Wow. Everyone took their vitamins today. (Big topics galore.)

Let's start with Evelyn Rodriguez' "Edgy is Hot & Has Blogging 1.0 Souled Out?", which explores the hotness of "edgy", the slippery slope of mass marketing, and the mediocritization of blogs. (Um... yeah, I may or may not have just made up that word.) Anyway, here's some of what Evelyn had to share with us:

"Edgy is hot."

I know what you're thinking: "What? That's it?" Nah. There's a lot more, but I wanted you to ponder those three words, because together, they matter. They matter a lot: "Edgy is hot."

Are you edgy? Are you hot? Shouldn't you be? (You don't have to answer if you don't want to, but the question is well worth asking.)

Evelyn channels Seth Godin (Purple Cow) with her next comment:

"Companies that are built around mass marketing develop their products accordingly. They round the edges, smooth out the differentiating features and try to make products that are bland enough to work for the masses. They make spicy food less spicy, insanely great service a little less great (and a little cheaper). They push everything—from the price to the performance —to the center of the market. They listen to the merchandisers at K-Mart and Wal-mart or the purchasing agents at Johnson & Johnson and make products that will appeal to everybody."

Her post is so rich in brilliant quotations, links and insights that I'll just stop here and just post a link to it. Go here and read it all. It's a fantastic read on many, many levels.

For a complete change of pace and topic, let's hop on over to Merrell Ligons' "TV Spots Losing Their Effectiveness" post, which points us to the results of a study that's been making the rounds this week. Here's the portion that always catches my eye:

"The results of a study conducted by Forresters Research in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) show that 78% of national advertisers feel that the effectiveness of their TV advertising has deministhed in the past two years."

Wow. 78%? Really? Oh wait... hold on a sec. What are we talking about here, exactly?

Okay... here's what the study isn't saying:

1) 78% of national advertisers find TV advertising ineffective. (Not.)
2) National advertisers find TV advertising 78% ineffective. (Not.)

What the study actually says is this: "78% of national advertisers feel that the effectiveness of their TV advertising has diminished."

Keywords: "Feel" (no hard data), and "diminished" (by how much? 0.03%? 58%? Nobody knows).

Don't let that shocking 78% figure fool you: All the study says is that over the past two years, 78% of national advertisers felt that TV advertising had lost some ground. That's it. Just how much, we don't really know. Has this been validated? Perhaps, but not here.

It isn't like me to come to the defense of an industry that has been (for the most part) failing itself, its clients and its audience for far too many years, but I want to make sure that such a soft statement doesn't get misinterpreted or taken out of context. This study seems to imply the impending doom of TV advertising, but it doesn't.

Some of the numbers from the study that seem much more valid (and relevant), however, are these:

"Seventy percent of those surveyed believe digital video recorders (DVR) and video-on-demand (VOD) will "reduce or destroy" the effectiveness of :30 spots. And once DVR penetration grows to above 30 million households, 24 percent said they intend to cut their TV ad budgets by at least a quarter and reallocate that money to online advertising, product placement and other channels."

See how we just went from 78% to 24%? Tsssk...

A few of today's other great reads:

Marketing & Culture: Grant McCracken's "Branding, the Birkin bag and damage control".

Blogging: Susan Getgood's "Les Blogs Francais".

Strategy: Chris Carfi's "It Looks Like Moore's Law Applies To Personal Hygiene, Too".

Come back a little bit later for a piece on transparency, ethics, and the importance of metaphors in advertising.