Yahoo! and T-Mobile are both getting all up in your business. Or “you” business, more specifically. Both have recently launched new campaigns that are all about “you” and they’re both getting a lot of attention, mostly because there’s clearly a lot of money behind them – Yahoo!’s money is in the form of a worldwide multimedia campaign and T-Mobile’s is in the form of Whoopi, Phil Jackson and a guy who buys pants for someone 4 inches taller than himself.

The YLou campaign is being panned for pretty obvious reasons. Such as, who is YLou? Or how could they expect offline advertising to drive online traffic? (I guess Bing sort of pulled it off, right?) But most importantly, what is Yahoo! trying to actually say in these ads? What’s the message? According to the commercial, “you’re about to enter a place where time and space collide.” I believe that’s called reality, and it’s a universal constant. Also, it’s a Rush lyric, according to the first result in my search on Yahoo.com. These ads don’t tell me why I should want to go to Yahoo!, but they do make me want to get out and play some soccer and visit India.



While Yahoo! may be “Y!ou”, T-Mobile’s new phone is “100% you”, which I believe is the maximum amount of “you” one can hope to attain. So the My Touch is more “you” than “Y!ou”.


While I’m not positive about what “100% me” really is in the context of a cell phone, I can only infer that the My Touch is the technological embodiment of my personality, which in Phil Jackson’s case means a delicately balanced stack of pebbles….



Or in Whoopi’s case, a deep-seated resentment that she lost out to Eddie Murphy for the role of a lifetime…




The only thing I really know about the My Touch at this point is that I can customize the wallpaper, which really isn’t all that revolutionary, so I think for now I’ll be sticking with my BlackBerry despite the fact that it only feels about 50% me.

Nike unleashed a new advertising campaign all over the boob tubes and interwebs this weekend which featured a handful of NFL superstars in separate spots, the most notable of which starred Adrian Peterson in an ad which hearkened back to the opening scene of The Last Boy Scout, except instead of a torrential downpour, we were watching a game played in post-apocalyptic nuclear fallout.

The featured ad on ESPN.com this morning was quite unfortunately ill-timed for Nike, considering that Brian Urlacher of the Chicago Bears was lost for the season due to a wrist injury suffered last night. Given that Nike’s ads are presumably for a new brand of protective athletic gear (either that, or some sort of lizard-like skin graft procedure), they would have been wise to act quickly to disassociate their new protective gear from painfully injured players.

I realize that most people forgot that a professional hockey league exists anymore. That includes the majority of people in Philadelphia because the team was so incredibly pathetic this year. So pathetic in fact that the marketing department pretty much admitted it. Just two weekends ago, as I was in a cab driving up I-95 from the airport to my house, I snapped this pic of a billboard on the side of the highway, which I realize is terrible quality. (Ladies and gentlemen, the power of the Treo.)

Just as the NHL playoffs are beginning, and long after the Flyers have been eliminated from even fantasizing about holding the Stanley Cup, the team decides that the best way to get people to buy tickets is to tell everyone that, while we may have the least intimidating team in hockey, we have “The Most Intimidating Fans in Hockey”. A once storied franchise has only one thing to offer prospective spectators: the spectators themselves. I guess that’s one way to go.

I hope I don’t get hit…. in the reeeeaaaarrrrr again.

Those Geiko commercials kill me, especially the Burt Bacharach one. I realize some people don’t care for them, like C, who squirms everytime she hears about the licking of the eyeball. And my mom, who’s 100% convinced that they’re all celebrity impersonators because there’s no way Burt Bacharach looks that bad/creepy. Regardless of your thoughts on those ads, this clip here from the Daily Show is top drawer. Top. Drawer.

[YouTube - President Bush uses Little Richard as translator]

On a semi-related note, Mr. Bacharach has a blog on the Huffington Post. I don’t really know why. I think his first post was “Hello. I’m in Delaware. I’m Burt Bacharach.”

Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?

Here are some better questions…
Can you make commercials that don’t suck? Can you create a marketing campaign that doesn’t convince me to never use your product or services for as long as I live? Can you hear the maniacal screams of the people who’ve been subjected to this smug over-the-hill-hipster driving a metaphorical nail into their brains for what seems like the past decade? Good.

If you share my sentiments, you’ll enjoy this commercial parody…