And with that, a hearty slap to your raised open hand. Huzzah.

It’s been the standard five months between posts so I thought I’d stop by and offer a bit of an update. In December, I started on as a staff writer at Canadian Business magazine. It’s been great so far and kept me a tad too busy to come by here and blather on. That’s why Twitter exists, right? (Right? Hmm.) Speaking of, my first story for CB looked at the latest hype around Internet IPOs. You can read “The New Dot-Com Boom” here and listen to the corresponding podcast here.

Now, if it’s June and you’re seeing that I wrote this in March — probably not a stretch — you’ll find all the latest stuff on the Canadian Business site, which is set to unleash its redesign sometime in April. Fancy.

It’s been a busy summer, but of course you wouldn’t know it by looking at this site. I’m still trying to figure out just how to use this space in the blind hope that a defined purpose might actually result in something remotely interesting. I bow my head in mild shame that it’s been void of any original content and simply served as a dumping ground for various bits I’ve written elsewhere.

Much of my work for Marketing mag can be found here. The last feature posted online (from the July print issue) talks about the changing relationship between Canadian production companies and ad agencies. The most up-to-date stuff is still in print-only for now, but that should change once the Marketing site gets overhauled by the end of the year.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue the quest to discover just what the sweet hell this site is for, which I suspect might involve a hearty amount of tinkering. Huzzah.

When the weather starts to warm up, it puts one’s mind to the outdoors, which then leads to patios, which then leads to beer. Not only is spring the season of blooming flowers and outdoor boozery, it’s often when we get a slew of new beer commercials to get folks stoked for summer. This put me in a nostalgic mood and I decided to take a stroll down beer commercial memory lane. It’s a magical land of jingles, dancing, stubbies, boats, camping in the wilderness and hair farms. Walk with me…

For the whole thing, go here.

Salutations and good day…

I just wanted to drop a note to let you know that this will be my last week at Advertising Age.

After more than three years in New York, my wife and I have decided it’s time to take our recently-arrived son back north to a place many Americans refer to as “that big gray blank space above us on the map,” but what we like to call “Canada.”

Don’t worry, I haven’t crafted some hackneyed, Didionesque rant about my time here, but will say it’s been a hell of a good time working with the classy folks at Creativity and AdAge over the last few years. A particular thanks to Teressa Iezzi for hiring a fellow Toronto ex-pat with no fixed address or experience covering the ad industry, back in 2006.

By the time February starts, I’ll be back in Toronto and a staff writer at Marketing magazine. I’m excited to start work with the crew there and continue talking about the interesting, inspired and insidious ways that business and popular culture cross paths.

So thanks to everyone I’ve worked with and covered so far, please stay in touch and keep me posted on your adventures. I’ll still be wandering the interwebs here, as well as @jeffcbeer, while the sports-related ramblings continue at The Cheap Seats. You can also reach me at theycallmebeer@gmail.com.

And with that, a gentlemanly slap to your raised open hand.

huzzah,
jeff

Last week, I wrote in Ad Age about the coming third annual NHL Winter Classic and how it’s become a very important brand for the league. The consensus among U.S. ad buyers, NBC execs and the NHL itself was that the game had put hockey into a lot of business conversations that it previously hadn’t been a part of. It’s elevated the NHL’s status (at least in the US) by creating a meaningful event that’s acted as a magnet for casual fans and marketers. Yeah, yeah, feel good hockey stuff, right?

Well, while the game and event itself may be bullet-proof — how else would you describe a game at Fenway Park between the Boston Bruins and Philly Flyers on New Year’s Day? — the newly unveiled commercial made to promote it is not. As I said in today’s Cheap Seats entry, I get it, I know what the folks at the NHL’s ad agency Y&R were going for. It’s the modern rink-morphs-to-frozen-pond thing. Makes total sense. Except the end result is just utterly lacking any sort of emotion, be that nostalgia, adrenaline, humor, anything. This is hockey. The ads for a game like this in a city like Boston should feel more like a punch to the face than a long-distance phone commercial.

In that same Cheap Seats bit, I say they should’ve looked at favored Beantown sons and sports fans the Dropkick Murphys. The band’s played at Bruins games before, has a few Bruins-flavored tunes and rocked the Red Sox theme for the team’s historic 2004 World Series run. And they’re insanely popular in that city. You couldn’t find a better fit for a musical hockey/Fenway/hometown hero hat-trick. So until that puck drops and interrupts our New Year’s hangover, we’ll have to make do with this:

Although this is, technically, a personal site, I’m not really of the online type to regale you with tales of my toothbrushing technique or why tomato soup is my favorite of all the warm, fluid-like lunch options. But! Last Wednesday my son Henry was born. And seeing as he’s not unlike many a newborn, my activity here will probably be somewhat interrupted by this sudden and vigorous change to my daily life. But don’t worry, I’ll adapt soon and eventually you’ll see just as many infrequent updates here as before. Besides, wouldn’t you rather just read the twitter version? (Pssst, it’s on the right.) huzzah!

This week, AdAge published my piece on the various marketing efforts behind “Where The Wild Things Are,” particularly those involving or influenced by the film’s director Spike Jonze. I was disappointed not to get in touch with Capt. Jonze himself, but had some great conversations with Girl Skateboards co-founder Megan Baltimore, artist and designer Geoff McFetridge and Vice/VBS creative director Eddy Moretti. Interested? Check it out here.

Let’s just begin under the obvious assumption that 99% of advertising is utter bile. So, any criticism leveled at Fallon London director/creative/wizard Juan Cabral must be taken with the proverbial bucket of salt. Cabral is the guy responsible for some of the best Fallon creative over the last few years (also the worst, read: Trucks), starting with Balls, moving on to Paint, then Play-Doh, a quick diversion over to Cadbury for a Gorilla and now back to Sony. With Soundville.

Creativity has a great Q&A with Cabral about this latest effort, the details of which I’ll leave for you to go there and read, but rest assured it’s all very cool, eclectic, original and creative. (Cliff Notes: Town of 400 in Iceland hooked up with speakers for a week, all set up with the help of Sigur Ros technicians. All the bells and whistles. Hot. Shit.) And yet, in the end, I can’t help but feel like the story, effort and general creativity behind the idea come off more impressive than the actual film. All these snazzy background details go a long way to give industry nerds and creative folk an adverchubby, but will it really get Tommy Whogivesasweethell to buy a Sony over a Samsung? Is that even the point?

With something like Balls, Paint and Play-Doh (KozynDan controversy aside), the visuals and/or music pretty much grab the viewer by the throat and force them to pay attention. A relatively quick payoff, is what I’m saying. Here, we have a moody, mellow, surreality that doesn’t quite pack the same punch. Don’t get me wrong, I dig trippy atmospheric hoo-haa as much as the next rube, but am I quite ready to trot out and buy a TV any time soon? I like to think I support brands who in turn support creative endeavor. Hell, there’s a reason I smell like my grandfather. But I’m not quite sure this one will hit the high watermark set by Cabral’s earlier efforts.

All that said, let’s not get bogged down in how this affects sales numbers and those sorts of dirty ins and outs. In the interest of raising the overall bar of ad creative, I tip a pint to Mr. Cabral, Fallon and Sony and say, in the words of the great Ernie Anastos, “Keep fuckin’ that chicken.”

As the 2009/2010 NHL season approaches, Toronto Maple Leafs fans (once again) prepare themselves for the unknown. While, as the late, great Joe Strummer said, the future is unwritten, a new book by two Hogtown scribes examines the sins of Leafs past to get a hint at where the club should head in the years ahead.

Leafs Abomination: The Dismayed Fan’s Handbook to Why the Leafs Stink and How They Can Rise Again by Dave Feschuk and Michael Grange is like a painful intervention. Far from having a grudge against the Leafs or their fans, the book does a great job of simply lining up all the facts – like a four decade long buffet of hockey incompetence and underachievement.

As a Leafs fan, it’s a lot like waking up hungover and having your friends recount every single transgression from the previous evening’s events in horrifying detail. I slept with who? In the ladies’ room? I drank pure gasoline? We killed a goat in ritual sacrifice in the backyard? Now imagine that night was 40 years long.