thinks

OK. The Taco Bell ad with the lions is the best spot of the second half so far. Ricardo frickin’ Montelban. Everyone in the room here was cracking up. The good news is that Taco Bell shows the ad on their site. The bad news (really, really dumb, guys), you can’t link to it or embed it. Which I was planning to do. Opportunity lost.

Separately, the halftime show is already available on YouTube. That didn’t take long, now, did it?

The last two commercials (Dorit0’s “Cleanup on Register 9″ and the Chevy HHR spot) both were created by the audiences for those products. By far, each offered the most compelling and memorable pitches so far. Budweiser should have such good spots this year.

Anyone talking about the Garmin spot tomorrow will be doing it for all the wrong reasons. It’s the kind of faux-hip thing that has led consumers to generate their own content. How long do you think it will take for a parody spot to show up on YouTube? I’m betting by the second half.

I haven’t seen any great commercials so far. Thought the “Letterman/Winfrey” commercial was laugh out loud funny, but I don’t think anyone’s talking about it tomorrow. The “Bud Light - No Speak English” commercial is the best so far. I expect to hear at least some folks saying “Bood Light…Bood Light” tomorrow.

I was highly disappointed in the Snickers “After the Kiss” commercial. I hope afterthekiss.com (the first URL that registered with me so far - and one I won’t link to for obvious reasons) gets very little traffic. It’s sad that companies still find homophobia funny. Hey, Snickers. Get over yourselves.

I just finished watching the Super Bowl pre-game show. I have always enjoyed:

1. Cirque du Soleil - I’ve seen them perform in Vegas a couple times
2. Football in general and Super Bowl Sunday in particular

This year it feels a bit archaic to me. In the new media, place and time shifted present, is the term “television event” no longer valid? It might be television. But it doesn’t feel like much of an event yet.

Big picture or little picture? Big goals or little goals? Big ideas or little ideas? Big steps or little steps?

While we all need to have a sense of the big, sometimes the greatest roadblocks aren’t the big ones, it’s the little stuff along the way. We rarely trip over boulders. Pebbles are a much bigger risk. Persistence pulls us through when we fall. One tactic for remaining persistent is to set smaller goals. Just as GTD focuses on the very next task for any project, focusing on your next step is the only one you need to worry about. Don’t let the big picture overwhelm you. What’s the next step? Even when boulders get in the way. You’ve only got to back up to get around them.