Desperate Chives Marketing Board Launches 'Big Bowl O' Chives In The Mornin'' Campaign

"There's nothing like a hearty, fragrant helping of chives to jump-start your day," celebrity spokeswoman Jessica Alba says in one of the new "Big Bowl o' Chives in the Mornin'" commercials, which feature the actress smiling broadly with chives stuck in her teeth.

The Onion

Top Advertisers Add Meaning to Marketing

Bridge's alternative, according to Mr. Woffington: "How do you make sure your marketing is held up to the same standard the product is? ... P&G says their products improve people's lives. But how about the marketing? Does the marketing itself improve consumers' lives? ... That's a much higher standard than just selling more product."

Trying to answer yes to that question is an approach, he said, that's helped Bridge attract talent to grow staff at double-digit rates for more than five years (currently more than 200) in a place not widely seen as a digital mecca. But it's also one Bridge believes is working for an ever-wider variety of clients, including not only P&G but ConAgra Foods, which has attracted more than 2 million visits to a healthful-lifestyle site since January, and Kroger Co., which has gotten more than 1.2 million votes on more than 35,000 designs in a contest to create the grocer's national reusable bag.

Ad Age

Innovation Advice from Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley

The boy from Chingford who puts the bite into Apple's iconic design

Apple is unique, Ive says, by being in the hardware and the software games; design permeates through everything. "We have a very clear focus that all the development teams at Apple share, a focus around trying to make really great products.

"That can sound ridiculously simplistic, almost naive, but it's very unique for the product to be what consumes you completely. And when I say the product I mean the product in its total sense, the hardware and the software, the complete experience that people will have. We push each other, we're very self-critical and we'll take the time to get the product right."

The Independent

Can a Dead Brand Live Again?

Marketers like to talk about something called brand “equity,” a combination of familiarity and positive associations that clearly has some sort of value, even if it’s impossible to measure in a convincing empirical way. Exploiting the equity of dead or dying brands — sometimes called ghost brands, orphan brands or zombie brands — is a topic many consumer-products firms, large and small, have wrestled with for years.

New York Times Magazine

Can I Take Your Order?

From Logic+Emotion

You're It.

The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people's heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.

Brand Tags

Bezos On Innovation

A: My view is there's no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough—and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about. For us, it's such a deep-seated belief, I'm not sure we have a choice.

Business Week

In the Air

Who says big ideas are rare?
By Malcolm Gladwell

The New Yorker

Dove's 'Real Beauty' Pics Could Be Big Phonies

If true, the news could be devastating to the nearly 4-year-old Dove campaign. The most famous execution to date -- and one that won both a Cyber and Film Grand Prix for Unilever at the International Advertising Festival last year -- has been the "Evolution" viral video, which shows an attractive but rumpled woman transformed through a variety of makeup, styling and retouching tricks into a billboard bombshell. The kicker: "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted."

Ad Age

Different by Design

That kind of response is generating more and more heat in the emerging field of transformation design--a hybrid of business consulting and industrial design. Firms like Humantific, whose founders are designers, apply the same process used in designing sleek MP3 players and ergonomic teakettles to unwieldy intangibles like cell-phone promotions and hospital organization, transforming their effectiveness. Along the way, the field is creating some unusual teamwork between designers and business people.

Time Magazine

Two Heads are Better than One

"The brand will be rolled out gradually on the Web and in conjunction with product launches beginning in the fall," according to Rich Walker, Intuit media relations. "This refreshed brand will place new and broader emphasis on the Intuit name. It will serve as our corporate brand and as the master brand for our small and mid-sized business products."

Under Consideration

The coming backlash over green marketing

The easiest marketing promise to make is to say you'll do something green if people consume what you sell. That you'll support one green cause or another. No one is in charge of checking out your story, and my guess is that 90% of the time, it leads to a net negative--more landfill, more carbon, more waste.

Seth Godin's Blog

P&G Boosted by Basics

Procter & Gamble Co. made its numbers last quarter, and that should be no surprise. How it did so, however, is a little more interesting, with less glamorous businesses such as diapers, paper towels and coffee pulling up results dragged down by beauty.

Ad Age