Jennifer Wells interviews Canadian Scott Goodson, the founder of New York-based agency StrawberryFrog. In Noted, Wells chats with Zulu Alpha Kilo's Zak Mroueh, whose agency is charged with developing a campaign for Magazines Canada targeted to the ad community. And in Created, she looks at a new ad for Nissan Canada by TBWA Toronto.

Read More >> Because it's Friday, something fun...and food-related...and, in most cases, Photoshopped.

Read More >> And you thought it was over.

The election may be, but there are still interesting opinions about Obama's marketing and media strategies being aired.

Ad Age, for instance, observes that "what most miss or underplay are the ways in which the Obama campaign demonstrated its boldness, the trait that happens to be the most important for anyone trying to build a brand now, in a chaotic time when many will be tempted to shelve innovation and creativity to take up defensive postures.

Read More >> Pepsi has just launched a new campaign in the U.K. that sounds like tons of fun.

The soft-drink maker has printed one-inch pixelated images on Pepsi Max cans and bottles. These squares are 21st-century versions of bar codes--they're scannable areas of digital information.

The difference: Consumers do the scanning, and they do so by taking pictures of the images with their cell phones.

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Jennifer Wells chats with Tim Armstrong, "senior vice-president of Google Inc. and overseer of the company's North American and Latin American advertising." In Created, she reviews a new ad for Coast Capital Savings that Vancouver agency Rethink tried to make "PVR-proof." And in Noted, Wells draws our attention to The Nature of Marketing: Marketing to the Swarm as Well as the Herd, a new book by DDB Worldwide's CEO.

Read More >> The proverbial Mouse House is exploring ways to extend its brand, reports the New York Times.

Times media reporter Brooks Barnes writes that the legendary name "is asking people to think of Disney as a brand of luxury clothing, expensive home furnishings and hip jewelry."

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Our American friends make a very important decision tomorrow. The Sandbox has kept a close eye on the communications efforts of both parties throughout the year.

In this entry, we proudly present our Obama vs. McCain media smackdown.

Read More >> Microsoft's newest television ads are compiled from user-generated images and videos based on the theme, "I'm a PC."

And it seems to be gaining traction. To date, says a spokeswoman, "more than 17,000 photos and videos [have been] uploaded and...videos have been viewed...almost 1.5 million times."

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Jennifer Wells profiles a young Canadian company with an exciting new advertising medium: a series of digital posters that are installed in subway tunnels and convey the effect of "15-second television commercials to captive transit riders zooming past." In Quoted, she talks to the art director of a company that created a series of spots for the Detroit Institute of Arts. And in Noted, she reveals the winner of Strategy magazine's Agency of the Year award.

Read More >> Plenty has been written about the Obama campaign's media savvy, but most of it focuses on social networking or television.

Now a new Slate article lauds the team's clever use of another communications tool: text messaging.

Obama uses text messages to "remind people to register to vote, to go to the polls, and to organize others on behalf of the campaign," says writer Farhad Manjoo, who compares the tactic to McCain's use of robo-calls.

Read More >> Want to hold your own when a colleague rants, "I always knew NotoriousBabySeals.com was a flog, but I never dreamed it was Astroturfed"?

Simply download and save Nielsen BuzzMetrics' consumer-generated media vocabulary guide.

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It's pretty viral, so you may have already seen the video on YouTube. But I had to do some digging to find the story behind Wassup08.

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