Irresistable

Tonight's Grammy award show featured a slew of rap and R&B artists from Atlanta. Ludacris, Pharell, T.I. were all nominated. My favorite Atlanta artists, Gnarls Barkley, were also present. Dressed up like flight attendents they performed a hilarious verison of Crazy. This was almost as colorful than Outkast's Hey Ya, another Atlanta act from a previous year.

Heineken was sponsoring the award show. Even they had jumped on the Atlanta bandwagon by making a commercial with Lil' John and super producer Jermaine Dupri. I could not find it on the web. However, I did find the Heineken Light ad featuring Snoop Dogg. From New York.

Anna Nicole Smith

This is probably the first picture I ever saw of Anna Nicole Smith. In 1993, her photo appeared on H&M billboard ads in bus stops all over Amsterdam. Not for very long. People were breaking the backlit ad frames and ripped the posters out. I wished I had one.

Yesterday, she died. The news networks went bezerk. Her red carpet scenes kept looping across the tv screens. I picked up the news in our Dallas office. The local tv stations in Dallas sent crews 85 miles south to Mexia, TX, where Anna Nicole grew up to ask the locals about their feelings.

If they had stopped me, I would have asked them to show one of those 1993 H&M ads from Amsterdam.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force is da bomb

A marketing campaign by Cartoon Network caused a lot of commotion this week. During the last two or three weeks, the TV network placed magnetic lights showing cartoon characters from Aqua Teen Hunger Force in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Portland, Austin, San Francisco and Philadelphia. This photo by Todd Vanderlin shows an electronic device hanging beneath an overpass in Boston on Monday.

On Tuesday Bostonians flipped, calling in bomb squads, shutting down the "T", closing roads and basically paralyzing downtown Boston. Soon it became clear that this was nothing but a guerrilla marketing hoax. Boston Mayor, Thomas Minino, was not amused, saying "it is outrageous, in a post 9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme." Mike Chertoff of the Department of Homeland Security congratulated Boston with the alert response, while it really had been the other nine cities that had kept their cool.

We'll probably see more of this. In one sweeping and inexpensive maneuver, Aqua Teen Hunger Force jumped to the top of search engines, blogs and received coverage from just about every major media source. Compared to the estimated $2.6 million it will cost for thirty seconds of publicity during Sunday's Super Bowl, this phony bomb scare certainly got a lot more bang for the buck.