I’m not all that impressed with the “Cyber Monday” sales (and shipping & financing discounts), but if you want to check out an overview to decide for yourself you can do so at blackfday.com.  In my opinion, the best offer is the 20% off certain stores if you use PayPal to checkout (most appear to be capped at $50 or so).

This ad is from the coupon section found in the Sunday Indianapolis Star in November 2007.  For some reason Thanksgiving ads don’t seem to get much attention as everyone is eager to roll out the Christmas ads the moment Halloween is over.  That said, there wasn’t that wide of a selection to choose from.  But there are numerous Christmas ones showing up (which I promise not to post until after Thanksgiving).

This has to be the oddest PR I’ve seen around town in sports marketing (even toping some of the Indianapolis Ice promos in the past)…

Now if only the “aliens” would abduct certain players and plant a “common sense chip” in them.

The site that this video/commercial mentions, worldunexplained.com, just takes you to the plain Pacers home page. I think that would have had some marketing potential for the season as a whole (and would be kind of fun to organize), but hey, it’s a start of thinking outside of the box, right?

(Shameless plug: we’re for hire if they need some help.)

Yesterday I ran across a new “pay wiki” site, OneBuckWiki, who’s offering pages for $1 (until 1000 pages are sold, then it goes up to $10).

I’m currently undecided about how useful/helpful something like this is (wikis in general, not just this one), but I do see the potential (as long as it is policed AND people still buy pages after it goes beyond $1). And for a one time $1 payment I guess there’s not really a whole lot to lose. If you get any site traffic from it, it’s well worth the investment, right?

So, I went ahead and purchased a few pages to help promote Watershed Studio and Surge Bucket Media. (So far I’ve only had a chance to add content for the weird news page which promotes Squirrel Dish, Utter Oddcast and Utter Oddness…with a nod to Gene & Bryan over at Hometown Tales.)

I think that the one thing that I really like about this site is that fact that they’re using a theme/template that looks more like a normal web page or blog post. A big thing that really turned me off about Wiki’s in the past was the default layout found in every one that I came across just didn’t light any fires for me (along with a handful of functionality issues).

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. And now the wheels are turning on how Wiki’s might be useful for a few of my own sites and I think I’m going to take a look at the software again (whenever I can manage to find some “free time”).

So when is the 2008 Valentines Day candy going to appear? I’m having a hankering for Sweet Tart Hearts and buying over priced flowers, aren’t you?

OK, I’m being a little sarcastic (maybe not about the candy part), but is it just me or are the retailers truly pushing out the various “holiday” merchandise much quicker than before? I began to see “back-to-school” supplies in early July (presumably to make way for the upcoming “seasonal” items), Halloween costumes and candy in late August (at both Target and Wal-Mart) and Christmas merchandise in mid-September (at Target and I’d assume the same at Wal-Mart and other similar retailers). Then in yesterday’s paper I saw Halloween and Christmas items in the Kohl’s ad on the same page. (Apparently fall/harvest/Thanksgiving is all lumped together with Halloween.)

Being a “marketing type” and knowing that Halloween and Christmas merchandise are both huge money makers for retailers, I can understand why you’d want these items in front of customers as long as possible. But it’s a little creepy looking at graveyards, skeletons, zombies, mummies, witches, werewolves, vampires, bats, rats, spiders and disembodied heads in crystal balls while hearing Bing Crosby singing “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” in the background. But maybe it’s just me…