While catching up on my favorite shows this weekend, and drinking an ice cold Coke Zero, I noticed a healthy amount of in-program product placements. At times I felt like the placement was a little clumsy and forced,  and other times, I wondered if it was paid product placement at all.
An Ad Age article told me [...]

I want to add a note to Alli’s Super Bowl ad post from yesterday. Tom Fugleberg of OLSON made this point to me in my MinnPost column on the Super Bowl adstravaganza.
Increasingly, these high-profile ad spots are being used as entry points to other marketing efforts. In this year’s Super Bowl, VW’s ad directed viewers [...]

We just bought a couple new laptops, so that must mean we have more job openings, right?  Indeed we do! The first will be issued to an emerging superstar with serious social media chops, strong writing skills and a little gravitas to boot.  Ideally, our new Client Relationship Director would be a highly creative and strategic thinker who [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To view the original, go to http://bit.ly/7Layqc.
I’ve been fascinated to see marketing with a homoerotic subtext enter the most macho of realms: the National Football League.
Head & Shoulders shampoo has tapped as its celebrity spokesperson Troy Polamalu, an All-Pro defensive back who’s won two [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To see the original, go to http://bit.ly/7BA4Y2.Â
The Twin Cities have long held an outsized position relative to their size in the advertising world. Both on the client side and the agency side, this cold Omaha has produced groundbreaking work for more than half a century.
There’s [...]

I’m usually pretty generous with my assessments of marketing efforts. It’s a tough business and I don’t want to be throwing stones at hard-working, creative people. None of us bats 1.000. But the Dodge Ram ad in heavy rotation right now sets my teeth on edge a little.
You know the one: “My name is Ram. My [...]

It’s hard to imagine the position once held by LIFE magazine. From the 1930s through the 1950s, it was possibly the single most important and influential advertising medium in the world.
Even when I was a kid in the ’60s, when TV advertising had really begun to eat LIFE’s lunch, the weekly arrival of the magazine [...]

So it’s football season again, my fantasy teams are completely demolishing opponents, I’m bragging and karma will soon punish me by injuring my best player. This happens every year. Wash, rinse and repeat. But that’s not really why I’m here. As cool and likely cooler than Drew Brees being on my fantasy football team is [...]

I like Rachael Ray. I don’t watch her show and I only read her magazine in the grocery checkout line, but somehow I’ve gained enough awareness of her to be more intrigued than I usually am by celebrities. Her voice sounds like she sucks down a couple packs of unfiltered Camels a day, and her decidedly not model-thin [...]

I was thinking about the changes in the advertising business and I decided to look back on the top 100 ad campaigns of the 20th Century as chosen by Ad Age magazine.
Their top choice: “Think Small,” Doyle Dane Bernbach’s Volkswagen campaign that began in 1959.
A striking thing about the list is that only one of the [...]