Early last week, I received a couple of unsolicited offers for revenue generation from the content I’ve generated on the Web:

- D2, a newspaper-insert magazine-lette akin to the New York Times’ T Magazine, requested permission to use a long-ago photo I took of the former American Apparel billboard adspace on Manhattan’s Houston Street (a crop of which is featured above).

- The same day, someone at vectorTrap asked to place a text ad on the index page of this blog. Something to do with wireless phone service, I think.

The common thread? Both offers flaked out. I might have scared them off. I asked for a relatively hefty sum from vectorTrap (“hefty” if you consider that I’m sure these outfits usually pay out only a couple of bucks to more naive bloggers), while I told D2 that I’d expect accreditation and some sort of compensation. I didn’t hear back from either after relaying that information. I know D2’s request was time-sensitive, hinging on the production deadline for their next issue, so I assume they moved on.

No big loss, although I’d gladly take the money/credit if it was offered up. Part of my ulterior motive was to avoid going out of my way for such non-spam inquiries, so in that sense, I got what I wanted. The micro-monetization of user-generated Web content doesn’t seem well-structured for substantial cash outlays.

It’s been the mass medium of choice for the past half-century-plus. So it’s only appropriate that TV is now showing its age, demographically:

The median age for viewers at [CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox] is now 51. The broadcasters’ audience has aged at twice the rate of the general population during the past two decades, according to a new report. It’s a quiet trend with a real impact on the way they do business.

“It should be a concern, but it doesn’t seem to be a concern at the moment,” said Steve Sternberg, who wrote the report for Baseline Inc., an information source for the film and TV industries that is owned by The New York Times Co. “You don’t want to have CBS, ABC and NBC all having median ages in their mid-50s.”

The risk in having a rapidly aging audience is the networks becoming less relevant to advertisers, the backbone of their business. Increasingly, that’s a way of thinking that itself is getting old…

A young audience has always been the holy grail for networks, but that’s changing, said Alan Wurtzel, research chief at NBC. Not only are more older viewers available, advertisers are starting to recognize that they spend money and are receptive to their messages.

“But that’s changing” has been the supposed trend for the past couple of decades now. When the chips are down, though, advertisers still skew their pitches to the younger end of the spectrum. The fact is, there’s a cachet in tailoring marketing messages to young adults, because it appeals to older demos and their aspirations to identify themselves as “still young” or “not that old”. That’s not going to change — in fact, I’ve argued that it’s a societal trend that’s only going to get more pronounced.

That doesn’t mean that television will be part of that persistent process. The aging of the boob tube audience is a testament to how fragmented the media landscape has become, especially to youngsters who never experienced a world of TV as the primary media outlet. Without that force-of-habit viewership, we are indeed seeing a fundamental shift in media consumption:

Does TV begin a decade-long transformation, similar to what radio went through in the 1950s, with various shows and other programming migrating online, leaving behind… What? Infomercials and pharmaceutical ads on the boob tube, branding it as something that only “old people” watch?

I think that question, which I asked only a little over a year ago, has been answered by these numbers. Welcome to the end of the Television Age.

I don’t listen to enough radio to give much of a damn about the medium. But one trend has me puzzled: What’s with applying identity-like brandnames to individual stations?

Many radio station names are basically mnemonic devices for remembering the call letters — stations like KROQ in Los Angeles (“K-Rock”) or New York’s WHTZ (“W-Hits”) — and some even manage to turn the mnemonic into a brand, as did San Francisco’s KLLC, known as “Alice,” a name that goes beyond the call letters to effectively evoke its “chick rock” brand identity as well as referencing Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice (their in-studio webcam is called the “Looking Glass”) and the lyrics of “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane (“Go ask Alice…”).

A growing trend, I think, is that more and more radio stations are beginning to realize that there’s no law requiring them to be named after their call letters, so you get stations like San Francisco’s KSAN calling themselves “The Bone,” a name related more to their hard classic rock format and brand identity than their call letters (which, typically, just relate to the local area). When a station has an evocative name, it has more than just call letters or a handy way to remember the call letters — it has a brand. And since radio is now such a competitive big media business, brands are more important than ever. So The Bone’s listeners are called “Boneheads” and KFOG’s are called “Fogheads,” and all kinds of promotion is done playing-off the names.

The local New York examples that come to mind: The Breeze 107.1 (hardly unique, as I’m betting there are a few hundred easy listening stations across the land that use the same name); The Peak 107.1 (Adult Album Alternative format, whatever that’s supposed to be); and The Wolf 94.3 (upstate-oriented country music). The trend is probably more prevalent on non-music format stations, chiefly news and talk.

Music stations are so homogenized, with the same songs on virtual repeat for days/months/years, that some kind of station-based branding is the only way to build listener loyalty. What makes it unique is how it’s applied strictly on the local level — by necessity, but still. Television networks do the same thing, especially when they’re niche (Spike TV, Cooking Channel, etc.); but they have the additional advantage of exclusive content to distinguish themselves. With radio, outside of format restrictions, the same song can be heard on a range of stations.

The big constraint in communicating these brands: They’re always accompanied by the station frequency. That’s another necessity, because the goal is to have people know where to tune in. But it’s an awkward pitch. To me, it sounds goofy: “Music festival sponsored by one-oh-two-point-five The Sound!”.

But again, radio is largely dead to me, so maybe I’m immune to this marketing angle. The charms of station-monikering escape me.

This sign, adorning a Chelsea storefront, says it in as blunt a manner as possible:

Because summertime is the right time to have a store-wide sale on “most shit”. The rest of the shit inventory gets moved during the winter sale, I’m guessing.

Corning has gone through its R&D vaults to unveil something called Gorilla Glass — a super-strong yet flexible material ideal for televisions, touchscreens and other electronics.

Corning set out in the late 1950s to find a glass as strong as steel. Dubbed Project Muscle, the effort combined heating and layering experiments and produced a robust yet bendable material called Chemcor…

In 2006, when demand surfaced for a cell phone cover glass, Corning dug out Chemcor from its database, tweaked it for manufacturing in LCD tanks, and renamed it Gorilla. “Initially, we were telling ourselves a $10 million business,” said researcher Ron Stewart.

Interesting that Corning felt the need to re-brand an industrial component with a snappier name. Does “Gorilla” sound more appealing to manufacturers than the technical-sounding “Chemcor”? Should that matter, when it’s performance that counts? This hints that business-to-business marketing resorts to the same tactics used for consumer-facing selljobs.

Metro Washington has suffered without a streetcred-worthy nickname for long enough, so hipsters in the District and its Maryland-Virginia environs are promoting “the DMV”:

Sleek, succinct and inclusive, the name has been in common use for several years among the area’s — ahem, the DMV’s — hip-hop and go-go music crowd. It’s familiar to listeners of black-oriented radio stations such as WKYS-FM and WPGC-FM, whose DJs decorate their patter with mentions of it. It also pops up as geographical shorthand (“DMV man seeks woman”) on Craigslist.

Hate to break this to them, but here in New York, “the DMV” is instantly-recognizable shorthand for the Department of Motor Vehicles. That’s been the case for decades, and it’s not going to change easily. I know that not every state shares that designator for its driver’s license clearinghouse, but most in the Northeast do — including DC.

Adopting the widely-known mark of a perpetually unpopular bureaucracy as a civic tag? At first I thought it was a weak ploy. But, we are talking about Red Tape Central here. So I guess it’s perfect.

I’m not above triggering an online meme based around images of some anonymous hot chick. And so:

The above two ads have been making the rounds on websites I routinely visit. Nothing particularly special about them — one’s pushing the acai berry fad, while the other claims to hook you up with Apple gadgets for low-low prices. Nothing shady there, I’m sure.

But obviously, the common thread is that tanned blonde woman, posing as some kind of investigative reporter in both instances. She must have a fairly free-formed beat if she’s covering “breaking news” on both superfoods and iPads. Reportage versatility is highly valued…

Obviously, she serves as an eye-catching prop in both ads. It probably works too, to the tune of an extra percentage-point or two in clickthrus. I’m just wondering who she is, and what possible connection there is. Is she actually behind both ventures, as a sort of scammer-girl of all trades? Or simply a stock-photo model, whose image was procured by separate ripoff operations? From such are online mysteries born…

I had thought that the model in that York Peppermint Pattie commercial looked familiar: It’s Alexi from IMBOYCRAZY.COM!

And this is that commercial, spliced together with Requiem for a Dream:

I think the extreme closeup on the pupil in both video-works was the inspirational hook. How else to draw a line between mint-flavoring and heroin? And the chop-quick cut scenes complete the parallels. Well done.

Not that Alexi endorses the smack habit. But she does encourage you to tan it, in the event that you can’t tone it. Yeah.

If the prick of the flu vaccine keeps you from going through with inoculation, a few hundred tiny microneedles on a medicated patch might be more palatable:

The business side of the patch feels like fine sandpaper, [Georgia Tech researcher Mark Prausnitz] said. In tests of microneedles without vaccine, people rated the discomfort at one-tenth to one-twentieth that of getting a standard injection, he said. Nearly everyone said it was painless.

Some medications are already delivered by patches, such as nicotine patches for people trying to quit smoking. That’s simply absorbed through the skin. But attempts to develop patches with the flu vaccine absorbed through the skin have not been successful so far.

In the Georgia Tech work, the vaccine is still injected. But the needles are so small that they don’t hurt and it doesn’t take any special training to use this kind of patch.

Ingenious. But a micro-pricking is still a pricking, and so some selling might need doing:

Asked if the term “microneedle” might still frighten some folks averse to shots, Prausnitz said he was confident that marketers would come up with a better term before any sales began.

Leave it to the marketers to sugarcoat the medicine. How about “friction patch”?

Short-branding comes to the organization formerly known as the Young Men’s Christian Association. From here on out, it’s simply “The Y”:

The Y’s new name coincides with its efforts to emphasize the impact its programs have on youth, healthy living and communities. Its affiliate in Sioux City, Iowa, for instance, is working to change zoning regulations to promote sidewalks, which it hopes will encourage more people to walk. In Louisville, Ky., the local Y is trying to increase the distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables through bodegas. In low-income housing complexes in Houston, landlords have given the affiliate apartments for an after-school program to reduce vandalism by teenagers.

“We’re trying to simplify how we tell the story of what we do, and the name represents that,” said Neil Nicoll, president and chief executive of the organization, whose membership peaked in 2007 and has remained flat.

But let’s focus on who this really impacts: The Village People, who will remain unreconstructed YMCAers by sticking with the old acronym when performing their signature song.

The People do have an out-clause to draw on, as the mothership is maintaining one exception:

The Y said in a note to editors that affiliates collectively should be referred to by the new name, but a specific branch should still be referred to as, say, the Y.M.C.A. of Greater Seattle.

So, nostalgia concerts will henceforth be location-specific? “It’s fun to stay at the — Y-M-C-A-of-Mil-wau-kee-ay!” has a different vibe to it. As long as it’s brand-accurate, I guess.

If you think that tagging sugarwater and snack chips with “extreme” labels in their names is a silly, wholly marketing-driven gimmick, consider the experience of Hosmer Mountain Soda. This locally-focused Connecticut softdrink bottler stumbled upon the public’s attraction to potentially wild food rides:

Hosmer’s ["Dangerous" Ginger Beer] is another new release. Its pepperiness inspired [co-manager Bill] Potvin to apply the word “dangerous” to the sandwich board promoting it in front of the Hosmer soda shack in Manchester. The result: “People were whipping in — ‘What’s this dangerous drink?’ — and I realized that just having that adjective on the beverage was enough to create interest,” Mr. Potvin said.

Simply including a strong descriptor as part of the product name — as hokey as it seems — will rope in customers. I’d say it’s due to the appearance of added legitimacy: Subconsciously, you rationalize that if this drink’s “dangerous” quality is so potent that it merits this sort of permanent enshrinement, the it must be legit. It’s somewhat on par with naming rights for sports stadia and similar branding tactics.

This particular tactic that I’m sure will run its course eventually, but for now it’s a strong magnet for thrill-seeking consumers.

Until recently, a “sugary beverage tax” of one-penny-per-ounce seemed destined to become law in New York State. But apparently, counter-lobbying by the American Beverage Association killed the proposed bill, and supposedly more persuasive advocacy by the industry turned the tide:

Next, this TV ad from New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes, a name calculated to make the blood boil. A mother unpacks groceries in the kitchen as her son mixes a powdered lemonade, one of the drinks that would be taxed. “Tell Albany to trim their budget fat and leave our groceries alone,” the mother says…

It is too early for a final tally of the money spent on advertising and lobbying by either side in New York. But by most accounts, the beverage industry has outspent the pro-tax side and has succeeded in painting the soda tax as a naked money grab cleverly disguised as a health policy.

I question how convincing the ABA’s advertising was, at least with the general public. I caught their commercials a few times; frankly, I wouldn’t have been aware of the tax if hadn’t. I found the ads — including the one referenced above — to be particularly grating and transparently self-serving. In fact, I came away from them more in favor of the tax, just because the industry opposition was so blunt. I think this is more a case of the state legislators getting swayed by their corporate constituents, prompting the burial of this bill. Democracy at work, right?

I guess that’s just me, though. I don’t froth at the mouth every time a new tax is proposed. Plus, I don’t consume all that many soft drinks. So that makes me the silent minority in this arena.

If you squint hard enough, you’ll see that the screen time displayed in the above iPhone image reads 9:42 AM. Apparently, that’s a theme:

I’ve noticed that in all the commercials, print ads and outdoor ads for the iPad, the time is always shown as 9:41 a.m. Then I noticed that the time in all the iPhone ads is always shown as 9:42 a.m.

I know that watch ads like to show the time as 10:10 so the watch hands are open to reveal the brand name, but cannot figure out why Apple likes times before 10 a.m. in its ads.

Furthermore, checking this blog’s iPod category, I notice that the standard iPod Touch image similarly sports a 9:42. So this is consistent across all of Cupertino’s touchy-feely product line.

The reason remains a mystery, as Apple apparently isn’t talking. The old 10:10 minute-hand/hour-hand watch timestamp is a tempting clue, but I’m not sure there’s any connection. I can’t imagine a rational reason though.

To get around the European Union’s ban on tobacco advertising, major Formula 1 sponsor Marlboro decided on a high-speed stealth presentation of its product colors:

In January, Ferrari presented the new Scuderia Marlboro F1 single-seater. (Ferrari is the only Formula One team with a tobacco brand in its formal title, Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro.) At first glance the car is void of major sponsorship per the rules and has gone relatively unnoticed over the last four months. Now, however, 4 races into the year, the EU portion of the Formula One season is about to begin in Spain and the car’s livery is in the spotlight due to the team’s unique solution to the ban on advertising.

The livery (paint job) features a predominately red car with a number of associate sponsor logos: Shell Gasoline, Ferrari itself, Bridgestone and a few others. The most striking aspect of this design… is a red, black and white barcode-like design on the canopy of the vehicle, as well as on the uniforms of drivers Fernando Alonso and Felipa Massa. Up close it just looks like a cool aesthetic touch but from a distance (and possibly even more clearly when moving 200 mph) it appears to resemble the packaging of a certain cigarette manufacturer. Can you guess which one?

The barcode look is what’s prompting the “subliminal” charges (which is, historically, a recurring allegation against cigarette advertising). The digital-like design suggests some sinister neuro-marketing afoot. It’s primarily an optical-illusion presentation, if you want to split hairs — but definitely toward a subliminal placement of messaging.

So yes, it’s definitely sneaky. Also a sign that Marlboro and its parent company, Philip Morris, put a lot of stock in the brand’s red-white-and-black logo being recognizable enough to leave an impression in such an indirect presentation. They get credit for trying to loophole their way out of a tight situation.

Today I received my first-ever payment check from Yahoo! Publisher Network. It’s also my last-ever check from them, as Y! shuttered its answer to Google AdSense not long ago.

My grand total? Five dollars, eighty-five cents.

That’s four years after signing up to be a Network partner. But my tenure was short-lived: I swapped in the YPN ads for a brief test-run, immediately saw that they weren’t serving up anything of value, and promptly ended my experiment. I never did tinker with them again; AdSense pays well enough that, frankly, it’s not worth my time trying out blog-advertising alternatives.

I never bothered to close my YPN account. I would receive infrequent auto-messages over the years. From those, and casual news-tracking, I knew that Yahoo!’s foray into ad syndication was doing poorly. I figured it would end soon enough, and now it has.

And I’ve got a paper check to show for it. Hardly worth the cost of printing it and mailing it out, but there you go. I will indeed deposit it. My dreams of Internet millions obviously won’t involve the Sunnyvale company.

Yesterday, Ford Motor Company officially announced it was killing off its 72-year-old Mercury line.

Which means that everyone’s favorite Mercury Girl disappears along with the brand. Not that Jill Wagner particularly needs the car-commercial gig these days, as she’s moved on to other acting projects. Still, her stint as automotive spokeswoman was a notable mini-phenomenon.

Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t take the hint, and shutter up this blog as well. Despite being five years old, my post that “revealed” Wagner as the “gotta put Mercury on your list” model still accounts for a healthy chunk of traffic to this site. Once the commercials stop, the visitors hereabouts will stop too. After that, really, what’s the point?

I suppose I’ll just have to craft some other throwaway post that will catch fire. Something non-vehicular, preferably. But definitely with female ogling — this is the Internet, after all.

Top Hat. Junk Shot. Top Kill.

I’m starting to suspect that British Petroleum* is purposely whiffing on these attempts to plug up its undersea Gulf of Mexico oil well leak, just so it can keep its code-name conjurers employed. What’s the next snappy failure-label, “Crude Hole”?

When we combine Starbucks with the National Hockey League, the word-mashup of “StarPucks” is an inevitable outcome.

Two possibilities come to my mind for using this puckishly-cute StarPucks label:

- As a cross-promotional campaign. Both entities like to position themselves as higher-end pursuits for discerning consumer bases (versus going after mass-market appeal, ala McDonalds or the NFL), so they’d find common ground in their audiences. Some sort of rewards program tied to city/team territories would strike marketing synergy.

- A potential name for a Seattle NHL franchise, perhaps the first blatant corporate branding of a franchise identity in North American major-pro team sports history. But only if an on-ice resurrection of the Seattle SuperSonics doesn’t work out.

If Fortune Magazine is to be believed, there’s a new drinking game sweeping the nation:

“Icing” — or “getting iced” — is a drinking game that’s rapidly gaining popularity amongst office workers, tech and media types, and college students. The rules are simple: If a person sees a Smirnoff Ice, he or she must get down on one knee and chug it, unless they happen to be carrying their own Smirnoff, in which case they can “ice block,” or refract the punishment back onto the attacker. In order to dupe people into stumbling across the beverage, participants have devised creative ways of presenting them with Ices, like strapping the bottles to the backs of dogs or burying them in vats of protein powder.

The trend first took hold on college campuses in the South, but it’s trickled up both coasts, where icings have been spotted at the offices of companies like Yelp! and IAC’s College Humor. Bankers, too, have embraced the fratty fad: An ice attack was recently reported at Goldman Sachs, and Fortune has learned of icings at Florida-based investment bank Raymond James and New York City hedge fund D.E. Shaw.

Smirnoff parent Diageo claims to not be behind this brand-specific recreation. It certainly does smack of corporate-guided viral/guerilla marketing, so it wouldn’t shock me if that turns out to be a lie. Then again, I can totally see this being a genuine grassroots effort. People — particularly the college-aged contingent behind this — love their vodka.

Then again, again: I’m not sure how much to make of this. A handful of frat boys in the finance industry are playing with liquor bottles — so what? I don’t see this taking hold on a wide scale.

What’s the solution for all the extra housing inventory left over from the real estate market collapse? Simple: Build even more houses.

Land and labor costs have fallen significantly, so the newest homes are competitively priced. Some of the boom-era homes, meanwhile, are in developments that feel like ghost towns. And many Americans will always believe the latest model of something is their only option, an attitude builders are doing their utmost to reinforce.

In Phoenix, a billboard for Fulton Homes summed up the builders’ marketing approach. “Does your foreclosure have tenants?” it asks, next to a picture of a mammoth cockroach.

Brent Anderson, a marketing executive with another Southwest builder, Meritage Homes, said it bought 713 lots in stricken Arizona last year, and was on the verge of starting construction in a new Phoenix community called Lyon’s Gate.

“We’re building them because we’re selling them,” Mr. Anderson said. “Our customers wouldn’t care if there were 50 homes in an established neighborhood of 1980 or 1990 vintage, all foreclosed, empty and for sale at $10,000 less. They want new. And what are we going to do, let someone else build it?”

One of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, right? (Actually, it’s not, but let’s not get in the way of a good quip!)

It’s amusing that marketing is largely driving this impulse for the latest model of new-construction dwelling, similar to automobile buying patterns. Too bad houses aren’t designed to be as disposable; and that existing properties stand to be mired in depressed valuations for decades to come, thanks to this over-building binge.

So we’ve all seen that Kia Sorrento Super Bowl ad with the joyriding kids’ toys. And we all know that Muno of “Yo Gabba Gabba!” fame is a prominent member of that car-selling entourage.

But not everyone in the automotive-marketing world is picking up on Muno’s family-friendly image:

What the hell, Kia? I understand that this “one-eyed monster” is a character from some kids’ show, but to your child-free customers this key marketing character looks like an infected phallus with a nasty case of genital warts. If that’s what you get with a new Kia Sorrento, I’ll pass.

Of course, “child-free customers” wouldn’t be in the market for a minivan anyway. So it’d be easy enough to dismiss such criticism, seeing as how it comes from a jaded car-showroom human prop. On the other hand, speculation about Muno’s phallic-reminiscent vibe(ration) has been around since the show’s 2007 debut:

“He’s tall and friendly,” the theme song informs us, as the giant orange cyclops jumps up and down (vibrates, really) and giggles. His most noticeable for-her-pleasure feature by far is the fact that he’s covered with Astroglide little bumps that aren’t unlike several products you’ll find in the Good Vibrations catalogue.

So is Muno really an overgrown joystick, in more than one sense of that word? I guess there are worse things to be patterned after.