(Photo: Warby Parker)

All that company-subsidized beer pong must be inspiring. Warby Parker*, the online glasses retailer, has decided to expand its marketing efforts to the small screen. Rather than just promote their $95 try-at-home model on the web or through cool kid pop-up stores and kiosks in Standard hotels, the company is investing $250,000--a small fraction of its $50.3 millon in VC funding--in a small-scale, highly-targeted TV ad strategy.

The New York Times reports that the company is saving money by sending the ad, featuring anthropomorphized eyeballs riding on unicycles, to its (very) particular target market:

To be thrifty with its dollars, the company will run the spot on Dish TV and DirecTV using addressable technology, which enables the spot be aimed more precisely to the Warby Parker demographic target: men and women ages 18 to 34 who like to buy designer-style eyewear at lower prices.

Yes, Dish and DirecTV subscribers, apparently your cable provider knows your budget and predilections where spectacles are concerned.

You can check out Warby Parker's stylish inspiration board for the 30-second national spot, assiduously annotated with references to artifacts both highbrow and kitsch. Scholars of the brand's quirky sensibilities can even peruse a reading list to go along with the commercial--no doubt anticipating an HBS class on preciousness in ad strat.

Personally, we're rather partial to the video Warby Parker made last year starring photographer Noah Kalina, veteran chronicler of Silicon Alley's far out founders. What can we say? We're suckers for a little sexual innuendo.

*Disclosure. 

(Photo: Glamour)

Freshly-minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is set to make $60 million in overall compensation, including a multi-million dollar bonus for staying on for more than five years. The money will reportedly reek of desperation. [AllThingsD]

Speaking of Ms. Mayer, here is her first memo to the Yahoo team. It's marked "privileged and confidential"--oops. [AllThingsD]

Google earned $12.1B in Q2. Suddenly Ms. Mayer's $60 million is starting to look quite paltry. [VentureBeat]

The Daily Show is making its way back to the TVs of DirecTV customers, as the provider finally reached a deal with Viacom. [Engadget]

Reddit has composed a comprehensive timeline of the gut-wrenching fatal shooting that took place in Colorado last night. [Reddit]

The Wall Street Journal reports that recent weak pay-per-view and video-on-demand earnings reports from the likes of Time Warner Cable and DirecTV are prompting the companies to disclose that, when it was good, porn was a highly-profitable business for them. The paper says that cable companies used to have their own dirty little secret: they once commanded margins of over 90 percent on renting "generally interchangeable" (i.e. ho-hum) porn titles.

And charged more because they could. On Time Warner Cable in New York City, adult movies still cost $9.98 to rent, while your standard Hollywood fare is only $4.99. Online, porn is cheaper to create and consume, with little demand for better quality, even as the clicks roll in. The average time spent on adult websites during each visit has increased 26 percent since 2008, up to eight minutes and 35 seconds and ten of the top 11 adult sites have watched their share of overall internet traffic grow fourfold, according to Experian Hitwise.

Cable's strategy for competing, according to Vivid Entertainment co-chairman and co-owner Bill Asher, is to offer better prices and more exclusive content, like celebrity sex tapes. Celebrity sex tapes? Mr. Asher knows you can get those for free on the internet, right?