There used to be a backlash against showing the huge ugly logo of a company in the ad …in the late eighties, I believe. That was a reaction to the ‘branding’ mantra.

Now there’s a return to stealth branding, thanks to YouTube and viral distribution.

This ad –if you can call it that — for Levi’s features no close-up shot of the label. Just a few guys doing stunts, diving into their brand, that make it extremely watchable. It has been viewed over two million times todate.

Gawker makes an interesting comparison between Levis and Ray-ban about how the stunt is such a formula for going viral today.

Looks like the idea of hiding the logo has gained vogue, telling us something: People are tired of logos masquerading as ads. A logo is nothing, if it does not give you a reason why to buy or subscribe. I don’t use Skype over Google talk because of the cool blue logo. They can hide it from my call interface for all I care. (It’s so tiny, I don’t even notice it is there.) They have made the experience worth coming back to, and paying for, in my case.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of the new book, Groundswell, are asking readers to send in short reviews via Twitter.

“We love bloggers reviewing the book, but you may not have a blog, or have time to write a few paragraphs. So why not make it easy. Twitter your review,” they urge.

With Craig Newmark (Graig’s List), Steve Rubel and Guy Kawasaki already endorsing the book with their ‘mini reviews’ that could be a bit daunting…

“Steve Jobs doesn’t need sa sales force because he already has one: employees like the ones in my company.”

Mark Slada, CIO of a company in Johannesburg, in a Businessweek story about how more businesses are demanding Macs in the workplace.

“Journalistically, going alomng with such an arrangement would be completely inappropriate. I agreed immediately.”

E.J. Montini, columnist in the Arizona Republic, on not mentioning the name of someone selling T-shirt with the name of each soldier killed in Iraq, with the words “Bush lied, they died.”

“Pardon Our Dust“

Brian Lusk, Manager of Corporate Communication, at Southwest Airlines, on the relaunching of the blog Nuts About Southwest, this week.

“The final piece in the digital jigsaw.”

ITV chairman, Michael Grade, on FreeSat, the free digital television service from ITV and BBC, launching this week.

“It’s becoming clearer that paper is holding news delivery back in other ways … I’m about ready to admit that the Web isn’t just another outlet for newspapers; it’s becoming better than print.”

Seth Grimes, an analytics strategist, commenting on The NewYorkTimes.com use of a new form of visualization to show relationships in a graphic that’s interactive.

“The Internet is the shortest, hardest wall against which your voice will echo back.”

Stephen Colbert. Enough said!

Very happy to be able to break the story about a pandemic flu exercise we conducted here at the Decision Theater at ASU.

It was an exercise that worked on several levels:

• Strategic Planning
• Testing Scenarios
• Communicating with multiple groups
• Testing a plan through systems dynamic model

I am in the Communications business, so I was keenly observing how different players interacted, assumed leadership positions, and communicated from within the ‘crisis.’

I was lucky to be the fly on the wall (the camera-toting fly, that is) so it got me thinking of the parallels there were for businesses. How do organizations communicate and act in a crisis? As in any marketing campaign or business crisis, the war room is staffed by team members who are are suddenly confronted with the need to operate without the usual props. They may have Blackberries, but the information is coming at them fast and furious through other channels. They may have strong opinions, but so too do the people across the table.

Then there was the interesting irony of some having too much information (mock TV news updates, threat levels, a web cam feed, fact sheets etc) on one side of the room, and others deprived of the usual sources of information (CNN, RSS feeds, radio etc) –all this according to plan. We hosted this event in two areas. Emergency Ops was situated in the ‘drum’ -the high-tech room with a 260-degree panoramic screen, laptops etc. Incident Command and the Executive Policy Group were situated in an adjacent conference room, tethered to the drum via a live camera feed and a land line. No cell phone communication was allowed between the rooms.

Communicators often face situations like this, albeit not in the same life-threatening context. How does a team of those representing PR, Marketing, Advertising, Web Design, HR, IT and Legal Affairs work in crisis mode, in a compressed time frame, when they barely talk to each other in normal life? We seldom act out scenarios, assuming bad things won’t happen to us. History tells us otherwise.

Unless we plan for these hypothetical ‘pandemic’ events we won’t really know. That’s the deeper meaning of strategic planning, isn’t it?

Larry Lessig never ceases to impress. This week the Harvard law professor, blogger, author, and authority on intellectual property rights went off the grid to spend time with family.

So he effectively put up a ‘closed for business’ sign on his blog.

Lessig calls it a “tiny compensation for (almost) spending more time on the road than at home each year.”

Follow up to my post on storytelling using higher form of visualization. The New York Times online has started using some really mind-blowing graphics that go beyond illustrating the story. I am not even sure we could call this treatment information graphics.

Take a look at this story on disease and genetics. Redefining disease, genetics and all. The story is about disease mapping, and the illustration literally maps what disease mapping could look like visually.

You can click on Myocardial Infarction (geeky word for heart attack) and it pops up a magnifying glass that you can then move around so it shows you the relationship between the disease and, say stroke, and SARS.

This is what great story telling online has been missing –creating an experience plus context that makes it engaging, and easy to grasp quickly.

Adidas created a ‘left foot, right foot‘ event that was a brilliant way to inspire young people and be creative, without needing to run ads belaboring the point.

Called “Superstar,” it involved taking two oversized shoes –really oversized ones– and asking artists from the East Coast (the right shoe) and the West Coast (the left shoe) to customize each. Then they brought the pair together.

Lots of visual appeal, a fun event, and unlike a lot of ‘about us’ advertising, it’s breaks through the clutter.

I love bizAZ magazine for many reasons. It is local, and it is laid out for people on the move –literally and figuratively.

So I am very proud to write for the magazine, covering the technology space. This story about mobile marketing agency, Blumo, was published in the March-April issue, and also in AZCentral.com.

Read article here.

I keep hearing how bad customer service is, but I cannot help bumping into some great stories.

So this one about “magically appearing” paper-towels in the restroom as part of a corporate culture at Southwest Airlines was an eye-opener.

A simple pay-it-forward principle that is not the stuff of an employee handbook, but makes a huge difference.

I wrote this article, titled “Great picture, but what’s your story?” for Communication World magazine, based on a post here on the blog. Actually three posts. This, this and this.

This is a perfect example of the ROI (if you will) of my blog. It’s place where I test ideas out in a short post which gathers steam and based on online and off line conversations, and the idea quickly takes on a second life as a column.

Download article here.