Justin Timberlake Wants Your Ideas.

Cue hungry agencies licking their lips over another opportunity to have interns enter a contest. Justin's 901 Tequila announces more loser-generated mayhem. Yawn. You know the drill: Create. Enter. Wait. More details here and sample clip of what not to do below.

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But Will It Be Available in All 50 States?

It won't, just ice cream trucks in Vermont. Ben & Jerry's have renamed one of their flavors to recognize Vermont's gay marriage resolution. (Other states recognizing same sex marriages under the law: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Maine (beginning mid-September 2009), New Hampshire (final legislation pending), New York and Washington, DC recognize same sex marriages from other states, California recognizes those married between June-November 2008, Hawaii offers limited benefits and Oregon offers benefits similar to marriage.) The flavor getting the sex change was originally Chubby Hubby. Cue floodgates as other brands follow suit?

Who's Up For Some Crowdsourcing?

GET YOU SOME! Nice little quiet topic to bring up, innit. More than a few ad blogs have covered this (as I also did with the AdPulp gang on a recent episode of the Beancast). Only reason I'm beating a dead horse, besides looking for traffic, is that two new services sent us releases about what they do, which would be... crowdsourcing! Tongal (video below), and GeniusRocket.

Whether it's good to open up your marketing to the masses or whether designers are prostituting themselves, we can go back and forth all day. The arguement for it though oversimplifies several things, specifically, it fools people into thinking they'll have total control over all aspects of their work, and that's simply not going to happen. (Quite the opposite actually.) But another thing comes to mind.

FF >> 20 years at a crowdsourced student logo for the next Nike while its bitter creator wonders why they ever gave it away in a $200 contest. Look on the bright side: It'll make a great post for an ad blog.

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ad:tech Chicago Attendees Politely Converse at CIMA Enclave Party

Last night CIMA and Tatto Media sponsored a party at the Enclave nightclub in Chicago after the first day of ad:tech. The place filled up quickly. The party, which is perhaps a Chicago thing, never ended up like San Francisco or New York ad:tech parties where loud music and drunken dancing prevail. Rather, during most of the party, everyone just stood around and conversed. How amazingly refined!

That, of course didn't preclude some of us from consuming one too many martinis causing this particular article to be written, shall we say, a bit later than intended. But it's all good. The party was fun. It was great to catch up with Chicago friends and traveling conference buddies.

And the photographic evidence is here.

Hey, It's One of Those Viral Things

The Money Supermarket saves people money. How much? Well, I'll tell you. So much that they can go out and spend it, shoot what they bought or did with it, then upload it to letshavethesavings.com. Which, if you look at it, is a microcosm of our economic mindset right there: Screw saving, let's spend it. But you don't come here for the lectures, YOU COME FOR THE BATMAN DOGGIE COSTUMES! The beautiful thing here is that she will still have some left over for Benson's therapy.

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The Case They Don't Want You To See!

That line almost always guarantees traffic, donnit. Seems that Cash4Gold.com has taken issue with the Consumerist's reporting on the company. (Yes, the same company with Hammer in the Super Bowl spot.) The history of the story is a long but compelling read that you can check out for yourself. It raises a lot of issues, from brands trying to control the internet to a consumer's right to know.

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Do 30 At a Time.

Degrees freaks, degrees. Washing clothes in 30 degree water saves lives, lives I said. Wait, trees? Oh yeah. Trees. It saves trees. No, that's not it. Bio-innovation company Novozymes and Danish agency Mindjumpers calculated that if all households in Europe go to coldwashing (30 degrees celcious - hence the name), it can save the same amount of CO2 as produced by 3 million cars a year. Yeah, that's it. Find out more on their website and take their pledge, or try their, wait for it... Facebook app page thing. First though, check out a happy clip below.

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by Bill Green    Sep- 2-09    
Topic: Cause

Let's Throw a Bunch of Numbers Around and Pretend They Mean Something

"A lot of these "facts" are classic examples of how to lie with statistics."

"Brilliant collection of stats, the evidence seems to be compelling. Top sound track to so many thanks to you and Fat Boy Slim for an uplifting five minutes:)"

Had enough social media charts? Not so fast, this is the net--it won't ever run out of those. Welcome to the Social Media Revolution. (Maybe after reviewing it this is why Ad Contrarian is calling it quits for now.) It's ambitious factoids supposedly backed up by a ton of sources, but as with anything 2.0, there's just too many ways to look at data like this and still sound right. Regardless, those two comments pretty much sum up the two opposing camps of this brief look at social networks and internet trends. It's got a Web 2.0 proprietary name though: Socialnomics!

All I'm saying is, credit for not doing the enlarged rotating type thing.

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