The effect of pop culture & advertising on our everyday lives.

Well it’s official – you can now find yourself in a cushy new job for tweeting dick jokes. Not just a cushy job, but a gig as a copywriter at Saatchi & Saatchi LA, making $70,000 a year.

from adFreak -

Saatchi & Saatchi L.A. exec Mike McKay’s idea of hiring a copywriter based on a single funny tweet seemed like bad idea jeans from the get-go. Still, even with low expectations, he might have set the industry back by choosing a dick joke. The winning tweet, which earned Jonathan Pelleg a $70,000-a-year writing job: “You have to be concise on Twitter. Like a circumcision, everything extra gets cut off whether you like it or not.”

I guess it’s time I put down my sketch book and throw away my mouse, and start brushing up on my dick jokes and copy-writing skills.

Read More on AdFreak

(via – Advertising Is Good For You )

So you think you’ve got a cool marketing idea? You think you can change peoples perception of a product, and breathe new life into a product that has been around for decades? – well that’s nice but you’ve got to try a little harder now, after W+K comes through again for Old Spice – this time having the Old Spice man respond in real time to questions from Youtube and Twitter users.

For the past few days the talk of this campaign has been flooding Twitter, facebook, youtube, and blogs all around the internet. After already getting the Old Spice guy into People Magazines’ beautiful people list, they are now getting more brand awareness and actually having the brand interact with the consumers, as well as people in general.

Extending their reach and appealing to everyone with funny, witty videos where each one is better than the last. This whole idea is something that we have never seen before, and each day more people are talking about it. Already before the campaign has finished, it can go down as one of the freshest ideas to hit the world of advertising. Not only is it fresh and innovative, it is using social media in a way we haven’t seen before.

Bravo Wieden Kennedy, and bravo to Old Spice for trusting their agency to push the limits, and try new ideas and tactics.

here are a few select videos – you can view more here…

What do you think of this campaign?

This is an interesting campaign from New Message, out of the Netherlands. Interesting way of using Twitter for a campaign, and an even more interesting twist at the end. Really cool idea – and a great way to connect to your audience and to make it real.

Twitter is quickly becoming a major source of news, as we have seen this year stories have started breaking on twitter, before the news stations can even put something together people are talking about it on twitter. But what happens when twitter lies? People lose it and get carried away with rumors. This shows that Twitter cannot be relied upon as a major news source but rather a starting point of breaking news. I saw this little bit in the most recent issue of Wired Magazine and it made me laugh because I saw these tweets, and some of them I actually believed. Here is my top 5 list of the lies twitter told in 2009.

enjoy!

1. Bill O’Reilly is gay

This January the Fox News Twitter account was hacked, and rather than spread fear or propaganda, they decided to come clean and say that Bill O’ is gay.

2. Rick Sanchez is high on crack, and may not be coming into work today…

One of the funniest by far of all Twitter hacks had to be when Rick Sanchez of CNN got his twitter hacked in January, and declared that he had smoked a little too much crack that morning and that he may not be coming into work today. In an age where bosses are following their employees, it’s a good thing Twitter confirmed it was a part of a phishing attack.

3. Britney Spears is dead.

This year we have seen a slew of major celebrity deaths, and it’s only natural to assume that Brit would have been on that list. When a radio show in Dallas picked up the tweet the rumors exploded. First reports were that it was a car crash, driven by Justin Timberlake, others said it was an OD.

4. Pork Gives you swine flu.

This is pretty funny, and it shows just how dumb people are. When the swine flu began to become a major health concern many people wanted to let people know what was happening and what to do. Of course people made that assumption that since the flu was called “The SWINE flu” everyone figured that eating pork would give it to you. In that case this kid is screwed.

5. Jeff Goldblum Is Dead.

And finally, coming on the heels of the Michael Jackson death, and the Britney scare, twitter needed a less public figure to declare dead. Suddenly the trending topic became Jeff Goldblum. What’s even funnier about the whole situation? This rumor has been swirling since as early as 2006. The rumors stated that Jeff had died while filming a movie in New Zeland, when he wasn’t even in country. The original rumor was Tom Hanks in 2006, followed by Tom Cruise in 2008.

I would say the jury is still out as far as Twitter being a true news source, but one thing is for sure. As long as people have the internet, and means to spread rumors this will never end. So here’s to the Lies Twitter Told in 2009, and looking forward to 2010 and what we all take as truth!

I made a post a while back about my all time favorite twitter account @shitmydadsays, where Justin Halpern (28) chronicles the random sayings of his 73 year old Father. Since August of this year he as amassed over 700,000 followers and still growing.

Well NOW, according to ABC news CBS has offered Halpern a contract to make his fathers hilarious sayings and tweets into a TV show!

If the creators of the sitcom “Will & Grace” can work their magic again, it just might happen.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Justin Halpern, the creator of the, Twitter hit , S***MyDadSays, now has a CBS option deal that would turn 28-year-old ‘s online record of his father’s profane quips into a television comedy series.

The team behind “Will & Grace,” David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, will reportedly executive produce and oversee writing for the comedy. Halpern and Patrick Schumacker will co-write and co-executive produce the Warner Bros. TV-backed project, the Reporter says.

This could potentially be very funny, considering how funny the twitter account is.

Geek or not these pillows are freaking awesome! Tell me you wouldn’t want one or two or all of them! you can buy them from Craftsquatch on Etsy! Simply awesome! ( via – mashable )

awesome.

So Starting my day like everyday, I make my #coffee then check my email, and twitter, get caught up with the world at large. I then get the Whale Fail, which is twitters way of saying “you’re cut off from the world”. So After thinking maybe it was my Destroy Twitter going crazy, I try to go to the site….

Normally if twitter is down you are greeted by the whale fail message on the homepage. Today. NOTHING. this then got me wondering “how do I know if twitter is down without twitter?”

Twitter has become such a part of the social networking, new relaying source for many of us; but when it’s not working what do we do?! Grated a year ago I wouldn’t have cared less, but today, now, I depend on my twitter.

This begs the question, how dependent are we on our social medias? After realizing that something was wrong with Twitter, I turned to my good friend Google, in where I came across many other blogs telling of the twitter outage. I know if I am feeling out of the loop without it, many others are.

Twitter hasn’t had a major outage since May 8th, since then they are rare events, granted they do still happen. The occasional system maintenance does occur as well, but to show just how critical twitter is becoming in our ever evolving world of social media, on June 16th they were scheduled to preform maintenance and take twitter offline for a bit, but at urging of the US State Department they halted that; this was because it was a peak time for the #IranElection and for many people in Iran the only way to contact the outside world and let them know what was happening was through twitter.

What ever you think about Twitter, it’s dumb, the devil, or what ever, you have to admit to its power to connect people. To give people a voice, to relay ideas, and news.

[UPDATE]
Reports are now coming out that the reason behind twitter going down may be due to hackers!

“Twitter said in its status blog Thursday that it was “defending against a denial-of-service attack,” in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.” (via – Associated Press)