There's a bloatospheric storm brewing over Wal-Mart's "fake" blog, Wal-Marting Across America. John at Biz Hack calls it a "flog," otherwise known as a stealth PR blog. Bottom line, it lacks transparency—the very thing Wal-Mart's PR agency likes to trumpet. And it's not just Edelman on the line, here. Editor & Publisher reports on the real world repercussions now faced by one of the two floggers. A photographer for …
The Last Retainer
Pat D'Amico, business development partner at Psynchronous Communications and former SVP/Group Director at Arnold Worldwide, calls his own fiction "a bitterly funny account of the rat-eat-rat world of advertising" in our comments. So let's look at the man's prose, offered semi-anonymously on a Blogspot site: Tracy DelAngelis was in the late stages of making a name for herself at Shaughnessy + Greene, which at …
Dialogue Marketing Trumps Monologue Marketing Everytime
Friend of AdPulp (FOP), Tom Asacker wrote something I like a lot. Don't look for breakthrough insights in outdated processes like "inventory control" and "advertising." Instead, study those businesses that actually broke with conventional wisdom and discovered new ways to get closer and closer to the customer. And for the record, I am not saying "don't advertise." Not advertising is like winking at a beautiful …
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Hugh’s Give And Take
I haven't peered into MacLeod's Gaping Void in a while. Let's take a look, shall we? I was in the pub the other evening, trying to explain the difference between Web 1.0 ["Dotcom"] vs Web 2.0 ["Blogs & Social Media"] to a web neophyte friend of mine. The short answer: "Dotcom was about 'taking'. Web 2.0 is about 'giving'." The architecture of Web 2.0 is about people giving away their stuff i.e. "sharing". Whether its …
Why Confine Storytelling To Books?
Toronto Star looks at Cathy's Book, a great example of an interactive book. In the tradition of Griffin & Sabine — the series of books that contained packages of letters that became best-sellers in the 1990s — Cathy's Book includes a sleeve of letters, invitations, pictures and other ephemera that are actually clues to help readers solve the mystery of what happened to Cathy's boyfriend. But Cathy's Book takes that …
Showin’ Trucks At The Fair
USA Today explains Texans' fascination with pickup trucks. It's a cultural thing. That's the explanation. Some facts to support this argument: More than 27% of vehicles registered in Texas are pickups, compared with 20% for the rest of the nation. The article goes on to explain that the State Fair of Texas, an event attended by more than 3 million people, is ground zero in the pickup wars. This year, for the first …
Web-Two-Point-Dough Blues
Greg Storey at Airbag has written a pensive peice on "blahgs." His piece was inspired by Jeffrey Zelman's question, "Are you still fired up about blogging?" Storey's answer: Not so much. Our content is all starting to look the same because of the tools used to manage it and web-two-point-dough has homogenized the Internet. For sure, anyone who spends a great deal of time researching and organizing content will …
It’s Not A Website, It’s Your Customer’s First Point Of Contact
Randon Culture points to this Financial Times story on corporate websites. At the center of the story is BP's decision not to scrap its site altogether in 2002. For companies, websites are often a first point of contact with the outside world. So how can they make the best impression? Someone – though not necessarily in corporate communications – must be given sole responsibility and must have heavyweight back-up. …
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