Stardust Gets Sentimental, Launches Creative Montage on .tv

Having been among the first to leap onto the .tv train in 2005, Stardust has just posted a 2007 montage of its ads on the homepage.

Before we even go into the montage, Stardust.tv by itself was given the Favourite Website Awards Site of the Day in November as well as the 2005 Tween Award for Best Reel.

This kind of news typically means jack to us but after watching the montage, we're inclined to disagree with our first inclination.

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Actions Speak Louder than Clicks; or, The Prodigal Brand

My last ad:tech session of the week was Actions Speak Louder than Clicks: Exploring the Laws of Relationship Marketing.

Okay, relationship marketing. I hope you've got a pair of Chuck Taylors on hand.

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Got Cash? Get Drunk on an Amtrak

For GrandLuxe ticketholders on the California Zephyr, which brings the plush from Chicago to San Francisco; or equally cushed-out Southwest Chief (Chicago to LA) or Silver Meteor (moving between DC, Miami or Orlando) riders, Amtrak has a thirst-quenching proposition: a $100 per person credit for alcohol between November and January.

And yes, that includes hard liquor (unlike that one party we attended for ad:tech the other night), and yes, it's on top of dinner wine already included in the cost of the ticket.

This draw for alchy-kind was bound to piss somebody off, and MADD, of course, was high on the list. Spokeswoman Misty Moyse says, "This sounds like a lot of credit toward possible overindulging."

But hey, nobody on the train is driving (that's their whole shtick, right? Drunk driving?), so we say MADD's overstepping its bounds.

Do shoe salesmen tell the cufflinks guys how to do their jobs? No.

Newsflash! Jeep Secretly Landed on Moon With Astronauts

Brent Terrazas has provided us with an analysis of the new Cutwater-created campaign for Jeep, part of which includes a :60 spot called Heritage that shows us the 66 year history of by digitally manipulating images of past Jeep models with historical images from the time of the model. You'll see Jane Goodall, Elvis, Godzilla, lunar landings, Woodstock, the Road Runner, Devo, Lost, and more. The effects, courtesy of PLANK and The Mill, are just as eye tricking as Cutwater's recent Rayban work. We like.

Bloggers Build DIY Network 'Blog Cabin'

For those of you tracking the many purposes a weblog can serve, you can now add house building to the list. DIY Network will air a new show August 16 at 9PM called Blog Cabin which will document the building of a log cabin which was built with guidance from bloggers contributing a DIY Network weblog over the course of several months. From roof style to window selection to fireplace, bloggers logged over 4 million suggestions and votes during the project. They even alerted the apparently forgetful building crew a window had not yet been installed. Check out the entire project here.

Hawaiian Coffee Gets Parachute Treatment

Starbucks has done it. Microsoft has done it. Why not Coffees of Hawaii? Guerrilla Communications created a "fall from the sky" (sort of) campaign for the coffee maker which draped parachute-wearing packages of coffee throughout neighborhoods, shopping plazas and tourist attractions in and around Atlanta and Chattanooga. Free coffee? What's not to love?

Bugaboo Gets Fly On Stage For Bee

If you've never thought of a baby stroller as a stage prop for a choreographed dance sequence, you will now after watching this 72andSunny-created video for Bugaboo Strollers in which a group of fours dads go all Broadway to demonstrate the Bugaboo Bee's cool factor. It's not your average stroller commercial and that's a very good thing.

If Only the Commute Were Always This Cool

If only New York's trains were actually this cool all the time. Deutsch (yes, they still do stuff) tricked out Grand Central Shuttle trains for Westin Hotels making the train interiors look like the Caribbean, the rain forest and Iceland. Very cool stuff. Check it out here.

We Don't Have a Search Beast; We've Got an Ego Vacuum

On Wednesday morning at ad:tech in Chicago, I hit Managing the Search Beast, the first of the several SEM seminars I masochistically slated myself to take.

It was one of those seminars in which a speaker like David Doucette feebly tries pushing product (the Fairmont Hotel and Resorts) while the audience, every member of which thinks it's smarter than he, attacks with questions that, if you've ever worked in SEM, you know nobody knows the answers to.

And they're simple questions: "How did you track that social networking effort?" and "How do you prevent against click fraud?"

The crickets chirp in response. It's not that there aren't any answers; it's that marketing and sales guys rarely have a true sense of what's happening on the back-end when it comes to SEO. They pull the numbers from IT and that's the deepest it gets.

This is one reason why search engine marketing (poetically) highlights the growing tensions between marketing and tech.

You think Boyz n the Hood was scary? You've probably got similar tensions running between creatives and devvies - except without guns, and possibly more animosity.

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Smirnoff Debuts Tea Partay Sequel, 'Boyz N The Hillz'

Perhaps it's because we're squarely East Coast. Perhaps it's because sequels rarely, if ever, surpass the greatness from which they spawn. Perhaps its that we're much more prep at heart than West Coast Whacked. Perhaps it's just that this JWT New York-created Smirnoff Tea Partay sequel, Boyz in the Hillz, simply isn't as good as the original.

Oh sure, it rips West Coast oddities just as the original ripped East Coat preppy life but it doesn't seem to have the wit of the original. Of course, we could be completely wrong and this sequel may go on to garner millions more views than the millions the original achieved. Time will tell. But according to East Coast Tea Partay frontman Prescott, "those West Coast rappers are whacked, yo!"