Google celebrates the modern stone-age family with a doodle. LOHAD celebrates with a trio of cigarette commercials.

While heading back to the train from a new client meeting yesterday, I snapped the photo you see here in Times Square.

Okay, I get it: It’s Advertising Week, and the Barnum gene in me applauds the idea of an ice cream truck in Times Square serving up a menu of “Digital Interactive Services” that include “Marketing Kitchen” and “Digital Foundry” and more.

Then the Cluetrain gene in me makes my teeth grind when I visit the Zemoga site and learn that their “service offerings provide innovative solutions for our Client Partners.”

Then the client gene in me makes me wonder: How much does it cost to have an ice cream truck in Times Square, and do I really want the fees I’m paying to my agency to go to something like this, or would I rather they be spending my dollars on my business?

(All due respect to the folks at Zemoga, by the way. Hey, their CMO started at Marvel, and I’m an old-school comic book guy; rest assured I have nothing against them and no axe to grind. Snapping this photo was the first I heard of them, so I guess from an awareness perspective their tactic was successful with this focus group of one.)

Takeaway for marketers: In this every-penny-matters economy, we have to ask ourselves: Do these sorts of high-profile (and undoubtedly high-cost) tactics really make sense?

After enjoying this amazing montage of Dick Van Dyke Show clips (hat tip to Mark Evanier for the heads up on that one), I was clicking around YouTube and found the above Kent commercial. Can you imagine the cast of any television show today doing blatant on-set commercials like this for any product, much less cigarettes?

It’s strange to think that my professional life has been focused on Internet issues for about three years longer than Google has been around. I often tell people that I’ve been working online since Prodigy was The Next Big Thing; I may amend that to incorporate a pre-Google perspective. After all, how many people actually remember Prodigy?

Anyway, today being Google’s 12th birthday, I decided to take a look back at the 1998 version of the Internet. (By the way, that’s the New York Times home page up there, circa 1998.)

I found a Pew commentary titled The Internet Circa 1998.Back then, “57% of non-internet users said they worry ‘not at all’ about missing out on something by not going online. 22% of non-users said they worry ‘not very much,’ 10% worry ‘a fair amount,’ and 7% worry ‘a great deal’ about missing out on something by not going online.”

This page of predictions for the Internet in 1998 from Jakob Nielsen included the observation that “the Web is simply not that suited for advertising” — which, of course, hasn’t stopped advertisers one bit.

And here’s a place where you’ll find results of a survey focused on “the scholarly uses of the Internet. Among the survey’s conclusions:

The three most popular professional uses of the Internet revolve around sending and receiving electronic mail (individual and list-mediated), and reading online news.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

… and  sees Bing. At least that’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt says.