Today’s videos feature an amazing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire story teller, Michael Winslow doing video games, Unicorns humping dolphins, and the making of a wooden lamp shade.

Is it real? Most signs point to yes, and hopefully it is. Should it have been aired during the Super Bowl? I’ll leave that up to you. Either way, this commercial definitely went the dark comedy route.

Fact: Liam Neeson, throughout this entire segment just sips on his (what is hopefully) scotch, chews on a coffee stirrer; it’s already more badass than full shows on television. Neeson is truly a boss. The rest of the segment is funny too.

Nothing else to say, it’s a video of a scooter going 70mph in the snow.

The stories which led to the answers in Slumdog Millionaire have nothing on Joann Chan from Brooklyn, NY.

This video is proof that we sports fans (I’m self admitted) are some of the dumbest people on the planet. And to the guy who still has his Christmas tree up in February…COME ON MAN.

I definitely empathize with being a synaesthete.

Synaesthesia from Nikko Hull on Vimeo.

What happened to Michael Winslow appearing in films? Yes, he has a one note schtick…but it’s a funny one note schtick. You’re telling me you wouldn’t want him to make a cameo in Hangover III?

Now, this commercial should have aired during the Super Bowl. Humping a dolphin, humping a dolphin…get a tattoo!

Who knew watching a wooden lampshade being made would be so interesting and hypnotic…

The ad features a greyhound race with a bulldog wearing Skechers’ new shoes that allow it to beat the speedy dogs. While Cuban only shows up at the end, he fits right in as the dog’s owner.

I’m sure he’ll talk about the ad sooner or later on his blog. It’ll be interesting to see what he has to say about it.

Twitter loves the man and he received a largely positive response for his role in the ad.

Since this is the 25th anniversary year of the Legend of Zelda, it’s no wonder why Nintendo has gone to such lengths to release so many games. What better spokespeople than Robin Williams, and the daughter he actually named Zelda? The duo conducted the original advertisement a few months ago for the release of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (which looks amazing on the handheld).

The lone commercial has now turned into a multiple ad campaign. With a commercial for the Legend of Zelda: Four Swords game which is a downloadable title for the 3DS.

And the latest commercial, which is for Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Releasing in November for the Nintendo Wii.

As someone who’s been a Legend of Zelda fan since the original, I have fond memories of actually sitting down and playing it with my mom (she was the one who actually beat Ganon). Seeing these commercials brings all the great Legend of Zelda memories back again. Almost can’t wait for the next game release to see some more commercials. Genius.

Rather than trying to get you to "defriend" the people you don’t think you know, the campaign asks a much more interesting question. If you had the chance to meet your online friends in real life, would you learn they were really your friends, or little more than strangers? To find out, the company found a girl named Rosa and decided to send her on a journey across the US to connect with her online friends in real life. They armed her with a KIN, a new phone which seems to be either made by Verizon, Sharp or Windows (they don’t really say) and recorded video of her travels.

It’s a marketing campaign that fits squarely in between the concept of a documentary and a social experiment, but it works because you want to know what Rosa will discover. Not only for her, but because it has some meaning for each of us who keep these virtual relationships and wonder what they really mean. It’s not that often that a marketing effort can turn the lens back onto a cultural phenomenon that we are all living through right now. This succeeds brilliantly at that and is worth watching.

From a marketing point of view, however, the campaign equally brilliantly demonstrates how a lack of connection can make life confusing for a consumer. Details like the KIN Studio or the KIN Spot are features that sound important, but are shared on Facebook without any real explanation of what they are or why someone should care. Ultimately the Facebook page relies on product imagery and placement to make you aware of the product and make you want one.

The connection to how the phone might actually help you better filter your network or find out who your real friends are (both things the campaign focuses on) are missing to connect the phone to the bigger message they are sharing.  What this leads to is that the campaign may stay in people’s mind for the questions it raised and the story it focused on telling, but the phone (and company behind it) will be easily forgotten – like a subtle product placement in a TV series that you might notice, but never really makes much of a difference.

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The message coming from the radio industry is clear: Terrestrial radio is in trouble financially and things will get worse before they get any better. Many of the country’s largest national broadcasters are on the verge of bankruptcy, and the Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB) announced that Q1 2009 was the industry’s worst quarter ever in terms of ad spending.

“Internet Radio Makes Waves,” a new eMarketer report, predicts the radio industry will see double-digit losses in ad spending this year alone, with terrestrial radio bringing in $14.5 billion in ad revenues in 2009, a drop of 18% from 2008 levels.

At least radio isn’t stumbling into the online space as badly as the newspaper industry has. The outlook for online radio ad spending is much brighter although it’s not going to be taking the world by storm by any means. The nice thing that online radio presents advertisers is more segmentation and more niche-oriented opportunities to target ad spend in ways that were not possible in recent years.

The chart below shows that the prediction is that online radio ad spend is poised to at least continue to grow while the jury is out on traditional radio. Early returns though seem to point to the steady decline of radio for the purist. No news on ham radio operators though so maybe there is still hope

What are your habits when it comes to radio? I know mine have changed significantly but it’s still on when I am in the car. The difference is that I listen now for different reasons and will quickly play a CD or whatever once there is nothing to being offered on the air. As for Internet radio? I’m not quite there yet but that may just be me.

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Gigaom reports

Greystripe, a mobile advertising network that distributes ad-supported games and applications, said it secured $2 million in funding from the Peacock Equity Fund, a joint venture fund co-founded by GE and its NBC Universal unit, ending a Series C funding round. The funding and a new strategic partnership with NBC Universal give Greystripe an edge in the hyper-competitive mobile ad world.

This ‘hyper-competitive’ market is projected by some to reach $2 billion per year in 2014 so there is certainly a lot at stake and getting in now rather than after the ship has sailed shows that at least NBC is paying attention. That can’t be said for all traditional media that has traditionally been slow on the uptake of the most current ways to reach consumers
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As more evidence of just how the advertising world has changed one needs to look no further than other investors in Greystripe up to this point

Today’s funding news marks the second time a major media corporation-backed fund has invested in Greystripe. Steamboat Ventures, Walt Disney’s venture capital arm, led Greystripe’s Series B funding round in 2007, injecting $8.9 million into the ad network. In addition to receiving capital from NBC Universal, Greystripe will partner with the media corporation’s big-name properties, such as the Sci-Fi (sic) Channel, Bravo and MSNBC, to provide ads on its mobile applications. At the same time, NBC Universal can now sell ad space within its mobile apps to advertisers through Greystripe’s mobile ad network.

Yup, that’s Walt Disney Co., owner of ABC and ESPN among others. While this type of ‘partnership’ is less and less unusual it still shows just how much the advertising world has changed over the past several years as a result of the Internet and mobile computing / browsing.

One major competitive differentiator for Greystripe, notes their CEO Michael Chang, is that the network can serve ‘flash-like’ ads on the iPhone. The iPhone does not support flash yet but Greystripe apparently has some kind of workaround / variation on the flash theme that was attractive to a broadcast company like NBC.

Maybe mobile is finally here. If the networks are on board that means there can’t be too many adopters left out there.

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But, then, maybe this all makes sense. Since Facebook is so popular, it’s not entirely surprising that they serve one out of every twelve online ads. Even better? At least some proportion of their on-site CPC ads lead to another page on the site—so they’re getting money and traffic.

This isn’t a recent development, of course—we’ve all seen ads to “Become a Fan” of something on Facebook. But as smart as it sounds to make your advertisers pay for generating traffic to your site, the underlying logic is pretty much a stroke of genius:

Facebook is an Internet unto itself.

Facebook has long been accused of being a “walled garden”—with its fan pages, apps and other utilities, FB is almost a subset of the offerings of the Internet. If your brand is prominent enough, you’re on Facebook (or you should be!). Driving paid traffic from a personal page (personal) to a branded page only makes sense on that kind of paradigm.

Of course, that kind of advertising is good for advertisers, too, or they wouldn’t do it. JCPenney went from 22,000 fans to 500,000 fans with these advertisements in the run-up to back-to-school shopping (though Bloomberg didn’t say if JCP saw increased revenue from this).

And something seems to be working for FB, too. Last month, Bloomberg said the most popular social network in the world should post at least $500 million in revenue this year.

What do you think? Is Facebook a subset of the Internet, and is internal paid advertising a natural extension of that mentality? Can Facebook sustain this kind of revenue?

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The sad thing is that even of the economy comes back strong at some point this century newspapers may not even see improvement because it’s the medium, not the economy, which is the biggest culprit in the agonizing demise of a once vibrant industry. The chart below shows just how bad things are for the newspaper industry and there is little hope for recovery.

Only one category saw a revenue bump in over the 5 year span studied and that was the smallest of the small papers. There are many possible reasons for this including the lack of online hyperlocal content thus allowing the paper to still be relevant as well as the lower overhead. But is this just delaying the inevitable?

One major reason for the little guys still holding some ground is the classifieds. I personally never look at the classifieds for much of anything so I am a little surprised by this

Another sign of hope: small papers still have a hold on classifieds. Average classified sales for small papers have actually gone up, at a time when they have been declining for most papers. Inland cites an example of a daily newspaper with a circulation of less than 15,000, which posted a 210.4% increase in classified revenue from 2004 to 2008. But it didn’t do much good. The paper’s profits were down by almost 30%.

Now the paper’s profits were down 30% which still means that they were profitable. Now, we’re getting somewhere. This data, however, is just like most where it can be a bit misleading. Considering the sources were the papers themselves and the information was offered voluntarily and with anonymity there may be room for some fudging. Also, there was no recognition of who suffered tremendous losses and who fared OK. The numbers can best be seen as an average.

Who really knows the real deal but there is certainly not a lot of room for celebration. When you have to concentrate on who suffered the least then you have to figure that no matter where a paper is on the scale of size there is not a tremendous amount of hope for the future.

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Then, the boxes began carrying info on Twitter apps. Rather than paying for their placement, the featured apps were actually approached by Twitter. The apps being advertised didn’t pay to get there, so despite the fact that they were still called “sponsored definitions,” they weren’t ads. Nope, no way, nuh uh.

Well, now they are, apparently. Read Write Web reports that two of the “sponsored definitions,” for Cinema Tweets and the infamous ExecTweets, are really ads this time.

As RWW notes, these ads appear only on your Twitter homepage when you’re signed in, not on other Twitter users’ pages. However, since this ad format has been used since March, it’s possible that Tweeple will either a.) completely ignore the ads, just like the did the previous definitions, or b.) not realize these are ads, despite the “sponsored” marking (though we’ve seen that before ).

What do you think? Are these really ads, or are they just more of the same? Will Twitter users click on ads unwittingly, ignore them completely, or somewhere in between?

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