Connectiviy issues + babysitter woes = no blogging

Hi guys, just wanted to say that sorry to be so remiss on the blogging front this week. Had double trouble with my ongoing connectivity problems and then facing a sudden childcare gap. Hopefully in the next week or two it will all be better.

Even speechless, still love Mac ads

I couldn't even get the sound to work and yet I'm still a sucker for Mac vs. PC ads. Interesting that The New York Times would let anything resembling editorial that's actually an ad to appear on its home page. Then again, that PC is so cute, and inept! Irresistible!

Yahoo hiring Bradford: a good thing

I have to admit to deriving some pleasure from Yahoo's hiring of ex-Microsoft ad sales chief Joanne Bradford to replace that search guy. It hardly means that Yahoo is now in the clear, but no matter how much emphasis Yahoo has tried to put on search in its quixotic quest to be a true rival to Google, having someone from the search ad business replace Wenda Harris Millard seemed like a non-starter from the get-go. Bradford, like Millard, understands the mainstream advertiser mindset, and since their embrace of online advertising, and search in particular, is still a work in progress, much better to have someone in the top job who gets where the people they are selling to are coming from. Good luck, Joanne, and as for the people at Yahoo, I hope this is the first sign that you're moving in a new, right direction.

Whoa! Cool! Electronic paper

Been wondering for awhile what the hell electronic paper is, and thanks to 3-minute Ad Age, I finally know. It's gracing the front cover of the 75th anniversary edition of Esquire, and required what looks to be a whole bunch of Elmer's Glue, some refrigerated trucks and an advertiser--in this case Ford--which has a literally flashy inside cover ad for the Ford Flex. The guy Ad Age interviewed from Structural Graphics, Michael Maguire, envisions a day when this will be commonplace. We'll see. When you see the footage of workers physically pasting pieces together, one-by-one, makes you wonder how this would ever scale. BTW, Good to see that Abbey Klaasen, an actual Ad Age reportetr, is doing anchor duties on 3-minute Ad Age. Nothing really bad about the guys who usually do it, but they're mere headline-readers, who wouldn't know Lee Garfinkel from Art Garfunkel. Ha!

Slow on the search for Palin

Woke up this morning and saw what I didn't see yesterday: search ads bought off the keyword "Sarah Palin." Doesn't that seem incredibly slow on the uptake to you? By my precise calculations, it's been about 10 days since she was nominated for VP. Can't say how quickly or slowly sponsored links showed up next to Joe Biden's name after his nomination, because I never checked. But as the candidates themselves would probably say, it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. I think a few people had heard of Joe Biden before his nomination.

Where are the Monday morning picks?

Hi all. I'm on a deadline today for people who actually pay me, so sorry there's no picks to be had. I'll get to 'em when I get to 'em.