If you’re wondering about sustainable business models, bear with me while I rant about ABC’s free episode streaming, or just skip the first bunch of paragraphs to the Sustainable Business Models heading.  Ohterwise bear with me, I’ve got a couple lung-fulls to spend talking about why I’m not having the best time I could be having finally watching LOST.

After years of resisting, I finally decided that I should watch LOST and catch up on everything I’ve been missing (that damn near everybody’s been telling me about).  I’m watching it straight through from Season 1 on ABC.com – and I’m afraid I have a few complaints about how they’re handling their free episodes.

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Whoever’s making commercials for Bacardi is a genius.  I usually don’t even drink rum, but this new commercial certainly has me thirsty for a mojito.  The music is by “Matt and Kim”, the song is called “Daylight”.  They’re on Green Label Sound (who seem to be some sort of musical offspring of PepsiCo/Mountain Dew – and also have some sort of relationship to an artist I’ve heard of before – Flosstradamus). Matt and Kim have an official website too!  You can download an honest to goodness MP3 of the song from the label’s site.  And finally there’s full access to a video of the commercial on YouTube!  Unbelievable, I guess after all those years of having to search out your favorite commercial’s songs, lyrics, videos, etc. are over and done with.  Now all this media is at our fingertips and I’m pretty sure the folks running the show at the companies that come up with the commercials, that make the products and that create the music … finally get it!  Thank you social media!

Here are the lyrics for anybody who’s trying to decypher the words:

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Just read an article on AdAge about Charles Schwab putting their accounts on review.  Omnicom Group’s PHD is who has the business now.  Nice folks over there, I worked on their “perspectives.” corporate blog a couple years ago, which included a couple trips to their office.  I hope they manage to keep the contract. The “Talk to  Chuck” campaign is definitely pretty good, and take a look at this quote:

A number of media agencies are going to get the chance to “Talk to Chuck” about his $100 million media-planning and -buying account in the next few weeks. Charles Schwab, one of the only financial-services companies not to take any federal bailout money, has put its traditional and digital media business up for review.

How about that, here I go and talk about AIG like they’re the devil.  And now there’s some contrast for you - one of the only financial-services companies not to take any federal bailout money – excellent.  So there IS a way to run a financial-services company without needing handouts from the government!  That’s what they should be talking about in their advertising campaigns (unless they also have humility listed as a corporate virtue, in which case they’re pretty much saints).

I got a ping-back about my last post, the second of its kind actually.  Looks like there’s a Wordpress plugin called RSSDoodle that allows automatic compilation and posting of posts based on a keyword search to your blog.  This is definitely a fascinating way to create awareness about your blog – essentially by auto-commenting on other people’s relevant blog posts.  The only disappointment is that the initial “wow, I’m flattered that somebody had something to say about my post” quickly disappears once you realize it was an automatic comment.