Despite being effectively fired by Mitt Romney during the first presidential candidates' debate, Big Bird doesn't need the president going to bat for him. Obama's campaign released a TV commercial (description: "According to Mitt Romney, it's not Wall Street you have to worry about, it's Sesame Street") criticizing Romney for making the Sesame Street star, as the brand ambassador of PBS and the federally-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Enemy #1. The Sesame Workshop wasn't amused, responding:

Sesame Workshop is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns. We have approved no campaign ads, and, as is our general practice, have requested that both campaigns remove Sesame Street characters and trademarks from their campaign materials.

That's right — the president of the United States was schooled by puppets, but his campaign still has not taken down the offending video, despite the request, by this writing. Whether Sesame Workshop's lawyers sends a cease and desist letter (unlikely) remains to be seen.Continue reading...

"It's time to get the dough out of politics." Maybe not in real life but we know that's at least how Stephen Colbert and Ben & Jerry's feels about it — by showing it (or tasting it).

The latest edition of "AmeriCone Dream" ice cream, first released as a tie-in with the Comedy Central wag back in 2007, is timed to the upcoming U.S. elections. This “2012 Collectable Election Year PACkage!” is also complete with election streamers, an Uncle Sam hat, red, white and blue motif and messaging around the company’s social mission to "Get The Dough Out" of politics, as cofounder/activist Ben Cohen has been promoting.

The container pays homage to Colbert’s own Super PAC, labeled on its lid skirt: “SUPERPACK!” and clearly noted (just in case you miss the PAC reference) on the front: “2012 Collectable Election Year PACkage!” The reverse side (see below) includes Colbert's editing notes and signature.Continue reading...

Take that, David Einhorn. [Photo: AP via Buzzfeed]

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is busy pitching Wall Street and Madison Avenue on FB advertising, calling it "incredibly effective" in her first post-IPO interviews. She's not the only Facebook exec defending the efficacy of ad campaigns using the social graph, even as the FTC raises privacy concerns about FB's new partnership with Datalogix for ad metrics, and social ad skeptic GM challenged the site's analytics.

With its stock down 43% since its May IPO, new initiatives to increase revenue including mobile ads and now the Datalogix union are attempts by the social behemoth to wean marketers off clicks, which is the key metric pitched by Google. Instead, Facebook is focusing not on the click-through rate (CTR) but on the number of times a user sees an ad (and whether the campaign has reached its target audience) as more effective metrics to track in marketing.

Indeed, Facebook reports that fewer than 1% of in-store sales tied to brand campaigns come from people who clicked on an ad.Continue reading...

Ben Cohen may be a member of the elite 1% in America, but he’s a hippie at heart and always has been up for helping out the other 99%. Although the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand he co-founded with buddy Jerry Greenfield is now owned by Unilever, the brand still reflects their left-leaning vision by maintaining a commitment to activism, funded by a foundation to support “social justice, environmental protection, (and) sustainable food systems.” Plus, what makes the world happier than free ice cream? Ben & Jerry’s has been hosting a free cone day every year since it started in 1979.

Well, there’s one group of folks who aren’t too happy with Cohen today: Occupy Wall Street.Continue reading...

"Designing for impact” is the theme of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting, the annual philanthropic TED-like session now underway in New York.

Former President Bill Clinton framed the discussion in his opening remarks on Sunday, as noted in TIME: “Today we want to talk about how you can design your actions in advance to make it more likely they will succeed.”

He went on to challenge Walmart to open a store in Libya creating jobs in the world's hot spot for trouble and woes. "If the new president of Libya asked you to open a store in Tripoli, would you consider it?" Clinton asked Walmart CEO Mike Duke, part of the opening panel that included U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Queen Rania of Jordan and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim. Duke's dry-witted response: his "small company from Arkansas" has operations in regions of sub-Saharan Africa, but no presence or plans for Tripoli.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced, "I'm going to sound an alarm to all the leaders. We are living in an era of insecurity, injustice, inequality and intolerance, and what should we do?" as he called on business leaders like Walmart to act "for humanity" and not just for profit.Continue reading...

It’s hard to know right now how the good people in the swing states of Florida, Ohio, Virginia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada will be voting on Nov. 6, but you can get a sense of what the campaign managers for President Obama and Mitt Romney think by watching how they spend their ad dollars.

Romney seems to have given up on Michigan, where he was born and his father served as governor, for the time being since his campaign has “abandoned their (advertising) efforts” in those two states, according to CBS Boston. Wherever the money is spent, though, there will be heaps of it. Total political ad spending this year is expected to add up to $1.1 billion, and only a third of that has been spent so far, according to Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group.

With the Romney camp sharpening its messaging and Team Obama getting tougher on China by filing a complaint via the World Trade Organization, get ready to see a whole lot of political ads, America, such as the latest from the Obama and Romney campaigns, above and below.Continue reading...

Occupy Wall Street protesters gathered in New York's financial district to mark the first anniversary of the movement, their presence contained by metal barriers and riot-clad police forming human walls. The current activities, dubbed a “roving carnival of resistance” include “nonviolent civil disobedience” as well as events planned in at least 15 other cities including Asheville, North Carolina, San Francisco and Hilo, Hawaii. 

Chants of "All day, all week, Occupy Wall Street" and "We got sold out, banks got bailed out," greeted Wall Street workers arriving at their offices, echoes of the original goal of the protest to generate "a swirl of mobile occupations of corporate lobbies and intersections," as stated on the Occupy website for the Sept. 15-17 anniversary events, promoted on Twitter with the hashtags #S15, #S16 and #S17.Continue reading...