Howard Johnson started its "Go happy. Go HoJo" campaign a few weeks ago, and despite it being one of the oddest hotel campaigns out there, no one really seemed to notice. Only 300 YouTube views in three weeks (10 of which are mine)? Maybe it's because the art director looked at all the options and s...

Despite the totally hip vests and fashionable shoulder sashes, membership in the Girl Scouts has been steadily falling in the U.S. in recent years. So, last year the Girl Scouts hired Laurel Richie, a former senior partner at Oglivy & Mather, to reinvigorate the G.S. brand, and now she’s bring...

Tween Brands Inc. and Philadelphia ad agency Red Tettemer have spewed forth yet another tween virtual world, just a few weeks after Disney XD burst onto the scene. This one's dying by design. ScapeNation is your standard build-an-avatar, play-games, win-points world, but with a twist: It's being des...

Kit Kat has dropped a few human vending machines into London's Victoria Station as part of its new U.K. campaign. The human vending machine isn't new—the Japanese, always first in all things vending machine, have employed them. But this execution really fits nicely with Kit Kat's "Working like a m...

After a few years of smaller Electronic Entertainment Expos, organizers of the gamer conference have rolled out a bunch of changes aimed at returning to the glory and pomposity of riotous 2006. Apparently, the exhibitor list is over three times last year's size and growing, and the invitation-only p...

I love watching Disney do its youth marketing thang because it does it so darn well. Seeing that its audience was starting to skew towards girls (that whole Disney Princess thing might have had something to do with it), Disney has launched its new Disney XD cable channel, and accompanying Web site, ...

A new study by researchers at RTI International claims that the "Truth" national youth anti-smoking campaign prevented 450,000 youngsters from smoking from 2000 to 2004. During that time, the campaign spent $245 million on television advertising. That works out to $544 spent on each successful inter...

After putting out several hundred trailers with slight variations, creating a vast slew of "official" posters, animating the Black Freighter subplot and bundling it as an extra DVD along with a movie adaptation of Under the Hood (the first Nite Owl's tell-all book), publishing an art book, and creat...

Yesterday, following serious allegations that Chris Brown beat the snot out of his outrageously hot girlfriend Rhianna right before the Grammy Awards, causing both of them to cancel their performances, Wrigley's Doublemint Gum said it was suspending Brown's Doublemint ad and all the marketing involv...

I'm sure you've all been following the Jessica Simpson weight-gain freakout that's been momentarily distracting the media from the economy. If not, peep this link. Now, consumer brands are coming out in support of Jessica. Jenny Craig's vp of marketing has released a statement saying the company is ...