Not the Guy from 'Fantasy Island'.

Classic. Driving along the other day, I passed a tattoo shop with a sign outside that read:

"Get your tattoos while they're still cool!"

Quite a clever little jab given the recent mainstreaming of the marriage between skin and ink. I'm sure many still go in and miss the irony, carrying with them small scraps of paper with Chinese characters they think speak to their strength, empowerment and singularity. Inkredible.

Good Ol' College Try.

Take a pill - it's just an ad! After a couple of weeks of buzz, the lid is off College Ontario's "Obay" viral ad campaign (how many puns can we get into one paragraph? Hmm?), which prominently ran advertisements featuring a faux pharmaceutical and had people scratching their heads.

With the unveiling came a shiny new web site and fresh ads with overlays ("Don't push your kids into doing what you want.") designed to get parents and students thinking about options beyond university. Options are good.

I think it was also a clever, cooperative way for the province's colleges to leverage economies of scale and generate a positive, proactive campaign. I can't imagine that getting 24 colleges on the same page in order to run something so different was easy (now that's collegial). Now that the curiosity factor has peaked (as opposed to the past couple of weeks when it was piqued), however, I'll be curious to see how effective the rebranding strategy is going forward. Given how many students do not end up going to university, it still offers an important message.

As much as I liked the campaign, I still find it a little odd that most of the advertising was done in and around public transit, yet seemed to be targeted toward parents. That might work in Toronto, where the TTC enjoys a broad demographic, but in some of the province's other college towns and cities, I think you'd find the majority of riders would be the students themselves.

Tough Pill to Swallow.

When I first saw this bus ad the other day, I wondered if it was the work of an enterprising culture jammer making a statement of some sort related to society's propensity to medicate, rather than parent, its children. That or, maybe, an elaborate advertising campaign teaser, but I couldn't think of what it would relate to. The ad contained no identifying information and I was left scratching my head.

I didn't realize at the time that this ad, along with a series of others ("My son used to have his own aspirations, now he has mine. Thanks Obay!"), had begun popping up all over Toronto and in other Ontario cities. So it wasn't the work of a lone wolf, particularly given the expense of the campaign (there is also a 1-800 number, bus shelter ads, etc.).

It turns out that this brilliant piece of marketing is for Colleges Ontario, an advocacy group for the province's colleges. Appropriately enough, an announcement will be made at The Centre for Creative Communications at Centennial College tomorrow to give details about the campaign. I've only heard some rumours about what the ads' goals are, but in marketing terms, it's brilliant because people are talking and wondering. Kudos.