There is a story today on Ad Age about Pepsi’s new logo.

For a brand as large as Pepsi, the article raises a valid point: it costs big money to roll out a brand as big as this:

For Coke or Pepsi, when you add up all the trucks, vending machines, stadium signage, point-of-sale materials and more around the world, it could easily tally several hundred million dollars, the expert said.

Brand New, which is a great source of the inside scoop for branding changes (thanks Paul), has posted several times on Pepsi as the changes have rolled out for Pepsi, Mountain Dew (now Mtn Dew):

• Pepsi, New Bottles
• The New Pepsi Challenge: Guess the Smile
• Pepsi, Revealed. Sort of.

There is one comment from Andrew on the Brand New blog that stuck with me:

Something about these logos has lost the longevity that the originals seemed to have.

If you walk through the comments, the general consensus is overwhelmingly negative.

Technorati Tags: Pepsi, soda, logo, drinks, pop

As an alumni of Iowa State University and Baker University, I try to stay on top of the latest happenings at the schools.

For Iowa State, I receive their College of Business alumni magazine called “Prospectus” and published twice per year. In addition to sending out the magazine in print, they also make the publication available online.

I stumbled upon an article (PDF) about how Iowa State and other universities are using Second Life as an education tool. For those unfamiliar with Second Life, it is an internet-based 3-D virtual world that launched about 5 1/2 years ago.

You don’t have to look much farther than Business Week, Inc. and a whole slew of other magazines to read about them, so I am excited that educational institutions are taking advantage of technology to reach students.

Technorati Tags: Second Life, virtual, world, college, education

If you haven’t visited Ads of the World before, I highly recommend you checking it out, especially if you are in advertising or marketing. I subscribe to the RSS feed, but there is so much content posted that it’s difficult to keep up. It helps keep your mind fresh when you see things like a creative Milky Way ad at the checkout of a grocery store.

Keep in mind that global cultures vary widely, so be sure to visit the site with an open mind and check your political correctness card at the homepage.

Internationally, pretty much anything goes.

One of the ads that I stumbled upon, which wasn’t an award winner, but I saw it on the site when I was reviewing some of the awards, was an ad that utilizes escalators.

I’ve posted about escalator ads before, as I think they aren’t overused too much yet here in the US.

The railing, which appears to have plates of sushi on it, is avoided by most people until they figure out what is going on, but it definitely gets your attention.

Without further ado, I present the Sushi Train:

Technorati Tags: escalator, advertising, sushi

I like to keep our agency updated with the latest on mobile marketing, text messaging, GPS, etc, and I was scheduled to present to the agency, so the timing worked out well.

Below is my presentation I gave to our agency on mobile, including recent trends, devices and an update on mobile advertising.

Want more details on any specific topic? Drop me a line.

Technorati Tags: mobile, CTIA, technology, phone, mobilemarketing, sms, textmessage, internet

I’m at the fall 2008 CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference in San Francisco this week.

Like many of my colleagues, my blog has taken a backseat to many other things, such as Twitter.

That being said, I will be posting updates via my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/dustinj. Updates will also be posted (through integration) to the Twitter widget on the right of this blog (and any other place I have integration like Facebook, Plaxo Pulse, etc).

Currently, the tracks that I will be attending include the following.

Tuesday

• Mobile Marketing and Advertising Metrics: Establishing Meaningful Benchmarks and KPIs
• Mobile Marketing Ecosystem: What Carriers Want?
• Mobile Marketing Ecosystem: What Brands and Agencies Want?
• Mobile Social Networks

Wednesday

• mCommerce: Device, Application, or Technology?
• Consumers, Mobile Devices, and LBS – Defining the Marketing Zen Moment
• The Common Short Code Potential: Picking Apart the Pieces of the Puzzle
• Accelerating Mobile Use: Upsetting the Mobile Paradigm

I’m hoping to post a summary of the event (probably a presentation via slideshare) in late September in preparation for a presentation I’ll be giving Oct 1.

If you are at the event yourself or want more details about it (I’ve been to the event the last 3 years), give me a shout or leave a comment.

Why, you ask? In this day of social networks, you’d be surprised how easily you can connect to others through a few degrees of separation.

Let me use LinkedIn as an example. I currently have about 480 connections on LinkedIn. Three degrees, though, I’m connect to almost 3 million people.

Although Facebook doesn’t have the same “friend of a friend” contact mechanism, it is easy enough to see who each person is connected to and do some manual footwork to establish a connection.

So as I was working through my contact list that I exported from Outlook (about 1000 contacts in all), I noticed several that several email addresses were listed like the following:

/o=ORGANIZATION_NAME/ou=first administrative group/cn=Recipients/cn=Tester2 EX Tester2 Tester2LastName (Tester2@corp.organization.com)

You might ask why I use Outlook when I run a Mac as my main work laptop? Well, I use Outlook in Parallels when it comes to things like contact management because it seems easier to deal with (at least in my mind) than Entourage, Microsoft’s email and calendar client that we use on the Mac side.

Well, that format above isn’t very helpful when you are trying to import the list into another program, such as Evite, for sending out invitations to a party.

After a bit of searching, I stumbled upon the solution from a site in Australia with a blog entry title of Outlook Change Email Address Type.

The problem is due to the fact that we use Microsoft Exchange Server for our email and calendar management, and any internal email address it stores in a format that is easier for the server to read. This also has to do with the way that I added the contact.

In order to fix this and save the actual email address and not the MS Exchange Server information as part of the contact, you have to modify the contact and trick it into thinking it is a stand alone contact and not connected to the mail server.

The hack to change Email Address Type is below. Is it a hassle to fix? Definitely, as I had about 100 contacts that I had to correct, but maintaining the contact information is an important component of maintaining an active social network. I recommend exporting your contacts as a CSV format (comma delimited) and uploading them to sites like LinkedIn at least once a quarter.

LinkedIn and others due have plugins for Outlook that allow you to sync your data much easier, but I prefer the old school method, because it also forces me to cleanup my contacts.

1. Select the contact’s details.
2. In the General tab, replace the existing the e-mail address with a string starting with smtp:. For example, replace a.b@mail.x.com with smtp:a.b@mail.x.com. Note: you have to type in the new dummy address; if you use a suggestion from Outlook, the address type does not change.
3. Select the Properties context menu item of the dummy e-mail address. Outlook should display the E-mail Properties dialog. Note that the E-mail type: field now has a value of SMTP.
4. In this dialog, remove the smtp: prefix from the e-mail address.
5. Press the OK button and the dialog should close.
6. Initially, the Contact’s e-mail address does not seem to have changed. If you click on the Display As: field, Outlook corrects the e-mail address.
7. Delete the string in the Display As: field and press Enter. Outlook should refresh the Display As: field.
8. Save the updated contact.

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, Outlook, Exchange, contact, export, email

I wrote about the European incandescent-light-bulb-ban about a year ago.

According to ENERGY STAR:

If you have ever had to recycle the bulbs, you know how much of a hassle it can be. Since the bulbs have mercury in them, I hope that you don’t just throw them in the trash. I’ve been stockpiling the bulbs and waiting for a good time to recycle them and now is as good of a time as any, as we’re moving houses and need to move the bulbs.

According to Wikipedia (although no source is cited), only about 3% of CFL bulbs are recycled or disposed of properly.

The NY Times recently ran an article about Home Depot offering compact fluorescent bulb recycling, as the article states, “creating the nation’s most widespread recycling program for the bulbs.”

The article also mentions that 75 percent of the nation’s homes are within 10 miles of a Home Depot. With Home Depot stepping up to the plate, I’m hoping that others follow, such as Lowes. Menards (at least in MN) also offers free CFL recycling. Several other hardware stores also offer bulb recycling. Check with your local store for participation.

The EPA has a page on recycling the bulbs as well.

I broke a CF bulb a few weeks ago and was happy to find out that the amount of mercury in a CFL is relatively small.

But if you do break a bulb, the EPA also has lists some directions to follow. The key item to remember is to leave the area for at least 15 minutes (and research via Google what to do next).

Technorati Tags: recycle, compact fluorescent light bulb, CFL, Home Depot, green

The article was about the different government regulations that are being put in place for mobile phone use while driving:

Gabbing while crossing state lines can get you busted. By July, six states will ban the use of mobile handsets while driving, two will have explicit no-texting laws, and six will all but forbid drivers younger than 18 from touching their phones. Although research shows that hands-free devices do little to reduce crashes caused by distracted cell users, a Bluetooth headset can at least save you from hefty fines and free up a hand for still-legal munching and manicuring (not yet strictly prohibited).

So here is why I think this is ridiculous.

You can’t tell me that texting is any more dangerous than fooling with an iPod, changing the radio station, changing the temperature, etc. Every day on my way to work, I see plenty of people putting on makeup, searching their glove box, eating or carrying on a myriad of other random tasks.

Is texting while driving or messing around with email on your BlackBerry, iPhone or any other mobile device a bad idea? Yes, of course.

Should it be illegal? I think that’s a different question.

I think smoking in a car, especially with kids in the back, is a really bad idea, but I don’t see any laws on the docket for that.

According to one article, over a million people have been ticketed in New York since they passed a total ban on using hand-held devices in 2001.

Experts estimate that as many as 80 percent of motor vehicle crashes and 65 percent of near crashes have driver inattention as a contributing cause.

I talked to an attorney friend of mine about the subject and he mentioned that several states already have distracted driving laws in place, so I did a bit of research.

AAA put together a Microsoft Word document that outlines which states have Distracted Driving laws.

The problem with distracted driving laws, as I see them, is that they are open to interpretation. I don’t think that a distracted driving ticket would stand up in court, because I think it would be pretty tough for a police officer to prove unless it was video taped.

I did find this commentary about New Hampshire’s laws humorous, but it is a bit dated, with the article from 2005. Updates may have been made since then.

New Hampshire is the only state that doesn’t require adult motorists to wear seat belts, but it does ticket drivers for eating, drinking, talking on a cell phone or fussing with their makeup while behind the wheel.

The state whose motto is “Live Free or Die” passed the nation’s first law against distracted driving in 2001. Since then, every state has looked at ways to keep drivers’ minds on the road, but lawmakers in most states are choosing to focus more narrowly on restricting cell phone use while driving.

I agree with Jonathan Adkins of the Governors Highway Safety Association, “If you’re going to have a law, it should cover all distractions.”

So, in summary, I’m not so much against distracted driving laws, although I think that they would be difficult to uphold, but I’m not in favor of singling out texting and mobile phone use as the only activity to be prohibited.

I’d like to see an updated version of the 2003 study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety that listed the top distractions. I listed the chart from the document below. Although I’m sure that mobile use has increased and new items will be added (like watching TV), it still hits home that other distractions are equally as important.

The existing data suggest that cell phones are a factor in a tiny fraction of crashes. A 2003 report by NCSL said that crash data from seven states showed that cell phones were a factor in less than 1 percent of accidents.

What about the other 99%? Did lawmakers miss the boat?

Technorati Tags: mobile, texting, sms, legal, law, , distracted driving

A great article today from Silicon Alley Insider called How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion In A Year [via Mediapost]

I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and I agree that Twitter has potential for being a platform for mobile payments.

Not sure what Twitter is?

You can check out my Twitter presentation or create a Twitter account and follow me on Twitter to learn more. I also have my interactions in the twitterverse posted to my blog and Facebook page.

Below is the summary from Mediapost:

Twitter is undoubtedly the hottest Web property with no revenue model. Silicon Alley Insider’s Nate Westheimer suggests that the microblogging service move into the peer-to-peer mobile payments space, where “no one has much of a head start.”

So what are P2P mobile payments? Think PayPal for your phone. What does this have to do with Twitter? At first glance, not much, really, except for the fact that Twitter is widely used on mobile phones. As Westheimer says, “Twitter is far from being a ubiquitous mobile platform, but they have more penetration and usage than any other mobile service and their current user base is the same important group of technology early adopters that PayPal enjoyed when it convinced the world that you could send money to an email address.”

Forget for a moment that the Twitter infrastructure often fails, and consider the implications of a carrier-independent mobile messaging system. This is effectively what Twitter could achieve when the re-architecting “is all said and done,” making it a powerful alternative to social and mobile SMS text messages. As more and more people become familiar with the Twitter language, the microblogging service could easily become the de facto platform for mobile payments. Imagine simply sending a message like “p innonate $5″ to pay for a beer at a bar?

Technorati Tags: Twitter, mobile, payment, sms

As part of that, we have been getting our current house ready to sell and looking at paint colors for the new house. As part of the moving process, I have been making almost daily trips to Lowe’s and Home Depot.

This evening, I thought I would check out some of the tools that Lowe’s offers: specifically the paint estimator.

Since I don’t have any paint yet, I thought I would use their paint estimator tool to see about how much paint that I would need.

To my surprise, I got the following results:

This job requires Infinity gallons of primer (estimated labor: 0.9 hours) and Infinity gallons of finish (estimated labor: 1.4 hours).

For the moldings, even worse than infinity is NaN:

This job requires NaN gallons of primer and NaN gallons of finish; estimated labor: 1.52 hours.

For the 99.9% of the people that aren’t web developers, NaN stands for Not a Number.

So, in reality, the system should have never allowed me to submit the input to be calculated, since required fields were missing. What should have happened is that I should have been presented with an error message stating that required data was missing and must be added before continuing.

Even if invalid data would have made its way into the calculator, it should have been smart enough to return an error to the site and not display a bogus response

I can’t be too harsh on Lowe’s, since the paint calculator is provided by a 3rd party (Construction Calculators provided by AccurateEstimates.com), but they still should have made sure that it worked right.

Technorati Tags: paint, Lowe’s, tools, construction, remodeling, error,