This story should be yet another wakeup call to every music label executive out there, assuming they don’t already have ultra-caffeinated bug eyes from recurring nightmares in which they’re assaulted by legions of Arctic Monkeys.

Takeaway for marketers: It’s not just the means of advertising (blogs, word of mouth, message boards, etc.) that have changed. The means of production have changed, too. The future is here. Deal with it.

I put well over 1,000 miles on my car in the last week. Among the things that became clearer to me than ever before (like: an iPod is an essential device when you’re 100 miles from nowhere) is this: Most billboards suck.

Don’t the people creating these things understand that the people looking at these things are typically breezing by at 65 or 75 miles per hour? Why pepper them with photos you have to stare at for five minutes to see what the hell it is? Or words so small you need to pull over to the side of the road and squint to read the damn thing?

I think the best test for a billboard might be to print the proposed design onto a 3×5 card and have someone hold it in the air and walk by the creative director’s desk. Briskly. If the creative director can’t read it easily, then it’s back to the drawing board.

Sturgeon’s Law tends to hold true with most things in life, but in the case of billboards I suspect it’s understating the number.

Over on The Marketing Excellence Blog, Eric Kintz (Vice President of Global Marketing Strategy and Excellence for Hewlett-Packard) details in this post why Second Life may be something for marketers to avoid. Or at least something about which marketers should think twice, then think again.

Of course, Eric asks what may be the most relevant question of all for marketers considering a presence in Second Life: “Are you ready to take the risk of having one of your press events attacked by animated flying genitals?”

(Thanks to B.L. Ochman’s What’s Next blog for the heads up on this one via her post, Marketers Flopping In Second Life.)

To get the word out on their May 2007 redesign and relaunch, Promo magazine has developed the Promo Marketers’ Challenge (registration required) which is (a) challenging, (b) viral, (c) addicting, (d) all of the above.

The answer is (d) — and it took me only 19 games to crack the top 10 rankings. Nyaaaah! (But someone needs to tell these people that it’s the New York Times, not the Post, whose slogan is, “All the News That’s Fit To Print.”)

APRIL 9 UPDATE: I did. They’re fixing it. Now you should be able to get that perfect score of 45,000, right?

FURTHER UPDATE: The Challenge has evidently been removed from the Web. Damn. Now you’ll never achieve perfection.

“Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can be aroused by two things: first, an idea which takes the imagination by storm; and second, a definite, intelligible plan for carrying that idea into action.”
—Arnold Toynbee