Coming to a college campus near you: the Starbucks coffee truck

"Am I crazy, or is that Starbucks truck following me?" might be something overheard on college campuses soon.

College campuses might be among the few remaining places to escape the shadow of Starbucks. There are roughly 11,500 Starbucks outlets in the U.S., but only about 300 of them are on U.S. campuses. That means most students of the country’s 4,700 colleges are buying their coffee somewhere else.

As Venessa Wong writes in Bloomberg Business Week – that is about to change at three schools. Starbucks will peddle caffeine from food trucks at Arizona State University, James Madison University and Coastal Carolina University.

Why trucks? Starbucks says the trucks can travel around with students throughout the day, literally following them to meet their caffeine needs wherever they pop up, according to a Starbucks spokeswoman. Presumably that means parking outside dorms in the morning and by the quad in the afternoon.

The trucks, operated by food service company Aramark, will help Starbucks reach a coveted demographic and continue their quest for total brand domination. College-age students love coffee. More young adults are “turning to coffee, rather than caffeinated sodas, as their pick-me-up of choice,” reported NPR. Not just any coffee—they want the fancy stuff. 

Just an aside here – does anybody remember when coffee was THE pick-me-up of choice, before the Diet Coke craze, and way before the “energy drink” phase? Admittedly, it was in our college days when many of us began our special relationship with "the bean."

Is bad grammar killing your brand?

Siting our increasingly abbreviated writing styles, Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers poses this very interesting question.

Dramatic, you say? Maybe not so much.

My fellow storytellers at CCM know that I have a love-hate relationship with grammar, a condition that I often blame on the New Jersey public school system. So who am I to write anything about grammar? Seriously, random typos, acronyms, and memes prevail across online and social platforms, and brands are increasingly engaged in a two-way conversation with their communities. I’m not being a 'meme-o-phoebe' here. This is a good thing. But if you begin to sound too much like your audience, overusing acronyms and Internet speak, and losing focus on maintaining a strong brand voice, how can that be anything but detrimental in the long run?

Is your brand cool but authoritative? Hip, but also smart? It better be, or risk being like the parent who, preoccupied with being “the cool mom,” allows her children to make all sorts of bad choices, loses their respect and ultimately drives them away.

DeMers asks, “Is grammar dead, or just changing?” Read thefull story in Forbes.

The oldest company logos in the world

I’m often asked about logos – which do I like best, who designed them and, occasionally, how long they’ve been in use.

Even before Sherwin-Williams began to “cover the earth” and a certain insurance company used the rock of Gibraltar to suggest its sturdiness, their was Stella. The origins of Stella Artois can be traced to 1366 when the Den Hoorn brewery was established in Leuven, Belgium. Despite numerous shifts in management over hundreds of years, the original horn logo has not changed.

In a fast-paced world where clients and marketing consultants seem to share a serious attention deficit, it is truly amazing that so many of the logos we recognize today have been in continuous use, largely unchanged, for so many years.

To learn more about the world's oldest logos, go to the 24/7 Wall Street story by Thomas C. Frohlich.

Julian Koenig, writer of the best print ad I've ever seen.

In 1999, Ad Age ranked VW's "Think Small" campaign as the top advertising campaign of the century.

Julian Koenig, the ad writer who gave birth to the campaign while at Doyle Dane Bernbach, passed away last week at 93, according to a NY Times obit.

To me, the brilliance of this campaign cannot be overstated. It was a different time - the Mad Men days. One of the ads in that campaign is, in my opinion, the greatest print ad ever written. The "Think Small" ad got the whole thing rolling, but the "Lemon" ad was the ballsy one. Can you imagine a client having the courage, at that time, to allow their product to be shown over that one-word headline? This was 1959!

But it also told a meaningful story. If you were willing to read past the headline – and of course you were – you read about how this particular beetle "missed the boat" because it didn't pass VW's rigorous quality control inspection. While the "big three" domestic car makers were battling it out to see who could make taller tail fins or crank out more horsepower, VW was talking about quality. If you'll indulge me another Mad Men reference, Koenig's work did what Donald Draper famously advised – it changed the conversation.

So take a minute to look back at that campaign and smile.

Julian Koenig later became the "K" in "PKL" with George Lois. Shortly before he passed away last year, my dear friend and creative partner Don Adamec scanned these two images from PKL's 1963 Annual Report. The shot of the Art Dept. features Don (at far left) and Mr. Lois. The COPY photo, of course, shows Mr. Koenig with his team.

If you have a copy of George Lois' book, Damn Good Advice, look at #84. He says, "In 1959, Think Small was the big idea that sold a Nazi car in a Jewish town in a New York nanosecond." And he reminds us that six months later, he convinced Koenig to join him in leaving DDB to start up PKL.

Running GIFs on TV? What is Fiat Thinking?

Chrysler CMO Olivier Francois likes to take risks. That has never been more evident than

now – that  a GIF-driven ad campaign featuring twerking rabbits and horse heads has reared its ugly head. Ok, that’s a bad pun. But after my initial ‘WTF’ reaction, I thought about the wisdom of this campaign. It’s quirky, very cheap to produce, and might just resonate with the Fiat 500’s target. Let’s just say their target is the same as Honda Civic – and you know how I feel about their latest effort – and Kia, the cool hamsters’ chariot of choice.

As reported in Ad Age, it's crazy, and weird. And if this strategy pans out, there may be some very unhappy producer/director folks out there who make a living creating expensive traditional TV spots. Stay tuned.

Penguin Random House's Smart Logo Solution

Sometimes you just have to spell it out. And that's just what Penguin Random House has done with their graphic identity makeover.

It's a simple, elegant, two-part system that makes very clear what could have been a real mess. I like it. Designed by New York design shop Pentagram, it uses a font called "Shift." Very cool. And it really does the job.

Take a look at the system in this Bloomberg BusinessWeek story.

Putting On The Ritz, Six Words at a Time. Campaign celebrates human experiences not the trappings of wealth.

When Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story in six words, his reply was, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Marriott International’s Ritz-Carlton brand is now borrowing from an Internet meme for its new campaign by Team One, called “Six-word wows.”

The chain of luxury hotels and resorts is extending a marketing effort that celebrates the accumulation of experiences and memories, rather than the trappings of wealth.

The campaign, which began last month, is for the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company division of It is intended to expand upon ads that Ritz-Carlton and its agency, Team One Advertising, introduced in 2011 with the theme “Let us stay with you.”

The new campaign, also by Team One, is called “Six-word wows,” after a popular online creative exercise known as six-word memoirs and six-word stories. 

The New York Times