Luckily for Mullen, the 1999 Monster.com spot When I Grow Up is still in the mix. Thanks Teressa and Fast Co. for recognizing this gem from Mullen’s past.

We’re hoping that some enterprising reporter will track down the kids who were cast in this spot and see how their careers are going.  Hopefully they’re all gainfully employed in inspiring jobs with dynamic companies or at least doing something to save the world.

My, has Mullen come a long way. What was once merely a reliable regional shop is now attracting the hottest digital brands around — including Google and LivingSocial — and gets entrusted with international campaigns despite the fact it doesn’t have any offices abroad. In 2011, Mullen found 20% revenue growth while having a lot of fun with its work. For Zappos, it executed a zany homepage takeover on Yahoo’s website so viewers saw a scantily clad man running across the screen. The point was to demonstrate that Zappos is about a lot more than shoes. To get the word out that JetBlue lets passengers’ first bag fly free, it set up an exhibit of celebrity luggage in Los Angeles that also raised $50,000 for DoSomething.org. Its biggest project was leading the international brand launch for Google’s Galaxy Nexus phone, for which Mullen’s creative is running across four continents. The agency is charting the course for the next generation of leadership, making Alex Leikikh president in its Boston office as Joe Grimaldi moved to Chairman-CEO.

Big congrats to all of the agencies profiled in the A-List issue, in particular McGarryBowen, Ad Age’s Agency of the Year, and Droga5, Creativity’s Agency of the Year. Winning and being bold was their recipe for success.

It’s that time of year again. The online Superbowl party that Mullen started three years ago to celebrate the age of Twitter is well into development. If you remember, we began our annual project when there weren’t very many ad types on Twitter. In 2009, most of the industry was still like “huh?”

A few of us at Mullen, the kind folks at Radian 6, and some friends like Sally Hogshead and Lisa Hickey made the effort to get ad land excited. We launched what was then called Trash Talk from the Twitter Section, shared instructions for how to sign up for Twitter, and encouraged people to open accounts. Today it’s hard to imagine that Twitter needed an introduction as recently as three years ago.

Now here we are for our fourth anniversary and we’re excited to introduce some new features. For starters, we’ve made the site, brandbowl2012.com, more interactive. (Note that at this posting it re-directs to last year’s site.) For the first time, users will be able to compare brands head to head in a statistical showdown. Whose ads are getting more attention or more favorable reaction? Brandbowl knows.

We’ve isolated a box at the top of the page, held high by a digital fan, to feature the best tweets of the game. Post something particularly insightful or clever and you could find your tweet featured atop the stream for everyone to see.

Brandbowl 2012 also has some new data to share. This year’s analytics will track the geo location of tweets and also the gender of the participant. Might be interesting to see comparisons between the sexes when it comes to talking about Superbowl ads.

The mobile experience will be better, too. Let’s face it, there’s likely to be more people watching the game with a smartphone in hand than a laptop resting on their knees. You’ll be able to check live rankings and post instantly from your iPhone or Android. Given that it’s a site, not an app, it will work everywhere.

And finally, we’ve been approached by Billboard, which wants to get in on the action. So we’ve offered them the featured tweet board for the half-time show. Madonna better watch out. Billboard knows what it’s talking about when it comes to reviewing music and performances.

Once again, our partner Radian 6 is back with its sentiment data and analytics. And for the second year in a row Boston.com is hosting the site and helping to promote it.  Given that Twitter’s active user base continues to grow and that social media advertising couch critics is an expanding population, we expect to get some pretty good data.

Hope to see you there. On brandbowl2012.com. Using the easy to remember hashtag #brandbowl. I know who I’m rooting for. The creative.

If you need a reminder or are interested in what this is all about, here’s a video recap of last year’s effort.

But in Las Vegas, Nevada, another primary of sorts will be taking place on January 10. That’s the start of the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), when more than 2,700 exhibitors from 140 countries will attract nearly 150,000 attendees to experience more than 20,000 product launches. For the tech companies that participate, CES is the key time to make stump speeches, roll out their 9-9-9 plans and dazzle media, retailers and the public with their amazingly innovative solutions.

Like Vegas itself, CES is a gaudy, inflated, all-you-can eat buffet of delights. Anyone who has attended the tradeshow can attest: it’s exhausting. Not just because walking the enormous space wears out your soles, but because the information overloads your system.

That’s why Mullen banded together with JetBlue Airways and leading social media analytics provider Pointslocal to develop CE Pulse. It’s a real-time, interactive gauge of online public opinion that helps consumers and marketers filter through the overwhelming hype to understand how consumers actually feel about brands and products. CE Pulse tracks and ranks social sentiment so you can see what’s important to the masses. Which brands and products are leading the pack? What gear do I want to blow my paycheck on in 2012?

CE Pulse is the latest in a series of social media monitoring and analysis projects from Mullen. For the past three years, we’ve held BrandBowl to gauge consumer sentiment surrounding Super Bowl TV commercials. Working with Pointslocal, we’ve also measured consumer sentiment related to major sports teams with The Pulse/Boston Red Sox and The Pulse/New England Patriots.

We think that brands that listen to how consumers talk about them are in a better position to engage in a dialogue with those consumers. Social media monitoring tools like CE Pulse enable consumers and brands to truly understand how the public perceives new products and to filter through the noise to uncover valuable information. As the candidates would say, and brands should learn to say, “It’s not about me—it’s about you!”

For a play-by-play report from our own Wolf in the field, follow @CE_Pulse on Twitter and visit the site.

“I’m tremendously excited about Sean coming on board to run digital media and social influence,” said John Moore, Chief Media Officer at Mullen. “His Forrester background makes him a unique asset and embeds in Mullen one of the preeminent thinkers in a space that is keeping CMOs up at night. We look forward to Sean creating a new vision and helping our clients navigate critically important channels like social, mobile and gaming, to name just a few.”

“Integrating different media silos is an imperative for marketers to succeed in the digital era,” said Corcoran. “And to do this at Mullen – with its hyperbundled approach to integrating creative, media, and technology, along with its stellar portfolio of clients such as Google, Zappos, and JetBlue – makes the opportunity even that much more exciting.”

Hey, speaking of beatbox videos, did you see this one we did for Google?

Our digital holiday project was called Snowify.me, an experimental HTML5 holiday card creator made with Google Maps v3. As you’ll see when you go on the site, you simply type in the location you want to snowify, decorate, and share your panoramic card with the world. And the gallery of decorations includes all kinds of fun icons from 2011, including the lovely newlywed Royal Couple and your friendly “Occupiers.”

A stealth creative and technical team at Mullen put Snowify together and, as you can read on Creativity_Unbound, this kind of was the “Accidental Holiday Card.”

Happy Holidays All!  Let it snowify!

As of Tuesday, Meredith Corp. unveiled the first major advertising client for its Engagement Dividend program. Consumer packaged goods industry leader Kimberly-Clark has signed up to take advantage of this opportunity as Meredith’s “premier advertising partner.”  This partnership will begin early next year.

As advertisers, we recognize the need for proof of performance among our brands. This program could signal a game-changing approach to print advertising, as it brings to an end the days when print was measured solely on soft metrics and puts it more in line with digital measurement.

This production is unlike anything I have done before. In my career, I have placed billions of dollars’ worth of ads for clients and felt little more than the satisfaction of keeping a budget straight; but here, today, we are running radio spots, print ads, banners and straight-up walking into businesses and handing people a website URL that will actually help them — no BS or misdirected strategic frameworks or anything like that. Google is here to help, period. What we are doing is good for them, and if enough people around the country hear about it, it’s good for Google and “Howtogomo.com.” Yeah, it’s marketing and whatever, but we are actually going to help real people and real businesses up close in a place that needs a bit of a pat on the back. So I am not ashamed to admit it: It feels good to work in advertising today. Plus the people in Mobile are so thankful and happy.

So, let’s go! Mobilize Mobile!