Lewis Lazare: Chicago-based veteran creative Gordon Robertson is giving Chicago something it needs more of -- a new boutique ad agency.

Robertson is teaming with Brainforest, a design firm specializing in Web, identity and strategic development, to launch the city's newest boutique shop, called Sway Creative Group, which will function as the advertising division at Brainforest. Clients at Brainforest include Motorola, Union Leasing, WXRT-FM and Millennium Park.

Robertson, formerly a group creative director at BBDO/Chicago, hopes to provide clients with the proverbial "big ideas" he hopes will work on both a visceral and rational level.

Robertson sees another opportunity at Sway. "As an industry, we've gotten away from advertising as a sales tool," he said. "Either it's hard-sell, hurry-in-now retail, or it's clever and soft, and often times irrelevant. I believe in doing advertising that moves a consumer along the path to a sale."

The Work Environment Index (WEI), rates working environments in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., in terms of average pay, employment opportunities, employee benefits, percentage of low-income workers, fair treatment between genders and ability for employees to unionize. It is the first index to evaluate worker climate as opposed to business climate on a state-by-state basis, and was developed by researchers at Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts. The WEI is included in PERI's new study, Decent Work in America.

A major finding of the study is a consistent correspondence between the quality of a state's environment for workers and its economic health. States ranking high on the list generally have faster economic growth and lower poverty rates, and conversely, states at the bottom of the list tend to have slower economic growth and higher poverty rates.

Delaware, New Hamshire and Minnesota are the top three states for worker climate. The lowest ranking states are found throughout the Sun Belt, or Bible Belt.

Steve Rubel advises clients to let go of the idea that they can stuff their blog full of old-style advertising.

Give us a reason to read your blog. Give us something we can't find anywhere else. Provide information that your customers, partners and prospects care about, not necessarily what you care about. Be a resource and a connector.

This goes against the grain of how some organizations think. They want to talk about their widgets and how great they are.

You mean we can't just tell people how great our product is day after day?

Nope.

According to Wieden + Kennedy's London office, these guys - Dave and Ian - were outside this morning with their banner, no doubt encountering all sorts of abuse from passing students, drunks and conceptual artists.

Media Post: Led by a surge in entertainment spending, U.S. consumers shelled out $987 million for online content during the first half of this year, marking a 16 percent increase from the first half of 2004, according to a report issued Monday by the Online Publishers Association.

Spending at entertainment and lifestyle soared by about 45 percent to $265 million in the first half of this year, from $183 million in the first six months of 2004. Almost half of the total entertainment/lifestyle spending--$115 million--was from single-purchase sales, such as digital music.

Other categories showing large gains were research sites, which surged by 39 percent to $73 million; games, which grew by 23 percent to $54 million; personal growth, which jumped 19 percent to $58 million; and personals and online dating sites, which grew by 8 percent to $245 million.

Still, the vast majority of Web surfers--around 89 percent--didn't pay for any content as of this June.

John Moore considers Adweek's report, Measuring Buzz.

The major reason why word-of-mouth hasn’t taken off is not because marketers lack the metrics to measure it. It’s because most products, services, and businesses simply aren’t worth talking about.

Johnnie Moore picks up on his thinking and adds to it.

Most boring conversations are only a heartbeat away from being very interesting... all it takes is one participant to take an emotional risk. I think the dullest business can have an interesting conversation, the moment it is willing to take the risk of getting out of bullshit mode.

c|net: "It is time to say that electricity and the Internet are very similar in end users' eyes," the sandy-haired Veljo Haamer said over a cup of smoky black tea.

Haamer, one of Estonia's unofficial chief geeks, is largely responsible for a level of Wi-Fi connectivity-–even in remote areas-–that puts the biggest cities in America to shame. For the last three years, he and a handful of volunteer evangelists with the WiFi.ee organization have successfully lobbied Estonian cafes, hotels, hospitals, city parks, local governments and even major gas stations to start offering Net access, helping to design and set up the networks.

The results have been nothing short of astounding. I recently spent nearly three weeks traveling around the small Baltic country, and found that in small-town cafes, city parks--even in a remote national park in a town without so much as a bar or restaurant-–I was able to turn on my laptop and go online at the touch of a button.

Mobile technology evangelist and Yahooligan, Russell Beattie, went on one of his patented rants the other day. It's good stuff.

It just seems that no one is trying to change the world any more. No one is aiming to create “insanely great” products or do the impossible. Why not? Why are so many people grasping at the low-hanging fruit, when there’s so much more goodness for everyone if they just stretched a little higher?

No one seems to be coming up with the next interesting new business model. I’m not looking for anything wacky, but there’s got to be better ways for your site to make money than waiting for Google to send you an AdSense check every month. Seriously, everyone seems to think the Text Ad Train is just going to keep on rolling forever. It’s not. Where is the new innovation to keep things moving? Remember, Google stumbled upon the way to do it right, but someone came up with the Contextual Advertising concept first and his name was Bill Gross. Where is that type of new innovator?

Actually, where are all the personalities, period? Where is the hubris of Jobs? Where is the unrelenting focus of Gates? Where is the arrogance of Ellison? Come on, let’s get some new budding tech-industry stars out there! I want to see someone’s face on the cover of freakin’ Time soon, you know? It’s been at least a year since Larry and Sergey… Come on! Who’s next?

Why not think big? Let's see, there's always fear of failure. And laziness. If we put those hypothetical hindrances aside, strictly for the sake of discussion, I'd say there are some big ideas floating around our realm, the ad realm.

I know for myself, just a few years ago I was still transfixed by the possibility, however distant, of seeing my best work in CA's Advertising Annual. Now, I never think of it.

I think about being a consumer advocate, about having the client's ear when it matters, about building bridges between the camps. I think about blogs helping to reinvent the art of copy, about storytelling being on the rise, about what it all means for brands and my careeer. I think about what's under AdPulp's hood, about where we want to go with it, about how to share all that in measured bursts.

As part of her "Naked Career" podcasts, Sally Hogshead lands what they call in show bidness a big "get": Nancy Vonk, Co-CD of Ogilvy Toronto, whose comments about Neil French...well, if I have to fill in that part, you must've been in the Kalahari for the last month.

You can download the podcast at Talent Zoo's website or by searching on "Radio Talent Zoo" on The iTunes' Music Store podcast section. It should be up by 9:00 this morning.

Lewis Lazare: He's baaaack! Thomas Kemeny that is, the plucky Columbia College/Chicago valedictorian who graduated last spring with the dream of becoming an ad man. Soon after graduating, Kemeny departed for an internship at the very hot and happening Crispin Porter + Bogusky ad agency in Miami.

Now Kemeny has returned to Chicago, where he continues to learn his craft as a free-lancer at the city's largest agency, Leo Burnett. The Crispin gig, Kemeny told us Tuesday, was a real learning experience.

That's great, but we wanted to know what the vibe was like at Crispin, especially compared to shops he has interned at in Chicago. Very fast-paced, he said, perhaps because a lot of the Crispin staff were East Coasters, with a hefty infusion of Texans for good measure. And the hours were very long. "Twenty-hour days weren't uncommon," Kemeny said.

The New York Times: Wal-Mart Stores came to Manhattan last night for a peak at a movie about itself. But before it got the chance, a Wal-Mart consultant was told to leave the theater after the director accused him of trying to secretly record the film.

Minutes into the premier of the film, "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," the director, Robert Greenwald, said he spotted the consultant pointing his open cellphone toward the screen. A confrontation ensued in the lobby. "Get out of here," Mr. Greenwald yelled, according to the director and a Wal-Mart spokeswoman. "This is a disgrace."

The spokeswoman, Mia Masten, said she and two consultants had bought tickets to the screening "to find out what they were saying so we can correct it." Ms. Masten said the consultant who was asked to leave, John Marino, was trying to call her because she was running late.

"Why would we record it?" she said, "We bought tickets."

The incident is the latest chapter in escalating public relations battle between Wal-Mart and its critics. The retailer has set up a rapid response war room in Arkansas to monitor its critics, and sent media specialists to Manhattan as part of the effort.

Rick Jacobs, the chairman of Brave New Films, which is distributing the film, said he was considering filing charges against Wal-Mart and the consultant for attempted piracy. "You can't just go in and record a movie," Mr. Jacobs said. "Wal-Mart should know. They are the largest seller of DVD's in the country."

2005 GRAND PRIZE WINNER
Morning Crave

10 White Castles
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
10 eggs
1 tbsp. chopped onion
Dash of pepper
1 tsp. salt
1/2 to 1 lb. crumbled bacon or sausage
4 cups milk
1/2 tsp. dried mustard
1 tbsp. parsley flakes

Line bottom of greased 9” x 13” casserole dish with White Castles. Sprinkle cheese over sandwiches. Beat eggs, add milk and all ingredients except bacon or sausage. Pour egg mixture over cheese and sprinkle bacon or sausage on top. Cover with foil and refrigerate overnight. Bake uncovered at 325 degrees for one hour. Let sit before serving.

Submitted by Karen Burke of Ft. Wright, KY. For creating the 2005 Grand Prize recipe, Karen will receive a Crave Case every week for an entire year!

Steve Is Bored contemplates the rise of table tennis.

Now that poker (the new hockey) has become mainstream programming, I recently read that the next big thing in televised sports will either be darts or ping-pong. The latter might have an edge because Killerspin (the 'Nike' of table tennis) is marketing Biljana "Biba" Golic as the 'Anna Kournikova of table tennis' (except that Biba can actually play).

According to Killerspin, Biba is 2-time Yugoslavian Champion in singles and mixed doubles, Balkan Champion in mixed doubles, and the Mediterranean Doubles Champion. Biba is a phenomenal athlete with a very aggressive style.

USA Today: Ford Motor says it will soon offer wireless mobile offices in its F-series pickups, an option aimed at building contractors and others who do business on the road.

Pricing isn't finalized, but it would cost around $3,000 for a wireless-equipped computer, printer and global positioning system, Ford spokesman Alan Hall said. Add-ons like a digital camera and credit card scanner also would be available.

Ford expects to offer the mobile office as a dealer-installed accessory in 2006. The system uses a flat Stargate Mobile computer, powered by the truck's battery and mounted on a stand between the driver's seat and passenger seat.

The computer has a touch-screen option — eliminating the need for a keyboard or mouse — and is designed to be removed from the stand and taken to a work site. It stays connected to the Internet via a broadband wireless cellular card.

The computer in the Ford pickups will be equipped with office software, including Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint, and also can play music or be used for navigation.

Around 60% of F-series buyers use their trucks for business.

Fortune has named O+M CEO, Shelly Lazarus, one of the most powerful women in business for 2005.

According to Fact Monster, Shelly graduated from Smith College in 1968 and earned an MBA from Columbia University in 1970, where she was one of four women in her class. She started working at Clairol, but within a year switched to Ogilvy & Mather. After a series of promotions, Lazarus was named president of North American operations in 1994. In the early 1990s, Lazarus scored two major coups: she won the American Express account, and made Ogilvy the exclusive agency for IBM, whose advertising had been split between 40 agencies. She took over from Charlotte Beers as CEO in 1996.

We Make Money Not Art points to this AP Photo from Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, where advertising billboards are repurposed to serve as rain covers on the tents of earthquake refugees.

David Pogue has some rules for electronics makers who want some consumer love this holiday season (and beyond).

Worship at the altar of good design and make customer satisfaction your religion. These should be your commandments.

I. Thou shalt not entomb thy product in indestructible plastic.

II. Thou shalt hire native English speakers to translate thine instruction manual.

III. Thou shalt not hype irrelevant specs.

IV. Thou shalt not charge tech-support fees for thine own mistakes.

V. Thou shalt not participate in rebate rip-offs.

VI. Thou shalt not hide from thy customers.

VII. Thou shalt remember the customer's phone number.

VIII. Thou shalt not prevent "zeroing out" of thy phone-mail maze.

IX. Thou shalt not hog the power strip.

X. Thou shalt not plan obsolescence.

Great advise. And applicable well beyond gadgetry.

Night Agency interviewed Steve Hall of Adrants last week. Here's an excerpt:

Night Agent: Steve Hall, what did you have in mind when you started Adrants? Were you launching a revolution or were you just bored?

Steve Hall: I wish I were that insightful. Actually, I started it during a period of unemployment in March 2002 as a way to stay in touch with the industry.

NA: Well, looks like you are in touch now!

SH: I seem to be. Or so I’m told

NA: You’re media today, probably on top of any good PR person’s priority list. How does this feel?

SH: Well…. in one way it feels as though I’m just a cog in the big PR machine. In another it feels as though Adrants has been validated as an important medium. And in another, it just makes me feel as though, personally, people respect what I have to say.

Reveries: You may call him mellow yellow (quite rightly) but creatives on Madison Avenue are calling pop icon Donovan Leitch and asking him if they can use his tunes in their commercials — and he’s usually happy to make the sale, reports Brian Steinberg in The Wall Street Journal. Lately, you may have heard Donovan’s “Happiness Runs” in an ad for Delta Airlines or “Catch the Wind” for Volvo.

As for Donovan himself, he seems only too happy to answer a series of questions about his new kind of commercial success, as posed by Brian Steinberg, starting with: “…Are you concerned about being accused of selling out?” Donovan: “Embracing the modern world and invading the pop charts is what the bohemian folk singers did … I consider commercials not selling out, but selling in, and of course, attracting many younger fans who have already written to me from the commercials saying they discovered my music or rediscovered it in an ad, and found something special to them that was missing in the artists they were listening to.”

When asked about Bob Dylan’s 2004 appearance in an commercial for Victoria’s Secret, Donovan replies: “… It didn’t bother me … It’s using pop culture as pop art … I didn’t think it was a problem if Bob wants to do lingerie. After all, he wore makeup on many an occasion, you know.” And as to the potential of the rest of his catalog to be used in other ads, Donovan says: “I have amassed an enormous amount of songs about every particular condition of humankind — children’s songs, marriage songs, death songs, love songs, epic songs, mystical songs, songs on leaving, songs of meeting, songs of wonder. I pretty much have got a song for every occasion.” He adds: “… There isn’t three weeks go by … that a film company or TV company or commercial agency doesn’t ask for one of my songs … There is another pile on the table today… “

The New York Times: Sirius Satellite Radio is joining the growing ranks of media outlets that accept liquor advertising, as it begins running musical commercials for Diageo's Tanqueray gin.

Neither Sirius Satellite Radio nor its rival, XM Satellite Radio, carries commercials on any of its scores of music channels. Both carry spots on most of their talk, sports, news and entertainment channels, although there are fewer commercials than during a typical hour on a traditional, or terrestrial, radio station.

XM already accepts liquor advertising, and has run commercials for brands like Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey, sold by a unit of Brown-Forman.

The arrival of liquor advertising on Sirius is emblematic of how the relationships between marketers and media companies are being transformed as consumers embrace new options like satellite radio.

"These days, the media are as important as the message," said Chris Parsons, a vice president for marketing at Diageo in New York, particularly in reaching "the leading-edge consumer" who is an early adopter of new technologies.

Diageo turned to Sirius for the campaign, Mr. Parsons said, because it wanted to run the song commercial for two and a half minutes; traditional radio stations and networks generally do not accept spots longer than 60 seconds.

In addition to Sirius, the Tanqueray song used in the spot can be heard on and downloaded from tanqueray.com and getyouriceon.com. About 30,000 copies of the song on CD's are being given away at performances by the comedian Mike Epps on a national tour through January that is being sponsored by Tanqueray.

Grey and Diageo plan to add an additional Web site, tanqueraytracks.com, on Nov. 14, which will offer a series of brand-track songs, including a holiday tune.

I have not heard much about Seattle's Wong Doody, of late. That could be my own fault, or it may have something to do with WD not putting time or energy into press releases (those dinosaur speaking docs have little future). Either way, I was pleased to hear from Mario Schulzke at WD's LA office.

Los Angeles and traffic are inseparable. No matter where you are going, there is always the outside chance that you will be staring at the back of a Pontiac Aztec for the next 2 hours. In an effort to entertain these frustrated motorists and possibly educate them on how to avoid these situations, we created extremely long, handwritten billboards. When you are crawling along at 4mph, you have nothing but time. Each execution takes drivers inside the head of an outspoken and very talkative individual. The kind of person that chats you up on a five-hour airline flight across the country. After you take the time to read this individual’s opinions and observations, you are left with a choice. Stay informed with the KNX 1070 traffic report or continue to read the ramblings of your new traffic buddy.

Normally, an outdoor board should have fewer than five words. I like how the environmental conditions of LA at traffic time allow for this uprising. Here's the copy from the board:

Anyone out there who says they like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain is a liar. Now, I can understand one or the other, but both? I don't think so. Tropical drinks and untimely precipitation go together about as well as corduroy and sea otters. Speaking of, have you ever seen one of those things play with a ball? It is absolutely hysterical. Cross my heart, they look identical to Salvador Dali if Salvador Dali had been blessed with watertight fur and obscenely short arms. If you'd like to hear more of my observations, please continue to ignore the KNX 1070 traffic report.

That's 105 words, and very likely a Guiness World Record for long copy in an out-of-home execution. Nice work.

Adweek: The front row of seats on 15 public transportation buses in Greenville, S.C., bear black ribbons in memory of Rosa Parks, the Alabama cleaning woman who helped spark the civil rights movement by refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white man.

The ribbons carry the message, "Sometimes you have to sit down to stand up for something," and will remain on the bus seats through the end of this week. The work was conceived, created and financed by Erwin-Penland, an Interpublic Group advertising agency in Greenville.

Parks died Oct. 24 at the age of 92. Fifty years ago, she was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for violating a law that required African Americans to sit in the back of buses. In response, the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system that evolved into the civil rights movement.

Parks also was honored this week by becoming the first woman to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C.

Adfreak points to this Design Observer post from Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram. Bierut laments the decision by SBC to retire Saul Bass' iconic AT+T logo after the big merger is complete later this year.

Take a long, last look at Saul Bass's finest moment. AT&T will live on, but its logo is about to disappear.

In 1968, Saul Bass was hired to bring order to the system, and created a classic modern identity program. In Nixon-era America, Bass's simplified bell-in-circle logo, rigorous Helvetica-based typographic system and ochre-and-process blue color scheme became as familiar as the Coca-Cola signature. It was the ideal graphic analog for a phone system that was hailed as the best in the world, a virtually indestructable monopoly posing as a public utility: Ma Bell, utterly reliable and as ubiquitous as air.

Now, after 20 years of telecom chaos, SBC Communications, Inc., a descendent of Southwestern Bell, is taking over its former parent company: the child becomes the father to Ma, as it were. Their brand strategy lets them have their cake and eat it too. By retaining the AT&T name, they signal continuity. By replacing the Bass sphere with a "fresh, new logo," they signal vitality and change. Who's going to argue with that?

Graphic design, unlike architecture , leaves no footprint. When one of the best known logos in the world disappears overnight, the only hole created is in our collective consciousness. By New Year's Eve, Saul Bass's sphere will be no more. Will anyone mourn — or protest — its passing?

Holy crap. I've hit The Print Motherload.

Gerber asks that you "Fend For Yourself," in their wonderfully rendered print ads and online.

America, when did we become so soft?

When did we decide campgrounds needed laundromats? When the car stalled,whose bright idea was it to reach for a cell phone instead of a tool?

There was a time when the words "quick" and "fix" were never found together in the same sentence. When our homes needed to be built, we grabbed brothers, fathers and hammers, not a mouse that clicked on Mr. On-line Contractor. Our nation's great accomplishments were a testament to hard work, sweat and ingenuity. After all, we not only put a man on the moon, but built him a rover to drive while he was up there.

What will we achieve today?

Can we turn our cheek to the enemy known as convenience before it makes us helpless? Do we have what it takes to depend solely on ourselves?

As you ponder these questions, we invite you to join us on our mission.

We're Gerber®. We design the tools, knives and outdoor gear that are essential, not only for the task at hand, but for bringing back something lost: our self-reliance.

Gerber. Fend For Yourself.

According to the Kelley Awards, Johnshon Sheen in Portland, OR is the agency behind the work. When you visit the Johnson Sheen web site it now says Johnson Cowan Hanrahan. Which can be explained by this article from Portland Business Journal, wherein the reader discovers that Tim Hanrahan from Wieden + Kennedy joined the firm a year ago as Executive Creative Director.

Kurt Vonnegut in Forbes:

What I do, which is becoming more and more impractical I think, is make people respond to idiosyncratic arrangements of 26 phonetic symbols and ten Arabic numbers in horizontal lines on a page. And there was a time when this was a form of home entertainment, and so it was worthwhile for people to learn how to read. But reading it is actually quite difficult--I mean it is as hard as learning to read music, and it’s a remarkable skill. And if you take ink on paper and make people respond to it, they themselves are going to have to be performers. It’s like arriving at a concert hall and being handed a violin, and you’re expected to play. That’s what we expect readers to do, perform themselves, because they’re half of the performance.

The Guardian: Mozart, Brahms and Bach have been enlisted to discourage youths from hanging around shops at seaside towns.

Classical music has been piped into Co-op stores at Seaton and Teignmouth in Devon for just over a week, and already youngsters who used to congregate near the doors have gone elsewhere.

The supermarket plans to experiment with different types of classical music to see if particular styles are more effective.

A Co-op spokeswoman said: "Classical music makes our shops less cool as places for youngsters to hang around. It is early days, but it does appear to be successful."

Colin Diver, President of Reed College in Portland, OR has no need, nor love for ranking systems. Writing in The Atlantic, Diver utterly destroys U.S. News & World Report. It's an enjoyable read. And one the bloatosphere--whose members are too often obsessed with their Technorati rank, Google rank or Blogebrity status--might learn from.

For ten years Reed has declined to fill out the annual peer evaluations and statistical surveys that U.S. News uses to compile its rankings. It has three primary reasons for doing so. First, one-size-fits-all ranking schemes undermine the institutional diversity that characterizes American higher education. The urge to improve one's ranking creates an irresistible pressure toward homogeneity, and schools that, like Reed, strive to be different are almost inevitably penalized. Second, the rankings reinforce a view of education as strictly instrumental to extrinsic goals such as prestige or wealth; this is antithetical to Reed's philosophy that higher education should produce intrinsic rewards such as liberation and self-realization. Third, rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one's score. Because the rankings depend heavily on unaudited, self-reported data, there is no way to ensure either the accuracy of the information or the reliability of the resulting rankings.

I’ll readily admit that I’ve been waiting for my copy of Hadji Williams’ new book Knock The Hustle: How to Save Your Job and Your Life from Corporate America for 3 months now, since I first heard about it and saw the excerpts on his website.

And now that it’s here and I’ve read it, I can honestly say that this is the most provocative, eye-opening look at the advertising industry that I’ve ever read. Sorry, Luke Sullivan. Sorry, Sally Hogshead. Sorry, Phil Dusenberry. Sorry, David Ogilvy, Jerry Della Famina and Howard Gossage. Hadji’s got you folks beat by a mile.

Hadji Williams spent 13 years as a writer in various Chicago agencies, including BBDO and Uniworld (and if you’re in Chicago, you HAVE to get this book, because Hadji isn’t afraid to name names, or slightly disguise them and call some people out on their actions). By not being from an upper middle-class white neighborhood, the ad industry and how it operates turned out to be a revelation to him, although it was strangely familiar: pimping, whoring, hustling, drug-pushing, gambling—all thrive in corporate America, albeit in unique forms.

What’s really great is that Knock The Hustle isn’t just a rant about minorities in advertising or a personal memoir. It’s a transparent account of how the ad business operates—from creative concepting to client billing, new business presentations to office politics. And Hadji has plenty of concrete ideas on how the ad industry could change its practices, where most people in the business just give lip service to the notion of progress. Actually, there’s a good amount of wisdom that nearly any business in any industry can apply. If that weren't enough, many parts of this book are funny as hell.

It’s 378 pages long, and Hadji stacks it full of personal stories, business history, pop culture references and attributable quotes that range from The Bible to John F. Kennedy to Mya. But he also writes something on nearly every page that’s a nugget of genius (and if you’re not good with slang, keep Urban Dictionary handy). My words can’t do this book justice—you just have to read it and experience it. Much like Matt Beaumont’s e from a few years ago, everyone familiar with advertising will find something in KTH to relate to. Only here, it’s all true.

I think Hadji self-published this book, so you probably won't find it at your local bookstore. But you can order Knock The Hustle through the KTH website and on Amazon. Either way, get it. It’s a must-read for anyone in the advertising industry, particularly the people who want to be in the industry next week, or next year, or next decade.

Lewis Lazare contemplates the tagline's place in motivational psychology.

For Two by Four/Chicago, the timing couldn't have been more perfect. The local shop was named ad agency of record for the Chicago White Sox a year ago, just in time to put in place an ad campaign for a season that would prove an unexpectedly historic one for the South Side baseball team.

For last season, Two by Four created the ad campaign tagline "Win or Die Trying," which at the time of its debut sounded rather extreme, even in the intensely competitive realm of professional sports. But who knows? Maybe in some small way, the team was pushed to achieve what it did because that tagline was in place throughout the season to remind them of their goal.

50 Cent's new film has a remarkably similar theme. I wonder if that means his film is bound for glory. Not!

Yahoo News: Julia King, 38, is part of an emerging class of women whom marketers call Yoga Mamas. These middle- and upper-income mothers are more style- and brand-conscious than their parents. No matter their income, they spend like lottery winners on their babies and toddlers. In the process, they're revolutionizing the baby-products market and forcing manufacturers and retailers of all sizes to adjust.

From the start, they are focused on active, fashionable, and fit pregnancies, and then on the fitness and well-being of their offspring. They tend to be more educated and have more disposable income to spend on fewer children than past generations. As a result, the $27 billion infant and preschool products business is growing more than 4% per year, faster than the overall toy, apparel, and furniture industries. "This group is influencing other moms who have money and plenty of moms who don't," says Timothy Dowd, a senior analyst at market research firm Packaged Facts. "Yoga Mama is pumping up sales across the board."

Marketers say the evidence is in the brisk sales of premium-priced products: Burt's Bees Buttermilk lotion is $8.99 and a top seller at drugstore.com; $11.50 buys a 2 oz. jar of popular California Baby Calendula Cream at Whole Foods Market; Italian leather toddler shoes are $129 at Nordstrom; Bugaboo strollers Yoga moms love for ergonomic design and brand cachet are $700 and up. And the appeal is well beyond Rodeo Drive and Manhattan's Upper East Side, where baby-bling-buying includes Gund brand diamond and emerald jewelry for newborns.

Wired: In the first U.S. prosecution of its kind, FBI agents arrested a 20-year-old Los Angeles man Thursday on charges that he cracked some 400,000 Windows machines and covertly installed pop-up-generating adware on them, in a scheme that allegedly brought in $60,000 in ill-gotten profits.

Jeanson Ancheta faces a 17-count federal indictment charging him with two counts of conspiracy and various forms of computer intrusion and money laundering. The government is also seeking the seizure of more than $60,000 in cash, a used BMW and some computer equipment from the alleged hacker.

According to prosecutors, Ancheta used a customized form of the "rxbot" Trojan horse program to find and take control of large collections of vulnerable PCs, spinning them into "botnets" capable of being directed as one. He then installed ad-delivery programs from two adware firms: Quebec-based Gammacash and LOUDcash, which was purchased by adware giant 180solutions and renamed ZangoCash earlier this year.

Adware firms officially require their partners to obtain the user's permission first -- a step unscrupulous affiliates have been known to dispense with.

Marketing guru Adam Hanft, founder and CEO of Hanft Unlimited queries Richard Florida in a Fast Company web exclusive.

Hanft: Does the importance of the Creative Class in driving innovation fly in face of the notion that technology makes geography insignificant? Are we becoming a world where free-agents work entrepreneurially, as "nowhereians" with a global soul, in Pico Iyer's term -- or a world where geography becomes even more important than it has been?

Florida: Both phenomena are at work, but in the end geography will remain as important as it's ever been. I wrote an article on this very subject in the October issue of the Atlantic Monthly, taking on Tom Friedman's assertions that "The World is Flat" and "you don't have to emigrate to innovate." In fact, the world is "spikier" than it's ever been, with economic growth and especially cutting-edge science and innovation concentrating in major urbanized regions. Between these regions are the valleys of this Spiky World, struggling to keep pace in the global economy.

Now, obviously free-agents are free to hop from peak to peak in this world, but it's a dangerous misconception that just because the world is "flat" for the privileged few (admittedly, an increasing number), it's flat for everyone.

As a creative thought worker who is not located in an urban creative center, I'm apt to take Florida's thinking with a grain of salt. For sure, our industry is organized in well established creative pockets, or ghettos, as the case may be. Yet, some of the best ideas (and work) consistently comes from "out of nowhere". Search for "Agencies in Strange Places" in the AdPulp search bar to see what I mean.

nola.com: Lamar Advertising Co. sustained $14 million in hurricane damage to its billboards in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to the company.

But the company's chief financial officer said new designs will cut future storm repair costs.

CFO Keith Istre said the storms would allow the company "to replace existing inventory with wind-resistant structures that are much more durable and have a much higher wind-resistance rating."

Some of the existing billboards could withstand winds of up to 110 mph, Istre said. The new designs will be able to handle winds as high as 140 mph to 150 mph, he said.

Instead of having a solid face, the new billboards will be like a frame to which vinyl sheets of advertisement copy will be strapped.

"If the copy blows out, that's just an $800 piece of vinyl," Istre said.

The company expects its billboards in Mississippi and Louisiana to be repaired by early 2006, Istre said. But he said the company does not know how long it will be before its business in the hurricane zones returns to normal.

Ad Age: Terrestrial broadcasters insist they’re not nervous about satellite radio’s 7 million subscribers, but they’ve successfully stalled Arbitron’s plan to add satellite and online radio listening to its diary measurement system.

Arbitron was originally scheduled to instruct its diary keepers to record their satellite and online radio listening in the fall 2005 book. Instead, Arbitron now plans a 25-market test of the process in February and will delay full implementation until summer 2006, at the earliest.

Arbitron said the change is a response to the concerns of the National Association of Broadcasters’ Local Radio Audience Measurement Committee and the Arbitron Radio Advisory Council.

Radio broadcasters have been wary of the effect audience-measurement changes could have on their ratings and bottom line.

Fruitcast is a new service with the aim of commercializing podcasts. Their logo is also strangely reminiscent, but that's another story.

We make it ridiculously easy to put ads on your podcast. All you have to do is sign up for an account, and post the new feed URL we create for you on your website (or redirect it through another service, such as the excellent FeedBurner). Each time a listener downloads an episode from your new podcast feed, we'll check to see if there are any ads that have been assigned to your podcast. If so, we'll automatically add them (at either the beginning or end, or both) into the MP3 file that your listeners download. Each ad takes the form of a brief spoken statement. We approve each ad before it goes live, and we won't hesitate to reject anything that we think would annoy the podcast publishers or their listeners.

No word on what happens when any audio ad in a podcast is found to be offensive.

[Via Adverlab]

Through a service called Amazon Pages, Amazon will allow people to "inexpensively" buy chapters from a book and read them online. Customers will get complete online access to the book through another service called Amazon Upgrade. Both services are an extension of Amazon's existing search within a book program.

"Amazon Pages and Amazon Upgrade leverage Amazon's existing Search Inside the Book technology to give customers unusual flexibility in how they buy and read books," said CEO Jeff Bezos. "In collaboration with our publishing partners, we're working hard to make the world's books instantly accessible anytime and anywhere."

[via The Street]

John Warner, a.k.a. The Swamp Fox, is a Greenville, SC-based venture capitalist. On his blog, he writes about the Greenville Chamber's recent visit to Austin, TX--a city that has emerged as an entrepreneurial haven with the third-most venture capital investment in the country. In other words, the money is flowing in Austin. Warner asks why and considers what his own vibrant upstate community can do to share in some of Austin's success.

People really enjoy living in Austin and are dedicated to preserving and celebrating their distinctiveness. Their attitude is captured in a bumper sticker: Keep Austin Weird. The distinctiveness of a city starts with its local, independent businesses, so Austin fosters the growth and development of local companies and doesn't subsidize the mega chains that are making America look homogenized.

Austin nurtures folks -- students, managers with new ideas and immigrants -- who don't fit into the power structures that exist in the community. On the plane ride to Austin, I sat next to a woman who had lived in Greenville only a year and told me how difficult it had been to get plugged into the leadership of our community. Now, if this was the only time I had heard this about Greenville, it would have been easy to write it off as an i