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The count­down to the 2012 Olympics as offi­cially begun. Peo­ple are dust­ing off their run­ning shoes and get­ting out their bicy­cles. Lon­don seems to be wak­ing up from its lethar­gic slum­ber and head­ing out­doors. Here are a cou­ple of cam­paigns that look at the ridicu­lous and sublime.

Car­ry­ing the (pen­light) torch

Olympics ath­letes doing weird stuff for quirky Cadbury.

Yes, it’s still 2011, but if you are a bud­ding sports star, or couch-bound enthu­si­ast, it’s also offi­cially one year to go until the Lon­don 2012 Olympics. And boy, have the spon­sors made sure you know it. The much-reviled logo is set to burn your corneas for the next year and a bit, before hope­fully being for­got­ten behind the actual event.

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For a long time now, the utopia for online dis­play adver­tis­ing has been to be as tar­geted and as cost-effective as search adver­tis­ing in order to claw back adver­tis­ing dol­lars. The jour­ney has been slow, ad net­works ini­tially helped scale online dis­play adver­tis­ing and pro­vided lay­ers of tar­get­ing tech­nolo­gies to make the cam­paigns more effec­tive. How­ever, pric­ing was based on arti­fi­cial flat fees and seg­ments that had been pre-set within the lim­its of indi­vid­ual ad net­works.

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It is said that if you give enough mon­keys enough type­writ­ers and time, they will write the com­plete works of Shake­speare.* Not great val­i­da­tion for your future prospects if you are a bud­ding play­wright. Fan­tas­tic news if you hap­pen to sell & ser­vice type­writ­ers…  This week we look at the count­less mon­keys and their type­writ­ers sub­mit­ting their rhetoric to count­less blogs, face­books, myspaces, twit­ters and youtubes. Harsh crit­i­cism? Not if you hap­pen to be one of the ones set­ting up, sell­ing, ser­vic­ing & devel­op­ing work for the interwebs.

Here are some great dig­i­tal ideas and pos­si­bly our sal­va­tion from an eter­nity of bananas.

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It’s amaz­ing how often I hear some­thing to the effect of “No one reads copy these days.” Now, of course, being a pro­fes­sional B2B copy­writer by trade, you might expect me to have a hang up about copy. I also encounter the related belief that we are all writ­ers. I write. You write. It’s stuff we all learnt at school. How hard can it be?

Today, it’s all about the pictures

We are a more visual cul­ture than ever before. Each of us spends seri­ous qual­ity time in front of one screen or another every sin­gle day. Over the years, adver­tis­ing has become more visual and less wordy. Online video is still grow­ing expo­nen­tially. And mil­lions of peo­ple restrict their thoughts to bursts of 140 char­ac­ters or less.

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Mar­ket­ing automa­tion is a pow­er­ful weapon in the mod­ern marketer’s armoury. It offers the abil­ity to tai­lor your approach far more accu­rately than ever before. It can deliver mod­els for suc­cess that can be repli­cated and applied to new and exist­ing cus­tomers. And it can make you more respon­sive to cus­tomer needs.

But how can you get more from your mar­ket­ing automa­tion efforts?

Here are five areas to take a look at:

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The Lion, the Switch and the Wardrobe.

Every year, the cream-of-the-global-ad-agency crop head to sunny Cannes for the Cannes Lions Fes­ti­val of Cre­ativ­ity. Often thought of as the ulti­mate in cam­paign kudos, the Grand Prix award is a cov­eted tro­phy in adver­tis­ing excel­lence. Here are some of my favourite win­ners from last week’s event.

Write the Future – Wieden Kennedy for Nike

What hap­pens when you have unlim­ited funds and access to pretty much every major sports star in the world? This out­stand­ing World Cup cam­paign walked away with the Film Grand Prix 2011. (W+K took the lion’s share with 6 Gold awards in total.)

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