I noticed recently that Meebo launched a new product with Talib Kweli’s new album drop campaign as its very first sponsor. Hunh, cool. Then I started realizing that Last.fm was serving a banner advertising the new album, called Ear Drum, on pages that belonged to people who’d listened to Talib recently. Or perhaps just people who had him as a favorite artist at all, or had any of his songs maybe. Not sure. And it seemed to me that this was the only banner getting served like that – I wonder if more examples are out there.

So, great job, Talib Kweli’s business development team (or maybe the label’s media buying team?). I love the willingness to jump into new mediums and untapped markets, where results aren’t easily measured – it really shows that you aren’t driven bottom line by hard and fast instant returns. It’s more organic than that.

Oh, and it completely reminded me that Talib Kweli had a new album out, and then it made me wanna go get it… and then it made me actually go get it. Bravo. The album is great.

This game is absolutely fascinating in the way it forces you to navigate through the questions. It reminds me of the book Thinkertoys. It’s all interesting stuff when you think about it in relation to behavorial patterns, habits, creativity, first impressions, human nature – and then, further along the marketing path, you can apply this stuff to customer behavior, eyetracking, purchasing patterns, seasonal trends, and so on.

But even on its own, it’s just great. So genius, creative, off-the-wall, and such a good example of paranoiac thinking in general. Which is really the only type of thinking that will keep you up til 4:30 in the morning writing a marketing blog.

From the above-linked Wikipedia entry:

The aspect of paranoia that Dalí was interested in and which helped inspire the method was the ability of the brain to perceive links between things which rationally are not linked. Dalí described the paranoiac-critical method as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.”

Nice.

I’m not sure I want to stick to pop culture in marketing so much as I want to get to the nuts and bolts pieces of marketing. The little things that add up. The way that all of life is marketing in one way or another. We’re all selling something, to be quite honest. I always think it’s important to look at the similarities and the building blocks in life. Connections. You know what they say these days in web 2.0 – every brand is a conversation, blahblahblah. And those are more things I want to talk about, as well! Branding, taglines, etc. So much to expound on, so little time! Thank God I finally got off my ass and started a blog – my friends and coworkers were getting sick of me.

“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful.” – Emerson