That headline probably sounds like a joke. Maybe it is. After all, it was in the “Gossip” section of <a href=http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/r_m/2007/03/26/2007-03-26_jacko_looks_for_a_jackpot_in_vegas_with_.html”>The New York Daily News…

Michael Jackson has been reviewing plans for a 50-foot robotic replica of himself should he launch a show there.

“It would be in the desert sands,” said Mike Luckman of Luckman Van Pier, consultants to large entertainment companies. “Laser beams would shoot out of it so it would be the first thing people flying would see. Neon is wonderful, but it’s old school.” Luckman’s partner, Andre Van Pier, who designed the futuristic spacesuits worn recently by Bono and U2 at a benefit concert in New Orleans, designed the robot. He has also sketched out a stage set of a giant audience-interactive video game with human cyborgs controlled by the audience. Said Luckman: “Michael’s looked at the sketches and likes them.”

“Gossip” section notwithstanding, consider that we are talking about Vegas here.

Sam Ford at MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium has recently started blogging a four-part serial on cereal marketing. The first addresses an academic article recently published in Journal of Popular Culture entitled “Tricksters and the marketing of breakfast cereals.” Other parts focus on store presentation, web sites, and the Kellogg characters themselves.

If you have known me for a while, you may understand how I might have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I am kind of kicking myself for letting other people beat me to this. I could have written this sort of thing. I have been saying for years that cereal mascots are based on mythic trickster figures, I myself having been raised on a steady diet of sugary cereals and lots of courses on various mythologies. (I read Old Norse myths in Old Norse, for goodness sake!) The author of the aforementioned academically published article even recalls when the Trix Rabbit won a bike race and kids were given the option to call in and vote whether he’d get the prize (a trophy full of Trix). I am amazed that others managed to leverage those bizarre, detailed memories into something that advances an academic career, and I’m crestfallen that I missed my chance.

On the other hand, I find it exceptionally difficult to discuss the issues related to this in a serious fashion, which probably would have impeded my ability to actually write such an article. When children decided that the Trix Rabbit should win the bowl of Trix, how could I describe his reaction without using the phrase “insane cereal orgasm”? Would I be able to address other mascots without an over-the-top, intentionally exaggerated analysis of Cookie Crisp’s gradual shift from the Cookie Cop’s role as protector to oppressor (all the while still a blatant Irish stereotype), denying cereal access to a sympathetic Cookie Crook with a dog sidekick (Chip), finally resulting in the unmasked dog’s solo career (“Coo-OOOO-kie Crisp!”)? How can I even discuss such characters at all without noting that the phrase “Trix are for kids” is eerily similar to “voting is for men” or “marriage is for straight people”? (Actually, maybe that one is only funny until you really start to think about it.)

Ultimately, perhaps I should just be glad that someone else is working on this stuff so that I don’t feel like I have to. Back to writing about comic books and video games for me.

As some of you know, Doombot is built on a foundation of trust, honor, and Kai’s free web space. When the internet was young—back when you might have insisted upon spelling it with a capital “I,” and seriously wondered whether “a series of tubes” was just a funny metaphor or God’s honest truth—Kai joined a collective of web developers maintained by a fellow who owned a hosting company. It seems almost sinful not to use that free space, so we slowly fill it with blog posts about TV shows and video games. But why not, you may ask, come up with a way to leverage that for some cash?

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This post has been updated. Also, I failed to get the anchor linking to the bottom of the page to work. Sorry if this post shows up about fifty times in your RSS reader.

In the wake of yet another widely-slammed Sony PSP viral marketing campaign (the earlier one involving graffiti that attempted to circumvent billboard regulations), Penny Arcade offers a useful distinction between viral marketing and guerilla marketing:

We need to distinguish between “viral” marketing and “guerilla” marketing. The reality is that no agency can create viral marketing, this is the sole domain of the consumer. Viral marketing is what happens when a campaign works – when we allow their message to travel via our own superefficient conduits. Perhaps it is entertaining on its own terms, divorced from the message. Perhaps it is a game or a story, like I Love Bees or other ARGs, where we take ownership in it. What distinguishes this from Guerilla Marketing is that we are aware of the message. When we are not aware of the message, or when the agents of the message misrepresent themselves, we call this “deception.”

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Over the years, an unspoken social contract has developed. Consumers effectively tell advertisers, “Entertain me, and I will give you my attention. Respect my intelligence, and I’ll give you my interest. Do neither, and I’ll give you neither.” Those advertisers that respect the contract enjoy success. Those who don’t end up complaining advertising doesn’t work.

This Business Week article goes on to cite some examples, such as Target, Apple, and John Hancock. Target’s “spots are fun to watch, because they include product placements as part of the entertainment.” Apple went down in history for a commercial that featured a sci-fi snippet rather than the product. John Hancock shows a man getting choked up over a birthday card as part of a campaign that “generated a 17% sales increase.”

This immediately reminds me of the entirely Target-sponsored issue of the New Yorker. Some friends suggested to me that this was advertising at its most insidious, confusing commercialism with content. I wondered if that was such a bad thing — wouldn’t it be nice if ads weren’t such an eyesore? Is a magazine run by a corporation any less commercial? At least you could tell which items were the ads by the logos — in magazines like Wired and How, I seriously can’t tell the ads from the content a lot of the time, especially since so much of the content is cheering on widgets and gizmos that excite the staff (or paid product placement fees, for all I know).

I’m really curious, so please post comments: do you feel you’ve bought into this “contract” with advertisers? Are you happy to look at ads as long as they entertain a bit? Or do they get your attention by being entertaining, but only with some resentment on your part? I think that our default response as educated people and as consumers is often to just decry all attempts to market to us, but then again, certain media forms really couldn’t exist in our contemporary economic structure without advertising. Given that ads are a pretty much necessary aspect of our media consumption, what’s the best way to receive them, as far as you’re concerned?

Sometimes people develop an unusual attachment to logos and corporate design that doesn’t really belong to them. (Or does it? I’ve often thought that trademark law should be revised so that any logo that is persistently visible on public streets in more than one city should be considered “public domain landmarks and cultural reference points,” but I’m crazy like that.)

Waste your day: my father sent me a link to this game some weeks ago, and now it’s being linked off Design Observer with the question, “It’s been said that this graphic is used to train US fighter pilots. But can designers last up to 18 seconds, or more?” Does anybody else find it quaint how designers are so often trying to cast themselves as a sort of intellectual elite with special visual powers?

I will credit Design Observer with this, though: they knew which part of this interview to quote when they linked it. “I suspect what I’m really against is what that term ‘graphic design’ has come to represent, i.e. synonymous with business cards, logos, identities and advertising, and, again simply put, those are things I’m just not interested in. To me that idea of ‘graphic design’ is as far removed from my interests as being a milkman or a lawyer. In fact, I’d rather be a milkman.” (Kudos to the interviewee himself—Stuart Bailey of Dot Dot Dot magazine—for having the temerity to say such a thing in an interview with design blog Speak Up, whose members have often made no secret of having made peace with design’s business/commercial legacy.)

And finally, this is a stretch in a design post, but an interesting example of how a social program can often work better than a poster campaign. Having seen its murder rate hit an alarming peak in 2005, Philadelphia has implemented a program that allows you to exchange your gun for a pair of Sixers tickets. On the one hand, I think it’s pretty cool that the city is doing something to combat gun violence. On the other hand, I find it pretty disturbing, since, you know, isn’t that what gun control legislation is (supposed to be) for?

Have you seen the McDonald’s billboard with the happy, skinny, ethnically-vague woman holding up two bags of Mickey-D’s food, proclaiming in both subtle yet painfully intentional young urban diction, “My kinda shoppin’ spree”? I hate this billboard as if it were a smartbomb sent into city streets by a cold and calculating enemy. It stands for everything (again, subtly) that the new professional standards for designers were written to oppose. Quite simply, if we can assume that advertising does in fact have any effect on people’s attitudes and behavior, it is downright unethical to actively promote overconsumption of McDonald’s food to low-income urban residents who might not appreciate the health risks because it is cheap, fast, and (more or less) tasty.

That’s why I love this photo.

The AIGA newsletter just keeps getting more interesting. The last newsletter announced that the American Institute of Graphic Art is now “the professional organization for design,” with the acronym just a vestigial trace of contemporary graphic design’s origins in the fine arts. The newest newsletter announces that the AIGA has updated its Standards of Professional Practice with the persistent input of Milton Glaser.

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The AIGA is a professional organization for graphic designers and illustrators. I signed up to be a member so I could participate in the annual Philadelphia “studio tours,” where you get to visit local design studios to see what they’re all about. (It has been a good experience for me, these last two years, but that is a story for another day. Was nice to compare the international ad firm with the company that does work for nonprofits.)

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I swear, this was the only thing in the whole message. I guess clicking on the highly technical diagram above would have transported me to a web site where I could have obtained a few “tabs” of my own. I can’t see myself getting past step 2 as pictured, though, as I don’t own a wristwatch.