social-creature

Remember the whole hoopla going on when the characters from Mad Men up and started Tweeting? It was Fall of 2008, the  show was in its second season, and the controversy erupted when AMC started DMCAing Twitter into shutting down these “infringing” accounts. After a huge backlash, the profiles were un-suspended and the rest is [...]

(photo: Mick O )

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“They say the music business is in trouble. No! The business of selling CDs is in trouble; this is a religion.”
- Michael Rapino, CEO, Live Nation

I was in the weekly Southern California marketing meeting at House of Blues the morning it was announced that Tower Records was going out of business. [...]

Last night, in a special election to replace the late Senator, Ted Kennedy, my home state of Massachusetts elected its first Republican to the senate since 1978, Scott Brown.
Massachusetts has never elected a Republican senator during my lifetime. I’ve never known anything but Democrats (except for one Governor, once), from my home state my ENTIRE [...]

The 7.0 peak from the Haiti earthquake indicated by a seismic analyst at the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

On Tuesday, January 12, I went into a meeting at 3:00pm PST, and when I came out, about an hour and a half later I quickly discovered that something had happened in Haiti during those 90 [...]

During their New Moon promo tour a couple of months back, the Twilight Trio was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and at the end of the show Kimmel let a few people from the audience ask questions of the cast. A girl came up to the mic with a question for Taylor Lautner. “I really like [...]

Note: This is actually way better if you’re first seeing it during a Dollhouse commercial break on Hulu, without the spoilers of the youtube video title and static screen (below) giving away what you’re about to see.
In the course of just 30 seconds the ad takes you on a ride of intrigue and suspense that [...]

To the extent that any advertising works, the model in place at websites like Hulu and Fancast, that offer commercial-supported streaming video of TV shows and movies, is pretty damn effective. Unlike the 3-minute average TV commercial break, which most people Tivo past or click away for or simply go to the bathroom during, the [...]

I don’t usually repost other people’s advertising commentary, but in this case it’s about an ad that I also happened to see at the same time as the author (left), but was unable to look at it long enough to articulate my own reaction due to the reasons described below. It was written by Jason [...]

Writing about the aftermath of the public outcry against Tropicana’s packaging redesign earlier this year, which ultimately led to the OJ cartons reverting back to the original art, I mentioned Mountain Dew’s “Dewmocracy” campaign — an interactive, story-based online game which resulted in 3 new Dew flavors designed and developed virtually entirely by fans.

Tropicana, I [...]

In college, we film students had a certain sense of disdain and smug superiority towards our TV-major classmates. Miramax, along with the whole independent film movement it was spearheading, had just hit it’s apex while we’d been in high school, and the late 90’s / early 2000’s saw the releases of such epics as The [...]