"Yellow wakes me up in the morning. Yellow gets me on the bike every day. Yellow has taught me the true meaning of sacrifice. Yellow makes me suffer. Yellow is the reason I am here." -- Lance Armstrong

Much of the world may not know exactly why "yellow" does all that for Lance Armstrong (it's the color of the Tour de France winner's jersey), but just about everyone is aware that he has parlayed it into marketing juggernaut. Originally, Nike manufactured a grand total of 5 million LiveStrong wristbands, but Lance thought they had made a mistake. "I figured we'd be shooting them at each other for years," he told USA Today.

Instead, Nike sold about 50 million of those yellow bracelets within a single year and has now launched a really cool-looking line of clothing and shoes featuring that trademark yellow band. So, never you mind that Pantone has anointed "Moroccan Blue" and "Glazed Ginger" (i.e., brown) as this year's colors. It matters not that sales of light-brown and blue cars are up. The color of marketing is yellow. Sorry Seth: It's the new purple.

Yes, yellow. As in Yellow Pages. Mello Yello. The wimpy color that means "slow down" when you're in traffic and "back down" when you're in a fight ("The sun's not yellow, it's chicken," quoth Bob Dylan) has a game going these days. Thanks, in no small part, to Lance Armstrong. It's amazing how a back-bench hue like yellow could become cooler than blue and bolder than brown with a doubtful push by an incredibly famous bicycle guy with a great story to tell, not to mention a certain proclivity for obscure verse.

According to Pantone, it usually takes so much more -- and so much longer -- for a color to rise to the top. It took blue and brown about five years, in fact, to make it to the top of Pantone's list of colors. And that was record time. The color brown, Pantone says, was put on the "fast track" by UPS and Starbucks. Blue, meanwhile, has always been a popular color but was helped along by its prominence in the operating platforms for both Microsoft's Windows and Apple's iMac.

And here I thought Microsoft's color was black and Apple's was white.

The ostensibly unlikely combination of blue and brown, in any case, is at least partly credited to the resurgent popularity of Johannes Vermeer, who was a really good painter as well as the inspiration of a pair of best-selling novels and a fairly recent hit movie. An impressive guy, Vermeer, but frankly he's no Lance Armstrong. If you need evidence of that, take a look at who is buying which color cars these days.

Saab may be moving a good number of those "smoke beige" 9-5's, and Volvo's customers may be loving that "Barents blue" S-40. But those wheels can't possibly compare to the thrill of owning a "screaming yellow" Ford Mustang, a "liquid yellow" Mini Cooper or even a "ballistic yellow" Hyundai HCD-8. If you're really going for it, check out that "speed yellow" Porsche or, best of all, the "just-mad-about-saffron yellow" Lotus Elise, like the one Randy Chase owns. "It's hard to drive down the street without people yelling at you," says Randy, who adds that he actually picked the color because the car sat so low to the ground he thought he might get run over if the color didn't pop.