In December 2007, McDonald’s had agreed to sponsor the report-card jackets for the county’s elementary schools (27.000 children) to cover the printing expenses of $1,600.

In exchange the report jackets would carry coupons redeemable in any McDonald’s restaurant, so any student with all A’s and B’s, two or fewer absences, or good behavior in a given academic quarter would be given a free happy meal.

Is this a sort of equal-fat-rights for the more gifted students? As we all know (and so does McDonald’s) there’s a correlation between education level and fast food consumption, so when they grow up, the A students wont be eating as many Bic Macs as the F students. “We’d better get them while they’re still don’t have an education”, must have thought Ronald McDonald.

After more than 2.000 complaints from enraged parents, McDonald’s decided to cancel the campaign. An end to the story that will no doubt make Naomi Klein and Morgan Spurlock happy.

More at Advertising Age

I bet the Adbusters guys must be really happy with this impulse purchase temptation right on the palm of our hand!

But it doesn’t stop here. A while ago there were some rumors about iTunes booths on Starbucks so customers could download via WiFi their favorite songs. Well it got actually way better (or worse) than that. Consider the following scenario:

You’re sitting in a Starbucks and you hear a song. You fire up your iTunes app on your laptop or on your iPhone and “boom” there comes the artwork for the current song plus the ten previous ones. One click or one tap and the song is yours forever (and your dollar is Apple’s).

Check Apple’s info on the matter.

The system could be generalized to any web based radio station or broadcasting platform for the matter opening new marketing opportunities in the music distribution arena. I bet Steve is on the job already.

Bonus 1: here’s the longest Starbucks order: Double Ristretto Venti Nonfat Organic Chocolate Brownie Frappuccino Extra Hot with Foam and Whipped Cream Upside Down Double Blended

Via Laughing Meme

Bonus 2: You get free WiFi if you own an iPhone or a laptop with iTunes.

Based on IBM global surveys of more than 2,400 consumers and 80 advertising experts, we see four change drivers shifting control within the industry.

A hint: IBM’s articles in the Press Room have links to post to digg and to del.icio.us. Times are-a-changing.

Link to IBM Press room - 2007-11-08 IBM Predicts the End of Advertising as We Know It - United States

Direct link to The End of Adverstising as We Know Iit PDF

So in this internet time, if you want to bluff your way in the advertising industry you just have to find good ideas online before others do, stamp your flashy corporate logo on them and sell them to a big brand. Ideas are important but if they’re for free and you get payed a large sum for them even more.

Three TV commercials that are currently on Spanish TV will prove my point.

Volkswagen Polo copies Kyle McDonald’s story
Kyle McDonald started by trading a red paper clip online for anything. The goal was to get a house in one year. After 14 transactions including a role in a Hollywood movie he got his house.

Volkswagen creates a TV campaign with the same concept (although they’re honest about telling Kyle’s story) and launch a blog written by Kyle. It looks like Kyle is blogging in perfect Spanish and encouraging people to trade stuff to get a Volskwagen Polo. Neat.

Here’s the commercial

Audi copies Brazilian roller
A couple of months ago I saw an amazing video of a Brazilian guy rolling down a long street hitting an endless row of water filled glass bottles tuned to different notes resulting in Mozart’s Symphony n.40.

Obviously Audi’s agency liked it and ripped it off without any problem. I hope I’m wrong and that guy got payed for the idea but I doubt it.

Watch the original idea
Watch the copy

ONO copies the Free Hughs campaign
It all started when Juan Mann got back to his native Australia after a time in London and nobody was there to hug him. He decided to write a sign with the words “Free Hughs” and hug anyone that wanted it. He later created the website freehugscampaign.org and people all over the world started to organize free hugs gatherings.

Again a smart creative saw potential and blatantly turned something spontaneous and non-commercial as Juan Mann’s initiative, into a TV commercial for the ONO telecom. By the way, at the beginning of the original free hugs video you can see a Vodafone shop in the background.

Watch the original idea
Watch the copy

There are probably more examples but I guess I should watch more TV to spot them.

A while ago I posted some suggestions on how to build your own Web 2.0 website. In this video the makers of Reddit take a step further and give a lecture on how to start your own Web 2.0 company.

And by the way, the video is not on YouTube yet. Or at least not properly tagged.

Watch the Ingredients for Web 2.0 success video

I went there and I was astonished to see the implementation of the site. It made me think of the things you shouldn’t do in a project like this.

1. Don’t put fences to data.

Why just accept the self called creative people from Barcelona? Accept people from all over the world and let them give their procedence. You’ll have much better data and still have the creative people from Barcelona.

2. Flash?!?

Why use flash to create hyperlinks when there are already HTML hyperlinks? Why hide URLs? Why break the page navigation? Why render the browser’s backbutton (the most used button in a browser) useless? Why render cut & paste useless? Why hide from Google? Do I need to go on?

This approach to the web was wrong since Flash was used for other than animation many years ago. Even more so in 2006.

3. Loading? Loading what?

Another relic of the past that still bugs users. As a rule of thumb: you see a loading page, hit the back button and go somwhere else.

4. Choose language splash screen.

Don’t make users tell you twice the language they speak. They’re already telling you with their browser’s language so why ask them in the first screen? (After the loading!)

5. Don’t call a social network a database

A database where you sign-in to and post your profile to get in touch with people with your same interests? Sounds like a social network, doesn’t it?

6. Don’t change interface conventions

Don’t make the user learn how the interface works at every click. Don’t design just for fun or just to impress your customer. Impress the user by sticking to standards.

7. Don’t use unreadable fonts

Why still follow the fad of small fonts which can’t be enlarged according to the user’s browser settings? Probably short-sighted people can’t be creative so why bother.

8. Don’t use animations to get to data

People want data, but you are convinced they’re wrong and insist on showing the same slow animation every time they try to access some contents.

9. Don’t ignore RSS feeds

If you’re a member of a social network you’re most probably interested on who joins in. You probably would like to subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up with new memberships.

10. Don’t use the .org just for the sake of it

Using the .org domain won’t make you cooler or more web 2.0ish just because every cool project in the web 2.0 is open source and uses a .org domain. If your website sucks hiding behind a .org only makes things worse.

11. Don’t reinvent the wheel

There are already many social software networks. Linkedin, Openbc or MySpace. It’s already there and with a user base of millions. Probably many of the people in terminalb.org are already on some other social network.

Or maybe not if they’ve ever used a real social network.

Worst of all is that we’re all paying for this as the Catalan Goverment is sponsoring this project that gets nowhere near other free, open-source, peer2peer, social networks. Had they consulted me I could have made big money just pointing them to MySpace.com. They would have got a much better service and probably for half the price.

See it for yourself at http://www.terminalb.org

The brochures showed here (just a fraction of the Museum’s holdings in this area) show some of the more important technologies, companies, and applications in computing from 1948 to 1988.

You can spend hours browsing through these historical documents and enjoying the graphical design and the concepts behind all of them.

Here are the Firefox ads made by Firefox users. You can upload yours too. There’s $5,000 waiting for the next Chris Cunningham.

Enjoy!

www.firefoxflicks.com

And for those of you browsing this web with a non Firefox browser get firefox here!

Last Sunday my mum asked me how to get a Paypal account to buy some stuff on ebay.com. She’d found a good deal for a second hand Louis Vuitton bag while wirelessly surfing the web with the old Dell laptop I gave her. She was surfing on prime TV time instead of watching the usual stuff on the box.

After the initial astonishment of discovering that all of a sudden one has a cybermum I started thinking about the situation, its causes and the consequences.

Why was she more interested in an ebay auction than in a soap-opera or a reality show?

On the net she is in command, taking an active role in deciding what interests her (and only her) the most. On TV someone decides for her (and for millions of mums) what contents are best. And not only that: online, the remote control is much bigger.

Paul Beelen a Dutch publicist based in Chile, wrote a whitepaper on the influence of the web 2.0 on media and advertising, the threats and the opportunities (yes, there’s hope) along with some very interesting case studies. He wittingly named it Advertising 2.0.

A must for marketeers, advertisers, techno buzz lovers, media planners and everyone else in between.

“This type of Internet is far more dangerous to the advertising industry than the previous one. This new type of Internet undermines the very principals advertising has relied on for decades, such as information-asymmetry and top-down content delivery.”

Download Advertising 2.0 whitepaper (English PDF).

Don’t miss Paul Beelen blog about the influence of technology in marketing and advertising (In Spanish).

Thanks to Rudy de Waele for the link in his post