Seventy five years ago today, a New York City NBC affiliate broadcast the world's first TV spot – 9 seconds for a total charge of $9. From Slate:

"On July 1, 1941, the NBC-owned station WNBT in New York aired the first legal commercial in television history. Advertising was banned on TV until the Federal Communications Commission gave commercial licenses to 10 stations on May 2, 1941, to go into effect July 1. WNBT was the only station to air an ad on that day.

"The commercial played before a Brooklyn Dodgers–Philadelphia Phillies game at Ebbets FIeld. It was a brief spot called the "Bulova Time Check," which showed a watch face with the second hand ticking while a voice-over read the time. Bulova paid $4 for air fees plus $5 for station fees."

Check out the jaw-dropping feats (and feets) in this video from DDB Worldwide / Chicago.

Most amazing of all: it’s all totally for-real. Real people. No CG. No post-production trickery.

The “online film” (I guess we can’t call it a “spot” since it's not on TV) promotes McDonald’s “GOL!” 2014 FIFA World Cup campaign.

The campaign’s centerpiece – what you find when you visit the url shown at the end of the video – is an “augmented reality app that transforms boxes of fries into a soccer field…You can test your trick-shot skills by bouncing a virtual ball off real-world objects…”

The app is cool. But not as cool as the video. (Maybe it’s an age-thing?)

OK. We can laugh. We’re not the advertisers whose ads landed in… the wrong spots. Or their agencies (thank god).

See more LOL mis-placements here…

Facebook has announced that video spots will start to appear on the News Feed within the next few months.

The silent ads will time-out at 15 seconds and will stop playing if the user chooses to scroll past. Tapping the video will launch a full-screen view of the video with sound.

But Facebook is being cautious about who can advertise initially and the quality of their videos. It will use a quality-control company to assess how engaging a spot is before it appears on News Feeds.

What Facebook is calling “Premium Video Ads” will be rolled out gradually while the social media giant observes how users react.

Is the value of brands on the wane? Check out “Twilight of the Brands,” James Surowiecki’s essay in this week’s New Yorker.

Surowiecki’s springboard:  a sad, sad story – hilarious in its way for those who have been following it:

“Twelve months ago, Lululemon Athletica was one of the hottest brands in the world. Sales of its high-priced yoga gear were exploding; the company was expanding into new markets; experts were in awe of its ‘cultlike following.’ … But then customers started complaining about pilling fabrics, bleeding dyes, and, most memorably, yoga pants so thin that they effectively became transparent when you bent over. Lululemon’s founder made things worse by suggesting that some women were too fat to wear the company’s clothes. And that was the end of Lululemon’s charmed existence: the founder stepped down from his management role, and, a few weeks ago, the company said that it had seen sales ‘decelerate meaningfully.’”

The moral Surowiecki draws: “It’s a truism of business-book thinking that a company’s brand is its ‘most important asset,’ more valuable than technology or patents or manufacturing prowess. But brands have never been more fragile. The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos.” [ Emphasis added. I’ll get back to the bit about logos…]

“For established brands, this is a nightmare. You can never coast on past performance…”

Surowiecki is one of the sharpest business and econ commentators out there these days. This time, he comes close to missing the important point – and buries the real lede.

Here’s where Surowiecki’s essay goes wrong, IMHO: A brand isn’t mere cosmetics. Your brand is who you are – not simply who you say you are or who people think you are or remember you as having been, once upon a time.

You can’t separate brand from “the real value of products” – or from how you actually do what you do.

Sure enough, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But lipstick on a pig won’t save your bacon in a competitive arena. Neither will “past performance” without current continuation.  Thus it has ever been.

Consider an analogy. The sharp-dressed, sharp-talking, successful fella who worked his way into a corner office can go a long, long way on style and “past performance.” But if he fails to deliver, it’s probably going to catch up with him sooner or later. (The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.)

So it is with your brand. If you want to maintain brand value – if you want your brand to work for you – you’ve got to keep your “brand promises.” You’ve got to walk the talk. (Memo to Surowiecki: Any company that thinks it can “coast on past performance” won’t have a strong brand for long. And that was true long before 1995 when the Internet was invented.)

What’s different today? Simply this: in our info-age – when it’s easier than ever to get size-ups of any product or service in side-by-side comparison with competitors, not to mention comparing notes with fellow consumers around the world – it’s more important than ever to walk the talk. If you don’t, customers will find out and word will spread – faster then ever.

That doesn’t mean you’ve got to be perfect. In fact, if you’ve built and maintained a strong brand, customers may forgive you when you screw up (if the screw-up isn’t too disastrous for your customers, and screwing up isn’t par for your course). “New Coke” (remember that?) is the example that’s always trotted out to drive the point home.

By the same token, if you’re better than people think – if you have an undeserved bad rep (or even a “meh rep”) that’s hurting you in your marketplaces – you need to do a better job letting people know who you are. You need to do a better job communicating and raising awareness of your brand and what it stands for. (This goes for the hard-working, without-whom-nothing patsy in the corner cubicle whose raise is long overdue as well as some companies I know.)

Surowiecki does hint at some of this: “If you build a better mousetrap, people will soon know about it… Hyundai has gone from being a joke to selling four million cars a year.” (Memo to Surowiecki: Hyundai has not coincidentally built a stronger brand along the way – by building better mousetraps, selling them at better prices, etc…) And “for brands like Lululemon, there’s only one consolation: make something really great and your past sins will be forgotten.”

But the real lesson to be drawn from the Lululemon story is buried in Surowiecki’s essay. You’ve got to dig for it.

“The reason is simple: consumers are supremely well informed and far more likely to investigate the real value of products than to rely on logos.”

My hunch: Surowiecki’s essay misses because it banks on a misconception: the all-too-common, dead-wrong idea that your “brand” is really (or mostly) your logo…

Understandable, I suppose. After all, the concept of a “brand” is rooted in an all-American livestock management metaphor – the symbol burned into poor Bossy’s hide by the cattle rancher. It’s a powerful and thought-provoking metaphor. But, like most metaphors, it can be deeply misleading…

Shouldn't every Season's Greeting go viral?

So... How small does this make you feel, with that weenie family photo card you ordered online...?

Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

 After "30 Days of Change" – a month-long online preview of mostly mediocre candidates -- Yahoo rolled out a new logo at midnight ET on Thursday, introducing a design that wasn't one of the 29 floated throughout the past month. Instead, it's a completely new design—one that CEO Marissa Mayer explains at length in a Tumblr blog post, “Geeking Out on the Logo.”

 “One weekend this summer, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into the trenches with our logo design team…”

Huh? No question, Marissa Mayer's an amazing phenom. B.S. in “symbolic systems” followed by an M.S. in computer science from Stanford. Google employee #20 (and Google’s first woman engineer). Named President and CEO of Yahoo at 37 (on the same day she announced her pregnancy). And one of Fortune’s 50 Most Powerful Women in biz – five years running.

But a roll-up-her-sleeves, down-in-the-trenches logo designer? Who knew?

Here are the 29 also-rans. Which would you have voted for?

I’m sticking with Google.

Well, maybe one comment fits: WTF, TravelOK.com?

Bacon-flavored Scope? The ultimate skinny jeans – painted on?

Here are two of this year’s crop of April Fool’s Day ad pranks – from P&G and American Eagle Outfitters.

For more 4/1 funnies, check out AdWeek’s collection here.

As I type this, there are 315,104,800 people in the U.S – or so says the Census Bureau’s “Pop Clock.” But according to a report released today by the market research firm The NPD Group, there are 425 million devices connected to the Internet in U.S. homes.

That’s right. If NPD’s survey-based estimate is correct, there are now 35% more computers, smart phones, tablets and game consoles in the U.S. than there are human beings.

NPD’s Connected Home report found that while computers are still the primary connected device, numerous others are “diminishing the computer’s relevance to the broadband content marketplace. This trend is being fueled by devices such as gaming consoles and Blu-ray Disc players adding to the number of Internet connected HDTVs, and the connectivity piped directly to the TV itself. Strong consumer retail sales in developing categories such as tablets and smartphones are also impacting the traditional computer’s share of Internet connected devices.” 

The NPD report predicts a shift towards more screen-sharing across devices by the end of 2013. Smaller screens such as the smartphone have the greatest reach now with an estimated 133 million users, with tablets contributing another 31.8 million screens. But the development of the shared screen experience, allowing users to project from smart phones or tablets onto their TVs, is producing a convergence of devices (or “ecosystems” as NPD terms them) and will “allow for over-the-top content to become even more prominent on the TV,” NPD says.

The NPD report was based on a survey of 4,000 U.S. consumers. E-readers were excluded from the survey “due to the limited content array they offer.”

Back in the bad old days, there wasn't much advertising in Soviet Russia. With few products to market and no competition for marketshare, there wasn't much reason to advertise. (Most Soviet advertising was political propaganda, confined to billboards and wall posters -- usually featuring models wearing overalls, gazing bravely, heroically across sunrise landscapes into Mother Russia's future. With clever, catchy headlines like "Communism Equals Soviet Power Plus Electrification of the Entire Country!")

Those bad old days are gone, babushka, gone. In advertising, as in many other areas, today's Russkies have adopted Western ways. They even have political ads. Really weird political ads.

Take this recent TV spot for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his United Russian Party, for example:

Message to Tulsa's own Fred Davis – now the go-to guy for top-tier GOP advertising: Hard to imagine Mitt Romney in a spot like this. (Newt would've been better casting.) But maybe worth a shot? Sex sells!

Translation:

“We’ll find out, little beauty, who fate has in store for you.”

“You know, I hope it’s for love.” Blink-blink-blink. “It’s my… first time.”

“The cards will tell the truth… I see it will be for love… without deception…”

A Putin card is revealed.

“Wow. It’s him!”

“You’ll be happy with him. He’ll protect you like a stone wall.”

 Putin. First time — only for [heart/checkmark]

How did we live – or work – before e-mail?

It’s no surprise that e-mail has become so indispensable – and, hence, so overwhelming.

•  In 2010 the Radicati Group estimated that 294 billion emails get sent every day. (Surely, the number has gone up over the past two years…)

•  All too many of us get more than our fair share. A Harris poll, also in 2010, found that 50 e-mails a day is about all most of us can manage to read, digest and act upon. Yet all too many of us find ourselves on the receiving-end of 100 or more e-mail messages in a single working day. And for people who have work to do – writing reports, preparing presentations, or (who knows?) thinking out smart marketing strategies or coming up with clever headlines – being interrupted 50 or 100 times a day makes it hard to stay focused and on-task.

All of which makes e-mail etiquette more and more important.

Here, as elsewhere, etiquette boils down to consideration – considerateness –  and common sense.

“I’m too busy to show common courtesy – or make my meaning clear” is not a subtext message your reader will welcome – and bad e-mail habits are counter-productive. They waste time and increase the chance of miscommunication and foul-ups.

Here are a few oft-offered rules that would make life and work a whole lot easier for all of us if more people followed them.

1.  Be concise. This is one I would be wise to remind myself of daily. Long e-mails are a pain – especially when a dozen or so other e-mails are waiting to be read. Keep it short – and to-the-point.

Yes: e-mail is a great way to document an exchange of information. The recipient can read or re-read at leisure – or print the e-mail and use it as a checklist if you’re transmitting a detailed list of items that all need action or attention. Barring some catastrophe, the e-mail will stay where it’s put in the computer for future reference – without taking up much space or wasting trees.

But keep your e-mails from being longer than they need to be to do the job. And never forget that any long e-mail will be an inconvenience to your recipient – and, often as not, won’t be read (or read carefully). So send a long e-mail only when its usefulness outweighs the inconvenience and the likelihood that it won’t be read attentively. If a long e-mail seems to be a good idea, tell your reader, upfront, that it’s a long e-mail: please read this at a convenient time.

2. In the Subject: line, clearly state the content or topic. Two days, two months or two years later, it’ll be a whole lot easier for your recipient to find the e-mail. “Hi” or “Hello” won’t be much help.

But it’s seldom a good idea to pack your entire message in the Subject: line. Even if you end it with “EOM” (End Of Message – which most folks won’t understand in any event).

And if you get an e-mail Subject-lined about X, don’t send a Reply about Y, a different topic. Send a separate e-mail with a Subject: line that matches your message.

3.  Be clear. Tell your reader clearly what your purpose is in writing – and what you want as a response. Write clear, complete sentences. And make sure you include all relevant information needed to understand your request or point of view. Too busy to be clear? Wait until you have time for it. Otherwise you’re wasting your time –and your reader's.

Tip: Read your e-mail out loud before hitting “Send”. You’ll weed out a lot of unclarity that way.

4. Don’t send giant attachments. Big attachments take too much time to download, even with a fast Internet connection. Plus, if you send a big attachment, you risk blocking other e-mail addressed to your recipient – because your oversized attachment may fill the recipient’s mailbox “quota.” Anything over a megabyte or two: .zip it. Anything over, say, 5 mb: Send it via an online delivery service – Yousendit.com or the like.

If you must send a big attachment in an e-mail, ask your recipient when it would be a good time to send it – and send it then.

5.  Use “Reply All:” only to keep people in the loop who need to be. Don’t keep or include anybody on the “Reply” list that doesn’t need to spend valuable time reading what you have to say.

6. If you can’t read an entire e-mail on your Smart Phone / mobile – or respond to it clearly – don’t respond until you’re in front of a computer and have had the time to read the whole thing.

And remember, e-mailers: all too often your e-mail WILL be read on a mobile. So keep it short. Etc.

Here are a few web pages where you’ll find lots of other tips on e-mail:

http://www.emailreplies.com/

http://email.about.com/od/emailnetiquette/tp/core_netiquette.htm

And if you’re looking for a long list: http://www.101emailetiquettetips.com/