“Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URLs. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms. It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone.”

Paula Scher: “I don’t see very many speakers from the advertising community invited to speak at design conferences (except for the very few who lead branding groups at agencies and in some circles they are still considered the enemy). I don’t read about it on design blogs, and I’m not seeing books published about it. I’m not seeing advertising, in any form, turn up in any design museum exhibitions, not at the Modern, not at the Cooper-Hewitt.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

“We have unearthed, in a most unlikely place, an ancient print ad we believe to be the greatest in history. We think you will agree. Or, alternatively, that you will not.”

“The adage that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is truer than ever on the Internet”

“Apple undeniably has great TV advertising with TBWA’s ‘Get a Mac’ spots, starring AdFreak favorite John Hodgman. As we mentioned previously, it’s also been extending its creative excellence to that most humble of vehicles, the Web banner. Today’s NYTimes.com continues Apple’s latest innovation of syncing up Web-display ads to work together to tell a story.”

“Celebrating great art in humble places: the glorious talents of the artists who illustrated stories, advertisements and comics in the 20th century.”

“Use a Nikon?

Or at least that appears to be the message.

I opened my copy of Outside Magazine’s companion piece of fluff, Go, this morning and was greeted by an ad for Sony’s A700 DSLR with the tagline ‘In Photography, Timing is Everything.’ The accompanying photograph was spectacular and showed a leopard about to dispatch a baboon. Dust is flying and, clearly, timing has a lot to do with the impact of this photo.

It was also very familiar.

In fact, it’s a 1965 photograph taken by John Dominis for the late, lamented Life Magazine.”

“I’ve been spending much time with ad agencies and focus groups lately and can only conclude that–with some exceptions–they are mostly clueless. Three years ago they had a traditional knowledge about consumers but didn’t know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology. Today, most of them don’t know about consumers and don’t know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology either. Mainstream ad agencies have one refrain–one message to their corporate clients–do social networking, do social networking, do social networking.”

“Welcome to the Cockeyed.com roundup of prescription drugs which use CG animated characters in their advertising…. Even worse than Mr. Mucus and Granger, Digger the gremlin is the animated face of Lamisil. Digger represents a nail infection. In real life, a nail infection probably doesn’t hurt, but in the commercials, this guy bends a toenail back like he is opening the hood of a Chevy and jumps right in. It is horrifying. An uncut version of this commercial features his other exploits, including mass-murder and cannibalism. A doctor can help you get Digger out of your toenail, but he will never be able to get him out of your nightmares.”

“In 1978, Donald Gunn was a creative director for the advertising agency Leo Burnett. Though his position implied expertise, Gunn felt he was often just throwing darts—relying on inspiration and luck (instead of proven formulas) to make great ads. So, he decided to inject some analytical rigor into the process: He took a yearlong sabbatical, studied the best TV ads he could find, and looked for elemental patterns.”

“One of the products you offer on your website is a ‘TV-B-Gone’ television zapper which is basically a glorified portable universal remote that can be used to turn off television sets in public places. This product epitomizes the hypocrisy that your organization preaches by allowing one single critic of television to determine what the population at large may choose to watch. It is this very concept that you attack within the television industry; Marketing executives make the same decisions everyday for large groups of people.” (Thanks Torrez!)

“The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has some great statistics and presentations available on their site. The title for this post comes from the finding that 76% of consumers think that businesses don’t tell the truth in advertising.”

“I don’t know a lot about makeup. When Organic started the pitch process for a major pitch for a cosmetics company, I thought Bobbi Brown was married to Whitney and that MAC was a line of Apple products. How could we get smart about women’s cosmetics? The answer was to immerse the team in the lives of women who use the product.”

Good stuff from the agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. But as with most material of this ilk, it sure makes the place seem perfect. “It’s truly bizarre for someone to work night and day for an entire year to earn a salary of $50,000 then remark that they ‘only’ have $50,000 to shoot a photo.” (Thanks jonnymac!)

“A strange gulf exists today between the worlds of design and advertising. That makes it easy to forget that one of the greatest designers that ever lived was an advertising art director: Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Helmut Krone. Long before branding became a buzzword, Krone intuitively understood how graphic design could define an institution’s personality. ‘The page,’ he once said, ‘ought to be a package for the product. It should look like the product, smell like the product…Every company, every product, needs its own package.’ Without ever designing a logo — often without even using a logo — he created corporate images that endure to this day. How many companies can be said to ‘own’ a typeface the way that Volkswagen does Futura Bold? They have Helmut Krone to thank for that.”