Shorter-word thesaurus

That long, complicated word too long for your carefully distilled, inspiring tweet? Then get a shorter word to stand in its stead with the handy shorter-word thesaurus known as Thsrs.

(disclaimer: shorter synonyms generated by Thsrs may cause confusion, loss of meaning, bland prose, flabby fingers, Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia and in some rare cases, loss of cultural flavor)

Sporks up to the Copywriting Underground

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Quicky: 34 Punctuation Inspired Logos

Punctuation- it's not just for books anymore. Here's a collection of punctuation-inspired logos (we'll pretend to ignore the growing overuse of exclamation points in place as the letter "i").

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Adweek: A tale of two Tigers

Adweek has naturally devoted a lavish amount of coverage on Tiger, but can't seem to make up their minds on whether or not recent events will negatively impact his image and earning potential. Here's one Adweek article where they say Tiger won't lose image points or sponsors from the public debacle and here's another from Adweek that says cutting Tiger is generating positive buzz for brands. So Adweek, which is it?

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Quicky: Microsoft's Bing being sued by Bing LLC

Read more here.

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Irony in action: Climate Summit to create as much pollution as a small city

It seems attendees of the latest Climate Summit to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark have taken a page from the U.S. automaker playbook.

While huge numbers of government officials, journalists and celebrities flock toward the northern European city, they'll be doing it in an estimated 140 private jets, and more than 1,200 limos. It's so many limos, in fact, that the entire country of Denmark can't satisfy the demand, meaning that hundreds of limos will actually be imported (driven one at a time by single individuals) from hundreds of miles away in neighboring countries like Germany.

Evidently, these officials haven't taken any hints from the public flogging U.S. automakers endured when they took private luxury jets to Congressional hearings to beg for tax payer money to save their financially strapped companies.

All said and done, the Climate Summit has already become a public relations nightmare before the Summit has actually begun. Now it just remains to be seen if any of these officials and journalists care enough to adjust their behavior or if they will simply spew eco-speak from the podium that their actions can't back up.

Read more here.

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Inching closer to quieter commercials

While most advertisers love turning the volume up to 11 on their TV commercials, few realize that the practice actually makes us hate TV commercials and the companies in the more, making us less likely to buy their products and more likely to skip the ads entirely. Counterproductive, isn't it?

Well, more progress has been made toward quieting down TV commercials to a reasonable level as the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, or CALM has now passed the House Communications Committee.

I'm sure many will fight it, but in reality, reasonable sound levels on TV commercials will lead to less muting, less skipping and less hating, which one can only assume would lead to greater ad effectiveness.

Read more about the CALM Act here.

One upmanship, and the lucky number 13

You may not have though it possible, or at least not likely, but someone has topped TipTipCash.com for repetition in a :60 radio spot.

While Twisted Tea doesn't actually mention their brand name quite as many times, they manage to say the word "tea" 13 times in a mere 60 seconds. That's roughly every four and a half seconds.

But how? With approved phrasing like, "Twisted tea. It's the hard iced tea that tastes like real ice tea." Evidently top quality writing is a common characteristic in ads that repeat things too much. I just KNOW they're going to set themselves apart with groundbreaking lines like, "Try Twisted Tea, it's really refreshing."

And practically comical on top of this is the fact that a brand that looks like a slightly funkier version of Snapple is trying hard to sell an iced-tea flavored alcoholic drink to young men.

The moral
I have two suggestions. First, not a lot of 18-24 males drink iced tea or want anything that tastes like it. Second, you're definitely not going to sell it to them with the voice of a chiding middle-aged woman saying, "My husband calls it his MAN-tea." Man-tea language could help you, but not if the person saying it is making fun of her man for doing it.