The Morning After the Night Before.

What work! Elegant, seductive and curiously timely given Mad Men’s return. After a day when most of the stuff you see and hear sounds verifiably insane and dangerously front-loaded, it feels almost like a wash to see an ad like this.

Not that today was like that. Today I had one of those meetings that actually yields something, with people who are smart and dry witted like vermouth, then got to travel home on a train, which is one of my most favourite things in the world to do. (They remind me of Amtrak trips down the coast with grandma.) So the last 24 hours were doubly awesome because I did those things and got to revisit this.

'Litany' by The Independent

"Litany," by Lowe Worldwide for The Independent, launched in 2000 and still makes a nice, melodic watch.

You will occasionally feel provoked. You'll wonder what this is building to, what revolutionary slogan you're about to get sandbagged with ... but the conclusion is simply the product itself, quietly parked on a porch step with a last accompanying "...don't read."

You are moved, but not overworked. You understand.

What finesse.

Via Georges Mohammed-Chérif of the infamous Buzzman, which most recently graced us with a convoy of falling angels.

Remember When Good Looks Were Integral to Good Service?

And while we're on the topic of that-which-no-longer-is, remember when imagery compelled you to read the copy, and copy fed the visual mythology, and together they conceived a better product in your mind?

Sometimes I miss those discriminating days.

How Many Ads Can Talk You into Eating Chocolate Plastic?

In the press room at ad:tech I met a guy called Frank Nein of OrionsWave, who observed the ad and marketing sectors are falling into turmoil -- spinning uncontrollably into hell, sifting through the din in search of equilibrium in a world gone self-publish and multi-platform.

And I can't stop thinking about Chris Franklin of Big Sky Editorial, who laughed at the idea of a viral ad. "All ads are viral!" he'd said. The point he made was that in order for an ad to succeed, it should be watchable again and again.

How many of our frenetic new manifestos are ideas that have always been there, or at least should have been?

With that, and as a kind of tribute to the future, I give you the Tootsie Roll ad. I couldn't count on my fingers and toes how often in childhood I saw this spot.

What's awesome about it is, most everyone I've met who's roughly my age still knows all the words to the song. We enjoyed watching it then; a lot of us still do.

And in our lifetimes, we ate a hell of a lot of Tootsie Rolls.

"Dooby dooby do..."

The obsolete Bud Ice's "Beware the Penguins" campaign, featuring a creepy penguin that goes "Dooby dooby do..." in a haunting manner, came at us over a decade ago and horrified me and my cousins.

Turns out we weren't the only scared ones. A friend of mine (this one, actually) brought it up recently and coolly divulged, "Man, that penguin scared the shit out of me."

Because any memories involving TV now lead to a frenetic Youtube search, we dashed to our computers to see if we could find it. This proved tough because we had no idea who made it. I felt certain it was Coke and he thought it was some kind of food purveyor. Add to this the trouble of how one "officially" spells "dooby dooby do."

I don't know how we did it (actually, I do: I won the "dooby dooby do" spelling contest) but before long we reaped the fruit of our labours (pardon the pixellation, beggars can't be choosers):

Most things that leave an impression in childhood turn out to suck when revisited in adulthood, like the actual size of redwood trees and the Christmas episodes of Alvin and the Chipmunks. But to this day - to this day! - that penguin ad still gives me chills. I couldn't really even tell you why. Why is he so haunting? Why does he say "dooby dooby doo"? It's genius, I say.

Sucks about Bud Ice though. Even after learning the product name we still couldn't recall it from childhood memory. So much for subliminal advertising. Or in this case, would it be latent advertising?

Either way, apparently kid-beguiling ad icons don't necessarily ensure cradle-to-grave loyalty to - oh horror! - vice industries like liquor or tobacco. So maybe Joe Camel can keep hocking ciggies. He wasn't all that interesting to us as kids anyway, plus smoking is a lot safer for him than for Marlboro Man.