Contemplating writing 3 posts tonight. Might as well start with an easy Commercial of the week.

For years I have dreamed of owning a Lexus Hybrid. For a good period of time they've had a full fleet of luxury Hybrids, while their competition really didn't have much to offer. Fast forward to now where hybrids are all the rage and its slowly becoming a much more competitive space.

Lexus does a great job making the point that they were a first mover into this space and have a lot more street cred than any other luxury automaker in regards to hybrids. The milestones they point to, definitely stand out and the imagery while a bit lackluster offers some accompanying product shots and reinforces the rather diverse fleet of hybrids Lexus has.

Lexus as well as Toyota was way ahead of the curve on hybrids. They invested a lot of R and D, engineering, and marketing to get where they are now in the growing market. While a lot of auto companies focused on the short term, Lexus didn't sit on their hands in regards to developing hybrids. They also knew that higher end consumers would likely be more environmentally conscious than other consumers and looked to "own" that space.

This commercial does a great job conveying how committed and experienced they are while also taking a jab at other automakers who are a bit late in the game at this point. Hopefully soon enough I'll be in one of these swanky rides. It's the anchor and part 1 of a 3 step program of hopeful adult awesomeness. 1) Get sweet car. 2) Get babe to ride shotgun. 3) Marry babe....put baby in car seat in back.

Hopefully good gas mileage can pay for his college. O yeah, I forgot he's going to Ohio State on a football scholarship!

I am a huge fan of The Pantless Knights, a group of local viral video makers who rock awesomeness with everything they put out.

Their concepts for viral videos, execution, as well as social marketing efforts make them a great source of entertainment and an emerging marketing option for companies looking to make a splash virally like the Mrs. Taken rings with the Puke In My Mouth video.

But the real special sauce of the Knights is there understanding of web culture. It's something that helps the finished product as well as shape the comedic tones and themes they explore in their videos.

Their newest video is a testament to that understanding as they celebrate "The New Dorks", the web entrepeneuer in their 20's/early 30's.

I love the video because its an accurate and funny celebration/satire on the growing community of web 2.0 entrepreneurs like myself.  I think the Silicon Valley startup web 2.0 culture is really something unique as well compelling. I could easily see a great movie, HBO or AMC series, or something of that nature being derived about this scene and era.

For now I'll settle for a great music video from the Knights and the occasional video by my other favorite musical act documeting tech culture, The Richter Scales.

Kudos to Grasshopper.com for sponsoring this video. Already in its first day, its approaching 100,000 page views and I am sure getting a lot of mentions in the blogosphere and Twitter. Glad to see the Knights getting more clients and the effectiveness of these viral campaigns helping them attract new customers.

About a year ago I offered Tas Melas and JE Skeets of The Basketball Jones my help in regards to working with advertisers and other possible business partners. They were gracious enough to allow the privilege of being involved and for a couple months I tried my best to connect them with potential advertisers, helped make them an official media kit, and did my best to generally educate them on the world of monetization of online media.

In the end Bloguin started taking up all my time and I was bummed that I couldn't see the project through to the end.

Today though I have a huge smile on my face (not literally because I got a bad cold right now), that those guys have finally have made taken this time consuming hobby to the next level and made it a full time thing for the whole gang.

For those who don't know TBJ, check out the video below

The Basketball Jones Demo Reel from The Basketball Jones on Vimeo.

For years these two friends and former classmates would wake up at the crack of dawn and record a podcast about the NBA. But it wasn't just a podcast, it was clearly much more as the two really put attention, research, and at times perfection into every nuance of the show. After a couple years, they moved to video all the while building their audience along the way.  The show was comical, the rappaport between the two was perfect, the production quality was high end, but most importantly the commentary was right on and very entertaining.

I met Skeets at Blogwold 2008 and started a full court press to get them to work with Yardbarker. This ended up being one of my most proud additions to the YBN. Still though, Yardbarker wasn't really focused on monetizing video content so when I found myself with some extra time on my hands, I tried my best to help the guys out mainly because I liked the show and thought they should be rewarded for their hard work. A part of me also knew they were somewhat of a barometer for the sports blogosphere.

Revision3 passed on them despite multiple inquiries from myself (cue, "I told you so" and "your loss"). Mainstream advertisers were interested but at the same time usually they like to work with major media companies and not independent outfits like TBJ. Their thinking is "If you have a big audience and are really popular and growing, then why don't you work with a larger company".

Its this type of thinking that makes Yardbarker's partnership with Fox, Yahoo's foray into sports blogging, Bleacher Reports's work with the pro leagues, and SB Nation's partnerships stand out as it is the first couple of steps of corporate buy in to the sports blogosphere.

What's amazing to me is that Skeets and Tas explored countless ways to further TBJ's potential and income with minimal success. Skeets had landed a dream position at Yahoo as the editor of Ball Don't Lie while Tas cobbled together an income through a myriad of sports journalism positions with The Score and Yardbarker among others. Their producer JD, had his hands full elsewhere and they were lucky enough to bring on an intern this season to help shoulder the load.

With years of not having a major break through, the team continued to wake up at the crack of dawn and pound out awesomeness for their large fan base. Yahoo and The Score both experimented and flirted with doing more with TBJ, but both never pulled the trigger on fully adopting the orphan show that was loved by tens of thousands.

That ended today, when The Score stepped up to the plate and announced The Basketball Jones crew will now be over at The Score.

This is very well deserved and as easy as it would be to say those goofballs up north got lucky, the truth is they worked longer on harder to make this happen than most people work on anything in their entire lives. It would have been easy to make the show weekly, a 5 minute show, or just give up entirely when someone passed on the show. Even easier, the duo could have settled into other roles as a nice compromise of doing something cool, but not 100% their dream in TBJ.

But the team preserved and got it done and I am proud and happy for them. Congrats guys! Below is their video talking about the new partnership and speaking about the times they could have given up on the show.

The Announcement from The Basketball Jones on Vimeo.

Skeets and Tas elude to improvements and more time to invest in the show. Glad to see Matt and JD coming along as well.

Curious to know if they technically sold The Basketball Jones to the Score or just partnered with The Score. I am guessing the ability to embed their podcasts will likely end, but hell that's a minor drawback to this big deal.

Another curious storyline unfolding is Y! Sports blogs, who I consider the best mainstream media blogging destination, losing another anchor blogger. Skeets' rationale for leaving is probably pretty easy to guess (more passion and loyalty to TBJ) but still this coupled with the fact that Eammon Brennan double dipped over at SB Nation before going to ESPN,  potentially casts shadow over at Y! Sports blogs.

Not to say that Y! Sports blogs isn't awesome, but maybe the compensation for the lead writers is possibly not where it should be considering how successful of a venture its been thus far. Maybe I am reading in between the lines too much, but something to keep an eye on as other opportunities present themselves to those guys.

In closing, many congrats to the TBJ crew. Knock em dead over at The Score!

Just wanted to write up a quick blog on WalMart purchasing Vudu for $100 million last week.

I've covered Vudu for awhile and was one of the first people to have the on demand video streaming box. I was really impressed with the business model, value proposition to consumers and studios, as well as the added benefits Vudu added to their product over time.

Initially Vudu launched with no HD, no television shows, no wifi, a modest hard drive, no adult content, and no integration with other web apps.

Fast forward to now where Vudu has HD and Blu Ray quality HD, a small collection of tv shows for download, wifi built in, a larger hard drive, adult content (Walmart has already turned that feature off.....per techcrunch you perv), and Vudu labs a collection of web apps like youtube and pandora.

Although I probably spent a good 4-8 hours watching content on my Vudu a month, one thing the startup didn't have was funding, marketing budget, and an install base that would let their digital rental and buying service break even.

In a good economy, I am sure Vudu would have been able to probably overcome these issues but with limited awareness for the product and retail distribution flat, the company opted to explore acquisition partners.

About a month back Walmart was rumored to be acquiring Vudu for $50 million. The final price tag was double that an indication that Vudu got another bidder to the table many of which believe to be was Cisco. Most likely Vudu was ready to take the $50 million but leaked the story in hopes of bringing another company to the table. In the scheme of things $50 million to Walmart and Cisco really isn't much at all.

So now what? Does this purchase make sense for Walmart?

I am biased since Vudu is probably one of my favorite possessions, but I see this being a good deal for Walmart. Most of the pundits disagree with me but lets put this in context here.

Walmart is one of the largest sellers of electronics in the world. Vudu was no longer pushing their boxes but rather televisions and Blu Ray players with Vudu streaming technology built in. If Vudu didn't have products coming to market from makers like Samsung, LG, Vizio, and Toshiba, then maybe this wouldn't make sense. However, Vudu has these partnerships lined up and a lot of these products will be at Walmart.

Getting a consumer to buy a Vudu box for $100-$200 is one thing. Getting a consumer to buy a television they were already going to buy which has Vudu integrated in it is a lot easier. Walmart can now market their new company as well as train their sales team to push Vudu enabled televisions to those interested over televisions that don't have the technology enabled.

In the end, Vudu ran into problems when they couldn't build awareness for their product and also the fact it was hard to find expensive to buy.  With Walmart now behind the company and a new fleet of televisions coming to market,  I look for Vudu to make significant inroads with consumers in 2010 and 2011.

I think television makers will also be more enthuiastic to integrate Vudu into their products knowing, Walmart is incentivized to push them in retail which also adds some more momentum behind this deal.

In the end, the metric that will really dictate whether this was a successful acquisition will not be the amount of units shipped, but the amount of households that utilize the Vudu functionality and the amount of movies rented or purchased. Its unclear just how aggressive Walmart will be in pushing Vudu to the next level, but given the hefty price-tag, the positive reaction people have to the product, and America's love affair for movies and convenience, its not hard to imagine this being a smart move that pays off down the line.

Does Charlie Daniels play a mean fiddle?

The Olympics and World Cup are great opportunities for advertisers looking to reach a large audience that generally skews more affluent and less male dominated compared to other sporting events.

Being a fiend for the Winter Olympics, I've logged some good hours consuming all things Olympics.

Thus far I'd say some of the big winners are Nike and Audi with a face palm for the obnoxious Geico campaign with the slick haired tough guy in a suit convincing you Geico can save you money.

Below is the Nike ad which has a lot of the qualities that Nike always brings to the table in commercials including a great soundtrack, visually compelling, and celebrity endorsements. I think what makes this commercial is the catchiness of the tune (Ali in the Jungle by the Hours) along with a great visual montage of training. Its something that makes an impression and I think using MMA and Rampage Jackson for the pivotal moment in the commercial was a great call that will really resonate.

The other brand that is impressing me is Audi and I've heard similar feedback echoing the sentiment.

The two ads they are currently running the most are blow.  Audi just seems to really have momentum in addition to being generally disruptive to other higher end auto mobile makers. The ads below have great production quality, show off almost the entire fleet of Audi cars, and plays off the social conventions attached to the ownership of certain luxury cars. From a brand perspective its very effective as Audi looks to get more traction with higher end consumers who may be waning on uniqueness of their current luxury car.

I remember my 6th grade Walk A Thon to raise funds for my school. Tasked with filling up a roster of people willing to sign pledge paper, I stalked my family and family friends looking for them to pledge an amount per lap that I walked.

Tapping my network of possible donors who didn't have their savings in a piggy bank required almost as much time and effort than the actual walking did. Even after the Walk A Thon, there was the somewhat awkward collection process of calling everyone up, telling them how much money to send and where. Given I solicited a lot of donations from some older folks who lived out of state, getting that donation back to my school could often be a bit of hassle as well.

Getting money for a charitable cause is never easy unless you're maybe a celebrity. Still though you have to look at how easy and efficient raising charitable donations has become via technology albeit at the cost of personal touch and inundation of charity requests in a given year.

Rewind 10 or even 5 years ago. If you were raising money for a cause, you'd probably talk to your friends, family, and co workers and would mainly utilize the phone to augment in your in person efforts.

Today requests for charitable donations can make their way to you through:

- email

- blogs you read

- Twitter

- Facebook (there are even third party extensions to help facilitate donations)

- Text messages

These methods are all in addition to the general web where people can request for donations through donation causes websites. In fact my sister for her birthday requested that I donate some money for books for her classroom. I was obliged to do it but snoozed a couple of hours in which time frame an anonymous donor saw her request and fully funded the purchase of hundreds of dollars of books.

And behind all the methods for you to market your cause, there are easy to make microsites to be a web hub for people who want to give or learn more. In previous years it was essentially easier to plead ignorance or forgetfulness when it came to the giving part after you were made aware of the cause. Now people can set up simple sites where all the info is laid out typically with a merchant account that can transact a payment.

Before the days of cell phones and computers, the amount of people you saw in a given week or had a memorized phone number for was probably somewhere between 1-100. Given many of you are like me and have hundreds of Facebook friends, the email addressees of hundreds/thousands of contacts, and have the phone numbers of various contacts saved to your phone, the reach of your message is inherently grown by just allowing yourself to utilize these tools to solicit donations.

If you think about this from a sales and marketing perspective, the amount of good leads you have contact information is multiples higher, the sales process is shorter, the marketing tools are greater, and the payment process is now built in.

With all these advancements for the better, unfortunately some of the charm of raising money for charity has been lost. I mean would you want the girl scouts to only take web orders? There is something natural in buying cookies from the Girl Scouts in person and encouraging them in their efforts and their affiliation for their group.

The Girl Scouts are not the best example as its a recreational group, but with every mass email, microsite, and 143 character Tweet, the request for a donation becomes less personal.

You're asking me for money, to support a cause, to give away some funds for personal use to support something you are involved with, and doing so in a a day and age where financial resources are meager and technology has propelled a much more frequent rate of donation requests.

At the end of the day, unless you are inclined to donate to all or none of the requests you field, it becomes a somewhat difficult decision making process.

The IT guy from 4 jobs ago is trying to feed poor kids

The girl I am FB friends with from college who I had a crush on but never asked out is raising money for cancer research.

The second baseman from my high school baseball team is raising relief money for Haiti.

These are all hypothetical but you get the point. You probably like all these people to some degree and who isn't supportive of cancer research, feeding kids, and rebuilding after a natural disaster?

At the end of the day your personal connection to me is probably the biggest indicator on if I'll donate money. After that, I really want to feel sold to. Why this charity? How did you get involved? Will you do it next year? How you been since high school? How much money are you trying to raise? How does the money help your cause?  Are you single and know I had a crush on you in college? Does philanthropy turn you on?

I guess what I am trying to say is that of late I've got a crap ton of requests to give a whole hell of a lot of people donations for a lot of greast causes. A good amount of them have been very cookie cutter pitches and I don't feel sold to.

While I am proud that you're doing something beneficial to society, I hope you'll take into consideration how competitive your request for donations is with others and will not remove the personal touch from the pre internet days. I'd also like to know that you're really emotionally invested in the cause you're involved with and not beefing up your MBA resume or just doing something because its something everyone at your office is doing.

Do that and you should be good. If not you better hope you're a babe from college who is turned on by philanthropy.

Back in the day when I was a Tour De Force in the blog world, I used to have a running feature, Commercial of the Week. I am now trying to get back to that and thought I would include one from this week's Super Bowl.

Being the tech nerd I am, I heard rumblings that Google was indeed going to have a commercial in the big game which is a huge break from the norm as the tech giant usually doesn't spend much or anything on advertising.

A lot of the Super Bowl commercials impressed me, but the Google one really stuck out. Call me a homer to Silicon Valley, but the sappy commercial was well executed and created an emotional connection with many of the people who watched it. Yes...search engine and emotional connections.

In fact a couple of young ladies at my house (not the Kirby vacuum girl), got a little teary eyed watching the commercial which blew my mind and took me back to Dumb and Dumber when Jeff Daniels and Jim Carey share a hearty cry while watching an ATT commercial.

Anyways, below is the commercial. I already used Google (sometimes Bing), but I can this ad getting some traction with the female audience. The fact they mixed in some nice product usability shots were a nice touch as well.

UPDATE: This is hilarious. Good work Slate, poking fun of Tiger.

A confident knock on the door followed by a door bell ring. Pop ins by my friends are rare but that's what my money was on. I was on the phone and passed it to my roommate while I investigated the unexpected visitor.

Lookin through my peep hole I made out the outline of a young attractive female. I couldn't make out who it was so I opened the door and was immediately pulled into some small talk with the young lady who I had never met before.

My first guess was realtor as they sometimes canvass the area and I've ran into a couple of attractive realtors in my neighborhood. Her opening line small talk piece was "I love your Element in the driveway. My roommate has one!".

She was spunky and I liked that, but it was not my Honda Element and rather my roommates which I told her. "Well we both have roommates with Elements!" she exclaimed.

She was growing on me as I began to realize the many things we could had common. But what did she want? It was then she dropped the hammer.

The auburn hair, energetic, personable, and good looking young lady was...... a Kirby vacuum salesperson.

These people are NOTORIOUS for  wasting hours of your time, ruining your day/life, and using pushy/shady sales tacticts that overstep bounds. They usually sell vacuums for over $1,000 and try to get you to finance it after watching hours of Billy Mays like demos. Don't believe me? Click on a link above or just google some stuff. These people suck and unfortunately I have had a couple friend get suckered into this racket.

She was about as good looking as this photo I have here of some random women holding a vacuum in a provocative pose. She had on a different outfit though although I am not 100% of that. Basically she was right in my sweet spot of "I think you're good looking, but not sooooo good looking that you're probably way out of my league. You're probably barely out of my league but close enough where I can fake being optimistic."

The staple of the Kirby sales pitch is just getting into the house. Once you're in, you've won half the battle and the war is going to last hours. So here I am at about 5pm with plans in about a hour. I have a good looking young lady at my doorstep (modern day Trojan horse) begging me to vacuum any room in my house for free.

I remember reading and hearing how bad these experiences were and being cognizant of the fact that I am a big pushover.  She just needed to do 25 demos in a day to get paid she claimed and that she would do a great job getting my carpets clean. I was having a Super Bowl get together within 24 hours so this was becoming enticing. Still though I knew that if she got past me there was a good chance I would be late getting out for the night and there was a decent chance I was going to buy a four figure vacuum.

I mustered up some strength and she got a little more pushy as well as flirty and even tried to make a move to get by me to check out the carpet. I held strong and after about 5 more minutes of nicely telling her no, she finally gave up and left.

While our relationship was short, the breakup was bad as she took back all her stuff.... and by stuff I mean the flyer she gave me. Who takes back fliers?

But it weighed on my heavily and I began to second guess my decision. Hot girl, wanting to clean my house,  good rapport, and lots of stuff in common like roommates automobiles. For hours I went through the scenarios and in the end I drafted this flow chart to map out the possible scenarios that could have happened. Follow the lines all of which have %'s next to them for % of likelihood of occurring when faced with a decision. Click Read more to see flow chart as its a little wide to see on my front page.

Let me know your thoughts on my decision in the poll on the side of this blog. If you can't make out the text just right click on the image and select "view image" to see it in its initial size.

Tonight I was really shocked to hear of what amounts to a major scandal in Silicon Valley involving the well read and tech thought leader, Tech Crunch.

TC is like candy for those of us who work in tech and its more like crack for those who work at startups or within the startup eco system. Younger startups lust for a coverage on the site and you can probably find a direct correlation between buzz, funding, etc, and Tech Crunch coverage.

Tonight the founder of TC announced that one of its many writers who also was employed by TC as an intern solicited coverage of emerging startups for kickbacks like high end electronics such as a Mac Book Air. The intern was terminated as described below. All of the interns posts were deleted as well.

"After an investigation we determined that the allegation was true. In fact, on at least one other occasion this intern was almost certainly given a computer in exchange for a post.

The intern in question has admitted to some of the allegations, and has denied others. We suspended this person while we were sorting through exactly what happened. When it became clear yesterday that there was no question that this person had requested, and in one case taken, compensation for a post, the intern was terminated."

Later the intern in question posted an apology on his personal blog, essentially identifying himself as the intern in question as he was not identified in the post over at TC.

How big is TechCrunch? The intern in questions name although NOT identified on Tech Crunch are two of Googles top ten search trends. That's a lot of people clicking on a link, finding out his name, and then Googling to learn more.

I thought the story was interesting as its text book story of someone extorting a "pay to play" tactic on an ambitious company. I wanted to do a little more research on the subject when I found myself a little curious as to just who this Daniel Brusilovsky is. Click Read more....