“It’s another way for us to engage with our advertisers and our audience” said Chris McCumber, senior VP of marketing and brand strategy for USA.

The preformatted fluff to the right, care of USA Network’s Chris McCumber, is in regards to their latest project (USA Network and NBC Universal) called Didja. Like, “Did ya see that?”. Ha ha, he he, hilarious. Didja is said to be an archive of old and new TV ads, movie trailers, and other stuff that usually interrupts the content you’re trying to enjoy.

“Both efforts are designed to give NBC a bigger share of the ad revenue being generated by streaming video.” Exactly. Didja is being made to help NBC milk a medium for as much as they can.

Look at what TBS has done with Very Funny Ads. They transformed an annual highlight show on their network, into a popular online archive of some of the funniest ads. Conceptually, being that their tagline is “very funny”, such a site ties into their brand perfectly.

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Things have looked a little strange across YGG this past week or two. I said we we’re trying to fix some “significant bugs” and optimize the site, when in reality, we we’re building a new theme. It’s not too different. Just nicer, easier to read, and aimed at building this community, not just the blog, into a behemoth.

We came up with the name Mr. Clean for the theme, somewhat because of Eric’s polished dome, but mainly because we really focused on stripping out all the crap (Adsense, excess space, etc…) so everything flows in a nice grid pattern.

We’ve also scribbled down a few plans on napkins somewhere (I really shouldn’t have thrown those out), for some interesting things to help up the forum participation and members, while allowing you promote yourselves in interesting ways. More details to come over the next few days.

There are still a few little tweaks we have to handle to make this release “official”, but I’m so damn tired, that I’d much rather have released the theme then held off any longer.

So here it is, YGG, Mr. Clean…….and we’d love to hear what you think.

If you have a request, suggestion, see a bug, have a hankerin’ for some ass kissin’, please do so in the comments of this post. Get at us while we’ve still got a bit of honky rhythm left in us, and we’ll do what we can to have the site at 100% asap.

PS for the 18% of our readers that still use Internet Explorer 6 - first off, upgrade your browser, damnit! Second, we made a special stylesheet just for you, so the blog and it’s comments don’t look like crap, as they did before. We’ll work on rolling out another special IE6 stylesheet for the forum in the next few days.

Ask yourself:

Does the previous version suck in comparison?

That’s all.

A trend is happening in Canada, as I’m sure it is in other parts of the world as well. What we would normally lug our groceries and shopping goods home in, those un-eco friendly plastic bags, are being replaced with designer friendly reusable bags.

President’s Choice has been running ads over the past month proclaiming their mission to divert 1 billion plastic bags from our landfills. And others like Holt Renfrew and Urban Outfitters have created some of the most sought after grocery bags ever. Holt happened to sell out of their entire stock the morning of release, and the $18 Anya Hindmarch designed item, which is now sold out in the US as well, is still fetching upwards of $100 on eBay.

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