Dr Pepper Ten

Last night I went to my first Dallas Stars hockey game. We had a good time, but I was surreptitiously watching all of the marketing going on most of the time.

According to my family, hockey in the South is not the same hockey that was played years ago in Canada. There is much more of an emphasis on marketing and fighting. But hey, people go to hockey games to be entertained, not necessarily to watch and enjoy the sport.

I think that one of my favorite ads was this one by Dr Pepper Ten:

From Dallas Stars Program

I love the use of Duck Tape spelling out the word "ten" and how Dr Pepper Ten is trying to assert its own manliness with this ad. 

Cheetos & Other Visual URLs

One of the recent Cheetos commercials ends with an interesting way of representing its URL. Here is a screenshot from the end of the commercial:



What impressed me the most is that I've hardly ever seen URLs represented in this way. I started trying to imagine what other companies could get away with using an image of their products and a .com to represent their URL.

Last week, I saw a different representation of a visual URL. This time, instead of typing out facebook.com/sokaglam, I noticed this on the Soka Glam website:

It makes me wonder if this is the future of visually representing URLs. 

Generic Trademarks

Does it ever catch your attention when you talk about qtips, band-aids or Kleenex? I think about it a lot when I use these words. They're brand names of items that we have started using for mainstream items. We not only use these words for Kleenex brand products, but we also use them for off-brand tissues.

It's an interesting phenomenon that has evolved over time. Descriptive terms like jell-o, saran wrap and xerox are used to describe both brand name and off-brand items. It's difficult for the companies that paid to have these items trademarked.

Can you think of any other examples of generic trademarks?