“The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible.”
—David Ogilvy

Who and what are some of the top marketing achievements of the past decade? That’s what the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards 2007 aim to determine. If you put any stock into this sort of thing, you can see the list of finalists over here.

This video is making the rounds. Everywhere, even internationally. You’ve probably seen it already: It’s been featured on almost every news and entertainment outlet imaginable and it’s getting millions of views on YouTube. The girl, Lauren Caitlin Upton, appeared on The Today Show yesterday.

Why was she on The Today Show? Did she win the Miss Teen USA pageant in which she was entered? (No, she finished fourth.) Did she donate an enormous sum of money to help feed starving kids in Africa or write a brilliant first novel?

No on all counts. She gave a rambling and incoherent answer to a painfully simple question.

The Miss Teen USA pageant is part of the Miss Universe Organization, which says that their contestants “are savvy, goal-oriented and aware. The contestants who become part of the Miss Universe Organization display those characteristics in their everyday lives, both as individuals who participate in the competitions to advance their careers, personal and humanitarian goals, and as women who seek to improve the lives of others.”

Joking about all this is easy, but those of us involved in developing marketing communications materials, especially those with a kid or teen focus, should be doing a double-take when a simple question to a “savvy, goal-oriented and aware” young woman meets with this kind of an answer.

In a world where marketers want to reach savvy and aware young customers, maybe one’s definition of “savvy and aware” needs to be recalibrated … along with the vocabulary and grammar level of one’s marketing materials.

Takeaway for marketers: If savvy and aware Americans can’t find the U.S. on a world map, how can you expect them to find your product in a crowded retail aisle?

Here comes the gPhone.

This iMedia Connection article begins: “IBM sales representatives in Singapore, Malaysia and Australia have begun staffing the company’s virtual Business Center in Second Life, signaling the growing popularity of so-called immersive online worlds.”

The article goes on to claim that IBM’s Second Life business center receives 10,000 visitors. Annually. My guess is that many of those visitors wandered into the virtual Business Center by accident and many others are some of IBM’s 350,000 worldwide employees.

How many of those 10,000 visitors actually used the virtual Business Center as IBM intended?

Go ahead and make some guesstimates and crunch the numbers. Dollars well spent? From the customer service budget, probably not. From the PR budget, maybe. Either way, it’s a pretty pricey spend, especially with enthusiasm around Second Life on something of a wane.

I hope IBM’s real (and only) goal here is simply to have a virtual world presence and start to understand how virtual worlders interact with companies online, sort of an R&D playground. Any ambitions beyond that are probably overreaching way too far.