Today, the Alliance for Climate Protection, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club launched the “Reality” Coalition, a national grassroots/advertising effort to establish that in reality, there is no such thing as “clean coal.”

The reality is that there’s not a single home or business in America today powered by clean coal,” said Brian Hardwick of the Alliance for Climate Protection. “If coal really wants to be part of America’s energy future, the industry can start by making a real commitment to eliminating their pollution that is a leading cause of global warming.”

The “Reality” Coalition will launch a multi-million dollar ad campaign, running in print, broadcast and online media and supported by the website, www.ThisIsReality.org.

The “Reality” Coalition’s main point is that there are no clean coal plants in the U.S. at this time, and until there are, stop talking like we have them.

The coal industry has spent hundreds of millions promoting ‘clean coal’ technology, but in reality, there is not a single large-scale demonstration project in the United States for capturing and safely burying all of coal’s CO2 emissions,” Vice President Gore said. “The industry must make good on its promise if they truly want to do their part to solve the climate crisis. Until that happens, coal cannot be called ‘clean’.”

Here is Reality’s first TV ad. Find ways to support their cause at www.ThisIsReality.org.

I really enjoyed the DC Ad Club’s luncheon speakers today, Brad Beckstrom of ApolloBravo Mobile Marketing and Rohit Bhargava, Sr. VP of Ogilvy’s Digital Influence group, author of “Personality Not Included” and Word of Mouth Marketing and Social Media expert.

Rohit talked about word of mouth marketing and how it can be integrated into your advertising, marketing or PR. His philosophy was interesting, and I was impressed to see that Guy Kawasaki wrote a foreword for his book. So I bought one of the signed copies he had there. Reading it now.

Brad filled us in on some recent stats from the CTIA (cellphone industry association) that are pretty astounding. Overall, I was impressed to know that cellphone ownership in the USA has now surpassed that of home PCs and web access. Plus, while more and more people have phones, the number of minutes Americans spend making phone calls has stayed pretty static. But the number of text messages (SMS) has grown exponentially. Of course these SMS messages can be used by companies to contribute to word of mouth campaigns.

Besides the book, I took away one big idea: word of mouth marketing is not something you can buy. But you can push it with advertising you buy or create, whether it’s guerilla marketing, or print, radio, TV advertising or SMS messages with three little words: “tell a friend.”

Here we have two angles of video proliferation, and how you can use video to market somewhere other than a plain old television commercial.

One is Truveo.com, a new indexing platform coming out of AOL, which is bringing in YouTube videos and videos from other sources and allowing you to search them all in one place. Their next step will be monetizing that discovery.

More interesting is NBC Universal, which to me falls along the line of stuff that we’ve seen in those post-apocalyptic movies, where you step up to a counter at your local grocery store and a screen knows you’re you and knows what movies you like and immediately starts advertising that a movie that you want to see is about to start in one hour at a theater one block away.

This is getting much closer to reality, and as an advertiser, sounds very cool! NBC Universal has screens in taxis, at gas pumps, in grocery stores, in sports arenas, in maternity wards, and in commuter trains.

You can (should) customize your message for the medium, and they’re working very closely with creative teams to do so. It’s quite impressive, it’s hyper-local, and it’s getting a lot of results. Their next step is unified metrics so they can really track their results reliably across vendors.

For more: Truveo.com
NBC Universal packages are available through NBC representatives.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this session at DC’s Ad Week. The title was “The Buzz in Business & Why It’s Not Hype.” Well, that title turned out to be mumbo-jumbo. What James Surowiecki (I will refer to him as James so I don’t slaughter his name repeatedly) spoke about was the wisdom of crowds. Coincidentally, he’s written a book on that topic.

Generally we don’t like to follow the crowd just because, but as market researchers, the wisdom of the masses is interesting to us.

So – James brought out some interesting examples. For instance, odds on horses at race tracks. Wikipedia. Google‘s page rank algorithm. The Threadless t-shirt company. The Hollywood Stock Exchange. All of these are success stories that hinge on the wisdom of groups.

James even threw out some interesting factoids, in case you’re ever on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The majority of the audience is right on 91% of the questions they’re asked to cast an opinion on. The experts, which contestants select ahead of time by topic area, are only correct 2/3 of the time. Just so ya know.

Of course there is a key to the success of mob rule. James provided some pointers.

• Be sure you’re aggregating lots of DIFFERENT opinions. You’re not looking for one or two genius ideas, you’re looking for a collective user response.
• Ideally, you want the group to be diverse, that is, thinking about the world in different ways, coming at problems from different angles.
• People need space to think for themselves. If you have an in-person group, watch out for high status people and talkative folks.

James’s book: The Wisdom of Crowds

Has this ever been done before? On June 4 the site already had 2,300 signatures. The count at the time of this post is 27,148 signatures. Citizens of the UK are begging their leaders to change the signal they are sending to the world.

Online petition – Change The London 2012 Logo

Today the new logo for the 2012 Olympics, to be held in London, was unveiled. “‘This is an iconic brand that sums up what London 2012 is all about — an inclusive, welcoming and diverse Games that involves the whole country,’ said Olympics minister Tessa Jowell.”

Um, OK. It looks to be something I wrote on the back of my notebook in 9th grade that I thought was really punk rock.

Supposedly this logo is designed to be instantly recognizable worldwide. It’s based on the numbers 2012. Did you see it? I had be told.

Read the story on Yahoo.

More commentary at AdRants.

Next day update:
The Washington Post picked up on the yuckiness of the logo:
“Jeers and Loathing Over a New Logo”
UK sport blog’s reaction: “London’s new brand of bother“

Boy, what a game! And for once in years, I found myself actually watching the game, and just giving up on the commercials. How pitiful is that?

I had my doubts — when the Seahawks came out onto the field to the tune of “Bittersweet Symphony,” someone should have clocked the DJ right then and there for the evil foreshadowing. Not fair. But the energy level cranked up, thank goodness, and the game got good. We weren’t so lucky in the marketing world.

Full Throttle — apparently provides caffeine and testosterone — seemed to be some sort of official sponsor at the beginning of the game, but luckily we were only submitted to one of those pied piper of the wiener ads.

And then, in a weird response to the wardrobe malfunction of the past, there was a rendition of “The Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Suess with a SuperBowl twist, saying someone will win and someone will lose but that’s okay, read by stars of turf and screen. For the families watching. And for the Seahawks. Trippy!

Okay now into the real ads… it seems like the big spenders were Pepsi, with a weird new URL — www.brownandbubbly.com — and a couple of ads that cost them a pretty penny. One with Puff Daddy and a calvacade of hip-hop stars, and a competitive one against Diet Coke with Jackie Chan. “Brown and bubbly” does not sound quite appetizing to me. But I suppose that’s what it is. And the ads were clever. I’m sure we’ll see more of this campaign.

The other ad that kept popping up, and is memorable to me because of its desperation, is Blockbuster’s online effort. They’re really trying to scramble to catch up with Netflix. But the ad was bland. A man walking through hallways of glass panels with a huge screen behind him — he may as well have been selling insurance. This did not look like a movie source to me.

GoDaddy.com did it again with two ads with a hot chick and the guy sitting next to me said — “Is that a porn site?” Very effective. Not. Or is it?

So — my favorite commercial? I’m glad the Careerbuilder.com monkeys were still in the running, but I love Jackie Chan and Diet Coke. Which one is going to work on me? I’m going to buy a copy of “The Places You’ll Go” for my nephew.

Jackie Chan Diet Pepsi Ad