an aggregate of all things Johnson

An Australian beer company has landed itself in Disney’s cross hairs with an ad campaign featuring the likeness of Snow White in bed with semi-nude dwarves.

The Foundry, brewers of Jamieson’s Raspberry Ale, said the “Ho White” campaign, based on characters from Disney’s 1937 animated film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,” is designed to convince consumers the beverage is “anything but sweet,” The (Sydney, Australia) Daily Telegram reported Friday.

The campaign, which includes advertisements online and in bars, features “Ho White” blowing smoke rings while in bed with dwarves renamed “Filthy, Smarmy and Randy” by the company.

A couple months ago Rachel and I went to the Brooklyn Flea under the Brooklyn Bridge and while I was getting some food, Rachel wandered off and sampled some peanuts from a local vendor. A reporter was there doing a story on the nuts and asked Rachel her opinion and as part of his story asked Rachel her occupation. Rachel then told the reporter a little about Swap-bot and a few weeks later he contacted Rachel to get more information about the site for an article he was writing.

The article hit the streets this morning and features a picture of Rachel.

I was working from home today due to an internet issue in the office and ran across the street to pick up a copy of the paper when I heard we were in it. Rachel heard from the reporter that we were on page 10, but the copy I first bought did not have our story anywhere in the paper. Rachel then reconfirmed that we were indeed in the paper, so at lunch we went out and tried a few more stores and found the edition with the Swap-bot article at about the fifth shop we tried.

Update: After reading this post Rachel made fun of this post. She was really wanting to know if I was excited or not to find the papers with us at the fifth shop. So Rachel, yes, I was very excited to not only find us in the paper but to also have a story about our site in the paper. Who knows what it will lead to next (hint: this a P1-esque hint)?

I have a big weekend of holiday shopping planned! Tomorrow I am going to the Handmade Cavalcade Holiday Show and the Martha Stewart Holiday Craft Sale. Then, I am meeting up with Travis at Bloomingdales to try to finish some of our Christmas gift shopping. (We might get to make a stop at Dylan’s Candy Bar, too!) On Sunday, I am going to try to get to the Bust Holiday Craftacular. It will be a busy weekend, but I am looking forward to it.

Today Right Media announced they were shutting down Direct Media Exchange. The reason I bring this up is because for nearly four years I worked on the team that built DMX. Working at Right Media and getting to build DMX was a great opportunity for me. I learned how to build web applications from some great engineers and learned how to build products from some amazing product folk.

DMX was actually a very useful tool that didn’t really ever catch on as much as it should have. The premise was simple: “put our ad tag on your site and we will find the highest paying ad to serve”. Seems like a dream come true for publishers, and as the publisher of Swap-bot I can confirm that it was with one exception – not everyone was on the Right Media Exchange. We had a really nice tool for handling advertisers/networks that weren’t on the Exchange, but it required manual tweaking for maximum revenue.

I’m not really sad to see DMX get shut down – Yahoo lost my sympathy when they let me and my team go after we did some great work on their “next generation” ad serving platform – but I do miss the early days of DMX. DMX hadn’t been touched for a couple years and was starting to fall apart. Swap-bot had to stop using DMX a couple weeks ago because the ad blocking tool stopped working and highly inappropriate ads were being shown.

I think real time integrations are fueling the next chapter in publisher monetization tools. Once we get all advertisers bidding on all available inventory the publisher really will be able to kill the daisy chain. Once all the supply on the internet is linked to all of the demand on the internet, publisher monetization tools will be little more than reports, ad tags and creative/brand blocking. Once you get this set up once you will never have to go back unless you want to see how large of a check you will be getting at the end of the month. Of course, this also means there will be some pretty exciting tools for advertisers, but I will save that discussion for the future.

I leave you with a video from some of DMX’s brighter days: