The ads were funnier than the show. But can the four 15-second spots Starbucks ran during Saturday Night Live's season premiere drive customers back into stores (and lift ailing stock prices)?

The delightfully nonsensical spots show taste tests conducted with town hall protesters, a jockey, a priest and a rabbi, and people who look like their dogs -- all agreeing that they can't taste the difference between Starbucks drip coffee and Starbucks Via.

Is Starbucks cannibalizing itself by positioning Via against their own product? Yes and no.Continue reading...

Clorox wants to be loved by moms. The company's website promises tips on how “to create a clean and sanitary environment for their little new one,” keep those first-day-of-school clothes looking fresh, and help freshmen college students with laundry.

But according to a mystifying Clorox ad that seems to pop up every time I watch Mad Men, while mom's doing the laundry, her husband is off smooching his secretary.

The Clorox ad features a man’s white, lipstick-stained dress shirt, and reads: “Clorox. Getting ad guys out of hot water for generations.”Continue reading...

Sometimes, after riding your hog along the open road, the spirit of a young James Dean bounding alongside you, you like to go home and bake a very elaborate birthday cake for your young child. At least, that’s what BakingShop seems to think.

What else could have prompted the creation of the Harley-Davidson cake decorating kit?Continue reading...

Seth Godin thinks he has an offer you can't refuse: pay him $400 a month and save your brand's reputation. This week, the author, entrepreneur and self-described agent of change announced Squidoo's launch of Brands in Public, a site with unofficial pages aggregating brand mentions on Twitter, YouTube and blogs. Brands that fork over cash are allowed to "curate" the page, and one expects, replace negative content with positive feedback.

Godin's site has come under scrutiny, notably from online consultant Lisa Barone, who accused Godin of "brandjacking." Barone sees the service as redundant: "nothing more than a 5k a year public Google Alert." These redundancies are the sources from which Brands in Public collects their data: Twitter, Google News, and blogs -- sources consumers may be far more familiar with than they are with Brands in Public.Continue reading...

How much money should a brand spend on self-promotion? For Yahoo, it’s a nice, round number: $100 million.

This nine-figure marketing campaign will focus on ads in a variety of traditional and new media over the next 15 months in the ten countries where the company’s soon-to-be 600 million customers live.

For a new-media brand, Yahoo has been looking rather, well, geriatric lately next to top Internet searcher Google, not to mention whippersnappers Facebook and Twitter. Sure, Yahoo’s been around for almost 15 years, but Apple is more than twice as old and never fails to generate brand buzz. Continue reading...

Use of minor or would-be celebs is a durable advertising trend. Aspiring "fameballs" -- well-known, if at all, simply for wanting to be famous -- are generally poised, presentable, and vaguely familiar, and don't bring the serious costs of using big names. In the era of Facebook, Twitter, and "lifecasting" blogs where wannabes stream their daily activies hoping for fans, there is a steady supply of talent.

But as Sony is now finding, one pitfall to using endorsements from these oversharing attention-seekers is that when you live your life in public for all to view, people can see when you're lying.

In new web ads for Sony, writer Julia Allison -- a notorious victim (or beneficiary) of media gossip blog Gawker's pump-and-bash approach toward intrepid self-promoters -- gushes over the "portabler" Vaio Lifestyle PC that "goes everywhere she goes." In a subsequent ad, she claims a different Sony model does "all the things I do everyday."Continue reading...

New York's ubiquitous drug store chain, Duane Reade, has made it to the Williamsburg Waterfront luxury condo developments. Like any great chain, they marked their new outpost in the fast-gentrifying Brooklyn hipster neighborhood with a commemorative picture of the Brooklyn Bridge. Unlike most, the picture was printed on the bar code of the store brand toilet paper.

Admittedly, it might have been more effective had they been opening up shop in Flushing.Continue reading...