Hitachi putting the “T” in IT.

To the clown! Who’s getting more work these days, Mr. T or Tim Allen. Damn, slow down fellas. Save yourself for the inevitable Super Bowl overexposure coming our way as agencies scramble to find a use for y’all. Best part(s)? The Baby Stewie heads and the backwards apostrophe on Mr. T’s shirt. Hitachi Data System Virtualization.

(Via BFFB.)

Next of Kin.

“Delaying a product's entry into a fast-moving, cut-throat market to make a platform change with zero user-visible impact is asinine.”

In other words, sometimes your ad campaign is doomed for reasons you don’t know even know about—and long before you even present it. The quote above is from an ars technica piece on what really happened with the failure of Microsoft’s Kin. There’s still this belief among some creatives that they don’t need to worry about business because it’s just not their thing. That what’s in the brief is good enough. Reading case studies in product disasters like this though is a crash course in business that they can’t get anywhere else. It not only covers Microsoft’s failed strategy, but what companies in general have to deal with when it comes to product launches. (The comments at the Microsoft insider blog paint an even bleaker picture not only of life inside Redmond, but how employees both past and present regard competitors like Nintendo or Apple.)

If a product has more wrong with it than it does right, and its management team won’t support it, then what chance does the ad have?

Now I can watch TV online on my phone on my monitor on my...

I guess this falls under the category of sure we can, but do we need to?*

So I’m sitting in the Testosteroom™ watching the first night of NFL Draft online where ESPN and nfl.com were streaming it live.** Rich Eisen comes on next and does a promo for the latest Verizon Motorola Droid iKnockoff that has iEverything (including free app for limited time).

He then talks about how you can watch anything anywhere and have up to the latest nanosecond coverage—almost implying a “before it even happens” type of coverage. (New top-secret feature of the phone—don’t ask.)

But as I saw this picture within picture being touted—literally and figuratively—I was like why?

Do I really need to have 24/7 access to... 24/7 access? It became this odd meta Escher data overlap of every single platform I could want giving me access—just because I *may* need it.

Is there really a calm that comes over me knowing they I can get ESPN six different ways if I needed to?

Yes, in times like these, there is.

Sure, each platform differs from the other in terms of sound and image quality and what we’re willing to accept in that regard. (I don’t expect surround sound and fury from a 3” screen the way I would a 42” plasma.)

But the important thing is that I have access to them all man.

All.

* This of course being the unwritten principle of Apple products and things you never know you needed but man, just gotta have.

**This being the place I’m relegated to with my laptop after the main TV gets hijacked with episodes of House Hunters.