Of the 3,000 or so marketing messages it’s been estimated we all see daily, my two favorites right now are the Coldplay iTunes spot (which looks absolutely spectacular in high-def on a 52-inch screen) and this commercial for Ocean City, Maryland. Watch them both: It’ll be two minutes well spent.

Takeaway for marketers: You can rise above the noise. All it takes is some smart creativity. It’s that simple … and that difficult.

Last week I called and ordered FiOS for both my home and the office in my home. That amounted to two separate orders: Internet and phone on one order, television and phone on the other.

In the days that followed, I received multiple emails and phone calls from Verizon both confirming my order and confirming my installation appointment. I was impressed: Where FiOS was concerned, they really seemed to have the customer service thing nailed down tight.

Yesterday, the FiOS installer came by and spent the best part of the day doing the installation. Nice guy. Did a great job and speedtest.net is showing me I’m within reasonable range of the speeds for which I’m paying.

Literally five minutes after the installer left, I get a call from Verizon. "Cool," I think to myself, "they have it nailed down even better than I imagined. They’re calling to see how the installation went."

Nope. They were calling … to sell me FiOS.

Takeaway for marketers: How scrubbed are your phone and email and direct mail lists? Or, put another way: How much of your marketing efforts are pure unadulterated waste?

The other day. a friend sent me this Newsday link to a gallery of 50 wretched album covers. The topic is an oldie but a goodie, and a little Googling found this site , which lists 100 terrible covers (with mostly well-known artists plus snarky comments), this site , which has 149 awful covers, and this link to the Chicago Tribune, which is either a gallery in the making or one that’s died: the links don’t work, but the page is designed exactly like Newsday’s. I wonder who was the swiper and who was the swipee.

What struck me upon navigating through the Newsday feature (besides the absurdity of some of the covers of course) is that as you click through from cover to cover, you get popup after popup. It’s a good way for Newsday to increase their ad impressions delivered, of course, but is there anyone who thinks that in the middle of a tour of album cover lunacy someone will stop themselves cold and say, "Oh, yeah, that’s right — I need to sign up for an American Express card."

Takeaway for marketers: Context and relevance matters.

The first paragraph of this article from AdAge the other day pretty much nails it:

"Avinash Kaushik thinks one of the reasons why so many websites ‘suck’ today is because of the hippo — as in the ‘highest paid person’s opinion.’ "

Bingo. You probably don’t have to read the rest of the article if you’ve been involved in any significant Web design or development projects (the familiarity of the hippo will be painful enough), but here’s the link if you want to check it out anyway.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re a hippo, back off. Trust your staff … isn’t that why you’re paying them?

As we wait for email standards to be established, paying attention to best practices is the next best thing. So if you’re involved in email marketing at all, be sure to read this terrific post from the Campaign Monitor blog.

Takeaway for marketers: There’s a lot more to sending email than just sending email.