Al Gore sure loves advertising

OK, so now I see why the ad industry can't get rid of Al Gore: the guy's about to launch an ad campaign to tell us what to do to stop global warming, and he's going to spend $100 million to $200 million a year to do it, according to this story. Maybe I just haven't been paying attention, or, more likely, I'm suffering from Al Gore burnout now that the guy has appeared at Cannes, and just last week at Google's Zeitgeist, the ANA conference and also, in his spare time, won the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, here's a guy who could hang out with anyone he wanted—with the probable exception of Dubya—but apparently actually likes to hang out with people in advertising. Anyway, the campaign is from The Martin Agency, and, if his ANA speech is any indication, expect lots of TV. Gore said that, "Television still works more powerfully than anything else by far." I'm not sure he's right, but hey, it's not my $100 mill. BUT, WAIT, THERE'S MORE: I kinda forgot about the Current TV thing when I wrote this last night. The guy has more reasons to love the ad biz than Don Draper.

'Cavemen' first pilot headed for extinction

So, you may have read that the producers of the already-questionable ABC sitcom, "Cavemen" are reshooting the pilot, which the network acknowledged yesterday. The problem, allegedly, is that while it's one thing for a caveman in a Geico commercial to bemoan his second-class status in the modern world, it's another thing to turn a sitcom about cavemen into "an ambitious allegory about race." Ya think? While spending way too many of my highly-evolved brain cells thinking about this, I actually tried and succeeded in finding a snippet of the old pilot on YouTube, which is posted above. Maybe you've seen it, as somehow I feel like all 6,000 people who've already viewed it are associated with the ad industry, and/or The Martin Agency. But if you haven't seen it, take a look. It's not as though this particular 38 seconds is that bad, it's just that it seems, in this brief moment alone, to work in every joke that might be told about how to work the term "Cro-Magnon" into contemporary culture, such as, "I like big Mags and I cannot lie." Argh.