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Do Celebrity Endorsements Sell More Product?

We are well aware of the excellent help that celebrities provide when the need is there — whether the help is for PR purposes or not, or whether other celebrities actively try to discourage you from helping, the help is there and can make the difference between a charity receiving hundreds of dollars versus hundreds of thousands of dollars — even if most of the money ends up coming directly from the celebrities themselves!

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The Spongebob Effect: Immorality and Commercial Children’s Television Programming

I spent the weekend with a gang — yes, a Gang! — of rowdy nine-year-olds from the Midwest.  I was shocked — yes, Shocked! — and disappointed by their crassness, overt sarcasm and apt insensitivity to those around them, and I blame antisocial, for-profit, children’s television programming for the damning result.

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The Commercial Ringing Phone Syndrome

In 2006, the New York Times confirmed an annoying niggle that was driving me batty:  Songs were being created with cellular phone ringtones intermittently interwoven in the background of the music to encourage your ear to listen to the unfamiliar song with a dedicated, if cryptic, authenticity.

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Older Fatter Uglier and Younger Slimmer Prettier

Is it just me or are the new, hilarious, television commercials for the new Apple MacBooks some kind of weird semiotic take on the caricatures of Bill Gates at Microsoft and Steve Jobs at Apple?
Windows machines are older, fatter and uglier than the younger, slimmer, prettier MacBook?
Or are the commercials a more direct shiv up the backs of Windows users who may not be as cool as their Mac brethren?
Or is this a more specific personal poke in the eye with a sharp barb from the Apple Boot Camp through the dawning Windows Vista?
The series of commercials are funny and they tell a succinct story — but the dark undertow beneath the raging rapids of laughter might tell us more about the real semiotic embedded in the subliminal Apple corps advertising.