Auto-Tune Cute Kids and Kanye

Yes, yes and yes.



Oh...you want to make the Kanye or Charlie Bit Me sections into your ringtone? Great. Go here: http://thegregorybrothers.com/

Don't thank me. Thank the Gregory Brothers.

Am I missing something?

Sooo...a few months ago the world went insane with the whole "swine flu" chaos. Twitter trending topics and Egypt's "Bacon Elimination" solution incited a mindset that H1N1 would bring about the apocalypse or Ragnarök or whatever other "end of the world" scenario you care to imagine.

Then, it wasn't that bad.

Cool. Awesome. Pigs won't kill us all. Life will go on.

But it's now Tuesday, October 20th, and I feel like I've read 2400 tweets in the last 2 weeks about H1N1. And nobody is panicking at all.

I'm seeing tweets about schools closing in Sioux Falls. I'm hearing about percentages of college students expected to come down with it in the next few weeks/months.

And we're basically just LOLing it off like it's not even happening.

I'm just curious as to what brought about the fairly drastic change of heart. I'm all about NOT getting worked up for things (mostly because forced panic is really off-putting). I just don't get how the entire world went crazy with swine flu fears a few months ago when almost NOTHING was happening, and now that way more people are coming down with H1N1, everyone's ho-hum about it like people are simply stubbing their toes or biting their cheeks.

To be clear, I'm all about making light of serious (or non-serious) issues whenever possible. Sometimes it's just necessary to maintain some sanity. As one of my favorite rappers, Gift of Gab, puts it, "life is insane, so insanity is a sane life." (I recognize that quote's not entirely fitting, but I think it's an awesome line and I wanted to include it.)

Regardless, I'm just looking for opinions on why this whole situation seems to be so trivial now when H1N1 actually does seem to be detrimentally affecting society at the moment. Is it simply because we now know people don't die instantly or turn into pigs and there's no reason to panic? Or is it just something people aren't taking seriously enough (and probably should)? I'm going with the former, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Image c/o bfishadow.

What Stan Lee's done for the comics industry...

Comic Vine is running a contest to win a signed Stan Lee iPod. I'm not sure why he signed an iPod rather than something way more awesome like a picture of one of his characters or something, but I guess (unfortunately) something like an iPod would get more people to sign up and submit than something not as (technically) valuable as a signed image of one of his characters (for that matter, I'd even take a signed picture of him). Needless to say, anything signed by Stan Lee is better than not anything signed by Stan Lee.

That said, the submission requires a text or video description of what Stan Lee has done for the comics industry. Although text is typically my forté (much more so than video), I felt passionate enough about this one to throw it in video form. Hopefully it's not completely awful.

Anyway, here's my opinion of what Stan Lee has done for the comics industry. It goes a bit deeper than his list of characters he created/co-created or the list of important issues he wrote or cartoons he helped develop. It's much more than that. Here goes something...



Those are my thoughts. Hopefully Comic Vine agrees with me and sees my point. Because it's more than characters and comics...it's passion and community shining through in ways that had never been seen. To me, that's a lot more valuable, and it's why the comic book industry is what it is today.

As Stan would say (much, much better than I ever could)... "EXCELSIOR!"

Pepsi To Cease All Advertising... Now What?

Did you hear the news? Pepsi is putting an end to all of its advertising and marketing forever. No more movie product placements, no more billboards and no more commercials. And with no mention of a social media budget, they are basically shattering not only the traditional media stigma, but every stigma known to the marketing and advertising industry.

Ok. So that’s not entirely accurate. Though a crazy concept, that idea simply comes from the ever-satirical (and never serious) online newspaper, The Onion. The “news” story can be found here and is worth reading in its entirety, but, for now, it has inspired a serious discussion in the Deep Bench office and we’d love to hear your take on it.

What WOULD happen if Pepsi pulled its entire, $1.3 billion (yes, BILLION) marketing budget and stopped running ads? Would their sales and profits plummet to depths not even Alvin could reach in search of the Titanic? Would Pepsi’s sales merely remain consistent or only slightly below where they were before? Or would sales, by some strange phenomenon, skyrocket (and steadily maintain that skyrocketed…ness)?

The questions are nearly mind-boggling. In the event that sales plummeted, would companies increase their marketing/advertising budgets after seeing how important marketing is? If Pepsi’s sales remained the same as they’ve been, would companies take note and cut off high budget media buys and traditional media efforts knowing the sales don’t drop?

Other questions could also be discussed. Would social media fall into the $1.3 billion budget cut or would Pepsi be able to aim an unprecedented and unparalleled focus at the social media space? What chaos would that incite? Would it finally be an opportunity for PR pros to earn their proper respect by demonstrating the true power of weapons like free media coverage and word-of-mouth efforts?

Or would Pepsi simply fall off the face of the earth entirely, left to suffer the fates of OK Soda and Pepsi’s gone-but-never-forgotten offspring, Crystal Pepsi?

What do you think? Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments below or join the discussion on our Facebook page. The topic is a fascinating one to us and we’d love to hear your insight on the concept.

Photo by laverrue.

This post was written by me and originally appeared on my work blog at www.thedeepbench.com.

Awesome look at AT&T's (accurate) predictions of the future...from 1993...

via core77.com

AT&T had some pretty solid foresight as to what the future would look like. Although, as Marvel's Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada worded it on Twitter, "ATT predicts the future with remarkable accuracy 16 years ago, doesn't predict lousy coverage." So they do still have that issue to overcome.

This also reminds us of a post we did back in March (http://j.mp/1bIh5i) on Microsoft's vision for what they can achieve by 2019. As accurate as AT&T was with these predictions, hopefully Microsoft can pull it off too. Because Microsoft's predicted future looks amazing.

This post was originally posted by me on my work Posterous account at http://www.deepbench.posterous.com/.

AMAZING Photos From the Hubble Space Telescope

These pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope (or whatever its proper name is) are stunning. Therefore, I recommend you take a look at them. I'll also post one of the many brilliant and gorgeous images that you can click to get to the rest of the photos. They're all worth viewing. Fo realz. Enjoy...

Good Morning...

Don't know how many haters I actually have, but I love the sound and general message of this one from Cham.