Meet the king of unsocial media: Rex Huppke.

Rex likes to tell a lot of fart, sex and gay jokes, like other Apatow-wannabe wordslingers. What makes Rex unique, however, is that he does it as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. 

Yesterday, after Huppke posted a string of puerile Karl Malden jokes on his Twitter account following the Oscar-winning actor’s death, I tweeted him back with this civil nudge:

Ease up, man. Karl Malden was a person, not a punchline.

To which the Trib reporter elbowed me back in response:

If you can’t take the jokes, get out of the Twitter. (And what are you, head of the Malden fan club or something?)

OK, that’s a little harsh, I thought. But I can take a joke. So I responded:

Take it easy, Rex. All I’m saying is that RIP doesn’t stand for Ridicule in Perpetuity.

To which, Huppke tempestuously tweeted back (as you see above):

And all I’m saying is I don’t give a puckered rat’s ass what you’re saying. Now shoo, before I sick [sic] Malden’s ghost on you.

This kind of frat-house flaming goes on all the time online, of course. But not from a reporter of a major newspaper, writing on behalf of that organization.

Huppke wouldn’t be allowed to write that way in the print edition of his paper. So I wonder what it is about the online medium that allows—and even celebrates—this kind of disrespectful discourse?

Journalists have been complaining for years that bloggers lack integrity. Now it looks like the shoe is now on the other foot. Shape up, Trib. Or simply remove your byline from Huppke’s Twitter page. Then he’s free to tweet whatever sophomoric thing he wants.

With Fourth of July just around the corner, there’s been no shortage of patriotic pitches over the airwaves.

But New Balance appears to be going one step further by aligning its entire brand campaign behind a red-white-and-blue theme: “The only athletic footwear manufacturer making shoes in the US.”

In today’s Wal-Mart world, I wonder: How many people really care any more? And not just with their hearts, but with their pocketbooks, since New Balance shoes typically sell at a premium.

Have we all just gotten so used to the idea of global sourcing that “Made in the USA” no longer resonates?

Or, does this strangely somber (and grimly tinged) video fail to deliver the emotional connection needed to make me genuinely care?

I feel a bit guilty admitting this but the video actually made me think less of the New Balance brand, seeing the rather low-tech way that the shoes are manufactured.

And what’s with the bottle of Gatorade and cup of coffee on the worker’s table in the freeze-frame above? Does that say “craftsmanship” to you?

Photo © 2007 MPL Communications Ltd./Max VadukulWhen I visited Belgium a month ago, I read that the Flemish town of Ghent had designated every Thursday as Veggiedag (Veggie Day), urging its citizens to go meat-free just one day a week.

While I know that the theory of “small change” is widely debated, I really liked this idea. Stop eating meat entirely? That’s a pretty radical change. But give it up one day a week: Hey, I could do that. And maybe I’d even learn something in the process.

Now a group of celebs—including avowed vegetarian Paul McCartney—is giving that idea some juice with a new Meat Free Monday campaign, launched earlier this month. The pitch: “By making a simple change in the way you eat, you are taking part in a world-changing campaign where what’s good for you is also good for the planet.”

Really nice work—and a true example of strategic communications, because the campaign aims to unite people who hold different views, rather than radicalizing those differences. You can’t change someone’s behavior by bellowing at them with a louder megaphone.

Savvy veggie-friendly marketers would be wise to pick up the theme. Hey, Wednesday used to be Prince spaghetti day. Why not Meat Free Monday?

Photo by munkt0n on Flickr.com, (cc) some rights reserved. Wall Street values brands far more than consumers do, according to a well-researched article by John Gerzema and Ed Lebar in this summer’s edition of Strategy + Business.

In fact, the authors believe that the gap between real brand value and perceived brand value is widening, creating a “recipe for disaster.”

Gerzema and Lebar argue that we live in such a brand-saturated world that only a handful of truly “energized brands” (Google, iPhone, Axe and the usual suspects) really matter to consumers any more.

That expression needs work, but the theory may be spot on. In fact, a recent study conducted by the Pointer Media Network shows that consumer brand loyalty has deteriorated alarmingly, with many brands losing half or more of their most loyal customers over the past two years.

That’s should be a big red flag for Wall Street—and for marketing agencies, too. There’s more to branding than aligning your touchpoints. (Ho, hum.) To create brand equity, you have to generate brand energy.

You won’t find “Scientology” on Brandtags, a cool Web site that tracks “the first thing that pops into your head” when you say the name of hundreds of brands.

But if it were, the top three word associations would probably come up as Tom Cruise, cult and weird.

The Church of Scientology is trying to change all that by creating new associations for its brand with ads like this one (above). The take-away: Scientology isn’t the bizarro fabrication of a science fiction writer. It’s about real-life stuff like roast beef dinners and kids on trampolines.

Will ads like this change negative perceptions about Scientology? Probably not. In fact, they may inflame the suspicions that many people have about the organization.

But it’s more likely that “The Church” is targeting its next generation of believers, not us. Of the smattering of comments on YouTube, nearly all are positive, like this one: “This makes one of my friends cry every time. So beautiful and so true.”

I  just saw this Riney-esque television ad for Michigan tourism. Turns out it’s more than two years old. But its poetic tone and nostalgic style could not be more perfectly crafted for the times:

25,000 mornings—give or take—is all we humans get.

We spend them on treadmills. We spend them in traffic.

And if we get lucky—really lucky—it dawns on us to go spend them in a world where a simple sunrise can still be magic.

25,000 mornings. Make sure some of them are pure Michigan.

Your trip begins at Michigan.org.

Should the new GM start with a new name, an AP story asked over the weekend.

It’s a surprisingly bland story, characterized by this even more colorless quote by a University of Chicago marketing prof: “I’m not sure there’d be that much harm in rebranding.”

The real answer, if GM is listening: Change your culture, not your name. 

Stop talking about yourself, as you do in this predictable reinvention ad. And start letting your actions speak for themselves through real change.

A good example: Look at how Wal-Mart has transformed itself and its reputation over the past three years, without a name change, through its commitment to sustainability.

Listen to Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard praise Wal-Mart in the video above, if you need further convincing. Don’t change the GM name. Make it stand for something again.

… then with one of the most played-out corporate stock-photo metaphors of the past three decades.

C’mon Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. You guys can do better than this. Were all the images of business people jumping over track hurdles taken?

Or was your marketing committee so large that such embarassingly derivative creative was all that the agency could get approved?

GMAC Bank has rebranded itself Ally Bank.

Smart move, considering the baggage its old brand carries. But the messaging, particularly in this ad, is indefensible:

“Even kids know it’s wrong to hold out on somebody. Why don’t banks?”

Uh, how about not telling consumers that you used to be called GMAC? Feels an awful lot like the old joke about the kid who digs through a huge pile of manure to find the pony hidden in there.

Information design is far from a lost art. But it has lost its lustre, as brand and interactive design now dominate the discipline.

That’s why I was thrilled, perhaps nostalgically, to see this proposal for taming ungainly credit card information in an opinion piece in The New York Times.

Kudos to designers (and AIGA Design for Democracy directors) David Gibson, Carla Hall and Sylvia Harris for taking up the challenge, and for reminding us all how it’s done.

I’m not a tea drinker. But I’d like to be. I just feel dumb standing in the tea aisle—like my mom, if she went into a wine shop or Starbucks.

The last box of tea I bought was Darjeeling, just because I’m a Wes Anderson fan. (Yeah, that’s pretty bad.)

But while shopping last week, this GET CHARGED package from The Republic of Tea really grabbed me. And so does the tea, for that matter.

It’s a great example of the power of packaging, especially when trying to woo new customers to an unfamiliar category.

The Republic of Tea brand gave the product credibility, sealing the sale. Now I’m looking forward to trying more.

If you’re a fan of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, you’ll love this story from Slate last week about how words are selected for the competition.

Among the piquant tidbits: Merriam-Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is the “bible of the bee.”

We all know who Noah Webster was, of course. But who the heck was Merriam?

As it turns out, George and Charles Merriam had a good eye for intellectual property. They purchased the publishing and revision rights to Webster’s work after the word maven died in 1843.

Too bad they didn’t have better attorneys, though. “Webster” is now in the public domain, and can be used by any dictionary publisher. But don’t bring that up to M-W. I hear they’re a bit atrabilious about the matter.