Copywriting, branding and other mayhem.

Let’s continue the online voting results held by Slate for least favorite ad songs. Next is Creedance Clearwater Rivival’s Fortunate Son paired with a Wrangler jeans spot. The problem is the spot is patriotic, and the song , while you can dance to it, is a defiant, anti-capitalism polemic. The music fights the visuals.

Third in this contest of inappropriate music is the use of Janis Joplin’s classic Mercedes Benz to sell the German cars. The song really is asking God to buy you some luxuries because you are totally down and out.

It’s a great song, and probably is used in this way because many of those Baby Boomers who grew in the Joplin era, Janis not Scott, can now afford the MB brand.

Slate, the online magazine, has asked its readers for the worst ad songs. These are not catchy new customized jingles, but uses of established songs in commercials.

Voted the worst by a wide margin was Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” used by Carnival Cruise Line spots. You mean doing drugs doesn’t fit in with a first-class cruise experience?

On reader commented that the cruise ship company probably wouldn’t allow anything like Iggy’s “done it in the ear before” to happen on their ships.

It could be the sound, not the lyrics that they wanted in their commercial.

Crest Whitening Expressions toothpaste has come up with a new TV campaign. It spoofs famous politcal campaigns of the past like Reagan’s “Morning in America” from the 1984 campaign.

A fourth spot pictures a reporter interviewing people about their voting preferences — their preference for Crest WE flavors.

Sly Stallone is pitching pudding. At least, it’s high-protein pudding for fitness.
“The world’s first ready-to-eat high-protein pudding” according to its maker, Instone. The fitness supplement company is based in Irvine, California.

Sounds like something of which the governor might approve.

Coor Light has begun putting up billboards featuring more of that urban hero, the bike messenger. According to AdRants, they dirtied up his carrying bag while leaving his clothes and hands pristine.

Some observers are distressed. Their point seems to be “leave hard-working lowly messengers out of your fancy corporate messages.” But their battle cry, at least this time, is for versimilitude, reality in ads. Hello? That was never even on my copywriter’s radar — not like humor, memorability, a powerful theme line, strong benefit selling. (Did you ever think a commercial was a documentary? Very rarely.)

This follows a recent Lincoln print ad in the New York Times Magazine that apparently borrowed a famous messenger’s nickname, “Squid” without permission.

A well-known bike messenger objects to the fake squeaky cleanliness of the messenger photo and the lack of a bike lock and chain around the messnger’s waist..

I know something a beer client’s way of thinking because I worked on a beer account, and my guess is they’re trying create a modern hero — like the Marlboro Man or heck, Ronald McDonald — for their brand. If they find the right one, this will be a terrific image that will boost the brand for years.

Why do I have so many ridiculously bright flashlights? I do not conduct a neighborhood patrol, either armed or unarmed.

Darnit. It’s CSI and its hybrids, each in a different city. Those pricey little crime scene investigation flashlights are everywhere in the show. (They seem to reveal smudged prints across a park at night.) Heck, why don’t they just give a toll-free number to order them during the credits?*

Wired has an article talking about the “infiltration” of Cisco Systems ™ high-tech security-video phones into 24. It’s a barter deal: Cisco has provided networking equipment for the show for years, without disclosing the details of their agreement.

Apparently, many companies are starting to barrage TV shows with tech gadgets that might make it into a future episode.

Nowadays, it’s not advertising, it’s “branded entertainment” woven into the show. (See my earlier comments on product placement, back when ET was a pup.)

* Oops, I spoke too soon. There’s technology afoot that will let you to order a product with the click of your remote.

Drum roll. I guess now it can be told by Bob Woodward.

He wrote a long article in today’s Washington Post, explaining his long history with Deep Throat.

Appparently, this is a warm-up exercise for an instant book to be released soon by Mr. Woodward. Then, too Mark Felt’s little-read out-of-print autobiography, The FBI Pyramid from the Inside
will be revised and re-released with new Deep Throat information. (Amazon has a used $900 first edition that apparently has put there this week because the blurb for it mentions Deep Throat.)

Quite frankly, I feeel Mr. Felt should get my first book-buying dollar on this matter, because of the risks he took. (That puts aside that I actually like Nixon as a president. He was great on foreign policy but apparently a paranoid wacko on domestic policy. Really now, could student Vetnam protesters bring down the US government? Did they even want to do that?)

Woodward describes how he met Mark Felt so long ago that Woodward was in the Navy, a mere messenger carrying important papers to a meeting Felt attended. They somehow hit it off. Woodward realized Felt’s importance as an inside source in his future endeavors, and they kept in touch.

The identity of Deep Throat has been the biggest journalistic secret of the last thirty years.

It has finally come out who the mysterious Deep Throat informant of the Watergate scandal is. Apparently, those who know DT’s real identity — Bernstein, Woodward and their editor at The Washington Post Ben Bradlee — swore never to reveal it during DT’s lifetime. (Apparently, Mr. Bradlee did not even reveal the name to the late Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Post.)

While the revelation is front-page news in The N ew York Times , The Washington Post and other papers today, the publication that uncovered the secret is Vanity Fair. The details are in the July issue and on its website.

Mr. Throat is none other than the number two man at the FBI at the time, W. Mark Felt. Just a month before the break-in, he was passed over by President Nixon to replace the lifelong head of the agency, J. Edgar Hoover. (The agency was started back in 1908, but Hoover became its chief in 1924 and remained in that capacity until his death in 1972.) It is said Mr Hoover had so much dirt on prominent politicians, including presidents, that as he got up in years, they were afraid to replace him.

So there must have been some bitterness on Mr. Felt’s part that he was passed over for the key position. President Nixon chose L. Patrick Gray, one of Nixon’s loyal supporters.

After the break-in, political dynamite arrived daily on Mr. Felt’s desk: he had 1, 500 pages of reports of the FBI investigation of Watergate, the investigation that Nixon wanted to use the CIA to stop, on bogus claims of national security. So Felt had both the weapon and the motive to bring President Nixon down in flames. And he did so by tipping Watergate secrets to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.

Mr Felt, now 91, has confirmed the story. Even more persuasively, Bob Woodward confirmed it on
The Washington Post website. (Apparently six years ago, Woodward visited Mr. Felt possibly as a gesture of goodwill to the aging “ultimate insider,” who helped launched Woodward’s career. Significantly, Woodward cautiously parked his limo some distance from the house, as Woodward had no clear connection to the retired FBI official. Woodward was not reporting upon any FBI matters at the time.)

Even highly-placed Washingtonians were as in the dark as the public about the real Deep Throat. In fact, one of Nixon’s attorneys Leonard Garment published a book in 2000 In Search of Deep Throat. In that book, he hypothesized incorrectly that DT was John Sears, a young Republican party political strategist 1n 1972.

Some insiders guessed the truth, according to The Washington Post. James Mann, a reporter with Woodward, wrote an Atlantic Monthly article in 1992 that named Felt as a likely candidate. Read that article: it is almost clairvoyant in its accuracy. Mann portrays Felt and other FBI long-timers as fighting Nixon’s efforts to muzzle the FBI or to use it for his own political purposes. (For example, the President’s counsel, John Dean, had been put in place to observe crucial FBI interviews in the developing Watergatre investigation.)

A company called ThinkMap has invented a Visual Thesaurus, a kind of road map of word meanings — with word dots linked by straight lines.

It’s looks useful, practical, efficient, usable, but my online trial lasted two lookups which is hardly enough to demonstrate its usefulness. (Oops, apparently the trial limits the daily uses to two.)

There’s another catch for me, at least. The language is very British, both in written and spoken forms. (There is an audio pronunciation feature. But because I’m American, I really don’t speak like that.) Then, too, a synonym for dessert is “afters.” Say what? Again, this is British English. It might help me translate British to American English.

It found “copywriting” was related to “copy editing” as well as “typewriting, ” and distantly “employee.” (This last word looks like a full day’s drive from “copywriting.”)

As Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s work: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” (I don’t view “typewriting” as a close synonym of “copywriting.”)

I will consider this as a possible addition to my huge Synonym Finder by J.I. Rodale. The Visual Thesaurus may equal Rodale, but I don’t think it can beat that dog-eared old friend.

Prices? The online version of the new product is $20 a year or $3 a month; the product on your desktop with no internet connection needed is $30. At those prices, it is worth trying out, if you live in the UK or want to talk as if you do.

Apparently, the FCC is getting hot under the collar about product placements.

You know the type: James Bond doesn’t just have a cool watch, he has a recognizable Omega Seamaster ™.

Or famously, because of one of my clients didn’t want the gig, ET doesn’t just follow a trail of small candies to the fridge, he follows a trail of Reese’s Pieces. ™

But this fuss is about paid product placement on TV shows, which is against FCC rules.

“The use of covert commercial pitches is penetrating deeper and deeper into media,” said Jonathan Adelstein, a Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission, quoted in a Reuters article.

For more on this, see AdRants.