We’ve won a lot of Addy Awards over the years and we always feel good about them. But it takes a lot to get us excited. We got excited about winning a Gold National Addy for our work on JEL last year.

This year we won Best of Show at the Des Moines’ Addy Awards for Stew Hansen’s Dodge City. Car dealers are seldom recognized for the quality of their advertising and that lack of recognition is generally pretty darn appropriate. When Larry Goering hired us to help brand Stew Hansen’s he couldn’t have picked a worse time. Chrysler was in crisis. The economy was in the toilet. Generally, things in the car business sucked.

That’s what makes this Best of Show Award all the more rewarding. We had a client with the courage of a lion. And that’s what the judges really rewarded. Maybe that’s why they call him Crazy Larry.

If you do what everybody else is doing, you don’t stand out. Can’t. Impossible. So when you’re tempted to do the mundane advertising that’s so easy to do. Remember Crazy Larry. He has the Best of Show Trophy that you’d really like on your desk.

Here’s the commercial that won.

We thought it would be interesting to talk to a few golfers about Tiger Woods and his current situation…especially as it relates to a lucrative Nike contract. So we went to the Longview Golf Centre with a camera and a list of questions. This video is what a few golfers said about the situation. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

What would you do if you were the Marketing Director of Nike Golf?

A study presented at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting, found that 11 percent of Florida high school students and 4 percent of middle school students had smoked hookah at least once.

For those of you who don’t know, a hookah is a big water pipe that is smoked socially like the one pictured in this post. The practice is rapidly growing in popularity among teens and college students.

With so much talk about social networking and herd thinking, it’s not surprising that social smoking is in vogue.

Every time one door is closed on tobacco use, another opens. Socially, smoking a cigarette is becoming taboo, but the hookah on the other hand becoming accepted. The problem is that it’s worse for you than smoking a cig. The urban myth is that because the smoke passes through water, it’s less harmful.

Tobacco has always had a social element to its use. Smoking was considered cool. Cigar clubs abounded in the 1990’s. Now hookahs are entering into the most social of generations. Is it any wonder?

You Google childhood obesity and the first image that comes up contains your logo. You can just imagine the blame every viewer of this photo places on McDonald’s. Is it McDonald’s fault? It is if they do nothing about it.

To McDonald’s credit they have taken some initiative by offering healthful substitutes to the french fries it offers in Happy Meals and if you happen to have your laptop with internet access while you’re ordering, you can get nutritional data for the meal you select.

By the way, did you know a Big Mac, large fry and a medium Cokes comes in at over 1200 calories?

I suppose that by doing more they would be admitting what is patently obvious to everyone else and that is that their food…along with nearly every other fast food restaurant….can make you obese if you eat too much.

Yet they miss an opportunity to do well by doing good. If they would provide people with encouragement to make good choices from their menu, they’d find people making more good choices from their menu. I’m guessing that the profit margin on a box of lettuce is at least as good as the Big Mac.

Imagine, if they conducted a social marketing campaign that encouraged parents to fight childhood obesity by bringing their children to McDonald’s and serving up fruit burgers. Then they would actually change the eating habits of a generation and firmly plant themselves and their franchisees at the forefront of the new way. Their profits soar, stockholders are happy and the government stays off their back.

Just a thought.

Remember “Bait and Switch?”  An advertiser lures you in with a fantastic price only to tell you they are out of that particular item but they have something much more expensive that would fit your bill.  That hacked everybody off to the point that it’s a pretty rare occurrence today.  If a marketer does that today, they get skewered by ratings and social networks.  Pretty painful penance.

The bar for business integrity gets higher still when marketing to the Net Generation.  Not only do they expect more, they know how to complain by attacking the business where it hurts…in the cash register.

On the same hand, have integrity firmly on display in your day-to-day dealings, and you could create a customer for life…even an evangelist.

As you think about touting your brand, make sure you live your promise.  As you think about running your business, make sure you do it as green as possible.  Do what you say you will do and put the customer first and you’ll have loyal Net Geners as customers.    Pretty simple.