• Toilet paper on a roll was first introduced in the 1890s, and it took several decades before consumers were really comfortable asking for the product by name. Not surprisingly, the US uses more toilet paper than any other country, and the growing use of "TP" is evidence of the rising influence of western marketing.... [url]
• Star Toilet Paper is a startup that puts advertisements on toilet paper. The investor pitch goes something like: "It's like Groupon, but on toilet paper... and everyone has to use the bathroom, so if we can just get 0.0001% conversion..." [url]
• A new toilet paper called "Moka" is partially made from recycled paper products, so it's not the gleaming white most people are accustomed to. Beige toilet paper is more environmentally friendly, but will any bathrooms (other than public restrooms) actually use brown toilet paper? [url]
• Recycled toilet paper relies on the quality of the products it's made from, so if there's less office paper waste -- recycled toilet paper is either going to get more expensive or feel even less like "normal" TP. Seventh Generation says there may be a limit to how soft recycled toilet paper can get, but there may be paper additives that might help (but additives might also reduce the environmentally-friendly aspects). [url]

Campbell's is running a very cool campaign called Hack The Kitchen, for which they've developed a full-fledged recipe searching API that pulls data from their Campbell's Kitchen repository.

This is your opportunity to revolutionize dinners everywhere: Develop a breakout idea based on the Campbell's Kitchen API that helps people decide: what’s for dinner tonight?

After seeing all the ideas, we’ll choose up to thirty semi-finalists and give them our API for three weeks to bring their ideas to life.

Up to ten finalists will then be invited to present their projects at Google’s HQ in NYC to compete for the championship and launch their ideas into the world.

It's a fantastic concept, and the API looks genuinely useful. Not only is the contest itself a great marketing opportunity, it's setting Campbell's up for ongoing exposure through the apps that are developed.

But, having said how cool this is from a marketing perspective, it's time for the disclaimer—and it's a big one. The moment you get past the initial idea and into the details, things really start to fall apart from an innovation perspective. Firstly, as you probably noticed, the API is not being opened up to the public—only to the contest semi-finalists. That severely limits the amount of innovation that will happen, and the amount of exposure the company will get as a result—it also limits the number of developers that will even want to participate. Unfortunately, Campbell's reason for this is clear: they intend to take total ownership of anything that comes out of this campaign.

In fact, they are so concerned about this that the fine print states the cash prizes ($25,000 plus a development contract for the winner, $10,000 to runners up) are not prizes at all—they are a fee for your work:

*Paid by Cambell for ownership of all ideas, concepts, code and intellectual property.

Setting aside the fact that you cannot own an "idea", this just stinks. On the one hand, it's not uncommon for creative contests to take ownership of submissions (though that's hardly universal), but it is the complete antithesis of what appears to be the spirit of this campaign: hacking and innovation. This is actually a big problem with corporate-run hackathons and coding contests, which frequently demand total ownership at the end. No smart developer with a truly great app idea would give it away for $25,000 for the copyright plus another $25,000 to build it—a popular app with a long tail can be worth way, way more than that.

There's nothing wrong with Campbell's trying to get an official app or two out of this—but when you look closely, the people who are submitting these ideas don't seem to be getting much in return. They want everyone to submit their best ideas for free, then they want 30 people to actually build those ideas—then Campbell's will plunk down $10k to take total ownership of any that "could be developed by Campbell in the future" (thus stopping all those runners-up from moving forward with their apps independently, and presumably cutting off their API access) and toss $50k to one developer to make their app market-ready. The winner gets an okay deal, while the runners-up pretty much get screwed.

So, for the next time Campbell's or another company tries a genuinely cool and innovative idea like this, I suggest a few tweaks to make the execution less distasteful. Firstly, open the API up to everyone, and leave it open; have sensible limitations like any public API, but let people build what they want. Secondly, give away modest but genuine prizes with no strings, while offering a bounty for ideas that you want to own without making that rights transfer a requirement of the contest. Thirdly, promote the submitted apps in a public gallery, and encourage all developers to move forward with building, deploying and marketing their apps—you'll get a hell of a lot more exposure, and you might even find your API becoming the de facto standard for such development.

In the mean time, to anyone eyeing the contest while an idea ferments in their brain, I suggest letting the Friday deadline for submissions lapse, and looking into some of the free and open recipe APIs to power your app.

Guy: "Wait, so what they're saying is, Samsung is the same as Apple?"
Friend: "I know, right? Makes me think twice about how much I paid for my Mac Book"
Guy: "Seriously"

Not 10 minutes later, a husband and wife, same newspaper:

Husband: "... Samsung's iPad is the same as Apple's iPad, and I paid how much for the Apple one? Honey, I told you they were a ripoff", after looking up the Samsung tablet on his iPhone.
Wife: "Oh wow," looking at the screen, "... that's a lot cheaper. Think we can return it?"

Today's consumer is a totally different animal than the consumer of even five years ago, meaning that what was effective and influential five years ago is not necessarily so today, as today's consumer is more likely to be influenced by someone in their social network than a weak celebrity connection. Today's consumer is informed, time-compressed, and difficult to impress, and they are only influenced by ads that are relevant and provide information. They don't want to have products pushed at them, even from a celebrity. In fact, the data show that relevance and information attributes were key missing ingredients from most celebrity ads.

I put up a teaser trailer [for "Zack and Miri"] back in April that had no footage from the actual movie in it. Just Seth and Elizabeth riffing. And the MPAA made us take it down. They said, "Look, we're in charge of all marketing materials as well, and we didn't approve this." So they made us take it down.

The payoff for Google is that over time, people begin to subconsciously associate the Google brand with a fast, clean, efficient user experience. Most user don't specifically notice that Google's ads are more relevant or its pages load a half-second faster. They just begin to feel that Google sites are generally less annoying than other sites. An extreme example of the opposite phenomenon is About.com, which I've learned to avoid it like the plague (despite the fact that it often has relevant information) because every time I click on an About page my screen seems to fill up with pop-up ads. Another example is mainstream sites like Forbes and Salon that make you watch a full-page ad before they'll show you the content you asked for. These policies goose revenues in the very short term, but at the expense of making it less likely that users will come back in the future. In contrast, by giving preference to advertisers with quick-loading websites, Google will be ensuring that users who click on ads find the experience as painless as possible -- and therefore, more likely to click on ads in the future.