Do you work from home? If you answered yes, you’re not alone. As many as 25% of workers telecommute at least one day each week, and that figure is likely to increase in the coming years. Some of the benefits are obvious: less travel time, less fuel and energy consumed, and less stress.

I can think of another benefit: it stops the spread of contagious disease!

This morning I woke up with a cold. As I debated whether or not to go to work, I was reminded of a former coworker of mine who insisted on coming to work when he was ill, even when he had a horrible hacking cough. Before long all of us in the office had a hacking cough, too. Hence we began calling him Typhoid Mark.

I don’t want to be a Typhoid Laura. I’m working from home today.

By now we’ve all heard of Joe the plumber, and I give the McCain campaign credit for responding quickly to the public’s identification with Joe and his question.  Their “I’m Joe the Plumber” ad is pretty good at getting the point across that Americans don’t want higher taxes.

But if Attention Marketing was hired to create the campaign ads for John McCain, we would create ads that would help viewers understand how “spreading the wealth around” really isn’t “better for everyone.”

With all the attention paid to Joe the plumber and the prospect of raising taxes on hard working Americans, it has caused me to wonder whether my neighbors will get to keep their jobs once taxes on “the rich” employers are increased. Certainly I’m not the only one who wonders about that.

I would make a TV commercial that included the people in my neighborhood. Remember the song from Sesame Street, “Who are the People in Your Neighborhood?” While that song played we would show the faces, names, and occupations of the people in my neighborhood.

We would construct a brief narrative about what would happen to Gene the builder, Russ the installer, and Judy the bookkeeper once their bosses get slammed with a tax increase. Will the people in my neighborhood get that raise they’re counting on? Not likely. Will they still have their job this time next year? Some won’t.

How will all of that affect my neighborhood?

Russ won’t be buying that new car he was planning on. Judy might even lose her home and move out. Vacant, bank-owned houses won’t be a good thing for my neighborhood.

OK, that is a lot to fit into 30 seconds. But, we could do a series of spots.

Then, we could show Barack Obama and the people in his neighborhood: Ayers, Rezko, Reverend Wright, Father Flager. We don’t even need captions for this part. The song would be enough.

What commercials would you make if you were hired for either campaign?

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Maybe it would be better to ask, would a skunk by any other name smell as putrid?

In a customer research experiment, Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT) recently reintroduced Windows Vista under a new name. By calling the much maligned operating system Mojave, they sought to wipe away preconceived opinions people had about the product, and get them to try it with an open mind. Is the new ad campaign built around this experiment working? Time will tell. View the Mojave Experiment.

It would be hard to wipe away the effect of the brilliant—however simple—ad campaign by Mac to position itself as relevant, fun, cool, easy to use, etc. You can’t forget the young guy in jeans vs. the older, stodgier guy in glasses and a bad suit. I give Microsoft credit for making a creative attempt to reverse that effect and to hit the refresh button on public perceptions of Vista.

I have to ask, as the prophet Jeremiah did, can the “leopard” change its spots? Even if it has a different name?