Probably the only thing I dislike more than cars is car commercials. Okay, that’s not quite right: I don’t dislike cars, I dislike car repair issues; and when you have a car, no matter what kind of car, you have repair issues. So it’s sorta one and the same.

Anyway, I tend to have a very utilitarian view of cars, and try to pay as little attention as possible to car commercials. But I have to salute the brilliance — yes, brilliance — of whoever convinced Honda to go with a snippet of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy In New York” (from the Bridge Over Troubled Water album).

There may be others, but I’ve found four spots on YouTube using this music: “Sun” is embedded up top. There’s also “Highway,” “Chase” and “Clouds.”

I usually despise the commercialization of classic rock (okay, more folk-rock in this case). And if you know the song “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine” from S&G’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme album, there’s a certain irony in using any of their songs in a commercial for anything.

But dayam — Honda absolutely nailed it with these.

Everyone loves a good infographic. Here’s one from Web Analytics World that takes an interesting look at Facebook.

“Approach all situations with a joyful mind.”
—Jeff Bridges

According to ClickZ, billions of Web ads carried malware in 2010.

I get a lot of email. I don’t mean a lot of email, I mean a LOT of email.

Part of it has to do with the fact that I have about a dozen email accounts, but right now I’d like to focus on one of them: the AOL account I’ve had since the early ’90s.

This is the catch-all account where I send all my subscriptions and newsletters and discussion group mailings. It’s the address I provide whenever I buy anything online. As a result, it’s where I get a lot of marketing-related email.

As I type this, there are 937 messages in this account’s inbox. That’s culled down from about 1,100 when I logged on this morning. How do I decide what to delete? I have several ways, but the main one is to search the subject lines for particular elements that tell me the email is worth deleting without reading.

Here’s my list of the top 10 things I search for when I’m trying to clean out my inbox:

1 — “%”
2 — “$”
3 — “!”
4 — “free”
5 — “Craig”
6 — “get”
7 — “offer”
8 — “save”
9 — “deal”
10 — “sale”

When I search for these elements in subject lines, 999 times out of 1,000 the email is a piece of junk I can delete without reading.

I don’t know how strongly my attitude is reflected in any given company’s mailing list of, say, 100,000 addresses. I do know this, though: In-my-face offers and fake “personalization” aren’t the things that make me interested in reading further.

Takeaway for marketers: I’m not saying you should never include these elements in your subject lines, but I am saying you should think about the rest of the messages in your recipients’ inboxes, not just yours. Which is yet another reason why A/B testing of subject lines is so important.