A coupla years ago, I was asked to name my favorite person in advertising. The answer: P.T. Barnum.

The nine years I spent developing online and offline marketing communications for The Greatest Show On Earth probably had something to do with it. Even so, a good book about Barnum should be on every marketer’s shelf alongside The Cluetrain Manifesto and the collected works of Seth Godin.

The other day, the New York Times ran a pretty good article on the man who, many say, invented advertising and marketing. It barely skims the surface, but it’s still worth a read. I particularly like how Kathy Maher, executive director of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, articulated Barnum’s talent: “His lasting legacy is how he managed to take something simple and make it extraordinary.”

Takeaway for marketers: It’s not about the humbug, it’s about the passion and creativity. Barnum had both in Jumbo-sized portions.

Forget the $10 billion valuation suggested earlier this month. Make it $15 billion. Insane.

Unless the type of advertising envisioned for Facebook is genuinely revolutionary, it could create a negative backlash among Facebook users. Or, at worst, serve as the pebble in the social networking pond that causes the school of fish known as the Facebook audience to dart elsewhere.

Takeaway for marketers: Someone’s going to have to pay some very inflated ad prices to help justify the numbers.

Matt Heinz over on iMedia Connection has posted this article about building brand buzz. He starts off talking about brand police and notes that “the very concept of brand police is flawed and implies that we’re failing to effectively create and build a sustainable brand within our organizations (let alone leverage it).”

I disagree. There’s a difference between creating a brand experience or being a brand evangelist (which is what Heinz refers to in his United Airlines examples) and being one of the “brand police.” The article concludes with Heinz imploring the reader to “make sure the concept of brand police is thought of as a very short-term strategy, with an eye toward the long-term plan of creating an entire organization policing, reinforcing and strengthening its collective asset.”

Having “brand police” and creating a corporate culture in which everyone is a brand advocate is not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, I would argue that the role of the marketing gendarmes becomes even more important the larger the company grows and the more mature the brand becomes.

An infinite variety of brand questions will inevitably arise as new company initiatives are brainstormed and undertaken. Who is to make the call as to whether this or that detail is the correct one for the brand, anyone or everyone in the company? Nope. That way lies brand anarchy. Final responsibility for keeping the DNA of the brand healthy and vital has to rest with brand marketing, i.e. the “brand police.”

Take a well-established brand like Nickelodeon. One of the tenets of their brand is to never call themselves cool; that’s for the kids to determine, not them. But think about the massive volume of collateral, presentations, paperwork and such that flows through the Nick organization. A bit of overzealousness while preparing a PowerPoint, a bit of self-referential coolness … and the brand DNA experiences another bit of erosion.

Or think about an emerging brand. Everyone in the organization is scrambling at the speed of business to get some positive cash flow happening. It’s awfully easy for someone to strike a deal or embark on a tactic that’s 180 degrees removed from what the brand marketers established up front … and the brand DNA experiences another bit of erosion.

In countless examples anyone can well imagine, it’s the “brand police” who need to be involved at crucial checkpoints in the business process to make sure that the brand personality is expressed correctly, and that the overall brand is being built up for long-term growth and not eroded for short-term myopia.

To put it another way: The well-defined and smartly communicated brand is like a well-written movie, play or television series. The employees, the brand advocates, are the cast and crew. The brand marketers are the scriptwriters. All are working together to present a complete, cohesive whole to the public.

It’s okay to go off script occasionally, but make a habit of it and you wind up with an episode of House that’s looks like an episode of Scrubs.

Takeaway for marketers: Academy Awards and Tonys and Emmys are great, but it all starts with a solid script.

The New York Times had a pretty good article yesterday about Web metrics, ComScore, Nielsen NetRatings, and the whole site traffic measurement thing. It’s always struck me as ironic that this online world of ostensibly precise measurement is anything but; the Style.com example in the article’s lead shows differences in traffic measures by a factor of four.

At some point, I hope surveys and extrapolation are supplanted by actual hands-on audits of the traffic logs of major sites by a reliable third-party traffic measurement service. Sure, it would be pretty labor-intensive, but we’re talking about an industry that measures its size in billions, not millions, with hefty double-digit annual growth. Seems to me like it would be a worthy investment for all, not least of whom would include the third-party service.

Takeaway for marketers: The online world is a realm of precise, undeniably perfect measurement? Bwahahahahaaaa!

Adrants alerts us to a pretty creative piece of online “advertising” in which Wendy’s takes over the home page of Heavy.com (self-described as “one of the web’s leading consumer video companies and the leader for 18-34 year old males”) today for 12 hours.

Takeaway for marketers: Thinking online? Think outside the banner.