A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, compared this letter to the time he caught his son smoking pot in the garage. He smelled it one morning while getting into his car. He was actually more mad about the fact that his son would think his dad was dumb enough not to know what was going on than that he’d burned one down.

In all seriousness, if State Farm (or the marketing company representing them) just asked me to feature their current promotions and the strategies behind them, I would GLADLY have done so. They’re all over the place. But fake form letters designed to trick me into writing a feature is not just bad business, it’s insulting.

And on a final note, I was honored to see that a “senior executive from State Farm” had viewed my LinkedIn.com profile after this post.

Golly, I love the Internets.

It is very difficult for an established mainstream brand to be “hip” …State Farm, Coca Cola, Bank of America, Dell, Marriott, Microsoft, Merck …doesn’t really matter. Apple and Starbucks are two examples of big and hip; but it is very rare and difficult to pull off. You have to excel in “lifestyle branding.”

When i ran MountainZone.com and we had sometimes over a million viewers a day, we chose hipper lifestyle brands such as North Face, Burton and Whistler as advertisers over bigger brands that would have paid more. We felt the “brand” of our advertisers reflected on our own brand. So we turned down a lot of advertisers.

that being said, i’m wrapping a tour bus for indie artists right now …and i think an advertiser such as State Farm or Geico would fit just fine on a bus. As long as other hip brands such as Fat Tire, Gibson, Red Bull and Urban Outfitters were also on the bus.

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