Mondelez Gives Middle Finger to Agencies, Moves to 120 Day Payment

Get a load of this insanity. Mondelez, that packaged goods company all the social media whiz kids love so much because it's behind Oreo, has now decided it will take 120 days to pay agencies and other suppliers. And get a load of this buzzword-laden bullshit a Modelez stament gives as reason for the move:

"We're continually looking to drive efficiency and improve our processes on a global basis. Extending our payment terms allows us to better align with industry and make sure we compete on fair grounds, while simultaneously improving transparency and predictability of payment processes."

Um, what?

You meant to say you're doing this to make your books look better, are able to spend more than you have and don't give two shits about how this will affect your agency partners.

If you don't have the money and can't pay for something then don't buy it in the first place. That'll make your books look better. Not fucking vendors up the ass by making them wait 120 days for payment.

And we wonder why this country is in so much debt.

On an up-note, this is great news for FastPay

Samsung Helps Guy Realize He's Got A Screw Loose

You've probably run into people like this before. And it's always an awkward encounter. Because you know they have are just whacked in the head. But you are kind and politely listen as they spout their inanities.

Like the guy in this Samsung commercial who thinks his stuffed animal dog is real. That is, until he saunters by a Samsung Premium Monitor -- with its super awesome, life-like picture -- and realizes he might want to have his head examined.

Tweets With Exclamation Points Get More Retweets!

Because these things actually matter and because there's a guy who love to dig into this stuff, we now know that tweets that include exclamation points get more retweets. However, thanks to Dan Zarrella's examination of 2 million link-containing tweets sent by accounts with at least 1,000 followers, tweets with exclamation points get fewer clicks.

Why is this data important when it's usually all about the click? Because sometimes it isn't. Sometimes all a brand wants to do is make it known something relevant to the brand and of interest to consumers is interesting. JCPenney hyping a sale. Southwest touting discount flights. Or CNN just trying to get a breaking story widely disseminated.

Coke Borrows From Disney's Fantasmic For Dublin Water Projection

Stealing an idea from Disney's Hollywood Studios Fantasmic water show projection (or whomever did it before them), Coke created its own water show projection at Dublin's Grand Canal dock last Friday to kick off their summer campaign.

People from around Ireland were prompted to share a coke with someone via Twitter and then have that converted to an aquatic message using a water projection.

As part of Coca-Cola's largest summer campaign to date, the 20 meter high and 40 meter wide water projection touted the launch of Share a Coke in Ireland, a campaign where the brand's 'Coca-Cola' script typography is replaced with the top 150 names in Ireland on 500ml bottles and sold in stores across the country.

Check out the video below.

How to Make Corporate Sponsorship Less Boring

This amazingly beautiful commercial makes mundane corporate sponsorship look like, well, much more than a simple exchange of sponsorship dollars. It touts the Qatar Foundation's support of the FC Barcelona soccer team.

The TBWA\Qatar-created commercial was shot in several locations in Barcelona, including the Telephonica Tower, the historic Gothic Quarter and FC Barcelona's practice stadium, Camp Mini. FCB players, including four-time FIFA Ballon D'Or award winner Lionel Messi, were also photographed on location at Camp Mini in between TVC filming sessions. Sports choreographer, Andy Ansah, was enlisted to work with the FCB players to capture of their best performances.

The spot was directed by first-time director Adam Swaab of Wolf & Crow, who brought to life objects representing aspects of QF's mission and make them travel from the main QF campus in Doha to Barcelona, where they become FCB players in the midst of a soccer match.

Really beautiful work.

Leaked Microsoft Video Mocks Google Chrome

You've gotta love these corporate videos that "leak" their way into the pubic. The latest, sent to us by a reader, comes from Microsoft which is out with a video that pummels Google's Chrome for its ubiquity, a quality Google has been touting as a positive.

Riffing off the original, Chrome: Now Everywhere, the Microsoft version claims Chrome is everywhere so Google can target you with ads as you move from device to device. The ad also attacks Google for knowing where you are, who you call, what you search for, what you watch, what you email, the contents of your chats, who your friends are and what you buy...all to make a profit off you.

The ad signs off saying "Chrome has you commercialized" and "Following You. Monetizing You. Now Everywhere."

One commenter backhandedly praised Microsoft writing, "It would be nice if Microsoft could put as much of the effort it puts into these videos into improving literally any of its products."

And so the battle continues.

Super Strange Chiropractor Ad Will Make You Cringe

Rhett & Link are at it again. After creating that incredibly weird Arlen's auto ad, the team is back with yet another cringe-inducing commercial for Ryan Lee Chiropractor Center. In the add, Lee can be seen manipulating women up close and personal in his office.

Now while we're sure the practice of chiropract...ology (?) certainly involves getting up close and personal with patients in order to properly snap and crack their bones but do we really need to see this in a TV commercial? It's almost like watching some twisted porn flick. Which, of course, is exacerbated by the fact all his patients appear to be hot females.

The video has been viewed over 1.3 million times so far on YouTube so clearly the word is getting out. And, perhaps, a few people have actually made an appointment with Lee. Weird as this commercial may be, Rhett & Link do seem to know what they are doing.

How Many Cars Has VW Destroyed to Make Its Ads?

This new Deutsch LA-created ad for the Volkswagon Passat will lull you into tranquility with its smooth montage of a man getting ready to go to work. He wakes up, kisses his wife, checks in on his son, carries him down the stairs, feeds him breakfast and then heads out to to his driveway where his Passat is parked.

And then...

All set to the tune of Lucky Man by Jim James of My Morning Jacket. The ad touts the vehicle;s top safety pick by the IIHS.

The was directed by Matthijs van Heijningen, who gave us the talking bear rug in "The Bear," the award-winning ad for France's Canal Plus.

Hey, didin't CP+B do this crash stuff before for VW?

Parkinson's Patients Create Ads For World Parkinson's Day

To promote awareness of World Parkinson's Day-April 11, 2013, Draftfcb + Shimoni Finkelstein Barki invited 18 different Parkinson's patients to create ads in their own handwriting. Each patient wrote the message 'Today is World Parkinson's Day' and signed their name under the headline. Their shaky handwriting created a graphic and self-explanatory way to express the degenerative effects of the disease and its effect on the lives of 20,000 patients in Israel.

Forget Likes. Learn How to Attract Paying Customers With Facebook

Did you know 67% of B2C companies and 41% of B2B companies have acquired customers from Facebook? That's a powerful statistic.

With over one billion people on Facebook, it's quite likely your brand can find customers too. Are you using Facebook as a customer acquisition tool yet?

In this HubSpot ebook, you will learn how to increase the ROI of your Facebook efforts and attract leads and customers through your campaigns. The ebook will walk you through the steps of planning, implementing, and measuring a successful organic and paid Facebook strategy.

After reading this ebook, you will be able to:

• Plan out a successful Facebook marketing campaign
• Segment your audience for best results
• Allocate budget aligned with your business's goals
• Analyze the success of your campaign in order to make improvements

Boombox Breakfast Gives Girl Giant Cereal Facial

This is, by far, the strangest, most disgusting and oddly sexual method ever used to sell cereal. Touting Curiously Cinnamon cereal, Boombox Breakfast features ex-footballer and presenter Chris Kamara pitting Latin lowrider Bobby against Dominica in a crazy game of oral cereal catching.

While Bobby is in his uber-hydraulic lowrider, Dominia is suspended over a large speaker in which Curiously Cinnamon cereal has been placed. As Bobby revs his lowrider, a microphone captures the sound which is then released via the large speaker. The cereal, of course, goes flying all over the place and Dominia is supposed to catch as many pieces in her mouth as she can.

Awkwardly, the whole things ends up looking like she received a giant porn facial. Hey, we just call it like we see it.

How to Play Tennis Using Twitter

Perhaps taking a page out of Philadelphia ad agency Neiman's playbook, We Are Social Paris has created a "Tweet and Shoot" campaign for financial services firm BNP Paribas. The campaign is tied to the French Open and number one French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Tweet and Shoot will a use a Twitter-controlled robot that launches tennis balls at him live on a court.

How it works:

- Three days before this year's French Open on May 23, fans around the world can go to http://tweetandshoot.wearetennis.com/ and log-in via Twitter. They can then drag-and-drop a tennis ball on a virtual on-screen tennis court to adjust the positioning of their shot to challenge Tsonga. The user's shot is then encoded as a hashtag and placed into a Tweet from them, to which they can add a personal message to Tsonga before it is sent.

- The on-court robot, connected to the internet and Twitter via 3G, will then select users' Tweets at random and fire tennis balls at Tsonga, with each shot mapped precisely to the positioning of each user's choosing.

- On May 23 at 11:00 am EDT, Tsonga will be on the tennis court and take on the shots fired at him by the robot. Fans will be able view the event on a live-stream at http://tweetandshoot.wearetennis.com/.

How this advances BNP Paribas' cause or gains them new customers is beyond us but it sure looks like fun!

Content Marketing Costs 62% Less Than Traditional Marketing

Content marketing is all the rage these days, right? It's the shiny new object everyone thinks is the bomb yet the practice has been around for decades in various different iterations. Well we aren't going to quibble over the fact most every "new thing" in marketing is simply a re-invention of something else. Nope, we're just going to hop right on the bandwagon with the rest of the lemmings and hype this thing until the next shiny new object appears.

So content marketing. Demand Metric has put together a fact-filled infographic with information from multiple sources on how content marketing has shaped up over the course of its short life.

Currently 90% of organizations market with content and spend 25% or their marketing budget to do so. Seventy eight percent of CMOs see content marketing as the wave of the future. While 91% of B2B companies and 86% of B2C marketers engage in content marketing, 62% outsource their content marketing to others.

Per dollar spent, content marketing generates about 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing and it costs 62% less.

Does it work? It would seem so. Eighty percent of people say they enjoy learning about a company through custom content, 90% find it useful and 60% seek out a product or brand after having read about it. And, 70% prefer to learn about a company through an article as opposed to an ad.

Done well, content marketing or the more complete approach of inbound marketing can, indeed, produce results. It's why companies like Pardot, HubSpot and Marketo have experience such dramatic growth.

Of course, not all content marketing is done well. In fact, just today, writing in Digiday, Jack Marshall highlights the many problems facing content marketing including cheesy lead generation schemes, poor content and companies like Taboola Marshall claims distributes content that's "not necessarily the type of content readers expect to arrive at when they click a link on Time.com that's titled 'You might also like,' and makes no indication that the placement is a paid one."

But, hey, there's always bad with the good right? There are always few who will always game the system or automate it in a fashion that ruins its true intent. So it's incumbent upon marketers to make the right choices when they decide with whom to spend their content marketing dollars. It's not so easy when there are so many reflections bouncing off the shiny new object but over time marketers' eyes will adjust (one hopes) and the right decisions will be made.

Holland Tells America What's Really Cool

The Dutch government, with help from Mustache, has launched Holland. The Original Cool. It's a 3-year joint effort sponsored by the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions, KLM Airlines, Schiphol Airport and Amsterdam Marketing and aims to increase tourism from America.

Informing America Holland isn't just flowers and windmills, a two minute video touts some of the things AMericans give fancy names to but are simply a way of life in Holland. It sure looks inviting to us.

Currently, the video sits in the number two spot on Reddit's video page.

Now You Can Have Sex Bareback...With A Condom!

Riffing off the term "bareback" which, of course, means going condomless during sex, Marcus Thomas is out with a campaign for the Okamoto Zero Zero Four condom.

Visualizing the fact the condom is just 0.04 MM thick, the agency has placed a translucent saddle on the back of a horse

Infographic Explores How Organizations Structure Social Media Teams

Web application and design company Go-Gulf has created an infographic which summarizes data from Ragan Communications on how organizations structure their social media teams. Sadly, it seems, social media is not yet seen as an integral component of an organization with 65% of companies reporting social media tasks being performed on top of current job responsibilities and 25% rely on interns to help with aspects of social media.

While 22% of companies plan to hire staff to handle social media, 78% do not. And of those companies that are hiring, 47% prefer 1-3 years of experience. As many companies haven't yet fully embraced social media and those that have do not appear to be giving much priority to it, it's not surprising just 5% of companies report being highly satisfied with their social media efforts.

In terms of social media success metrics, 86% of companies still measure ROI based on followers and likes. More encouraging, 40% base success on new leads and 31% attribute success based on sales.

Check out the infographic below for more details on how organizations are structuring social media teams