Now that The Hired Pens is four Pens strong, we thought it would be fun to do the occasional roundtable discussion. Our plan is to tackle all the important, life-transforming issues of the day. Like our favorite TV ads from our childhoods. Enjoy …

The Energizer: It’s Going to Surprise You (Dan)

It’s 1987, and I’m a freshman in college. My roommate Chris and I are up late watching Letterman. Without warning, this ridiculous commercial comes on. “Jacko,” a muscled Australian lunatic with spiky, dyed blonde hair, is screaming at us about the merits of Energizer batteries. His eyes bulge out. He sings while holding a giant battery over his head. He rhymes “Energiz-ah” with “gonna surprise ya.” He punctuates the jingle with a demonstrative “Oi!”

All of this couldn’t have been any funnier to Chris and me. Too bad they switched to that damned Energizer bunny just one year later. Jacko, I guess the advertising world just wasn’t made for muscled Australian lunatics like you.

Just One Look … and America Fell So Hard (Anna)

Commercials are better now. I think as a nation, we’ve gotten funnier. Or at least more comfortable with using humor to sell things. I like that.

But let’s be honest. There’s one thing that sells better than humor. That’s right: Cindy Crawford. This 1991 Pepsi commercial does everything a good commercial should: It gets your attention. It’s fun to watch. And it makes you want the product.

Back then, girls like me hoped one day to be as glamorous as Cindy. And the boys we loved hung posters of her on their wall, hoping we would, too — or that we’d at least outgrow our training bras. We all drank a lot of Pepsi. Since then, this ad has been imitated many, many times. It still works.

I Wanted to Like You, Mikey (Karen)

You were cute, in a chubby-faced underdog sort of way. Your older brothers seemed like real a-holes, forcing you to try that cereal no one wanted. As one of seven kids myself, I could relate.

The thing is, Mikey, you let your brothers have all the lines. I didn’t feel like listening to them anymore than you did. “He likes it! Hey, Mikey!” So grating. I’d run for the TV and crank the dial to another channel before they said it, and still that one stupid line would stick in my head all day.

I wanted to root for you, Mikey, but you could’ve shown a little self-respect. You could’ve said no to the cereal. And while your ad ran for 12 years and was considered a huge success, I think America agreed with me. Hence the rabid rumors of your untimely death by Coke and Pop Rocks candy.

I was glad to read recently that you’re alive and well, working as an ad man for a New York radio station — but a little sad to learn those jerks in the commercial were your real-life brothers. I hope you’ve found happiness, Mikey. I really do.

I Hanker for a Pair o’ Kneeees (Zach)

It had serpentine, boneless legs. It had internal rhymes and an elective cane. It even had a recipe: crackers and cheese; serve stacked.

“Time for Timer” was part of a frankly bizarre PSA campaign to combat … hunger? Cogency? I know it received heavy airplay throughout my childhood (WLVI-56!), and somehow that little bolus in boots stuck with me all this time.

Call it the power of context-free marketing, or perhaps a testament to some memorable jingle writing. Point is: I eat cheese constantly today, and I almost never don’t think of Timer. He was an extremely tiny part of my life, and it breaks my heart to see what’s become of him.

Fast Co. has a great post up from Buffer’s Leo Widrich, and it’s all about color. Widrich pulls together different data about how color works (or doesn’t) in marketing. According to the research, our own Hired Pens online color scheme suggests “credibility,” “clean” and “direct” with a little “excitement” thrown in for good measure. Sounds about right.

Widrich goes on to describe an experiment that found that even a minor tweak to a button’s color can have a significant impact on conversion rates. The tricky part? The research into how colors make us feel doesn’t necessarily line up with how things played out in the experiments Widrich cites. But the big, concrete takeaway is that color does matter, and you may find a few small changes can yield a big payoff.

We recently wrapped up two website projects — please take a moment to check them out!

OneVision Resources is a really interesting business that helps rich folks manage all the personal technology in their lives. We worked closely with founder/managing director Joey Kolchinsky along with the superstars at Fresh Tilled Soil to create this new slick site (which looks especially great on iPads, by the way).

Saturn Partners is a venture capital firm focusing on seed and early-stage technology companies. For this site, we relied heavily on input from one of the firm’s partners, Ed Lafferty. Rob Torres and the team at Digital Reaction Total Web Solutions brought the site to life.

Congrats to Hired Pen Karen Dempsey, whose essay, “Lockdown: Teaching Students to Hide From Guns, and Hide Their Fears,” went live on the NYTimes.com Motherlode blog yesterday.

Another new product name has cracked us up this week: The Hot Mess, brought to you by everybody’s favorite Halloweentown nightmare, Jack in the Box. If you are unfamiliar with the Mess, here’s all you need to know: Gooey jack cheese, onion rings, jalapenos, beef. Not necessarily in that order.

Okay, so it’s messy. But the name does far more than that, of course: Anyone under 40 will tell you that “hot mess” is what most of us call someone who’s coming apart at the seams. It is, in other words, a pretty negative connotation.

And that’s the point. The Hot Mess fits squarely into the canon of “rude” product copy, of a piece with The Stinking Rose restaurants, Coyote Ugly and this modern classic. It’s a challenge and it’s subversive, and that’s what makes it cool. That this particular sandwich also happens to be incredibly messy and almost certainly deadly only adds to the pleasing harmony.

This is high-flying brand work, and not the sort of name you’d want to propose at Starbucks or Bank of America. But someone, somewhere, broke through the traditional wall of corporate resistance to counterintuitive product branding over at Jack, and it’s working for them. We can say from experience: It ain’t easy convincing a big company to take a little chance.

In fact, it’s a hot mess.

Photo: Baby Steve Jobs

“I’m designing a new app” is the new “I’m writing a screenplay” for creative types who want to get rich quick — or just impress attractive women at cocktail parties.

Yes, a rare few do actually manage to create a killer app with potential. The next step (at least for the marketing team) is breaking through the very crowded Apple barrel. A good start is to write an effective online ad. A study from idea.org looked at what worked … and what was a dismal failure.

First, here’s what not to do: Mention the price. Or include fancy graphics. Surprised? Me, too. Turns out the most effective ads are simple, text-based ads — and shorter is better.

In fact, text-based ads outperformed visual bling by a startling margin. As in, no one in this study even clicked on the ad with the image, and lots of people checked out the app when it was a simple, single-line request.

The top performer?

“Have an iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch? Check out our app.”

The four takeaways from this study:

1. Text is better than graphical (a lot better).
2. Shorter is better.
3. Bright yellow highlighting helps.
4. Don’t include a price on the ads.

You can read the full study here (from 2011, but still very relevant). Or just go back to writing that screenplay — the one about the app that takes over the world.

Sometimes a great idea gets all the attention it deserves. Case in point: This incredibly clever résumé by a man in Paris who found a new way to break through the cluttered mess that is the modern job search. His answer: a familiar Web product page, repurposed in every conceivable detail into a viral sales tool:

Of course, the design and layout are the real stars here. Note the new logo, the charming pictures and the verisimilitude of icons and graphics throughout.

But to those of us who live and breathe the art of product copywriting, the real pleasure of M. Dubost’s work is in its conception and creativity. Turning his prior work experience into customer reviews? Brilliant. Recommending the addition of running shoes and a plane ticket? Inspired. And the coup de grâce: To contact this particular candidate, you must add him to your cart.

There’s probably something to be said here about how eerily well the format of an Amazon product page fulfills every requirement of the modern résumé, and what that says about how we are all just faceless numbers in a corporate dystopia. But for now, let’s just enjoy the hilarity of this idea and marvel at its effectiveness: PhilDub.com attracted over a million hits in its first eight days alone, and earned him mentions in Mashable, Adweek and the Huffington Post, among others.

That is one seriously hirable guy.

Further dispatches from the world of smart branding: On my way home from dropping my son off at school, I was flipping around the radio and stopped on an interview on NPR Business News with Jake Fisher, director of auto testing at Consumer Reports.

They were talking about how Subaru had been able to increase sales by nearly a third in recent years while other car companies were just trying to keep their heads (or turbo-charged V6 engines) above water.

So what is Subaru doing right? Actually it’s what we try to convince our clients to do every day: Find your audience and speak to them, just them. Trying to appeal to everyone, well, sounds appealing. When you crunch the numbers, though, it doesn’t work.

Successful companies like Subaru boldly define who they are and go after THAT audience, not EVERY audience. It’s as simple as picking a story that works and finding some reliable copywriters to tell that story right.

Subaru will never be a giant car company — and it shouldn’t be. As Jake Fisher explains, Subaru can serve as an example for other carmakers looking to grow:

“They’ve kind of taken this slow, systematic approach and just really concentrated on what they needed to do to be competitive in the market. … I don’t think they have to be a Toyota; they don’t have to be everyone else. They don’t have to be everything to everyone; they have to be something to someone.”

So is who is Subaru targeting exactly? Well, I drive a Subaru and so do all my friends. Who are we? The sketch comedy “Portlandia” dedicated a whole sketch to us liberal-leaning 30-40 somethings.

The way I like to sum it up is this: We think spending a ton of money on a car is a waste; in fact, we wish we didn’t have to drive one at all. But since we do, we’ll take one that is safe and at least vaguely stylish, can handle well in the snow and has enough room for hauling around our kids/skis/dogs. And, oh yeah, we wouldn’t be caught dead in a minivan. Even the Cadillac of minivans.

BTW: Read the whole article or listen to the live show here — or just watch the “Portlandia” clip.

Because I’m always on the lookout for fun, conversational copy (copy geek), I laughed out loud when I spotted this label from Anthony Logistics for Men.

If you can make shaving cream fun to read about, you’re doing something right. I couldn’t help but think of all the money that will go into this weekend’s Super Bowl commercials and still miss the mark.

The audience here is, to some degree, the same audience those goofy beer commercials are going after. However, this product is speaking to you with the voice of someone who’s not going to waste your time. He’s quick and witty and can poke a bit of fun at himself — but still sound like he knows what he’s talking about.

In fact, I’m such a copy geek that I had to check out their website, where the fun continues with headlines like:

Have a face worth saving

And, my favorite:

Only you can prevent facial fires

I love that these folks (or their copywriters) know their audience — guys who might need to still feel like guys even when they’re reading product labels, and the women who buy for guys who need to feel like guys even when they’re reading product labels.

Some other Anthony headlines make even more of a nod to the masculine without being over-the-top:

Multi-tasking essentials that get the job done

Performance matters

Whoever wrote this copy for Anthony sure did a bang-up job. We’ll see how those halftime ads compare on Sunday.