We attempted to reconstruct a famous 1950s experiment with subliminal advertising by inserting very brief flashes of certain words in this video clip.

Every time I see this, I wonder if it shouldn't be the exact opposite.

Nobody sells the dishwasher promising people that now, finally, they can do more dishes.

The washing machine rumbling in my basement means me doing less laundry on a washboard by the river.

I miss all the news that fit to print -- not all the news, and pseudo-news, and churnalism, and press releases published verbatim, and gossip, and updates to gossip, and galleries, and listicles  that drive  just one more page view.

I miss editors who say no.

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A note from EDGE Collective:

On September 27, EDGE Collective is hosting their inaugural event Expand My Brand, an all day symposium matching up today’s top brands with emerging technologies and startups to explore how social technology is impacting brand marketing and advertising.

Found a small stack of PDFs of scans of old issues of Grey Matter, Grey's research newsletters the agency sent out to media ("since 1935"). Particularly cool is a 1997 retrospective (pdf) of what Grey had published about television over the years.

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For a recent experiment, we divided respondents into two groups. To both groups, we showed a trailer for an upcoming movie. One group was given two different descriptions for the trailer (as if there were two different trailers) and asked to chose one or the other.

Microsoft unveiled the box art for the upcoming Halo 4 game by emailing Xbox community members one of the 32 pieces of puzzle that when assembled together reveal the image.

Google's Screenwise research project announced back in February is designed to collect data on more than just Internet behavior.

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Land Rover in the United Arab Emirates printed 5,000 edible copies of a desert survival guide. Twenty-eight pages of potato-based starch paper have a slightly sugary taste from the glycerin-based ink and are bound by a spiral that can be used as skewers.

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Saw this page on AdKeeper, the company that is trying to make online advertising bookmarkable. This could be an interesting way for Pinterest itself to make money: becoming a network for ads that people will want to hold on to.

"...when they run to the bathroom" is what I meant to ask.

In case you are wondering, some studies show that people in a coma can hear.

Pretty -- a panorama made of Pinterest boards.  Saw something similar on Flickr a few years back.

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Arrange 100 characters into the highest-scoring tweet of the day to win your box of Scrabble Trickster with this brilliant Belgian Twitter Scrabble promotion. Alas, only in Dutch.

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Four years ago, I noticed that Google was indexing AdSense ads as if it were content on the host pages. I thought I'd check to see if they were still doing it.  The reason I care is that,  for Google,  indexing ads it serves creates wrong incentives around ordering pages in search results. Here's a hypothetical scenario.  "Hey, look, here's a page with just the query you are looking for". The user clicks on the organic search result and then clicks on the AdSense ad. (My own experience with site analytics has shown that organic search visitors are the best AdSense clickers.)  Ka-Ching! Google is a dollar richer.

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A new puppet show in Russia shows Vladimir Putin fighting the loss of his penis, according to this Reuters story that was accompanied by a I Can't Believe It's Viagra banner.

Cats can has cheezburger, but dogs are getting their own TV programming.

San Diego dogs subscribed to Cox or Time Warner now have their own 24/7 TV channel called DogTV, soon to roll out nationwide. "DOGTV offers scientifically designed content for dogs of all ages, and all breeds.

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The Pinterest Giveaway Scam got pretty big today; at one point about 10% of Pinterest homepage pins were scam pins. In addition to the Starbucks offer, I counted at least three others -- for H&M, iPhone (of course), and GAP. What fascinates me about the scam is the authors' crafty use of recognizable social media symbols to create an illusion of authenticity, and -- more importantly -- an illusion of endorsement. In other words, exploitation of cognitive biases, also known as social engineering. Let's take a closer look at the "Starbucks" page (now available at http://giftinterest.com/coffee_4y8l1 but likely not for long). What do we see?

Update: Part II - How The Scammers Hijacked Facebook Likes It started with a tweet from a friend: Never one to pass a scam, I dutifully clicked and landed on a page with this URL: http://giftinterest.com/coffee_ob9ve

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From a book about which David Ogilvy is quoted as saying: "Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times": "Advertising is salesmanship. Its principles are the principles of salesmanship. Successes and failures in both lines are due to like causes. Thus every advertising question should be answered by the salesman's standards. Let us emphasize that point. The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales. It is not for general effect. It is not to keep your name before the people. It is not primarily to aid your other salesmen. Treat it as a salesman. Force it to justify itself. Compare it with other salesmen. Figure its cost and result. Accept no excuses which good salesmen do not make. Then you will not go far wrong. The difference is only in degree. Advertising is multiplied salesmanship. It may appeal to thousands while the salesman talks to one. It involves a corresponding cost. Some people spend $10 per word on an average advertisement. Therefore every ad should be a super-salesman.

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Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself in front of his computer, and an eagle-eyed blogger noticed that his version of Facebook sports a larger-than-usual search box. An unintended leak or not, Facebook competing in search is only a matter of time just as, in retrospect, it was inevitable that Google would integrate social elements deeper into its main product. This is why.

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This is a sponsored post.

RevResponse, a company that helps bloggers make money by selling and giving away white papers and magazine subscriptions, has a new nifty tool that converts a blog's RSS feed into an email with automatically inserted promo offers.

Simple. Except for the pre-roll.

Not science fiction anymore, this: "Once chairs and other things become content, the prospect of rampant chair piracy turns from unimaginable into very real."  The Pirate Bay is opening a new category for the new kind of piratable stuff: "We believe that the next step in copying will be made from di

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I took my first Kodak Photo Spot (wiki) pictures at my spring break trip to the Disney World in the mid-1990s, and through all these years I've never stopped admiring their genius. It's a marketing idea whose elegance has rarely been emulated.

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An Iranian company Aaye Art Group ("designer and manufacturer of artistic and cultural goods") is making replicas of the American RQ-170 drone aircraft downed in Iran last month:  "Most of the toys, which come in several colors and are made of Iranian plastic, have already been snapped up by Iranian

Ever dreamed of watching a video or a favorite TV show on the go?  Well, aren't you lucky:

Daily Mail: "Translucent TV: Lumus' PD-18-2 is a set of spectacles that can beam high-quality images directly into your eyes but allows the user to see through the images too." (This is Lumus.)

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This is a sponsored post.

The many uses for fine metal plaques are as varied as those who commission them. Whether they're intended for individual recognition, as a treasured memorial, or to identify a landmark or location, customized plaques make noteworthy markers.

Clotaire Rapaille, the author of The Culture Code who was featured in the PBS documentary The Persuaders, is the inventor behind the patent for "Advertisement for Leather Clothing" granted in 2005.

This Minority Report scene with personalized billboards that recognize your retina get a lot of people excited and pointing towards the future, but it doesn't look like people in 2054 are paying any more attention to the smart billboards than they notice the dumb ones of today.

It is so infrequent that automated communications are nice that I enjoy celebrating every instance. I had put my Netflix account on hold last month, but mailed back what turned out to be an empty envelope.

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As part of Hill's Beacon initiative, I traveled to the Y Combinator's Ad Innovation Conference earlier this week to watch some 20 YC-funded start-ups present their technologies to a roomful of ad people. AdExchanger already has a nice write-up that explains what each company does, so that's not what I am going to do here. Instead, I will go through my notes trying to answer the question Paul Graham, the YC co-founder (pictured above with the glass), asked after the event: "So, what stuck?" Here's what stuck.

"Henry Luce, a co-founder of TIME, disdained the notion of giveaway publications that relied solely on ad revenue.

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"Groupon is Hastening the Demise of the Newspaper Industry," wrote a daily deals trade pub in April.

It could be the other way around.

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Every frame of Kill Bill vol.1 compressed into a spectrogram-like "barcode".  This and a lot of other movies on MovieBarcode Tumblr.

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A Microsoft guy explains how Kinect and Nuads will add gestural and voice goodness to TV ads served through Xbox.

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Here's a way for eBay sellers to earn an extra buck by adding ads to their shipment paperwork and email confirmations: AdShip "dynamically inserts complementary advertisements on shippers' post-sale, customer-facing print and digital order fulfillment touch points."  Like this.

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I was watching this mega-awesome video and noticed that YouTube identified the artist on the soundtrack (Hybrid) and linked the artist's name to a separate page containing more artist details including other tracks, a playlist button, upcoming events, and an info blurb.There's also an affiliate "Buy

Love how CreditLoan.com jumped on the Twitter rapture train by paying to for the sponsored tweet in the #endoftheworldconfessions top trending topic. 150 retweets as of this post.

Puss In Boots, boot up your tablet - Friskies has released not one but three Games for Cats advergames playable in any tablet browser thanks to the magic of HTML5/CSS3. The games don't scale down to the phone screen size, though, so smaller cats are out of luck.

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Farrah Bostic points out that you can't have "insights" the same you can't have "intelligences":

"You can not uncover, seek, find, or land on "insights". Insight isn’t a noun in the sense that a car or a nickel or a pen are nouns.

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Hashtagart creates elaborate mosaic art out of Twitter users' profile pictures:"Hashtagart has proprietary technology and a suite of apps that make it fun for consumers to spread a brand's message.

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The very first article in the Wall Street Journal's year-long series on online user tracking places at least 23 "pieces of tracking technology" from at least 10 servers, as identified by the Ghostery browser plug-in.

As far back as 2007, Facebook's terms of service prohibited using one's profile for ad purposes (such as embedding affiliate widgets, for example): "You agree not to use the Service or the Site to upload, post, transmit, share or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising."

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A BBC Secrets of the Brands documentary looks into how one Apple fan's brain reacts to the brand's iconography.

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From the mailbox:

- Matt sent in this variation of a captcha ad where you have to click on the ad for it to reveal the security squiggle.  Why annoy your user once if you can do it twice?

- Buy cheap wooden furniture, not. Or else.

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