most are long lists of nonsense in various languages. So, I now have to add an annoyance to the process of commenting. A security check before comments can be published. Which I hope won't discourage you, if you're a human moved to say something. Security check isn't for you. It's for all those bot terrorists. At least you won't have to take off your shoes. 

mother of all media buys

You think media placement for your client is complicated? Don't go whining to Katherine Kinsella. With a budget of less than $8 million, she had to reach the entire literate world.

Her client? Google. On October 28, Google settled a class action lawsuit brought on behalf of authors whose works it scanned for its ambitious Book Project, an ongoing attempt to digitize every book on earth, creating the universe's most comprehensive (and searchable) virtual public library.

According to today's New York Times, Google agreed to pay $125 million to create a system by which customers will pay to read a copyrighted book, with Google and the writer both taking percentages. But before writers can be paid, they need to be found.

How to reach writers in every country of the world?

"We recommended print ads to reach writers. Because writers are readers," explained Kinsella, president of Kinsella Media, an ad agency specializing in notices for class action lawsuits. She advised the company at the forefront of digital space to concentrate its spending in analog media: newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals.

That meant negotiating space sales all over the world, except in countries where buys are prohibited due to US trade embargoes: Cuba, North Korea and Burma⎯oops, Myanmar.

"Some publications wouldn't let us buy space at first," laughed Katherine, when I spoke with her today. "Because they were afraid of pissing off Google. They didn't want to be on the wrong side of a company that big."



"Newspapers in Costa Rica, Brazil and Russia flat out refused our money," recalled Belinda Bulger, an attorney who worked with Kinsella on the project, "until they figured out the buy was legit because they saw the ads running elsewhere, in other countries or in competitive journals."

As challenging as the buy, was translating the ad into 70 languages."We had to figure out how to communicate words and phrases that don't exist in other countries and cultures," Katherine said, adding,"There's nothing we'll be afraid to take on, after this."

Print ads drive target to a website (also in your choice of 70 languages) that describes the settlement in excruciating detail, even down to defining the word "Book": a written or printed work…on sheets of paper bound together. (Hail from a bleak and paperless future.)

But if you're an author (I'm talking to you, Bob, Steffan, George) don’t get your hopes up for payouts to offset depleted 401Ks. Payment for each book is $60 and made only once, no separate payments for hardback and paperback. If you're the author of, say, an essay in an anthology, you've got (woohoo) five bucks from Google coming your way.

Sorry, ad copy isn't part of the settlement. Copyright is protected, not copywrite.

google earth-sized glitch

Like millions of others, I was in the midst of a google search this morning when the site I found couldn't be accessed because "this site might harm your computer." Really? It was a site I'd been to without problem before. But maybe it had been recently hacked. Oh, well. I clicked on the next site the search had turned up. Same thing. Then I noticed: every site in my search list was flagged with the same warning. Was it possible that so many sites were now bad? I typed the URL of a site I knew was clean: my own. Again, got the alert. Google even warned me about accessing google.com. Had my computer become infected with some sort of worm? I thought Apples (ironically) didn't get worms. But something was terribly wrong. Even if I chose to disregard the warning, the site wouldn't load.

A few hours later, Google apologized on its website and chalked up the mistake to human error. But I wonder. In the 40 minutes Google search was down, millions typed Yahoo.com for the very first time. Only days ago, Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz promised shareholders to jump start the company in unconventional ways. Hmm.

is google a feminist?

Thanks, Google, for misdirecting a searcher in Chicago to my site instead of telling him how to say u stupid broad in chinese.