ColemanMedia Report

A new marketing campaign from Skittles that encouraged teens in China with messages of fun and rebellion has inadvertently landed an entire generation of teens aged 13-17 in an undisclosed Chinese prison, according to officials with the Chinese government, who asked to remain anonymous.  The campaign, which urged teens to “Skittlize routine school activities,” reportedly backfired when the teens refused to turn in homework assignments on time, landing them in a state prison somewhere in the rural Xinjiang province.  Regardless, the Skittles marketing department is pleased with the results.  ”We consider this campaign a monumental success,” said Kitty Wang.  ”Our brand awareness within the target market is through the roof.  Our challenge now is that our entire target market is now in jail, and physically unable to buy our product.  And we have no word yet on when they might be let out.”

The blogosphere was abuzz early Tuesday after a recent round of financing by Derivative Capital valued popular micro-blog Twitter at just over 5 billion Retweets, dramatically topping earlier estimates of $250.17.  While the buzz seems to be mostly confusion over what exactly 5 billion Retweets actually means, most bloggers agree that the prognosis is good, despite Twitter’s inability to turn a profit thus far.  ”Technically a Retweet has absolutely no monetary value whatsoever,” said Moishe Malakai, lead blogger at Mashable.com.  ”But Twitter’s not concerned about making money, and they shouldn’t have to be.  Twitter as a business subsists entirely on buzz, popularity, and growth, not a sustainable revenue plan.  And so far they’ve done a bang-up job with that.  Besides, if someone named Derivative Capital places a big bet on you, you have to be doing something right.  Right?”

A complaint lodged by Western Regional VP of Sales Vince Chillini Monday afternoon accused junior media planner Judy Wittenmeier of comparing “apples to oranges” when justifying her selection of rival behavioral ad network SpyBot over CookieCutter Networks, according witnesses at the scene.  ”You can’t possibly make a comparison between SpyBot and CookieCutter,” Chillini said in an email to Wittenmeier.  ”CookieCutter uses a proprietary formula of complex algorithms and automatic back-end optimization that’s so advanced, I don’t even know how it works.  And as far as I can tell, neither does our ad operations team.  But it’s clearly outlined on slide 26 of my PowerPoint, so it has to be true.”  Wittenmeier wasn’t available for comment, but a planner on Wittenmeier’s team, who asked to remain anonymous said, “He can’t be serious, right?”

The Central Intelligence Agency announced late Friday that a new technology contract will allow the agency to instantly track criminals, suspects and ex-girlfriends within popular social networks Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.  The contract, with Seattle-based Visible Technologies, will allow agents to track any and all social networking activity of “persons of interest” secretely – without logging in or revealing their identities.  ”This is a huge leap forward in allowing us to stalk ex-girlfriends,” said CIA Director Leon Panetta.  ”Before we had to log in and send friend requests to find out what they were up to.  Most of the time they would just ignore or deny us.  But now I can track Peggy, Donna, and Gladys Steinberg without them knowing, and find out if they really hooked up with Kevin from senior gym class.”  Financial details of the contract were not released, but Panetta characterized the cost as “totally worth it.”