This video comes as a part of my personal top 10 funniest commercials ever and it lands on number 8
After some dramatic decrease in sales in the summer of 2004, the management of the Zazoo condom makers decided that it’s time to come up with some shocking yet rather funny visuals of unwanted parenthood, basically targeting the young adult that doesn’t wanna be the guy in the video. Little did they know that their humorous initiative will be aired all over Europe and USA as one of the best commercials ever made.
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
There are for sure money to be made out there by simply using Google AdSense. But how many of us succeed? Sure enough, you can follow Darren Rowse’s excellent AdSense tips or learn some common sense simple tricks from someone like Garry Conn. But despite the advice, ebooks and a whole bunch of effort you can end up with an AdSense dashboard that looks something like this:
Or better yet, when you succeed at making rent in one month just from AdSense you get banned. It happens. Ask this guy.
So I decided to share my secret method of increasing my AdSense earnings with at least 100 per cent. Here’s all you need in order to apply this simple, creative, efficient, idiot-proof method:
- one piece of paper, ideally blank
- one pen or better yet felt tip pen
- one plastic bowl. Ask your girlfriend for one or steal it from your dog. Anything for a good cause.
Better than a $9,99 e-book so far, right? Now, prepare for the process itself: every day when you get home from your crappy ass day job, empty your pockets. You’ll find a reasonable amount of pennies and dimes and once in a blue moon the $1 piece. That will suffice. You are now fully prepared to fill your AdSense bowl and double your earnings.
In one swift stroke open your dreaded dashboard. It will have to show something like: 500 impressions, 1 click and perhaps 17 cents in earnings. This is where you count your pennies, so to speak. Pick the plastic bowl described above, match the exact amount your AdSense dashboard just showed using the aforementioned pocket change and label the bowl “AdSense earnings”. Sure, you can go for sophisticated methods, like using two bowls, for each of your no good sites and call the bowls “Channel One” and “AdSense Monitor Two”, but that is only if you’re aiming to become an AdSense superstar.
By the end of the month you will have something as encouraging as this:
Bonus tip
If you live in a country like Canada, where your favorite smokes are $12.71 a pack, then look at the bright side: you’ll usually have 15 dollars in bills, meaning you get $2.29 in change, thus making you eligible for triple adsense earnings.
Please make sure you understand this is a Google joke motivated by the apparent reason-less ban on Billy Spinner’s AdSense account. Girlfriend, dog and plastic bowl are fictional characters. Any resemblance between the AdSense bowl and your home plastic bowl is purely accidental.
This video comes as a part of my personal top 10 funniest commercials ever
Believe it or not, there is a wikipedia entry for the now famous flea market. Here’s an excerpt from it:
“Flea Market Montgomery is a 73,000 square-foot, flea market in Montgomery, Alabama, which advertises itself as being “just like a mini-mall”. It ostensibly specializes in living room, bedroom, and dinette sets, but video evidence suggests that there is far more in store.
The flea market gained fame in early 2007 thanks to advertisements produced by owner Sammy Stephens and his subsequent appearances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. This advertising was in the form of a rap commercial which spread through the internet via YouTube, BoingBoing and similar sites. This video and related materials use the slogan “It’s just like a mini mall.” Sammy appears in the advertisement, showing off the living room, bedroom, and dinette sets.
The flea market, and its owner, were also featured in the twelfth episode of Family Force 5’s webisode series The Really Real Show.
Capitalizing on the popularity of the advertisements, Sammy Stephens subsequently began selling a variety of flea market-related merchandise, ranging from t-shirts to mobile phone ringtones.
Sammy was previously a local disc jockey and provided songwriting to other local singers and rappers. He graduated from high school in 1975.” (wikipedia source)
So that is what an Alabama DJ looks like. Here he goes:
New media consulting is wrong in so many ways
The idea of this through analysis of the social media phenomenon and the dirty little secrets behind some of it came to me during an instant messaging conversation with a great friend of mine who happens to be one the proud and famous top 100 diggers. According to him (and I do trust the guy one hundred percent), he was offered a ridiculously high amount of money by a certain online entrepreneur for each story he manages to promote to the front page of digg, thus bringing all those social media blessings upon the guy’s site. This is terribly wrong in so many ways, but I will manage to break it down into two different perspectives: why the online entrepreneur is ill-advised when he decides to take such a step and why the whole concept behind this idea is corrosive for the world of social media itself.
Pay a guy to digg you - be a brain athlete
No doubt in my mind from my rather limited social media reach that when you are trying to rely on the traffic and recognition it brings you, you are definitely in the wrong business. Social media traffic is an overkill, it takes too much effort, time, resources, it’s server-crashing and creates fake illusions of grandeur. If you’re aiming to make money with cost-per-click ads then it’s not worth it, as the actual click through rate is averagely 10 times lower than the one you get from good old google traffic. If you’re aiming for backlinks then you have better choices, traditional blogging choices, like commenting, tagging, directory submissions etc. The traffic from social media is eye-catching, but useless. It’s nice to have it, as you may hope that maybe 10 out of the 80.000 hits digg just sent against your server will come back or you may hope that one of them will make that 25 dollar affiliate sell you were always hoping for. But pay money for that? Come on people, let’s use blogs as they were meant to be used, let’s use our websites to promote our services through hard work, quality and commitment. Subversive methods like paying diggers to make you famous won’t get you anywhere except from on the path to a nice and simple McDonald’s job.
Can we talk about social media corruption?
When we say social media mavens, we think about a select group of people that can manipulate millions of websurfers every day. The power of being able to send 100.000 visitors to a site of your choice by artificially using the immense reach you’ve ended up having after years of hard work and networking is truly mind blowing. It’s not gonna be long before the urge of doing a little more than having fun and promoting great content turns into a job like any other, where you manipulate, fake, fight, work hard and have no fun with it. That is when corruption sets in. If you’re offered a mind boggling 500 dollars per front page (that is a random amount, the one they say it’s the going rate nowadays is much higher), you might think why not. And that’s what’s gonna blow the social media bubble pretty soon. How many of you guys ever met people online that claim to be “social media consultants” for a living? How many came up with an honest answer when asked what exactly does a social media consultant do. They promote content. That is their job and they will promote the content that came with a high paying fee. That is true and clear and sad. Sure enough, there are still guys like my friend that denied the tempting offer under the noble claim of wanting to keep his great reputation. But how many times does that happen? How do you trust digg when you click on a front page story and it takes you to a page that has cleverly hidden affiliate links or annoys you with popups? I believe that regular users will eventually get bored with it and then there won’t be a market anymore for these kind of scams. No social media. No money. No trust.
Photo credit goes to John Suler’s photostream
It’s only funny until someone gets hurt. Then it’s hilarious.
Darwin Awards were an awesome idea and I hereby grant Wendy Northcutt the genius status. One of the funniest personal accounts I’ve ever read in a book comes from a nurse’s personal experience. Here it is:
As a nurse in the intensive care unit of a large medical center, I’ve had the opportunity to care for many potential recipients of the Darwin Award. The man in this story didn’t lose his life, but lost his dignity and claim to common sense, among other injuries.
At 3AM one morning, the charge nurse called to tell me to expect a patient from the ER who had just had an emergency bowel resection. Trying to stifle her laughter, she said the report nurse would call soon to fill me in on the details.
My coworkers and I speculated about possible reasons someone would require emergency bowel surgery in the middle of the night. Finally, the phone rang, and we sat in rapt silence to take the report on this unfortunate soul.
A 40-year-old white male came in complaining of abdominal pain and rectal bleeding. He claimed to be unaware of any reason for such symptoms. But during his examination, the physician discovered a coat hanger protruding from the patient’s rectum.
When questioned, the man admitted he had inflicted this injury upon himself. Earlier that night, while his wife was at work, he was “pleasuring himself” when he had an urge to push an uncooked egg into his anus. Panicked when he lost it “up there,” he tried to fish it out with the crooked end of a coat hanger. But the coat hanger became snagged!
He decided that maybe the vibration from a ride on his motorcycle would cause the whole mess to dislodge from his nether region. Finally, unable to stand the growing pain, he rode his motorcycle to the ER.
The physician removed the coat hanger, and repaired his intestines.
An hour later, his wife arrived. Minutes later, she stormed out of the room and demanded to be told what had happened. I told her she should ask her husband. She said he claimed that he didn’t know, and that the medical staff wouldn’t tell him anything. She was politely, but firmly, instructed to speak to the man’s physician.
From the book Darwin Awards III. More examples of stupidity at its highest level on Darwin Awards.
I am not even close to the “blogging guru” status by all means, but after hitting social media front pages a few times for the past month and reaching close to 70.000 page views in less than three weeks I can say for sure that I get to add my two cents when it comes to successful marketing of your product. On a market that’s over saturated with blogging tips, hacks, advice and wannabe authorities, many neglect the basic human factor. I do agree that knowing a thing or two about affiliate marketing, AdSense, SEO and all the techniques you can read about every day is quite mandatory, but I will state that the most important of them all is successful marketing through your connections, your friendly network that can bring you exposure, advice, help and sometimes even funny conversations all the way to real friendship.
You shall have a real connection to your social media buddies
This may sound quite trivial, but many of us that try to get some reach in our field tend to interact artificially with their social media buddies: I vote you, you vote me. I think a closer, warmer and friendlier relationship can get you a long way. You’ll be surprised of how those people are fun to talk to, smart, sarcastic and helpful. I made some great friends through social media and I can’t refrain from mentioning chris here, along with a bunch of other great guys that I have a personal connection with.
You shall know a “Make Money Online” blogger
Once you start to have a certain reach you will for sure want to make a bit of dough, at least to cover up for the hosting costs. An MMO blogger can get you a long way. No matter how much research about affiliate marketing you can get done in about a week or so, you still can’t beat these guys. They do it for a living. Make friends with one of them, add them on your favorite instant messaging program and feel free to ask them questions. You will get an prompt and direct answer and some of them will go as far as to give you personal advice after browsing your own website for a while. Trust me, it does way more for your monetizing needs than reading all of John Chow’s archive. My favorite friends in the business are the one AdSense expert Garry Conn and the all-around nice Canadian guy Mattaw.
You shall make friends with other bloggers
Rather than wasting valuable time researching for the best keywords and their output on your latest post, you should just go play into the blogosphere and meet some actual bloggers. What they can do for you is more important than any homework you can do by yourself: they can give you an honest opinion about your latest redesign, read your material before it’s published, point out small typos, notice that you might have missed an idea, add their input on the topic you wrote about and on a final note just give you a little “thumbs up” emoticon, meaning they want you to publish it, because they trust it. Believe me, it gives you a great feeling. Some bloggers that I have this kind of relationship with are cybrville, the Romanian wonder kid Tibi, varadinum or maxy. Send them a shout from me if you decide to pay them a visit.
You shall use instant messaging
Nothing says “friends” better than a 1-on-1 conversation on instant messaging. Personally I am quite tired of repetitive formulas like “hey, can you reddit/digg pls? thanks”. I thought web 2.0 was a great initiative in the first place because it promoted closer human interaction. Come on people, let’s add each other on instant messaging, let’s talk about weather in Alberta, chicks, cars, share pictures of our significant others or our dogs. That’s what this is about. As far as marketing is concerned, instant messaging is way underrated: you can mass-link a group of friendly webmasters, use your latest blog entry as your status message, meet your fans “in person”. In my opinion instant messaging beats twitter. (I recommend using Yahoo! Messenger for this, for many reasons that will be debated at a later time)
You shall know a programmer
Quite self-explanatory. For those days when you just can’t understand why stupid Internet Explorer just won’t display your beautiful new sidebar made entirely in CSS3 with the help of 25 images. They’ll know, they’ll laugh at you and tell you that you probably didn’t close a “div” tag at some point. And those 3 hours of wishing Bill Gates the flesh eating disease will go towards a better cause, perhaps even something crazy, like taking your girlfriend out for dinner.
After sadly experiencing similar personal issues, I just happened to stumble upon this page from Asylum that assures me that the average recovery time is within the two-three months range. Well, thanks guys, that helps quite a bit, but I would like to go a little further than what social scientists have discovered while working so hard in the benefit of the humanity itself and lay down some of the things I discovered whilst being a fan of social interaction in general and relationship screw-ups in particular. Here it goes, breaking up the break-ups:
A lifetime of misery, the worse case scenario
I would say from personal experience as well as from hyper-analyzing people’s misery that the average time of getting over the break up with the person you thought was the love of your life is half of the duration of the relationship. But in this particular case we are facing the person that will never try and get over it. We’re facing a socially unadjusted individual that just won’t move on. These can be found on forums that supposedly teach you how to get him/her back, they can be found resorting to psychics, calling the suicide hot-line in need of some attention, turning religious or even hurting themselves. Usually they are needy and emotional characters which is likely the reason they got dumped for in the first place. Needless to say, there’s nothing we, normal people, can do in respect of helping them so they will go on making the choice of living a lifetime of regrets, misery, obsession and socially unfit behaviors.
It hurts a bit but I’ll survive
If a person in this unfortunate situation feels that way about it, then their chances of joining the rest of the humanity in their quest to the perfect partner in about a couple months. However, there are factors which can significantly decrease the “waiting time”. Having a positive attitude, going out, doing forbidden things, focusing on work more, rewarding yourself in different ways always help. Also, not to be sexist or anything, but how many socially healthy guys can’t go right back on the dating scene and meet some hot stuff to heal their souls? I will come up with a post soon, that will be quasi-ironic like this one about 5 easy ways of getting over some chick that just dumped you.
None of the above are valid if you’re Anna Murdoch and you walked away 1.7 billion richer. In fact anything above 1 million as a compensation for your loss will do. Now go outside and play.
This British original artist has achieved Internet fame back in 2006 for his sidewalk paintings, a collection of absolutely remarkable ideas for three dimensional appearance using plain paint and a common sidewalk. Here’s a collection of Julian Beever’s work from England, USA, Australia, Germany and Belgium.
People are actually going around “the hole”
There’s the “chick in the pool” one taken from a wrong angle
Shot taken using a mirror
This is a 40 foot long painting as you can see below
Strangely enough, in a time when web fame is easily converted into money making websites, Julian Beever does not appear to own a branded website, but you can find more of his amazing work through google.
Why I hate italians is retiring
When I first started my ironic depiction of Italians series I decided that if it starts to bring out the worse in people I would stop writing it.
Quite unsurprisingly, most of the feedback it got was negative, starting with idiotic offenses like “you’re really a dumbfuck i hope you get slashed next time you’re in italy” (yes, the intellectual level of Italians is rising, some of them can write nowadays) and ending with moral-leader wannabes that paternally advice me to “please reconsider your attitude towards Italians and especially foreign people”. I do appreciate the subtle humor and refined sense of irony that very few had in their comments and I just wanna let them know that it was for their kind that I wrote that.
However, just for the extended crowd, I would like to come up with a few explanations: in common spoken English the word “hate” benefits of a wide semantic value and the one I employed might be replaced with synonyms like “despite”, “dislike” or “distaste” rather than “enmity” or “animosity”. I do not believe for one second that someone that is not completely ill minded would consider that I’m suggesting any kind of racial, national or other types of hatred.
Doesn’t it seem like people take offense on this topic a little too much nowadays? I mean, can we still make Scottish jokes about them being cheap? Or at least blond jokes? Is that politically incorrect too now? I just can’t understand how someone can take that innocent Italian roast as a form of national hate whatsoever. Where are the days when we just made fun, smurked and moved on? Grow up people, get a life and stop playing moral teacher.
PS: No, I will not write any more funny stories from my Italian experiences.