One of my favorite Bloggers (bookofjoe.com) wrote a commentary on advertising in response to this Wall Street Journal Article about Pepsi dropping the agency handling their Gatorade and Tropicana brands in which he outlines 3 commandments for 21st century TV advertising:

1) Thou shalt not repeat a commercial within an hour of its last showing ? anywhere in the same time zone.
2) Thou shalt not spend a fortune making any one commercial or series of them, since they're never gonna come remotely close to earning back their cost.
3) Thou shalt therefore realize, o corporations and ad agencies, that the future of your products lies in taking off the tunnel vision blinders and not just looking in different directions but seeing with different eyes. If you can't do that from within, find them outside your corporate confines. Remember that reality goes not just sideways and forward and backward and up and down but moves as well in time. Use the fourth dimension ? or it will use and crush you.

Not bad for a blogging anesthesiologist, maybe Joe should give up pushing gas for something less meaningful to society.

Maybe Pepsi has been following Mike Masnick series (here, here, here, here and here) that speaks 4 truths that apply to more then just the web of which he was speaking.

1. The captive audience is dead.
2. Advertising is content.
3. Content is advertising.
4. Content needs to be useful/engaging/interesting.

Obviously NBC is paying attention since it formed a new NBC Universal production unit which is teaming up with an advertising agency to create programs around sponsors' products.

Of interested for those of you not keeping up with the links in this topic should be that Omnicom the agency teaming up with NBC is the parent agency of Element 79 which Pepsi has dropped from the Gatorade and Tropicana accounts.

All this stands in interesting contrast to comments of Tim Robbins to the National Associations of Broadcasters last week in which he called on content providers to rise above the base [read as lowly] programming to help raise the nation to its highest level, as opposed to the lowest which he clearly believes we are in. Robbins challenged broadcasters to actually not think strictly as business people, but to lead the country through their programming.

Of course as the blogging anesthesiologist correctly point out the most important fact is that, "We click and leave now when we're bored ? or when we know we're about to be."

So join us as we discuss media and the paradigm shift in content and advertising.

As always, there is no better way to meet and connect with other executives then over dinner and conversation. $21 in advance via PayPal or $25 at the event gets you a full dinner, drink and the best networking around.