Candy’d out from last night? I am. Charlotte made a pretty good haul last night, but when we got home the first thing we did was to sort out all the candy she doesn’t like, which Bridget and I then split between us. My share of the loot: half a Butterfinger, one Reese’s peanut butter cup, one fun-sized bag of Reece’s Pieces, one fun-size bag of peanut M&Ms, two fun-size 3 Musketeers, and a fun-size Snickers (you can probably deduce that Charlotte does not like anything with peanuts). And I ate every last piece. Which is not smart at all, but there you have it.

I could probably go for a chicken dinner tonight, but not a Chicken Dinner Candy Bar. Yes, it was a real thing. As it happens, the Chicken Dinner actually had nothing to do with chicken dinner; it was your standard 10-cent chocolate bar. But the marketing wisdom of the era (the 1920s) held that making candy sound like a substantial meal was a great way to sell it. And that wisdom was apparently on point, because Chicken Dinner sold well, and the signs were a common roadside occurrence.

The “1984″ commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer during the 1984 Super Bowl has become legendary over the years. Not only did it help launch the new computer, it also was one of the first “must-watch” commercials to run during the Super Bowl, transforming that event from an often so-so football championship match into a huge media vehicle. This year’s Super Bowl ad rates are running at $3 million per 30-second spot. Writing in Ad Week, former Chiat/Day ad exec Steve Hayden tells a behind-the-scenes history about the business machinations involved in even getting the commercial made, and how the Apple Board of Directors almost killed it before it ever saw the light of day.

Another fascinating behind-the-scenes story is this one in the London Review of Books from Peter Pomerantsev, a British television producer who was invited to join a Russian television production company to make knock-offs of popular reality series like “The Apprentice” and “Big Brother” (!) for domestic Russian TV. Though I have no reason to doubt the stories he tells, it’s almost like a running gag of every stereotype about corrupt Russian bureaucracy and Soviet-holdover attitudes. As it turns out, he says, many of the concepts that are popular on reality series in the U.S. and U.K. don’t translate into Russian culture, where people are disbelieving of “rags-to-riches” makeovers and the shenanigans of “bachelors”; most popular are the “Survivor” knock-offs and other competition shows.

One more behind-the-scenes story, just for kicks. Sitcom writer/director Ken Levine has one of the most interesting blogs about television that I have encountered. His insider’s perspective about how sitcoms get made and his stories about the golden days on the sets of shows like “M*A*S*H*” and “Cheers” are full of tidbits of TV history and trivia. Once in a while, he also invites people he knows/works with in the business (and by “the business”, I mean “the industry”) to post. Back in December, he featured this post from Peter Casey, one of the co-creators of “Frasier”, explaining the backstory of how that series was devised (including some interesting bits about the casting)

Sociology blog “The Society Pages” takes a look at the use of the famed pink ribbon in advertising and product packaging in conjunction with National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and argues that marketers and consumers alike have turned the effort into feel-goodism. Research shows that consumers rationalize purchasing products adorned with the pink ribbon (or otherwise branded or re-packaged in pink) in lieu of donating directly to organizations or participating in other awareness/community support efforts. This compares directly to similar consumer behaviors with “green” and “eco-friendly” products, which, critics point out, often results in “greenwashing” on the part of the manufacturers: paying extensive lip-service to environmental issues while covering up or ignoring actual practices that are harmful. While it’s tough to argue that “pink-washing” allows companies to cover over practices that actually contribute to breast cancer (though I think that comparison can indeed be made in some cases), it certainly allows product manufacturers to buy a degree of positive PR for very little effort, and, as the post suggests, perhaps divert dollars that might have gone to better use to buying goods with some vague sensibility of “ethical” behavior.

So let that inform this announcement from a couple of days ago that Scott Paper is introducing “tube-free” toilet paper rolls as a test-market item. The press release from parent company Kimberly-Clark claims that toilet paper rolls account for 160 million pounds of trash per year, so the initial response to their announcement has been fairly positive, but the Natural Resources Defense Council counters that disposable paper product consumption in the U.S. consumes 500,000 acres of forest annually, and that paper manufacturers have a long way to go in changing their manufacturing to incorporate more recycled paper in their products and reducing the use of bleaches, dyes, and other harmful chemicals, and that consumers should reconsider their disposable paper product use. Or, just go on feeling superior because your toilet paper doesn’t have a tube, your choice.

On a slightly different tack, but still circling the nether regions, the blogger at copyranter has been keeping track of just how far adverts are willing to push the envelope in promoting the “personal lubricant” product category through suggestions of anal sex. His latest post looks at a couple of print ads for Durex that just leave me thinking “WTF?”, but the ones pictured above leave very little to the imagination indeed. Follow the links to see a few more examples, it’s quite the collection.

While everybody has been obsessing over the iPhone 4G “Antennagate” issue, the British IT news website The Register notes that Apple has submitted a continuation of a patent they submitted in 2009 that integrates advertisements into the operating system in a way that literally stops everything the computer is doing and forces the user to watch the ad before letting them continue working.

The code would allow the user to temporarily delay the ad, as shown in the diagram above. The revised code in the new patent filing does remove provisions that would deter users from disabling or tampering with the function by causing the OS to stop responding to an input device (keyboard, mouse, etc.) or by causing the application that was running to “cease generating output”.

Apple explains the idea as a way to let people have “free” OS upgrades — instead of paying the typical $69-$129 that Apple charges for a major upgrade, you could have it for free in return for letting your computer be crippled by occasional advertisements popping up, with no way of escaping them. Building in ads in return for free software isn’t a new idea — I have a couple of apps that I use all the time that always display an ad because I didn’t want to fork over fifty bucks — and there were even some PC makers who literally gave away their computers to people but forced them to have a frame of ads around their web browser window at all times, so I suppose it was just a matter of time before somebody applied the idea to the whole damn OS. It’s just disappointing (not surprising, just disappointing) that Apple might be the first one to implement it.

At least these tricks involve using (mostly) edible items. Some food stylist techniques include using Elmer’s glue in place of milk in cereal ads, painting food with glycerin to make it look shiny and juicy, and spraying food items with spray paint to enhance color. Granted, nobody’s ever going to eat the food used in commercials and photo shoots, but it’s the sort of unrealistic expectation that food ads create that results in situations like Domino’s Pizza having to “reboot” their product because the reality was so unappetizing. (I wonder if they’re going to fix the pasta bowls, too)

A Chicagoland McDonalds’ has a new sign in front of their restaurant that lets you know when breakfast is being served under the Golden Arches. As you can see in this series of photos, the “egg” cracks open to reveal one sunny-side-up interior when the breakfast shift begins, then closes back up once the menu shifts to the rest of the day’s fare. Not unlike the drool-inducing “Hot Donuts Now” neon signs that are in the windows of what few Krispy Kreme donut shops remain in business. (via)

Now they just need something for the rest of the day. Perhaps a guy who has a heart attack every time another batch of fries is ready.

The video embedded above is about seven minutes long, but if you’ve got the time to watch the whole thing, the payoff is worthwhile. It’s a clip from a British television program that’s looking at how effective subliminal suggestion is in advertising. The presenter calls in a pair of ad agency creative guys to ask them to do a rapid 30-minute brainstorm on some basic ideas for a branding identity for a particular imaginary product. He doesn’t give them much background to go on. He also leaves a sealed envelope with them which contains a similar concept that has already been devised. The ad guys are not to look at the stuff in the envelope. And so they set about coming up with ideas for a quick pitch.

Watch the video and see if you can figure out the subliminal suggestions before they are revealed at the very end.

Antony Young, the president of Optimedia U.S., a media strategy firm, had this article in today’s Ad Age about reconsidering the effectiveness of the traditional television ratings such as those measured by Nielsen and Arbitron and the need to consider the exposure of media consumers across media platforms. Television ratings have gone down as an actual percentage in the last two decades or so as a series of new media began to chip away at the dominance of the three major networks: first, cable, then the birth of new broadcast networks, and then, of course, the Internet. But because the content offered by the networks now reaches across more than one of these platforms, it’s useful to measure them and index their performance in all of these media.

Optimedia has developed a system they call “Content Power Rating” that looks at the overall audience of a television program on TV, online video (such as Hulu or Joost), web sites, and even mobile devices. Their index of these audiences comes up with a very different list of which shows score highest with viewers across media than traditional television ratings, as the graphic above shows. Programs that fall far back in the pack for television viewership can be big hits when viewed through the multi-platform perspective: notice that of the top ten in Omnimedia’s rankings, four of them are below the top ten in Nielsen’s ratings, and one (“The Office”) isn’t even in the top fifty.

Young says that in the U.S., media buyers are more interested in placing their ads in specific series, whereas in Europe it’s strictly about the stats (reach, CPM, and ratings), so a ratings system that pays closer attention to the varied audience a television series can now expect to garner, is a much better indicator of how well that program might perform for advertisers looking to reach highly-targeted demographics.

Optimedia uses this index in helping its own clients decide how to strategically target media buys, but this sort of rating system should turn out to be very generally applicable, if not outright critical, to media metrics while the so-called “new media” are still shaking up the overall media landscape.

Meanwhile, earlier this week Starbucks announced disappointing sales growth and said that they were planning to close 100 stores and stop opening up new stores every 500 feet.  There’s a new Starbucks under construction in my town (to compete with the SIX Dunkin Donuts stores), so it looks like it’s getting sneaked in just under the wire.  Also somewhat buried in that story is the announcement that Starbucks will discontinue their breakfast sandwiches sometime this year.  Maybe you can pick up one of those turbo-convection ovens cheap second-hand.

Oh, and does anyone in their right mind think that any player on the Patriots OR the Giants is actually going to do the KFC Chicken Dance during the Super Bowl?  The NFL has already warned them that they’ll slap a fine on anyone who does, and why would they give KFC a free plug like that?  It’s not like the "I’m Going To DisneyWorld!" campaign years ago, where the athlete actually WENT to DisneyWorld after the game.  They try too hard with all this guerrilla marketing bullshit these days.