Here’s another amazing ad from Dior featuring the beautiful Natalie Portman. This is an example of how much mileage a brand can get when they have the right celebrity endorsement. With Portman Dior has hit a home run given her timeless beauty which matches the brand perfectly. Then you also have the acting skills so Dior can be even more creative with their content marketing.

So here we have a video with Portman playing a runaway bride, giving an air of adventure and mystery to the brand as she sheds her spectacular Dior wedding dress and escapes to Paris. Visually it’s stunning, and Dior uses the ad to appeal to strong, independent women. It’s a winner!

Why is this guy’s “dad” a hamster? Why is the other dude dress up like he’s in a Cure tribute band? Does anybody get this? Do commercials have to be quirky and stupid these days? The whole Sprint Framily Plan line of commercials comes across as lame so far.

The AT&T commercials aren’t much better, though they do have lovely actress Milana Vayntrub starring in them.

From Milana’s official website

The latest commercial in this series features Gordon Ramsay is a particularly unfunny appearance.

There’s so much money at stake for these phone companies and this is the best they can come up with?

Are you sick of cable bills over $100 per month? Are you tired of paying for bundled cable channels that you never watch?

Thing may be changing as more people, particularly young people, are opting out of cable in favor of streaming services like Netflix and online TV options.

Even the CEO of Time Warner Cable is changing his tune in the face of new services like Aereo that offers everything that appears on CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, PBS and roughly two dozen other channels for less than $10 a month.

Now, more and more people are also getting set-up boxes as the ability to access online video and TV shows is showing up in Blu-ray players as well. The pressure on the cable companies and content providers to change the pricing model will just keep growing.

Red Bull is leveraging its lifestyle marketing and PR campaign with a new “World of Red Bull” video which features cool panoramic shots and extreme sports clips. They’re a great example of a company that knows how to capture the essence of their brand.

Microsoft is making a huge push today to promote the new Windows 8 operating system along with the Surface tablet. It’s a huge bet for Microsoft, as the try to take on Apple directly and get into the game in the tablet market, while still retaining its stranglehold on the corporate PC market.

We’ll see what happens. Radical upgrades often don’t work well for Microsoft. Remember Vista? I do. It was a complete disaster. Then Microsoft righted the ship with Windows 7, where execution was more important than bells and whistles. So we’ll see how consumers react, and then we’ll see how businesspeople react. The tablet revolution does have the potential to shake things up a bit in the workplace.

Still, we’ve reached a point where the changes affect how we use computing services and devices, but does it change other areas of business much? So much has already changed in the past 30 years that there might be areas immune to advances in the devices we use. Businesses still use brochures for some types of promotion despite PowerPoint, though they might use online printing and ordering brochures at UPrinting in order to save money. Even at the Microsoft event, you can be sure they have printed posters and displays to go along with the big tech screens.

We just seem to have reached a point where these upgrades make a big difference in some areas, but others just stay the same.