Kozlen Communications

Ellen DeGeneres apparently took an estimated 15% stake in “Halo Purely for Pets” pet food, to be the new pitchwoman for its high-end dog and cat products.  Watch for pitches soon on her widely watched daytime talk show along with newspaper, marketing circulars, and in-store advertising displays with her face on them.  Celebrities are increasingly signing unorthodox marketing agreements with companies.  Rather than straight endorsement fees, celebrities and athletes are looking for deals that offer a bigger piece of the action.

Microsoft announced that it selected Crispin Porter & Bogusky for creative on its consumer products.  In particular, they’ve selected Crispin to counteract Apple’s effective “Mac and PC” ads.  However, it got me to thinking… if Crispin is like most advertising and design shops, most of their machines are probably Macs.  Most ad people make a habit of using and living their clients’ brands so they can understand it better.  In fact, I have a friend who’s wife is an ad salesperson, and they won’t even buy products from a competing brand or advertiser – so they can show their loyalty to her clients. 

It got me to thinking, will Crispin switch over to PCs instead of Macs?  Do you have to be a user yourself to understand the brand and its customers, or is it better to be an outsider and come at it from an un-biased point of view?  Some would say that in order to sell a product you really need to believe in it… so do you think it’s possible to believe in a product, but at the same time, not be a user of the product because you’re not their target audience?

I just read an article from the Wall Street Journal that discussed the potential for Google to utilize weather balloons with (essentially) cell-phone receivers attached to them so people in more remote locations could access high-speed internet. Seriously… weather balloons? You’d think with all the technological advances we have nowadays that there would be something a little more sophisticated than weather balloons. However, I guess it’s right up there with a ship dropping its anchor and cutting whole countries off of the Internet.

Google has been able to keep its search results relatively free of clutter, keeping all advertising to text ads. However, today expandable video ads began running on on Google search results. Google believes that with the addition of more images and videos to their search results, viewers will naturally expect the ads to reflect the format of their search results. Some believe that because of a slip in Google’s Q4 financials and Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo! Google is likely looking for ways to continue to increase their income.