Think Different - My Favorite Ad Campaign

Apple's "Think Different" campaign is still my favorite and most memorable. I remember the first time I saw it was in a movie theater during the trailers. It was the one featuring Muhammad Ali. It was a captivating black-and-white montage of this legend who changed the sport of boxing forever. The documentary-style commercial built up to the final grammatically incorrect punch line "Think Different." It gave me goosebumps. It still does. The campaign features others like Gandhi, Einstein, and Rosa Parks who have challenged convention with radical thinking and action that have deeply changed the world forever. Leveraging the powerful feelings associated with these people and applying them to the Apple brand was ingenious and stills stand in my books as the best campaign of all time.

YouTube's Ad Model Lets Users Vote on Ads

Keeping in the spirit of user controlled content, Youtube.com will now allow users to vote up or down video ads that appear on its home page. This article appeared on Advertising Age.

How will YouTube retain its new-found fame when the time comes to turn a profit? That question -- one of the most bandied about by marketers today -- was partly answered today when the video-sharing startup unveiled a new ad strategy called participatory video ads.

Here's how it works: YouTube will feature video ads on its home page that members of the community can vote up or down, rate, comment on and list as their favorites. The ads can also be shared and embedded into a user's own video creations. The strategy is marketing jujitsu, as it pulls consumers into messages by giving them complete control over them.

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