Marketing, Shreddies and Diamond Shreddies

Seth Godin discusses marketing of Lucky Charms cereal in a blog post. If I could leave comments on his blog I would mention the Diamond Shreddies campaign in Canada.

Shreddies are a Canadian breakfast cereal. They are little squares. To market them they rotated them 45 degrees and called them Diamond Shreddies. From Wikipedia:

In January 2008, the company started a new ad campaign for "Diamond Shreddies" which is just a square Shreddie turned 45 degrees. Since the cereal hasn't changed in any way, the campaign could be described as a meta-joke playing off the frequent improvements and brand extensions of other cereals and similar foods. Regardless of the intentions, consumer reaction to the campaign has translated into a statistically significant sales increase, according to at least one media report on the campaign's success. The campaign won the 2008 Diamond Clio Award for Integrated (i.e. multiple media) Campaign, one of the highest awards in the advertising world.

I saw some of the commercials on YouTube and apparently people thought they could tell the regular and the Diamond apart - some by taste, some by sight. It either shows the power of branding, or the stupidity of people, including this one girl who posted a video to YouTube ranting about how pissed off she was to discover that Diamond Shreddies were just normal Shreddies rotated. I guess she didn't get the "meta-joke."

Microsoft Live Search Cash Back

Interesting analysis by Michael Arrington.

Stories by Dave

Random, ALL CAPS stories by some guy named Dave. Short and sweet.

A man and his dog

A man and his dog. And the dog's cat. And the cat's rat:

American Apparel Ad

A video about what really drives American Apparel:

Acid House

UK article on the acid house "summer of love." Has it really been 20 years? Damn.

Alleged plus sized model

An alleged plus size model won some reality show. She sure doesn't look plus size to me. She's supposedly a size 14. Unless she is 8 feet tall I doubt that she could have that body at that size.

I hate how women have this warped image of what they should look like. Most men I know don't like the stick-figure anorexic look that most women seem to feel is attractive. Yet for some reason women seem to continue to find that look and weight attractive.

The Onion and Blockbuster

The Onion on the dark ages of video renting:

Bill O'Reilly and his producer

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

How wonderful meetings are:

Great little "ad" from Seth Godin's blog. As my wife can tell you I just LOVE meetings:

Facebook

Quote from Details:

"Like the popular kids, Facebook will end up living in a trailer — just down the gravel road from Friendster."

Sums up my feelings on Facebook perfectly. People say that LinkedIn is boring and useless but in my opinion it is the one that will survive.

Web dating streamlines rejection

Yutaka Sucks

Yutaka Sucks. Good way to get a job. Chinzy web site, but good idea.

Yo Gabba Gabba

Some college kids get high before watching Yo Gabba Gabba, from ABC News.

SpotRunner raises money

Spot Runner raises another $51 million, bringing their total raised to $110 million. Probably about a $500 million valuation. And their product isn't even all that great as far as I know.

The humans are dead

This is seriously awesome. Robots that can reassemble themselves:

Back from vacation

Google TV ads, in their own words. Why it's not going to work, from Valleywag.

What to do with IP from failed start-ups, from TechCrunch.

Soon I will hopefully be able to ad my comments on both of these subjects.