January 2, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 12 Comments

Today's Slate takes a look at the promotional ads colleges insert into football telecasts. If you're a college football fan, no doubt you've seen these and had a good chuckle over them.

The ads typically run for 30 seconds during halftime. As state-school spokespersons are quick to point out, colleges don't pay for the airtime—the slots are provided at no cost under most college-football television contracts.

The standard mise-en-scène of the institutional spot will be familiar to any dedicated college-sports watcher: campus greenery, one-on-one pedagogy, chemistry labs, black gowns and mortarboards, and laughing/hugging students of as many colors as possible.

The season's most memorable institutional spot won't be playing during a bowl game. Notre Dame will introduce a new ad for the Fiesta Bowl, but the school will have a tough time encapsulating the smug Golden Domer attitude any better than it does in "Candle." A girl lights candles at her church, ostensibly for many years, until a thick letter arrives from the Notre Dame admissions office. A glance to the skies confirms just who's responsible for her shot at a "higher education." Prayer for personal triumph: It's not just for end zone celebrations anymore.

I'm getting ready for the Sugar Bowl. Go Dawgs!

January 2, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

This story from The New York Times sounds strangely familiar.

The accelerating speed of business and the relentless churn of consumer trends can create nightmares for marketers and their advertising agencies. By the time clients and creative directors realize that hemlines are going down, they may actually be rising again.

Some agencies are responding by honing their trend-spotting skills.

DDB, part of the Omnicom Group, introduced a service last month called SignBank, which uses the Internet and the agency's global office network to collect thousands of snippets of information about cultural change, identify trends in the data and advise clients on what it all means for them.

That's pretty much what we do here (minus the global network part). Hmmm...

January 2, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

This new household sailboarder from Germany hangs onto the rim of one's toilet and surfs the swirling waters keeping the bowl clean and odor free.

[via Strange New Products]

January 3, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Writer, brand strategist and entrepreneur Marc Babej, was kind enough to "sit" for some questions over the New Year's break. Marc is a frequent contributor to the comments section here and a prolific blogger in his own right. He manages all this while running Reason, Inc., a firm that specializes in strategic insight and development. Babej's firm is located at 80 Madison Avenue. When he speaks, perhaps he speaks not only for himself, but for the new Madison Avenue.

Q. I see you worked at Deutsch. What's the Donny all about?

A. I was an entry-level planner when I worked at Deutsch, but I had a fair amount of exposure to Donny because I was assigned to new business pitches. I liked and respected him from the start. He’s smart, intuitive and talented. What really sets him apart, though is that what you see is actually what you get. Some times you like what you see more than others, but you don’t have to deconstruct what he says in search of hidden motives. That’s particularly refreshing in a business that, by its very nature, attracts many manipulative types.

Q. You also worked at Kirshenbaum + Bond. I thought it was amazing and brave of those guys to spell it all out like they did in Under the Radar.

A. I wouldn’t call it brave. More often than not when ad people write a book, it’s to boost two things: new business and their own egos. That said, they did spell out what was, at the time, innovative thinking. By the way: much of that great thinking was produced by my former mentor Nigel Carr, who was the agency’s planning director for almost a decade… and in many ways the brains behind the operation.

Q. You speak four languages. Most Americans can barely speak one. Are you, in fact, an American?  

A. Not yet, but I’m about to become one. I was born in Germany and lived there until I was sixteen. The languages are incredibly useful, but also not a big deal. When different languages are a couple of hundred miles away, you’re bound pick them up.

Q. What motivated you to start blogging?

A. I hesitated about it for a long time because I’m allergic to hype. But once in a while, hype is in order. Blogging is great because it encourages people to be real. The results aren’t always pretty, but I’ll take “real” over “pretty” any day. The only thing missing from blogs in my mind were ratings, so I added them to my blog. Except for interviews, everything is rated on Being Reasonable. It’s a great exercise to boil an analysis or opinion down to a number… and it lets readers know right off the bat where I stand.

Q. Speaking of your blog...Being Reasonable is an interesting title for it. Does "Being Reasonable" sum up the Babejian ethos?

A. “Babejian ethos”? You need a more pronounceable name to have an anything-ian ethos. That said: yes, it does. My company is called Reason Inc. because I believe that the defining standard for marketing strategy is a reason to choose a product or company over the competition. Being Reasonable started out as the name of my column in Media Magazine. I liked it because it has a self-deprecating double meaning. After all, “reasonable” means both “sensible” and “average.” And it sounded like a classic name for a magazine column. By blog name standards, it’s what you would generously call an “outlier.” It’s the kind of blog name a totally uncool person would think is really cool. I thought it would be amusing to be prejudged as a dork.

Q. You've coined the terms "Motivation Engineering" and "Actionable Futurism" and hold service marks on them. How important is it to own these terms? Don't you want other people to use them?

A. There are a lot of gimmicky catchphrases out there, but once in a blue moon you develop a concept really deserves a name of its own. And when you stumble on such a concept, you want it to be your baby. It’s like owning a url. It’s the same way with trademarks. At some point, it might make sense to let other people use these phrases. That’s when you abandon a trademark, or just let it expire.

Q. As a professional journalist, do you find it hard to fully embrace the citizen's media movement?  

A. Not at all: I think it’s one of the best things to happen to journalism in a long time because it forces the profession to define the difference and reinvent its role. Nothing motivates progress as much as competition, and citizen journalism is competition. That said, citizen journalism is more than just competition to professionals. It’s also a source of ideas, leads and inspiration. Stuart Elliott and Brian Steinberg, for example, read marketing blogs regularly.

If you need more Babej than we can possibly provide, head over to Tom Asacker's place.

January 3, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Wired has a revealing profile of Jason Calacanis, the first to make millions by selling his blog business.

Here's some background information from the story:

The story of Calacanis' rise in New York's new media world goes like this: A bartender and a nurse in the outer reaches of Brooklyn have three sons. The middle one, Jason, puts himself through college at Fordham University, moves into a Manhattan apartment, and starts dabbling in computers and the early Internet. By 1996, he's figured out that he loves content - "software is so one-dimensional; it's not as much fun" - and begins publishing a 16-page social register-cum-technology newsletter called the Silicon Alley Reporter. He photocopies it himself and hand-delivers it to coffee shops and other digerati-haunted locales.

Thanks to good timing and aggressive promotion, the magazine catches on. It becomes a must-read for Manhattan's new media elite. CEOs and VCs vie for positions on its annual Silicon Alley 100 list. Calacanis throws huge, lavish parties. He publishes a sister magazine for the West Coast called Digital Coast Reporter. He charges people $1,000 a head to attend his conferences. His staff grows to about 70. Calacanis becomes the insiderest of insiders, partying with - and selling ads to - the tech icons he's writing about.

Here's some journalistic assessment of the Weblogs, Inc./AOL deal, followed by a look at the man's glaring ambitions and personal style:

So while Calacanis and a few other blog types insist that AOL's rumored buying price is completely reasonable, it's not clear that $25 million is a sane amount for 10 disconnected employees and a network of bloggers who could jump ship at any moment. Acquisition valuations for traditional media companies are usually equal to revenue, while a really hot property might get one and a half or twice that, according to Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. Calacanis got vastly more than that, making it hard not to think "bubble." Even he tempers his assurances - just a tad. "I can feel a little bit of froth today," he says. "Not a bubble, but froth."

Not that Calacanis is going to spend a lot of time worrying about it. For now, he's happy to drive waiters nuts with picky double macchiato orders and to rhapsodize nonsensically about how he'll use "citizens' media," as he calls blogging, to turn the publishing world on its head. Calacanis says he wants to "poach The New York Times' best writers" and insists that his writers, many of whom do not earn a living wage as bloggers, think he's a sucker. "They say, 'You're going to pay me to write about Macs? I love Macs. You're going to make my hobby 30 percent of my income!'" Calacanis is annoyed by writers he considers old-guard. He mimics them complaining: "'Where are my benefits? Who's editing me?'"

January 3, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Scobleizer wants content his way. And what Scoble wants, Scoble gets. Right?

Now that I have a sooppeerr dddoooppppeeeerr new cell phone (the Cingular 2125, it’s freaking awesome) I am looking at a lot of Web sites and RSS feeds.

One thing I wish is that Web site developers/designers would look at their site on a small screen with limited bandwidth.

So many sites suck really bad. I’m going to call these sites out with increasing frequency in 2006.

If your site makes you scroll for 20 minutes just to see your content, it sucks. It’ll get called out.

If your site squeezes a column so that it’s only one word wide, it sucks. It’ll get called out.

Millions of Web users are out there with cell phones. If you don’t get your site to work properly with a cell phone, you’re turning away customers and that sucks. It’ll get called out.

Okay, Robert. We'll get right on it add it to our to do list for 2006.

January 3, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Adweek: The True Agency has created a 30-minute original program for luxury carmaker Infiniti that features five black artists talking about design without once mentioning the brand.

Nor are there any commercial breaks. Instead, the conversation ends after 25 minutes and segues into images of Infiniti's various models.

The program, moderated by former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, will premiere Feb. 9 in prime time on BET and run again a week later.

Original programming is a first for Infiniti, a unit of Nissan that hired True in late 2003 as its first agency dedicated to reaching the black market. The show also breaks new ground for BET, which previously scheduled paid programming only on weekends in the early morning. "If it were a hard sell and something that was clearly commercial ... then it would have gotten different placement and different treatment," said Michael Lewellen, svp of corporate communications at BET in Washington, D.C. "At the end of the day, we felt this is something that our viewers will enjoy seeing."

Indeed, while Infiniti's sponsorship will be made clear by the opening credits and a closing sequence, "In Black" will not otherwise be labeled "paid programming," since it's not a hard sell, Lewellen said.

January 3, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

NYT: Across the country, the National Association of Realtors and the 6 percent commission that most of its members charge to sell a house are under assault by government officials, consumer advocates, lawyers and ambitious entrepreneurs. But the most effective challenge so far emanates from a spare Madison, Wisc. bedroom in the home of Christie Miller.

Ms. Miller, 38, a former social worker who favors fuzzy slippers, and her cousin, Mary Clare Murphy, 51, operate what real estate professionals believe to be the largest for-sale-by-owner Web site in the country.

They have turned Madison, a city of 208,000 known for its liberal politics, into one of the most active for-sale-by-owner markets in the country. And their success suggests that, in challenging the Realtor association's dominance of home sales, they may have hit on a winning formula that has eluded many other upstarts. Their site, FsboMadison.com (pronounced FIZZ-boh) holds a nearly 20 percent share of the Dane County market for residential real estate listings.

The site, which charges just $150 to list a home and throws in a teal blue yard sign, draws more Internet traffic than the traditional multiple listing service controlled by real estate agents.

FsboMadison listed about 2,000 homes in 2005 and said that about 72 percent of its listings sell. If those 1,440 houses averaged $200,000 per sale, the real estate commissions under the 6 percent system would have been about $17.3 million. Ms. Miller and Ms. Murphy collected about $300,000.

"They don't care - they're not profit-driven," said François Ortalo-Magné, an associate professor of real estate at the University of Wisconsin.

January 3, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Kristi Arellano of the Denver Post queried local ad execs about Crispin Porter's imminent move to Boulderado.

Pasquale "Pocky" Marranzino, president and chief executive of the Denver ad agency Karsh+Hagan (a division of The Integer Group), said his firm uses the Colorado lifestyle as a recruitment tool.

"It's succeeded in some cases and not in others," he said.

Cathey Finlon, CEO of McClain Finlon Advertising in Denver, considers Crispin Porter+Bogusky one of the most prominent firms on the national advertising scene and believes its presence will help boost the local advertising industry's prominence.

"Our advertising market has been one where it has great potential to grow into something," she said. "Where industries come together in a cluster, all things rise."

[via Spoonfed]

January 3, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 5 Comments

Thirty-five percent of the top 20 songs on the 2005 Billboard chart contained brand references. According to strategy firm Agenda, Inc., 2005 was the year that:

Missy Elliott’s Jell-o made the boys say hello, Mariah tottered back with a bottle of Bacardi, and the widest possible range of brands were showcased in the Billboard chart; from George Foreman Grills, to Froot Loops, to Listerine.

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Lewis Lazare: Maybe it's the name. Dunkin' Donuts, after all, doesn't suggest it's a chain that puts quite as much emphasis on its coffee as it does doughnuts. But starting this week in the Chicago market, and nationally as well, Dunkin' Donuts is introducing a new ad campaign from Hill, Holliday Connors Cosmopulous/Boston that hopes to convey the message the chain takes its coffee very seriously indeed.

The launch commercial, called "Traffic," is supposedly based on a true story provided by a loyal Dunkin' Donuts customer in Brockton, Mass. It opens with a woman leaving a Dunkin' Donuts shop with a tray of four coffees. As she makes her way through the parking lot, we assume she's going to her car.

Wrong.

She continues past the lot and goes on walking for what looks to be a few miles until she reaches a gridlocked expressway where she climbs over the guardrail and crosses three lanes of traffic before she finds the car she's been looking for. She then gets inside and hands her co-workers the coffees they've been waiting for as the voiceover helps explain the strange scenario we've just witnessed: "Why do people go to these kinds of great lengths for our coffee? Because we do."

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Russia Profile: It’s 5 p.m. on a grim and rainy Saturday afternoon in November, and finding a parking place near the IKEA store in the Tyoply Stan region of Moscow seems to be impossible. The gigantic parking area is completely full, and the line of cars waiting for available spots stretches for at least another hundred yards.

“During the past ten years, the middle class had been growing fast, and so have its consumer demands,” said Igor Berezin, president of Russia’s Marketing Guild and board member of ROMIR Monitoring, one of the country’s largest research firms. “But for a long time the supply just wasn’t there.”

Now, with global retail giants like IKEA gaining a foothold in Russia, supply is no longer a problem.

The IKEA company, founded in 1943 by Swedish entrepreneur Ingvar Kamprad, has 186 retail stores in 30 countries. Its philosophy involves affordability and quality as key concepts, along with the idea that “one design fits all countries.”

“People have the same needs anywhere – they want a nice place to eat, sleep, sit down with guests and play with children,” said Irina Vanenkova, who has been responsible for IKEA’s PR and advertising in Russia since the company first came here in the summer of 1998, in the midst of Russia’s severe financial crisis.

“IKEA’s furniture is simple and functional, and you can fit it into a limited space,” Vanenkova said. “It works great for people living in the small apartments of Russia’s big cities.”

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

This USA TODAY article helps explain the outrageous salaries many college football coaches earn. Often, a public university's coach ranks as the highest paid public official in the state, well beyond the governor, for instance.

Ohio State's athletic program is the nation's top collegiate sports moneymaker.

Ohio State made $89.7 million from ticket sales, royalties, advertising, broadcast agreements and other sources during the 2004-05 academic year, about $50,000 more than second-place Texas, according to U.S. Department of Education statistics.

The Buckeyes' top rival, Michigan, placed third on the list at $78.4 million, followed by Florida ($77.4 million) and Wisconsin ($75.3 million).

Ohio State has the most athletes and teams among the NCAA's Division I schools.

"You always want to be the biggest and the best," said athletic director Gene Smith, in charge of a self-sufficient department that has more than 900 student-athletes in 36 sports.

Ohio State sports receive no money from the government or the university.

Georgia had the nation's most profitable college sports program, making $23.9 million more than it spent.

Texas was tops in football revenue with $53.2 million, better than runner-up Ohio State's $51.8 million.

The Longhorns also had the most profitable football program, making $38.7 million after expenses. Ohio State was eighth in that category with $26.1 million.

January 4, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 1 Comments

It ain’t over till it’s over. CNNMoney.com reports that ABC is selling 30-second spots for as much as $2.6 million, a new record.

Advertisers still appear to be willing to pay top dollar during the Super Bowl since a gigantic audience is virtually guaranteed, regardless of which teams are playing. More than 86 million people watched the Super Bowl last year in the U.S., according to Nielsen Media Research.

"In this world of media fractionalization, this is one of the last times you can count on getting about 90 million viewers at the drop of the hat," said Brad Adgate, senior vice president of corporate research for Horizon Media, a marketing firm. "Advertisers realize this is the one event where people will actually watch your commercials."

Hype and record-setting numbers aside, Jaffe remains unconvinced.

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

NY Daily News: A thousand would-be sloganeers answered Borough President Marty Markowitz's call for a boastful phrase that would boost tourism - but in the end, a single slogan wasn't enough.

"Brooklyn is too broad and diverse for one slogan," said Markowitz spokeswoman Jocelyn Aframe.

"It became apparent that one slogan wouldn't be able to express all that Brooklyn has to offer."

Instead, the Brooklyn Tourism Partnership will use several slogans - which range from the classy ("Brooklyn: Bridge to the World") to the wacky ("Brooklyn: The Tenth Planet") and possibly risque ("Do It In Brooklyn") - for specific advertising campaigns.

Most of the suggestions - judged by a panel that included Brooklyn Academy of Music President Karen Hopkins and Brooklyn Brewery founder Steve Hindy - came from Brooklynites, but a handful came from as far away as Florida.

Markowitz, who cruised to reelection in November, plans to publish all the entries in a handout at his Jan. 26 swearing-in at Brooklyn Technical High School.

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

I've advised a handful of people on their paths to Adlandia. It's nice when things work out as well as they have for Matt Bergantino, AdPulp's new contributing writer.

Today, Matt's a Senior Copywriter at WPP's Bridge Worldwide in Cincinnati, working on P&G's internet properties.

He's contributed to Salon and is currently a contributing editor at Cincinnati Magazine.

Matt has also taught English Lit and writing at the University of Wales, Swansea, American University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Ad Age: In another victory for small ad agencies taking on Madison Ave. giants, Kraft Foods has moved creative responsibilities for its salad dressings, mayonnaise and barbecue sauce to independent McGarry Bowen, New York, the marketer said.

The accounts had been at WPP Group’s JWT and Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Foote Cone & Belding, both in Chicago. Kraft spends about $35 million on salad dressing and mayonnaise, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

The shift is the latest move by top marketers such as Coca-Cola Co., McDonald’s Corp. and Motorola to add start-up agenices to their rosters in recent years.

Run by former Y&R CEO John McGarry and former Ogilvy & Mather Executive Creative Director Gordon Bowen, the agency works for Reebok, Verizon, Marriott and Pfizer.

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Guy Kawasaki wants you to clean up your Power Point mess.

As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.

I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business.

January 4, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

For me, there was an interesting develoment today. I noticed a new blog--Amy Gahran's Right Conversation--thanks to Steve Rubel's pointer.

Amy is a conversational media consultant, content strategist, and freelance writer/editor based in Boulder, CO. It was the "conversational media" part that jumped out at me. For this is a term I've been using since 2003. I'm not claiming I invented it. That's not important. I'm just psyched to see it being used.

After I asked Amy where she might have picked up the term, she responded with an eloquent post that details her influences. I seriously doubt Amy had heard of me, or AdPulp, until today, but it was nice nonetheless to be grouped with the likes of Robert Scoble and Evelyn Rodriquez in her writeup.

Back in '03, I'd say things like this and think it semi-intelligent:

Conversational Media is the new paradigm. The power has shifted to the audience. The result of this awesome shift is new rules for marketers to play by. Those who grasp those rules and play by them will win. Those who refuse to see these changes or minimize their impact will lose. Traditional ad agencies will most often lose. They will lose because they see themselves as creators of TV advertising, which by its very nature is a one-way channel. There's no room (or very little room) for the customer in this time-tested, but tired equation.

What people want today is a voice. They want to be an active participant in a community. TV demands only the most passive involvement and does not offer one a voice, nor any sense of community, except possibly around the water cooler. Since markets are conversations, the task is to facilitate these conversations at every point of contact.

Now it seems trite. In this context, at least.

In the bloatosphere things move rapid fire. But time moves at another, more leisurely pace, in boardrooms and executive conference rooms across the land. In other words, TV is still a BIG BIG factor. TV's death sentence has been prematurely pronounced, over and over again in this impatient medium. I'm not for TV, but I am for looking at things realistically, and TV advertising is here to stay.

But TV is no longer all important. And that's a good thing.

Now, the idea is all important again. Advances in communications technology have given the customer more choices, and more control. In the process, the entire practice of "talking" with customers has been democratized and overhauled. Thus, the big idea, not the ad campaign, takes center stage because the big idea can live anywhere, and the more off-the-beaten path its home, the better.

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Online Media Daily: Ana Marie Cox, who is leaving her post as editor of political blog Wonkette to author a second book, will be replaced by two male bloggers--at least one of whom already has a feminine alter ego--confirmed Gawker Media Managing Editor Lockhart Steele Wednesday.

David Lat, who wrote "Underneath Their Robes," for which he presented himself in print as a female blogger, will co-edit Wonkette with 20-year-old New York University dropout Alex Pareene, who penned the blog Buck Hill.

With Cox at the helm, Wonkette became one of the most recognizable names in the blogosphere. Steele said he expects Cox to occasionally contribute guest pieces for Wonkette, and that she will have am emeritus title on the masthead. The site itself will retain its feminized name, Steele said.

With the new staff, expected to be in place later this month, Wonkette will join a growing number of Gawker Media blogs authored by more than one writer. Gawker itself has two editors, as does Hollywood gossip site Defamer. The masthead at tech blog Gizmodo includes a guest editor, news editor, contributing writer, columnist, two correspondents, and three reporters. "Different blogs call for different size teams, depending on how much user flow there is," Steele said.

January 5, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 3 Comments

I've been dealing with a dead Mac for a few days (not their fault--it's my abusive relationship with my Powerbook that caused it.) I spent about 10 minutes on hold when I called Apple's Technical Support hotline. During that time, the on-hold music was, and I kid you not, "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips and some other song I'd never heard before called "Rome Wasn't Built In A Day."

That's just plain wrong. It reminded me of The Simpsons episode where Maggie goes missing, Homer calls the missing child hotline and they play "Baby Come Back" by Player while he's on hold.

I love Apple, but they can do better than that with the on-hold music. Especially now that they've got iTunes at their disposal.

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Liz Tascio of Media Magazine showed AdPulp some love in the January issue.

>> Adpulp.com. Edited (and mostly written) by "poet, critic, and storyteller" David Burn, Adpulp is a smart, thorough, flexible blog. It also helps you navigate the dense jungle of media journalism. Burn delivers engaging insights while skillfully pointing readers to more coverage of the news, relevant content on other blogs, and comments by experts.

Tascio aslo profiles Adrants, AdJab, Adverblog and Fresh Glue.

Here's what Steve Hall of Adrants has to say about the development, "Self-promotion is for losers unless, of course, it's yourself you're promoting." Sounds about right.

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

According to Ad Age, CMO magazine, the title from CXO Media aimed at marketing executives, is shutting down after 15 months in business.

CXO, part of the International Data Group, introduced the title in September 2004. It had an average circulation of 24,419 during the six months that ended June 2005, according to its first audit from BPA Worldwide, but those readers received the magazine free under its controlled-circulation model. Its rate card listed the cost of a full-page four-color ad at $10,800.

CMO's blog does not appear to have the story at this time.

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Market Watch: Former "Nightline" host Ted Koppel has signed a multi-year deal to produce programming for cable's Discovery Channel, the network said Wednesday.Koppel, who built a storied 42-year career at ABC News before leaving the network last month, will be joined by veteran "Nightline" executive producer Tom Bettag and eight other former staffers of the program.

"The 10 of us are enormously excited to be at a place that wants nothing more than to produce the kind of television journalism that focuses on issues that matter to the largest number of people," Koppel said in a statement. "We look forward to creating quality programming that provides the in-depth information for which Discovery Channel is known."

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 5 Comments

According to Heidi Klum's father, we're not supposed to use his daughter's name "for advertising purposes." A German blogger, did just that in late Novemebr 2004, and 13 months later Guenther Klum officially objected.

“Hello,

The name “Heidi Klum” is protected by law ® and TM. I’m asking you to delete the name from your URL and desist from using the name “Heidi Klum” for advertising purposes. I have set January 2nd 2006 as a deadline for compliance.

Thank you for understanding my point of view.

Sincerely
Guenther Klum
www.heidiklum.com

The blogger's URL is Werbeblogger.de. I do not see any reference to Ms. Klum in there. So, the elder Klum must be suggesting bloggers are not to type his daughter's name, under any circumstance. How perplexing.

For more on this story, see Being Reasonable.

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Mitch Wagner at Information Week, thinks 37signals might be the new Google.

I don't know whether 37signals will grow from the plucky little startup it is today to become a multi-billion-dollar world-shaking powerhouse. But 37signals does have the zesty, refreshing, flavor of a little company called Google, ca. 1998.

37signals currently offers four Web-based applications for individuals and small workgroups. Backpack is personal organizer software, allowing individual users to post notes, to-do lists, photos and files, and share that information with others. BackPack will also send you reminders, either by e-mail or text messaging.

Basecamp extends Backpack, providing simple project management for small workgroups.

Writeboard is a word processor that lives entirely on the Web, allowing users to create and collaborate on documents, and export documents to their desktop.

And Ta-da List allows users to create to-do lists and share them online.

Both Writeboard and Ta-da List are incorporated into Backpack and Basecamp.

The applications are built using Ruby On Rails, which is a software platform invented at 37signals, then open-sourced.

37signals has something in common with another dotcom success story: Like Amazon.com, they don't have an ad or marketing budget. News about their apps is spread by word-of-mouth and blogs.

[via Micropersuasion]

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

According to this Seattle Times article, jingles are over and done with.

Ad jingles are on the wane, overtaken by pleasingly familiar commercial standbys like the Stones' "Start Me Up," which Microsoft enlisted to sell Windows. Advertisers say they're totally out, gone the way of Atari 2600s, indoor smoking and Libyan bellicosity.

Advertisers and pop culture historians blame — or is it credit? — cultural and technological changes for the demise of the jingle, which seems to live on only in the bowels of local advertising for bedding warehouses and car dealerships.

A jingle campaign today would be expensive and high risk because jingles require head-banging repetition, says Larry Londre, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. In the past, national advertisers could guarantee jingle saturation by buying time on the big three TV networks, whereas now they would have to include technology's new media platforms: cable, the Internet, satellite radio.

"You need the old media environment to make it work," Bob Garfield, editor-at-large for Advertising Age magazine, says.

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 4 Comments

John Keehler of Random Culture says let's give credit where credit is due.

He points out, rightly, that Campfire and The Barbarian Group, played huge roles in the development of Audi's "Art of the Heist" campaign and BK's Subservient Chicken campaign, respectively. Yet, McKinney and Crispin Porter seem to get all the accolades.

Can't we all just drive our Audis to Burger King and bask in the glory?

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Pod Guide points to two new advertainment efforts from major marketers. Both are delivered via the brand's own media property.

I've noticed a few more big name advertisers are starting to distribute short form content via their web sites in iPod format. It's the old “BMW Films” strategy of trying to convince people that ads are interesting by blurring the line between entertainment and advertising. Sprite offer a series of comedy videos entitled Marcus Hates His Job, while Bud Light brings us the psuedo-documentary about Ted Ferguson, Daredevil.

Surprisingly, neither offer an RSS feed of the movies. I say “surprisingly”, not because I expect ad agencies to be at the cutting edge of technology, but the notion of having a consumer choose to 'subscribe“ to your content must be any brands ultimate dream.

I think brands are taking to podcasting, both audio and video formats, because it resembles (on its surface) radio and TV. Minus one big factor--the media buy.

January 5, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Meme First has an interesting comment string going on Oddjack, the former Gawker Media gambling site, now owned by an anonymous publisher. Since the word in the beginning was the site was to be shuttered, there has been some speculation of late as to who is operating the site, which is clearly active.

Felix at Meme First points out that the following words were posted by Oddjack's new writer on December 18, 2005:

For now the full disclosure on the new Oddjack is that it is a blog with information on gambling, it accepts and displays advertisements from online gambling companies. These advertisers receive more mention and more attention than those not advertising here.

Uh oh, blurring of editorial and advertising.

Gawker's publisher, Nick Denton, ends speculation as to his firm's possible involvement in the continuation of the site with this comment, the first in the string:

Hey, Felix -- when we said we were closing down Oddjack, we received a few approaches, from people wishing to buy it. One of those panned out, and we sold the site, domain name and archive included, a couple of weeks ago.

After some discussion of scruples and such by other parties, Denton returns with aplomb:

Please don't ever suggest that I'm interested in blog ethics, whatever they are. I think I may have once suggested a committee on the subject, but that was just mischief-making, bait I hoped Jason Calacanis would take. To pose as a blog ethicist is a losing proposition.

January 6, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Ad Age: Nearly half of the chief marketing officers at Fortune 500 companies said they plan to increase their online advertising budgets by 30% this year.

The growth in projected spending is a result of online being viewed as a preferable ad channel because it is accountable.

“The average consumer spends about 30% of their media time online -- that’s why you’re seeing all that catch-up spending,” said Heath P. Terry, CFA, research analyst, at Credit Suisse.

While major brands plan to increase their online spending, the entire ad market is still spending only 5% of budgets in online advertising. Credit Suisse projected that the overall percentage to increase to 6.5% in 2006.

“If their consumers are spending 30% of their media time online, and they are only spending 5% of their ad dollars online, advertisers need to be spending that many dollars online,” Mr. Terry said.

January 6, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Micropersuasion: In an interview for Bacon's Navigator, Sally Falkow writes that Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems said that blogging had played a major role in the revitalization of Sun's reputation. Sun has gone from the 99th to the 6th most popular server company, largely because it has embraced authenticity and transparency in its communication initiatives, according to the piece.

“We've moved from the information age to the participation age, and trust is the currency of the participation age”, Schwartz said. “Companies need to speak with one voice and be authentic. Blogging allows you to speak out authentically on your own behalf, and in the long run people will recognize that. Do it consistently and they trust you.”

January 6, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Ben Popken unearthed a treasure trove of branded European posters from early- to mid-century.

Somehow, I can't imagine much of the work we see today holding up this well, or transforming itself into something someone somewhere might call art.

January 6, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 0 Comments

As reported by ZDNet UK, the French still dig independence.

The French public sector has once again shown its love of open source with the news the gendarmerie — the French military police — is to switch to Firefox and Mozilla's email client Thunderbird.

In an interview with the French magazine Linux Practique, the gendarmerie's head of IT, General Brachet, said his force will this year be using Firefox as its default browser.

Brachet revealed the switch to Firefox will cover 75,000 of the gendarmerie's more than 100,000 seats while the move to Thunderbird will encompass 45,000 users over the course of this year.

According to Brachet, the move to adopt the open source applications is to ensure independence and durability.

The switch follows the gendarmerie's adoption of OpenOffice last year, when the French force transferred all of its desktops from Microsoft software to open source. The change was expected to save the police millions of euros per year.

January 6, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 6 Comments

Spike Jones at Brains On Fire republished the latest response rate findings from the Direct Marketing Association:

Here’s a breakdown of what they found out about average response rates for 2005:

Direct Mail: 2.77%
Dimensional Mail: 3.67%
Postcards: 2.19%
Catalogs: 3.67%
E-mail: 2.48%
Telephone: 8.55%
Package Inserts: 1.74%
Statement Stuffers: Less than 1%
Coupons: 4.29%
Banner/Rich Media Ads: 3.52%
Search Engine Marketing: 1.07%
Newspaper – Space Advertising: 0.5%
Magazine – Space Advertising: 0.17%
DRTV: 8.14%
Radio: 0.31%

I love creating print ads. And you don't exactly hear about print being dead, but look at those response rates. I guess a double truck in Rolling Stone really is a vanity placement.

January 6, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Daily Kos: I've recently been on a crusade against the term "mainstream media" or MSM. The fact that it's a right-wing construct doesn't help. But the chief reason is that interactive media is now mainstream. In fact, there are tons of blogs and wikis and email lists that have larger readerships than most of the so-called "MSM". If Daily Kos was a newspaper, it would rank #5 in circulation (it would've been #3 last October, in the runup to the election). The top blogs have more readers than most cable news channel shows have viewers. And while their circulation numbers and ratings fall, our numbers continue to grow.

So really, why do we continue to self-marginalize by pretending we're not mainstream?

That's why I call old-school media the "traditional media". It's political neutral, it has no negative connotations. It doesn't put old media on a pedestal, as though it was more "legitimate" than new interactive media. It doesn't imply that we are tiny niches while they speak to the mainstream and the masses.

[via Blog Herald]

January 6, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

This story in the South Bend Tribune explores Victoria Secret's popularity among tweens.

Lily Feingold and Brittany Garrison, both 11, barely glanced at the nearly nude mannequin in her red tasseled bra and high-cut panties at Victoria's Secret -- one of their favorite stores.

"We don't use that," Brittany said, nodding toward the bra.

Marketing experts call Lily and Brittany's yearnings "aspirational," and that aspiration may explain why the girls and many of their friends are regular Victoria's Secret customers, despite their tender age.

Natalie Weathers, an assistant professor of fashion-industry management, said Victoria's Secret is also tapping into a tween trend known as co-shopping -- or shopping with Mom. "They are advising their daughters about their purchases, and their daughters are advising them," she said.

"They are not little girls and they aren't teenagers, but they have a lot of access to sophisticated information about what the media says is beautiful, what is pretty, what is hot and stylish and cool," she said. "They are very visually literate."

January 6, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 0 Comments

ClickZ: Independent blog network 9rules has reorganized its member sites into vertical communities, paving the way for its upcoming blog ad network.

The new organizational structure, dubbed 9rules Communities, sorts the more than 120 sites in its 7-month-old network into 30 categories, with more sites and categories being added daily, according to Paul Scrivens, president and CEO of 9rules Inc.

"Our framework allows for a number of possibilities, but most importantly it is helping us lead into the ad network that we will be launching this year for our member sites," Scrivens told ClickZ News.

Once the ad network launches, advertisers will be able to buy ads across a category, on specific sites, and on category pages on the 9rules site and search results, Scrivens said.

January 6, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

[via Adverlab]

January 7, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

photo by David King

January 8, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

NYT: The silvery mannequin in the window sports a sexy black sequined skirt with a butterfly tail and shear fringed halter top, her wrists weighted with $1,000 worth of Swarovski crystal bracelets. But above the matching scarf wrapped around her neck, where the head should be, sits a big red stop sign.

n

"Stop" as in "Stop Domestic Spying," the white block letters splayed across the plate-glass window.

It seems a strange slogan for selling Italian stilettos with four-figure price tags, but the owners of the exclusive boutique, G'bani, see shocking the shoppers strolling this city's Gold Coast district as part of their mission.

"Fashion is really centered on the exterior, but we are more about humanity," said Trevian Kutti, who owns G'bani with her husband, B. J., a native of Nigeria. "We do windows that show we are human beings before we are a business."

Ms. Kutti said she usually does statement windows only in February and September - "Chicago can only handle it twice a year" - but she could not keep quiet about the eavesdropping.

Several retail analysts said G'bani's provocative windows were a blunter, more extreme version of campaigns by companies like Kenneth Cole and Benneton, which weave liberal political messages about poverty, AIDS or racism into their advertising, and they praised the store's bold effort to stand out.

Since 1997, when the Kuttis opened G'bani - which is Uruba for independent wealth - business has grown and now tops $2 million in annual sales, Ms. Kutti said.

January 9, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

One of the advantages Sun Times advertising columnist, Lewis Lazare, enjoys is the arrival of a steady stream of reels from agencies around the country. Such catering allows him to pop the latest spots into his machine, sit back and let the pontificating begin. In today's column, he lavishes praise on the new Coca-Cola spots from Wieden + Kennedy.

For years, we sat in front of our television screen and winced whenever we watched new Coca-Cola advertising. For a legendary company with enough resources and the brand heritage to produce the best advertising in the world, Coke again and again came up with bush league creative that was working overtime to look hip and oh-so-with-it. Almost all of it was unbelievably stupid and vapid.

It's a new year now, and from an advertising perspective anyway, it's starting out on an extraordinarily bright note for Coca-Cola Co., thanks to the marvelously intelligent and ingeniously simple work Wieden has created.

Looking at W + K's debut work for the Coke brand made us realize once again how many American ad agencies and the creatives that work there today don't really get what makes great advertising. A close study of W + K's work for Coke would seem to be in order at a lot of these agencies.

What W+K has done, in a nutshell, is distill the essence of the Coke brand into a string of 15- and 30-second commercials designed to remind viewers of brand Coke's iconic status in a way that is light and playful, yet unmistakably powerful, fresh and of the moment.

What's even more amazing is how effective several of the spots are at conveying Coke's genuine appeal without resorting to excessive hype or overwrought production concepts. Everything about this effort works to make viewers connect -- or reconnect -- with everything Coke evoked back in the days so long ago when it was producing major league commercials such as "Mean Joe Green."

I have yet to see the spots, but I'm confident Lazare knows what he's talking about here. As for Lazare's comment on ad agencies' cluelessness, I believe there's plenty of blame to go around. When you have a company like Coca-Cola on your roster, most ordinary humans will do whatever they're told. Thankfully, the account, at long last, has moved to an agency not staffed by ordinary humans.

January 9, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

NYT: Even with increased competition from video games, the Internet, DVD's and portable devices, the average television viewing time has risen four minutes a day so far this season over the same period last season.

The increase in viewing (from 4 hours and 35 minutes to 4 hours and 39 minutes), measured from Sept. 19 through Dec. 18, represents a 2 percent gain over the same time period in 2004, according to Nielsen Media Research. The full TV season runs from September through May.

Paul Donato, the chief research officer for Nielsen, noted that TV watching was flat for younger people, but up for those 35 and older. "News is driving viewership," he said.

January 9, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Ad Age named BBDO "Agency of the Year" for 2005, based on the addition of $1 billion in new billings and the agency's commitment to reorganization. You can read the long-winded rationale, or be satisfied with this gem from the article, care of Chief Creative Officer, David Lubars.

“I can’t really say what I do all day, but I know I get home at 10:00 every night and I’m really tired.”

January 9, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 0 Comments

AdAge reports that SBC/AT&T’s first marketing campaign includes one of the most comprehensive online ad blitzes ever. Amazingly, their goal is reach nearly half of all unique users.

The media buy is structured so that about half of all Web visitors this month starting Jan. 9 will see ads for the newly merged AT&T. The company estimates its campaign will reach 137.8 million unique users, or about 46% of the expected 280 million unique users who will be online for the month. AT&T is basing its calculations on data from ComScore MediaMetrix 2.0.

Plans for the launch include home-page takeovers, banners, sponsorships and dual ad units synchronized on the same page, as well as TV spots on sites ranging from Reuters.com to ABCNews.com. As part of a promotion called “Open Access Week” on Investors.com, AT&T also will treat visitors to premium stock research and other content worth more than $20. The company, moreover, is running a full-page introductory ad on the ESPN home page, a first for that site.

January 9, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

In a recent post on Gaping Void, Hugh MacLeod returns some of the love Google showers on his projects.

Back when I was new to this whole internet thing, I would check my stats at least once a day. Now I'm lucky if I check them once a week, tops. Stats don't really tell you that much.

My new metric of choice is how well Me and Thomas' Savile Row business is doing on Google.

Where are the next generation of $4000 suit customers finding out about Savile Row? Fashion mags? Books? Hardly. They're finding out via Google and Yahoo and MSN.

When you type "Savile Row" into Google, English Cut is the top response. This is more proof that frequently updated web sites CREATE Google juice. Stale brochureware sites do not.

January 9, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

On December 19th, Brandweek published their "Best & Worst Marketing Ideas of 2005." Here's a selection:

#23 Worst Overhyping of a Marketing Trend—BLOGS

Blogs provide almost no new information. They’re frequently inaccurate. They contribute to the hysterical polarization of our nation’s political discourse. And they’re often written by people who can’t, you know, write. So naturally marketers have flocked associate their brands with them. Seriously, it’s not entirely clear why so many marketers have rushed to get themselves name-dropped in one of the most unreliable media environments yet invented, we’re sure there’s a PowerPoint presentation on their ROI being prepared as we write this.

I wonder if the Brandweek Bozos who wrote this report read Adfreak, a blog written by their VNU partners at Adweek.

[via Jaffe Juice]

January 9, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Federated Media, the blog network started by John Battelle, is looking for help.

Now that we have a few months of development under our belt and have learned a few things, FM is ramping up. This is a chance to join a well-backed startup before we move to the next level and get all fat and happy (well, we are in fact pretty happy...). As a reminder, here's our backers, and yes, we do provide options and good benefits (and we pay market rates). Our offices are right across the Golden Gate bridge in Sausalito with grand views of the Bay, we're exactly one city block from the best sushi in town, and your commute - if you live in the city, for example - would be about 15-25 minutes of gorgeous driving, or a short ferry ride (we're very close to the Ferry terminal).

I wonder if John means market rate for bloggers, or for communications executives living in the Bay Area?

January 9, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Last November, we reported on Greenville-based Erwin-Penland's creation of a new identity for the city's baseball team, a Boston Red Sox affiliate in the Class A South Atlantic League. They landed on the Greenville Drive, after Major League Baseball rejected their first choice, the Greenville Joes—as in hometown hero Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Only one problem...the Drive nomiker moniker didn't go over real well with the intended audience.

Now, the citizens of Greenville are taking matters into their own hands. A group of Greenville SC businessmen, headed by Patrick Victory and Jon Smith, have commissioned a well-rendered site with a puntastic name, Hall Yes, to garner support for Shoeless Joe and the "Joes" name for their local team.

Go Joes!

[via Brains On Fire]

January 10, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 0 Comments

I suspect the forces of anti-globalism and anti-large-corporate-branding-and-domination were at work yesterday when someone left a bomb inside a San Francisco Starbucks. AP has the full story.

Nike, Starbucks, Wal-Mart: Many people love 'em. Many people hate 'em. Strong brands can inspire equally strong opposition.

January 10, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

USA TODAY: Whole Foods Market plans to become the largest buyer of wind energy credits in North America by purchasing credits equal to 100% of its projected energy use for 2006.

That will make Whole Foods the only Fortune 500 company to purchase renewable energy credits — which subsidize the production of energy from renewable sources such as wind — to offset 100% of its electricity use, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says.

Wind energy is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the USA. The Whole Foods purchase will help avoid more than 700 million pounds of carbon dioxide pollution in 2006, says the EPA. That's the rough equivalent of taking 60,000 cars off the road, the EPA says.

"From a branding perspective, it's a stroke of genius," says Barbara Brooks, president of the Strategy Group, a consulting firm. "It shows they understand where their customers are coming from not only nutritionally, but environmentally."

"We're looking to show our customers and team members that we walk our talk," says Michael Besancon, the regional president overseeing the chain's green efforts.

January 10, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 1 Comments

After being named Ad Age's Agency of the Year, and Adweek's as well, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has declared today BBDO Day in New York City. Ad Age has the story, of course, and the full press release is here.

So how will you celebrate?

January 10, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

News.com: "Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

In other words, it's OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors, I guess.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

"The use of the word 'annoy' is particularly problematic," says Marv Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "What's annoying to one person may not be annoying to someone else."

[via Buzz Machine]

January 10, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Direct marketing pro, Bob Cargill, draws attention to his neighbor's hunger for publicity and food.

Robert Rosenthal, an award-winning advertising executive, and founder of the direct marketing agency Mothers of Invention (formerly known as Passaic Parc), is undertaking a reverse hunger strike to call attention to serious problems that exist in the advertising industry - problems with significant economic impact.

“Every day, people in this business encounter a lack of respect, a lack of understanding of the value of what we do, and a stunning lack of loyalty. Hopefully, my reverse hunger strike will get people talking about these problems and improve working conditions. When that happens, we all win,” says Rosenthal.

The American Heart Association declined to comment.

January 10, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Tom Doctoroff, CEO of JWT Greater China and Northeast Asia Area Director, has a new book out.

Billions, published by Palgrave Macmillan, cracks the supposedly indecipherable code of marketing to the New Chinese Consumer—all 1.3 billion of them. In the book, Doctoroff illuminates the critical role of Chinese culture in shaping buying decisions and translates consumer insights into strategies for long-term success in the Middle Kingdom.

“The only way for multinational companies to succeed in China is to fully embrace the fundamentally different world view that China represents. Outsiders can only penetrate the market by understanding its dramatically different cultural and operational landscape,” said Doctoroff.

For instance, brands used inside the home are locally produced and cheaply made. Brands shown publicly are foreign made and expensive. In a Confucian society, social status is an investment, so consumers will pay a huge premium for mobile phones and high-end alcohol. At home, price sensitivity is extreme. There are no designer bedspreads. Victoria’s Secret doesn’t stand a chance.

January 10, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Ad Age reports that the city of New Orleans, for the first time ever, is seeking corporate sponsors for Mardi Gras.

New Orleans has hired Los Angeles-based Media Buys to secure corporate sponsorship for Mardi Gras next month, the first time the city has sought to offset the expenses of the carnival with marketing.

But whether marketers want to get involved with the annual celebration, while the city still recovers from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, remains to be seen.

Media Buys is seeking four companies willing to spend $2 million each to serve as an official presenting sponsor of Mardi Gras, to be held Feb. 28. The majority of the funds collected from these sponsors will be directed to the city to be used for support services like police, fire, emergency services and sanitation.

“In New Orleans, one of the drivers of the local economy is the tourism industry,” said Ernest Collins, executive director of arts and entertainment for the city’s economic development office. “A successful Mardi Gras will not only inject badly needed revenue into the local economy, but will also provide us with an opportunity through media coverage to tell a more complete story of our recovery.”

January 10, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 8 Comments

We all know Apple has brand evangelists like no other consumer goods company on earth. Which makes this poor guy's cries all the more poignant, or pitiful. Take your pick.

Hello,

I purchased a new Powerbook three weeks ago. It was working fine until a few hours ago when you announced the new Intel-powered MacBook Pro at MacWorld and I started to cry. "Four to fives times faster," I sobbed, "a built-in iSight, and a brighter, wider screen."

My display, while not as bright or large as the new MacBook Pro display, illuminated my wet cheeks and red, swollen eyes as my tears rained down on the backlit keyboard. An acrid smell rose up from inside the smooth metal machine as my salty tears joined with the electronics, joyfully releasing the electrons from their assigned silicon pathways to freely arc into forbidden areas of the computer and elsewhere, including, somewhat painfully, my hands.

Is this covered under my warranty and if so, can you send me a new MacBook Pro as a replacement, please? Thank you for your time,

-jason

January 11, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Dunkin' Donuts will reward caffeinated raconteurs with free coffee for life, if they successfully describe the great lengths they've gone to, to acquire a delicious cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee.

According to the brand's web site, they held this contest in New England in November and customers liked it so much they decided to run it again - this time for the whole country.

January 11, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Der Spiegel: From Munich in the south to Kiel in the north, Ikea is increasingly turning into a welfare center for pensioners, young moms, low-earners and the unemployed.

Many low-earners prefer eating in the familiar atmosphere of this temple to consumption to standing in line at the soup kitchen. Indeed, the stigma of poverty is hidden behind the company's cheep and cheerful designs. What started out as an extra service to improve customer loyalty, has developed a life of its own, separate from the shaky wooden furniture and fold-out sofas. Many people feel that they belong when they mingle among well-off customers -- even if all they can afford is a hot dog.

In 2004 the Swedish company, with its 37 restaurants, managed to reach 11th place in the list of the best-earning eateries in Germany.

January 11, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Internet News: Since the dawn of the dot-com era, Yahoo has had a billboard near the entrance to the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Patterned after motel signs of the 1950s, it says, "Yahoo: A nice place to stay on the Internet."

Thanks to a deal with Sheraton Hotels announced on Monday, Yahoo is making a nice place to stay in hotel lobbies.

In what the companies said was an industry first, the hotelier and the online media company have teamed to create a co-branded Web portal and branded Internet lounges in Sheraton hotels.

Yahoo Link @ Sheraton was based on insights about the behavior of hotel guests, according to Murray Gaylord, Yahoo vice president of brand marketing.

"Sheraton was seeing more and more of their users spending time in the lobby on their computers," Gaylord said. "People just don't always want to hang out in their rooms, they want some kind of social interaction."

January 11, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Shine Dance Lounge in San Francisco has updated the photobooth concept for the 21st century.

Revelers can pop in to the booth and have four sequential images captured in a vertical format like they would at any five-and-dime (if such places still exist). The main difference here is the images are instantly loaded to photo-sharing site, Flickr, for all the world to see.

Party on, you crazy diamonds.

January 11, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 0 Comments

MarketingVOX spreads the word that Publicis has been recruiting high-level agency types for a new digital business venture.

Publicis Groupe Media has been recruiting high-level agency media execs and will soon announce a major new digital business venture having to do with that recruitment drive, chief innovation officer Rishad Tobaccowala said Tuesday, but would not provide details, MediaPost reports. The article points to the recent hiring of Nick Pahade, EVP and managing director of WPP Group's Beyond Interactive unit, and says Scott Witt, group director-digital for Publicis's Coca-Cola City unit will be involved in the new undertaking.

The article surmises that Publicis's naming of former SMG Director of Emerging Contacts Tim Hanlon director of a vaguely defined Publicis Groupe Media Ventures has something to do with the upcoming venture.

It further points out that Publicis recently entered a relationship with internet TV startup Brightcove, which has hired former MediaVest Worldwide senior VP Adam Gerber.

January 11, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

HUB senior editor, Peter F. Eder, takes a look at The Trader Joe's Adventure: Turning a Unique Approach to Business into a Retail and Cultural Phenomenon, a new book by Len Lewis.

Len Lewis, a former editor-in-chief of Progressive Grocer, offers a treasure trove of carefully crafted and well-written insights and observations in his new book. Lewis, who suggests that Trader Joe’s mantra is “Do unto others as others want to be done unto,” identifies a number of strategies that ensure both the retailer’s success and its uniqueness.

For example, "Hire, train, and retrain people who enjoy interacting with customers and are capable of suggestive selling.”

Contrary to employee attitudes in many prodconventional supermarkets, everyone at Trader Joe’s, from the captain (store manager) on down truly appears to enjoy what they do. “They get paid well, go to work in a Hawaiian shirt, eat good food and get to talk to people and be helpful.”

The attitude is a result of careful selection, constant training and compensation. The company pays employees an average of $21 per hour, compared with an average of $17.90 at union operations. Add to that health and retirement benefits and total compensation of first year personnel comes to more than $47,000. A first mate (assistant store manager) has a compensation package of $94,000 and the captain’s total compensation is more than $132,000.

With pay like that, I have to ask myself what I'm doing writing ad copy.

January 11, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

The Orlando Sentinel profiled blog consultant, Josh Hallett, on Monday.

"Corporations think it's all kids talking about braces and dating, or the far right and left screaming at each other, because that's where much of the media coverage is," said Hallett, 33, whose consulting firm, Hyku, is based in Winter Haven.

"The truth is, there are a lot of doctors, lawyers and scientists talking about trends, along with various businesses," he said.

Hallett serves as a consultant for 10 or 12 business clients and also gives numerous speeches to enlighten businesses about the power of blogging.

Among his clients is Orlando Sentinel Communications, along with other media companies, advertising and public relations firms.

With a decade of experience with Web development, Hallett mixes a familiarity with technology with advice on how firms can use blogging effectively.

"Companies have to learn to let go of their control of their message and branding," he said.

I agree that brands belong to customers who ultimately define what a brand means, but I think it's going to take some time for brand managers (and the organizations they work for) to excuse themselves from the table. In fact, I can hear them grumbling now. "What the hell did I go to business school for?"

January 12, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Hugh MacLeod on the reality of corporate blog adoption, or non-adoption, as the case may be:

For all the "Blaze New Trails" rheotoric the corporate PR machine likes to feed the media, most corporate types don't like rocking the boat. And good blogs rock boats- they can't help it.

Only the brave, and those who seek thrills want their boats rocked. I've had the opportunity to pitch marketing blogs to some big time consumer marketers and there was an inkling of interest, quickly followed by the question, "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get any copy past our legal department?" I did have an idea, and at the moment of that particular challenge, I realized I was not merely asking my client to blog, but to rewrite all their rules.

Johnnie Moore on how blogs change not only the market, but the marketer:

There's a great principle in improv, that of letting yourself be changed. This encourages the actors to invest less energy in formulating a witity riposte, and more on joining their fellow actors and allowing their "feed line" to impact on them.

There's a parallel at work for bloggers - the value may not be the immediate impact of their words on the market, but how the conversation changes the blogger. As Hugh says, it may be a mistake to focus on using blogs to sell things; it's more about creating real engagement - where you are changed too.

And the thing about good conversations is that more goes on than just an exchange of information. Something more energising takes place. I think that's the deeper insight of the whole "markets are conversations" meme.

Likewise, Hugh highlights the impact on conversations inside blogging companies, whether a giant like Microsoft or a relative minnow like Stormhoek. It seems to be that when you start down the road of open conversations, the impact can be highly generative.

Generative energizing sounds wonderful to me. But I'm not a client. I have no MBA, nor the BMW and exorbitant mortgage that usually attends it. Thus, it's easy for me to see the benefits, while barely acknowledging the risks.

January 12, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Josh Spear, the Boulder-based maven of cool, has walked away from his deal with Charles and Marie, the so-called "Quintessential Lifestyle Navigator."

Dear Friends and Family,

Six months ago, I was contacted by two men who had an interesting idea to create a website. They wanted access to my readers, my voice and experience as a successful blogger. They asked me to participate in a speculative venture. I could never have predicted what would happen to our relationship, nor could I have known how it would end.

Sadly, I must inform you that I’ve completely ended my association with them. My friends, family and colleagues who worked with me writing, developing, and creating content have also left. I spent countless hours promoting their site; unfortunately, I referenced my association in interviews with internationally syndicated media sources, so it still may appear that I work with them.

Since I’m responsible for inviting tens of thousands of my readers to their site, I apologize for what now appears to be an error in judgment. As of December 24, 2005, I have had absolutely nothing to do with their content or direction.

No specifics are given. We're left to speculate. But it sounds like there was serious trouble in product paradise.

January 12, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 1 Comments

MediaBuyerPlanner’s profile of “ad agency” Spot Runner reads like a horror movie script in which the horrifying monster is a dead-broke, cheap-ass client.

A new, internet-based ad agency, Spot Runner, is positioning itself as a company that offers commercial production, media planning, and ad time for as little as $500. Unlike conventional ad agencies that "simply aren't equipped to serve local customers," said Nick Grouf, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Spot Runner, Spot Runner has found a way to allow even the smallest local business to capitalize on television advertising.

Spot Runner allows businesses to log on, provide information about their business and desired locations, and select a commercial from a library of thousands of pre-produced ads. The ads are personalized with the business's specific information and logos.

Spot Runner’s website claims that “a TV commercial can capture your customer's attention more quickly and effectively than any other form of advertising,” and that “now your local business can compete against the national chains with an affordable, high quality television commercial that rivals theirs.”

What’s next for Spot Runner? Perhaps they’ll start selling Unicorns and all-inclusive vacations to Middle Earth.

January 12, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 4 Comments

Coca-Cola has launched a new product blog and it's not going over too well.

Here's some of what resistance fighters, The Zero Movement Sucks, have to say:

In co-opting the trademarks of the counter-culture--blogs, street art and a passionate cause--to promote an artifically sweetened cocktail of chemicals and flavourings, Coca Cola is demeaning it's audience. We don't want an ad agency forming our life philosophy. We don't want a group of soft drink executives trying to tell us how to live our lives. We just want Coca Cola to 'fess up to the fact that it's a profit-driven multinational whose only interest in culture change is the carefully researched chord it might strike into it's target market.

Coca Cola, welcome to the underground. As others have found out, it's not always comfortable.

[via Adrants]

January 12, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

I'm guessing 15-year old podcasting phenom, Zoe, wasn't part of the following academic study.

Breitbart: Internet downloading and MP3 players are creating a generation of people who do not seriously appreciate songs or musical performances, British researchers said.

"The accessibility of music has meant that it is taken for granted and does not require a deep emotional commitment once associated with music appreciation," said music psychologist Adrian North on Tuesday.

North led a team from the University of Leicester, central England, that monitored 346 people over two weeks to evaluate how they related to music.

They concluded that because of greater accessibility through mass media, music was nowadays seen more as a commodity that is produced, distributed and consumed like any other.

January 13, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Lewis Lazare: Leave it to Hadrian's Wall, one of Chicago's brightest boutique agencies, to show the rest of this city's buttoned- down and straightlaced shops how to have a little fun with the highly anticipated Chicago Bears/Carolina Panthers showdown on Sunday.

Hadrian's Wall/Chicago partner Kevin Lynch happens to be a rabid Bears fan, and he also just happened to know that David Oakley, co-creative director at Charlotte, N.C. agency BooneOakley was, in fact, equally fervent in his support for the Panthers.

Never one to shy away from anything -- least of all a brave bet -- Lynch threw down the gauntlet to Oakley: If the Panthers win Sunday's game, the home page of the Hadrian's Wall Web site on Monday will inform its visitors that BooneOakley is a much better agency than HW, and direct visitors to the Charlotte shop's site. The notice will remain on the HW home page for one week.

But if the Bears win, BooneOakley will inform visitors to its site that HW is indeed a superior shop and direct people to the Chicago agency's site.

January 13, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 2 Comments

Today's USA Today notes that nearly half the ads on this year's Super Bowl will be filmed in high-definition.

But even with all the HD hype, there are still obstacles. Depending on the filming and post-production techniques, the ads can cost up to 15% more to produce.

And in HD, flaws are also supersharp. "In high-def, you see every detail: every wrinkle, every pimple and every blemish," Portela says. Makeup artists have to be more precise with their work, and set designers have to fix every paint chip.

I have some questions for the AdPulpers out there:

Ever have one of your commercials filmed in high-def?

Are your clients asking about it or is it something the agency insists on?

Is the filming process any different or do the actors and models just have more spackle on their faces?

January 13, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 0 Comments

Leslie Picot-Zane, who runs a brand consultancy called "The Center For Emotional Marketing," explores that question in this week's Brandweek. This is worth a read. Here's a snippet:

One of the classic agency arguments against product information is that it renders the advertising dull and lifeless and gets in the way of the movie they want to make. But a recent Advertising Research Foundation study of beer ads shows that romancing your product visually—for example, slowly pouring ice-cold beer into a tall glass—can generate as much emotion as babies or puppies.

Of course, the beer-pour cliché is likely to provoke cries of protest from the agency's creative folk.

And marketing clients contribute to the gridlock by viewing all advertising as black or white. As soon as emotional advertising stops working, they retreat to purely product-based campaigns, instead of recognizing the opportunity for creative that brings the two together.

January 13, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Adweek's Tim Nudd interviewed Seth Godin recently for Brandweek.

I didn't realize Godin had predicted (in 1994) that the internet was a fad that wouldn't last. Very interesting. Anyway, Godin recently wrote a book called All Marketers Are Liars. In the Brandweek interview, he gives a topline synopsis.

Q. Where's the line between white lies that marketers tell and the more insidious ones?

A. What marketers really are, are storytellers. It's the consumers who are liars. Marketers who succeed tell stories that people want to believe, and the lies are what consumers tell themselves they want to believe. A white lie is a story that literally isn't true, meaning that Dasani or Aquafina aren't worth the money, but if we package it right and sell it right and advertise it right, someone is glad we did it. I distinguish that from a fraud. An example is 20 years of telling Americans SUVs were safe and practical. Authenticity is at the core of this. You have to have a story that can hold up to scrutiny on the internet, that can hold up to people talking about you.

January 13, 2006 by Shawn Hartley | Permalink | 21 Comments

Courtesy of wieden + kennedy london, a preview of their new spot, Choir, for Honda.

Click to View

And, Bonus Coverage via video podcast (iTunes Link).

On Friday 13th January, Honda launches its latest TV commercial “Choir” – a 120” live action spot to launch the new Honda Civic produced by Wieden + Kennedy London. Following hot on the heels of the Honda “Impossible Dream” brand campaign, this spot shows a specially formed choir vocalising the many experiences one has whilst driving the new Civic.

The 120” commercial will run solus for one week and will then be supported by both a 60” and 40” cutdown. A website and interactive TV application will support this activity and a national press ad will run in motoring press. The TV ad is also believed to be the first by a UK advertiser to be available as a Videocast. The ad, along with a “making of”, will be made available as a downloadable Videocast from the accompanying Civic microsite as well as Podcast and Videocast sites.

The commercial was shot in both Spain and England. It was written and art directed by Matt Gooden, Michael Russoff and Ben Walker. It was directed by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet at Parizan. Communications planning is by Naked Communications and media planning and buying is through Starcom.

January 13, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 0 Comments

Marketing Vox provides a handy summary of eMarketer's predictions for 2006. Check this space on 1/01/07 for results.

(1) Online advertising will constitute 5.4 percent of all U.S. advertising spending in 2006, surpassing the 5 percent mark for the first time, and reach 7.5 percent by 2009.

(2) Retail e-commerce will grow even more, from $87 billion in 2005 to $105 billion in 2006, a 21 percent increase.

(3) Broadband use will continue to expand, from the current 105 million users in the U.S. to over 124 million in 2006.

(4) Online video will thrive, and U.S. online video adspend will increase 71 percent in 2006, reaching $385 million.

(5) The market for video on phones will come alive, with the number of U.S. consumers who have watched TV programming on their mobile phones doubling.

(6) Search engine portals will further extend their reach, delivering ad-supported web applications, enhancing their local search capabilities, and driving up the number of U.S. search users 5 percent, to 146 million.

(7) IP telephony will become mainstream, with the number of voice over IP (VoIP) access lines growing from an estimated 10 million in 2005 to about 14.5 million in 2006.

January 13, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Associated Press: Starbucks Corp. is moving into the movie-promotion business, partnering with the film studio Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. to market the upcoming film "Akeelah and the Bee."

The agreement marks the first film deal for Starbucks, which has been percolating into the entertainment industry by distributing music at many of its more than 10,000 coffee shops worldwide.

Beginning in early April, Starbucks employees, who get a sneak peek at the film, will wear lanyards with "Akeelah" buzz words in the hope of sparking conversations about the movie, billed as the story of an 11-year-old girl from inner-city Los Angeles who makes it to a national spelling bee.

"Akeelah," which stars Laurence Fishburne, Angela Bassett and young Keke Palmer, opens April 28 in more than 2,000 theaters.

January 14, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 6 Comments

Flipping through this week's Adweek, the following ad caught my eye. Exclusive Resorts took out a full-page ad to thank their agency, DDB Seattle, outlining just exactly what the agency did to help their business. Click on the image to read the ad in full.

I can't say I've seen many ads quite like this. Sometimes advertisers will take out a special ad for, say, Leo Burnett's 50-year anniversary to congratulate them, but rarely does a client ever show its appreciation for day-to-day work in such a public forum. And down in the fine print at the bottom, many DDB people were thanked by name. It's quite refreshing to see, since advertising is usually so thankless a business.

Of course, in the back of my cynical mind, it occured to me the ad might be an attempt from DDB Seattle to get some new business by showing off what it can do in Adweek. But I hope not.

January 15, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 17 Comments

Art Directors Club Italiano call for entries, 2005

One Show call for entries, 2006

Thanks to Horace Kidman--the creator of the original idea--for the tip.

I could say stealing is beyond lame, especially when there's no need for it, but that's obvious. Anyway, I'm more interested in hearing what you have to say.

January 16, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

As reported here last week, Hadrian's Wall, Chicago bet Boone Oakley, Charlotte that the Bears would win yesterday's NFC playoff game. Sadly, the Panthers prevailed.

Now, the home page of Hadrian's site says:

Please forgive your fingers. You accidentally typed in "hwadvertising.com". What they really meant to type was "booneoakley.com". Because Boone Oakley is far superior to Hadrain's Wall. Really. We're not just saying that because of a bet.

They're both winners in my book. Especially, Hadrian's Wall, which loves the Bears, yet shows unbelievable class in defeat.

January 16, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

NYT: Feeling depressed because you missed out on Google's stock bonanza? Not to worry. Just get on the company's shadow payroll.

Hundreds of thousands of people have essentially done just that by starting blogs, forums or other informational sites and getting paid for posting ads on Google's behalf. And while the money they earn might not be enough for them to buy, say, a share of Google's stock, such revenues are growing.

The trickle-down effect from Google does not stop at fledgling entrepreneurs. A growing number of rank-and-file contributors to Web sites are also profiting. Consider Digital Point Solutions, a software company in San Diego, which publishes an online forum frequented by about 15,000 users. Any one of them who starts a new forum discussion topic receives half of the advertising revenue paid to the site by Google for ads on the front page of that topic section. (The discussion's creator then splits his share with others who post messages.)

Google does not actually advertise on the Digital Point site. Rather, through Google's AdSense program, it places ads on the forum, similar to the ads that appear next to search results on Google.com. Google scans the information on the forum's pages, then posts related ads. If the discussion is about computer hardware, for instance, ads for DVD drives might appear.

Google pays Digital Point about $10,000 a month, depending on how many people view or click on those ads, said Shawn D. Hogan, the owner and chief technology officer of Digital Point.

Mr. Hogan said he started the revenue-sharing approach in 2004 "as kind of a marketing gimmick."

"But everyone seemed to think it was a cool idea," he said. "I saw a lot of other sites doing the same thing maybe six months later."

January 16, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 3 Comments

Today's New York Times reports on the growing use of ads on cellphones.

Marketers said they were particularly excited about the prospect of eventually using cellphones, many of which are equipped with global positioning systems, to send ads to consumers based on their location. With that information, marketers could, in theory, send pitches from retailers to cellphone users who might be in the vicinity of a store.

Cellphone-based marketing could be "the silver bullet we've been looking for in advertising for a long time," said Laura Marriott, executive director of the Mobile Marketing Association, a consortium of wireless carriers, ad agencies, technology companies and advertisers.

Jon Raj, vice president of advertising and emerging media with Visa USA, said he expected to see many new ad formats that could combine the text, video and the location-based nature of the phone.

"Unlike the computer, or a magazine or television," he said, "the phone is a piece of you."

That quality, which makes mobile marketing so powerful, could also make phone ads widely disliked and force carriers to use them very cautiously, said Edward Snyder, a financial analyst and co-founder of Charter Equity Research, where he covers the cellular phone industry.

January 16, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 7 Comments

I was pleased to read Simon Dumenco's piece on blogging in Ad Age today. He says there's no such thing as a blog.

It occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing -- writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder.

Its just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

Steve Hall of Adrants was also pleased to see this article, and I'm sure Shawn--our publisher--was too, for they've both taken this position before.

While it's true that we do some things differently than traditional media, we might just as easily be called online trade rags.

January 17, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

USA TODAY: After 25 years and 1,500 versions of print ads built around the shape of its bottle, Absolut vodka is shelving the campaign that made it famous.

Absolut will spend $20 million on a new effort that includes its first TV ads as the brand battles slower growth and tougher competition for vodkas.

"We're introducing the brand to a new generation of vodka drinkers," says Tim Murphy, brand director. "Those in their late-20s have come of age in a noisy, chaotic, cluttered vodka category."

The new campaign, by TBWA/Chiat/Day in New York, pushes the brand as "The Absolut Vodka" and continues to play with the name.

The ads "give new meaning to the word absolute and use different mediums that we haven't used in the past," says Matthias Aeppli, Absolut's vice president of marketing.

January 17, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

My alma mater is running a full page ad in today's New York Times to celebrate the 300th birthday of Ben Franklin.

Dennis Trotter, F&M's Vice President for Enrollment Management and Marketing, said, "This ad is just the beginning of an aggressive marketing campaign to make sure that people know about Franklin & Marshall College.”

Modernista! created the ad.

January 17, 2006 by Matt Bergantino | Permalink | 0 Comments

MarketingVOX, via the Boston Globe:

Boston-based Gather.com, set to receive $6 million funding this week, intends to become an eBay of sorts for bloggers, other writers and their readers—with a business model that recruits writers by offering them a share of online advertising revenue, writes the Boston Globe. The most popular writers would eventually earn hefty paychecks, according to Gather founder Tom Gerace. The site will officially launch in February or March but already has hundreds of writers and about 8,500 readers.

This week's funding infusion is coming from former Lotus CEO Jim Manzi, and New York investment bank Allen & Co., jointly run by former US senator Bill Bradley; both Manzi and Bradley will join the Gather board.

In a recent posting on the site, Manzi extols Gather's model: ''No longer must I accept much of my content from what I have called the Literary Industrial Complex, that group of concentrated media organizations with their small elites and self-reinforcing arbiters delivering my news and information 'top-down.'''

January 17, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 0 Comments

Over the years, I've developed a taste for shrimp. Seems I'm not alone. Accourding to this article in Slate, "the average American ate 4.2 pounds of the curved critters in 2004, up from 2.2 pounds in 1990."

It's a marketing phenomenon as well as a biological and economic one. The price of shrimp has fallen in the last 20 years because researchers have found a way to raise shrimp in controlled conditions on farms. Much of the shrimp we eat is imported from farms in Southeast Asia.

But the American shrimpers are fighting back, with a new branding and marketing campaign at a pretty cool website, WildAmericanShrimp.com. It's designed to educate consumers that there is a quality and taste difference between fresh water and farm-raised shrimp. Of course, I think about Forrest Gump & Bubba when I think about shrimp. And now I'm hungry.

January 17, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

According to The Sun News, high energy prices and economic uncertainties - combined with fewer state marketing dollars for the Grand Strand - present the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce with significant challenges for the 2006 summer vacation season.

The chamber, the area's main tourism promoter, is trying to grow the number of visitors from 14 million to 20 million. Perhaps a new branding campaign--the first created by a professional advertising team instead of inhouse--will help.

Strangely enough, the chamber turned to Lindsay, Stone & Briggs of Madison, Wis. for the campaign, instead of utilizing a Palmetto State firm.

[via AdPunch]

January 17, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Cultural anthropologist, Grant McCracken, on Hispanic American's preference for Coca-Cola made in Mexico:

You might think that The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) would embrace this development. After all, Classic sales are down %10 (since 2000) and the TCCC's share of the industry is at an eight-year low. Consumers are so passionate about "hecho en Mexico" Coke that they are prepared to pay a premium, as much as $.25 a bottle. In an industry that moves heaven and earth to create (or protect) a two-penny margin, this is a staggering development, and very good news. No?

No. TCCC is now condemning Coke importation "as the work of bootleggers."

TCCC is acting like administrators of the Roman empire who have discovered that they must now contend with a small group of enthusiasts in Gaul who worship Rome and Romanness with new intensity. The Roman decision: put them down! Because the passion of the zealot is dangerous even if it happens, for the moment, to run in your direction. It's the principle of the thing. "We don't want your zeal," says the administrator, "we just want your obedience."

Actually, there is a better way of putting this. TCCC is now acting like the Catholic church confronted by a cult of Christians who forsake orthodoxy for their own special brand of religous fervor. "No, no, no," says the Church. It is the Church that decides what devotion means and what belief shall be. It's Rome that determines the forms and vessels of religious inspiration. The zealots can just cut it out. We decide. Not them.

It is easy to be snide here. And we must remember that TCCC's problem is the problem of every brand. All of us need to grasp that we are not the arbiters of the brand and that we must defer to to the consumer even when he or she takes leave of our brand orthodoxy and starts making things up. We aren't Rome any longer, not the empire, not the church. We are shepherds.

[via Johnnie Moore]

January 17, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

Digital and direct marketing powerhouse, Digitas, recently conducted a study of online behavior. Marianne Oglo posted some of the findings on Digital Hive, the blog from the agency's brand planning department.

One of the more polarizing observations gleaned from our mini-ethnographies involves consumers perceptions of blogs. We witnessed a pervasive “blogs are for liberals” attitude among consumers residing in so-called ‘red states’. Some are so off put by their perception that they are simply uninterested in finding out more about them at this time.

Regardless of the perceived majority voice, blogs could represent one of the most effective platforms for vocal minorities to express their views. They are in a sense, virtual town hall meetings. But how persuasive are they with visitors of a different POV? Do they only serve to reinforce their believers (e.g. by preaching to the choir)? Ultimately, blogs probably function more as ‘cyber-tribes’ of ideas and like-minded souls.

When it comes to branding, implications abound. Obviously, transparency is a very good thing. And brands who know who they are and avoid making the mistake of trying to be everything for everyone will probably meet with more success than their less confident and/or schizophrenic counterparts. Moreover, given the tribal nature of blogs, pull marketing seems to be at the essence of it all.

I think it's pretty clear that blogs can change perceptions in the marketplace. Case in point: Sun Microsystems. Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems said that blogging had played a major role in the revitalization of Sun's reputation. Sun has gone from the 99th to the 6th most popular server company, largely because it has embraced authenticity and transparency in its communication initiatives. That's not preaching to the choir. That's getting the choir to sing.

January 17, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 2 Comments

In the spirit of Bill Maher, that's the first thing I thought when I read this Adweek article about The Richards Group's first ad campaign for its Shamrock Farms dairy client, which features "Roxie, Shamrock Farms' beloved spokescow who appears on all the packaging."

As all good Southerners know, Chick-Fil-A has quite a lot of brand equity in talking (or at least, expressive) cows. Which is also a creation of the Richards Group. Side by side, here you go:

I guess in the Peaceable Kingdom, they sure love the bovines.

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

NYT: Google said yesterday that it would spend up to $1.24 billion to buy dMarc Broadcasting, whose software can allow marketers to send advertisements directly to local radio stations.

It is the most tangible indication yet of Google's stated ambition to extend its Web-based network, which sells advertisements on thousands of online sites, to other forms of media as well.

Google agreed to pay $102 million in cash for the privately held dMarc, with additional payments of as much as $1.14 billion over three years, depending on how well the company meets certain performance targets.

The Internet search giant has been testing systems that place advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and it has talked of selling ads for television broadcasters as well.

It plans to integrate dMarc into its existing advertising system so that its 400,000 advertisers will be able to place radio ads in addition to those that appear on Google search results pages and the other Web sites where it sells ads.

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Stiff formality: Another press release no-no.

"We're delighted to be expanding our presence at Sundance, as we know that the Stella Artois drinker is one who appreciates creative risk-taking, diversity, and aesthetic innovation characteristic of the films debuted at the Festival," said Victor Melendez, director of marketing of European Brands, InBev USA.

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

If you're a forum user with a passion for a certain brand, UserBars.com might be able to hook you up.

[via Adverlab]

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

AT&T says it brings its customers "Blogging" in a current outdoor execution.

But this Flickr user says otherwise, and here's his proof:

[via Adrants]

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Ad Age is running a piece on Speedo's new campaign. Stephanie Thompson, the Ad Age writer uses the term "banana hammock" to describe Speedo's product. And while there is humor in that, how do you explain the following client gibberish about the brand's line extension?

“We want to layer the cool factor over [Speedo’s] more rational equities,” said Craig Brommers, VP-marketing for Speedo. The reasoning is clear: While Speedo has dominated swimwear since it was founded in 1928, the segment totals only $3.4 billion annually, so growth opportunities clearly have to be sought “outside of water,” Mr. Brommers said.

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Cities are encouraging citizens to drive hybrid vehicles with offers of free parking. Thus far, Bekeley, Los Angeles, San Jose, New Haven and Albuquerque are offering such perks.

According to WTNH, New Haven's Mayor said, "This isn't about parking, it's about public health. Eighteen percent of our kids suffer from asthma, and statewide the number is 10%. This ordinance sends a powerful message to not only New Haven residents but the rest of the state and even the country that the smallest measures can make a difference."

Hybrid drivers also enjoy favoritism while motoring. California now allows solo driving in HOV lanes for hybrids with EPA-rated fuel economy of at least 45 mpg. Florida has a similar program, for which both Prius and Highlander Hybrid qualify. Arizona, Colorado and Georgia have passed legislation for similar programs that have yet to be implemented. New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Maryland have HOV bills under consideration.

Then there are the tax breaks.

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Another fake blog has reared its anthropomorphic head. This time it's written by a dolphin named Flip, care of Frontier Airlines.

Here is Flip's opening salvo:

Good citizens of Denver, welcome to my Blog! I hope you like it, because it's really hard to type with flippers.

Dumb.

[via Jaffe Juice]

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Fortune Small Business is running a piece on Umbria, a market research firm in Boulder that designs software to find useful consumer intelligence on the Internet.

Izze Beverage, a 45-employee Boulder company that makes sparkling fruit juices, recently engaged Umbria to track what bloggers were saying about rival brands. When a blogger had a bad fruit juice experience with one of his competitors, the result was often a profane online rant. "We want to make sure that never happens to us," says Izze CEO Todd Woloson. The company recently hired a customer relations specialist that it hopes will soothe angry consumers before they take to their blogs.

The new customer relations specialist is a useful approach for contending with upset customers who take their gripes through traditional channels. Yet, some people will now go directly to a forum or their blog, or another's blog that allows comments.

This is a case where Izze might benefit from a blog of its own, to help it generate good pr, while also working to handle any issues that might surface in a transparent manner.

[via What's Next]

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

"In the factory we make cosmetics, but in the store we sell hope." -Charles Revlon

Michael Kiely: There's an old joke in the ad biz: "You only need one thing to succeed in the advertising business: sincerity. And when you learn to fake that you've got it made!" The truth is not so far from the exaggeration. Anyone who has (like me) been in the ad game for any amount of time (I've done 20 years hard labour) can tell you that not only are the ads insincere, the people are too.

Advertising people aren't ethically challenged. They are rarely challenged by anything or anyone. Ask anyone who has been a client of an ad agency. Did they laugh so hard at your jokes when you ceased being a client? Did they fawn on you and buy you amazing gifts and take you to expensive restaurants once your hand no longer fondled the purse strings? Surely they weren't being insincere all that time?

January 18, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

I don't read Slovakian*, so it's hard to determine precisely what's going on with the ads above, but it looks like Heinz and KFC have the exact same visual cliches running for different spicy products.

I know there are no new ideas, but on the heels of the One Show call-for-entries debacle, thievery is beginning to look like a trend.

[*via Ad Arena]

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

I'm conflicted.

When is trackback spam spam, and when is it okay, if ever?

We received three such TBs this morning, all from M-ook: Guide to modern living The site is an Amazon Associate, and all its entries are geared to sell the online giant's ever-expanding universe of products. I don't really have a problem with that, but here's what makes it spam—there's no reference to our original post in their post. That's abuse of TBs in my eye.

What do you think?

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

NYT: The sportswear company Perry Ellis has long employed the traditional formula for men's fashion advertising: take one handsome man, photograph him posing in an exquisite setting, and repeat.

The campaign features a male character in a series of settings that emulate real life. But now Perry Ellis has decided to replace its leading man with something less predictable: a comic strip.

Using comics in advertising is an old strategy that may be on the verge of a revival, thanks in part to the rising popularity of graphic novels among young men. Even Hollywood has caught on in recent years, adapting the graphic novels "Sin City" and "A History of Violence" to commercially successful films. And the customer Perry Ellis aims for is typically a 30-something man the company hopes will be drawn to the playfulness of a comic strip with the grown-up content of a graphic novel.

"Our guys are right on the fringe of Gen X, and they've grown up with this type of thing right in front of them," said Neil Powell, the chief creative officer for Margeotes Fertitta Powell in New York, which created the campaign. "And we were also looking to create an ad campaign that was a form of entertainment."

In today's advertising climate, most marketers are condensing their messages to match the shortening attention spans of readers. Perry Ellis is asking readers to do the opposite: linger over a comic strip to absorb the message and even follow the continuing series in several monthly installments.

"We're challenging several conventions about fashion advertising and communications in general," said Michael Kantrow, the president and chief executive at Margeotes Fertitta Powell. "It's hard to get people to pay the same attention to advertising that they do to content, but we're hoping that this will blur the line there."

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

I like to bust on MBAs. In general, they lean too heavily on books, and often end up sounding like it when they write and speak. What is worse, MBAs never learn to trust their gut--a key to success in advertising, a semi-rational science, at best. Lucky for them, corporate institutions don't feel the way I do about them.

USA TODAY: Salaries and signing bonuses of fresh graduates took a double-digit jump in 2005 to a record average $106,000 and signaled an end to the "perfect storm" of sour news this decade that included the dot-com bust, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a subsequent recession, said Dave Wilson, president of the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) that oversees the test for aspiring graduate students in business.

Corporate recruiters had disappeared from campuses. But, Wilson reports, "The MBA is back as the currency of intellectual capital."

More than 100,000 MBA degrees are awarded each year in the USA alone. That's likely to rise. Prospective students who took the Graduate Management Admission Test rose to 228,000 in 2005 from 213,000 in 2004. And this year has started strong, Wilson says.

There are 1,500 schools worldwide offering MBAs, a number poised to explode, Quacquarelli says, as programs in China, India and Russia take off.

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

How well do you know millennials--those born in 1982, or after? Fast Company purports to.

Millennials aren't interested in the financial success that drove the boomers or the independence that has marked the gen-Xers, but in careers that are personalized. They want educational opportunities in China and a chance to work in their companies' R&D departments for six months. "They have no expectation that the first place they work will at all be related to their career, so they're willing to move around until they find a place that suits them," says Dan Rasmus, who runs a workplace think tank for Microsoft.

Thanks to their overinvolved boomer parents, millennials have been coddled and pumped up to believe they can achieve anything. Immersion in PCs, video games, email, the Internet, and cell phones for most of their lives has changed their thought patterns and may also have actually changed how their brains developed physiologically. These folks want feedback daily, not annually. And in case it's not obvious, millennials are fearless and blunt. If they think they know a better way, they'll tell you, regardless of your title.

Meet any of the millennials now embarking on their careers, and this picture comes to life. Impatience with anything that doesn't lead to learning and advancement? "Nothing infuriates us more than busywork," says 24-year-old Katie Day, an assistant editor at Berkley Publishing, a division of Penguin Group USA.

Fearlessness? "I don't have time to be intimidated," says Anna Stassen, a 26-year-old copywriter at the advertising agency Fallon Worldwide who treats her bosses like "the guys." "It's not that I'm disrespectful; it's just a waste of energy to be fearful."

They don't sound all that different. I hate busywork, and I don't fear my bosses.

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 11 Comments

Steve Hall of Adrants is not diggin' on the new viral effort from Durham, NC-based McKinney Silver.

"Doctor" Myra Vanderhood

We're sure all the McKinney folks are huddled around their computers today laughing at all of us writing about their cute little effort, waiting patiently for the right moment to reveal the client behind this ploy. While you're all reading this you sneaky little McKinney truth-benders, remember, people don't like liars. The law doesn't like doctors who aren't doctors claiming they are doctors and, ever so coincidentally, BuzzAgent, the former master of deception, just released a study that says people hate stealth marketing, are offended when lied to and, get this, a brand fares far better when all is honestly presented upfront than when it's not. Do your homework guys. The days of trickster marketing are over.

A look at McKinney's client list reveals that they have Qwest. Perhaps the Pherotones site is meant to support Qwest in some strange way.

[UPDATE] Jack Schofield on the Guardian's Technology blog, posits that this is the first case of a brand purposefully distorting information on Wikipedia, but that it likely won't be the last. I didn't mention the Wikipedia thing above, but now that I have, I feel McKinney has gone too far. We all know we can't trust every web site we come across, but we want to trust Wikipedia.

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Associated Press: Amazon.com plans to broadcast on its web site an original show hosted by Bill Maher and featuring performers and authors touting new releases - which, not coincidentally, will be for sale at the online retailer.

The 12-episode webcast series, which will begin airing June 1, is the first offering in what the Seattle company says is a broader plan to add more original programming to its web site.

Kathy Savitt, Amazon.com's vice president of strategic communications, content and initiatives, said the long-term goal is to help Amazon.com become more of a "destination," where offerings such as this help people find artists whose works they might not previously have thought of buying.

The company plans to record the first show at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend, with guests including authors Stephen King and Armistead Maupin, musician Rob Thomas and actress Toni Collette.

After the launch, the free programs will be available for on-demand viewing anytime, although users cannot download them.

Besides sales, the company is relying on sponsors such as delivery company UPS Inc. to help pay for the show. UPS ads will accompany the Webcasts, and Savitt said Maher also will talk about UPS during the show.

"We're working with sponsors in a very different way than traditional advertising," Savitt said, adding that the companies will be "an interwoven and an important and authentic part of the show."

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Adweek says Guy Seese, 35, will be leaving Cole +Weber, where he is executive creator director, for Goodby by the Bay.

"I really wanted to work with Rich and Jeff and of course that whole group of people they have there," Seese said. "I wanted to work on big clients."

At Cole & Weber United in Seattle, where he will stay until the beginning of February, Seese oversees a 15-person creative department, working for clients including Dell, Nike and Microsoft.

Those are big clients, Guy. Hey, don't scare any sailors up in North Beach with that goat.

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Flickr user, Luca Blurb, brings us the joys of agency life, as depicted in 23 candid snapshots.

Make sure to read the blurbs. The image above has a blurb. It says, "Can't they find a chair?"

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Frankly much political advertising is of the shoddiest sort, barely a notch above what's produced for used car lots and local exterminators. So, it warms the Birkenstock-wearer in me to note that one of the more venerable environmental groups has taken the camera by the hand, as it were, and developed long-format programming that effectively "sells" their world-view.

Emmy Award-winning Sierra Club Productions develops and produces dramatic and non-fiction television and film programming that reflects the Sierra Club's belief that every person is connected to, inspired by, and responsible for the natural world.

Now in production: Sierra Club Chronicles captures the extraordinary efforts of ordinary people across America: ranchers in New Mexico, emergency medial technicians in New York City, fishermen in Alaska, neighbors of a chemical plant in Mississippi all united in common cause – the fight to protect their families, communities and the lands and livelihoods they love from pollution, corporate greed and short-sighted government policies.

Sierra Club Productions develops literary projects as well as true stories, commissions original concepts, and partners with production companies to co-produce and co-market projects. The goal is to connect filmmakers with grassroots outreach campaigns to help engage film audiences and heighten the film's impact. Headquartered in Southern California, the division has produced programming for public television, cable and satellite broadcast since its launch in 1999.

January 19, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

Ad-Rag, one of the most influential ad blogs in the world, is sponsoring a self-love fest for all ad bloggers. It's called Battle of the Ad Blogs and its logo has tanks as bookends, which may mean only the big guns are gonna be fired.

You might expect me to say how pointless such award shows are. Well that is true, unless of course you're in it. Then the thing takes on lots of meaning and importance. In fact, leave here right now, I beg of you. Tell the Adlandians that AdPulp is the shit when it comes to breaking it down on this biz.

Best General Ad Commentary
Adscam
AdPulp
Ernie Schenck Calls This Advertising?
Cup Of Java
Texturl
John Kuraoka
Jack Cheng
Hyper inked.

Going up against George Parker of Adscam is serious business. The dude's kind of frightening (in a cheery sort of way).

[UPDATE] I may have fingered the wrong man, as Ernie--who has a CA column, no less--now has a slight lead over us, 24 hours in to the competition.

Author, Rich Siegel, in an humorous allusion to recent comments of an angry sort left on Ernie's site, says about the matter, "Geez Ernie you sound like another tired, vacuous, glory-seeking Baby Boomer. How many awards is it going to take to validate your life? How many? Maybe you should just hop in your beemer, grab a latte and pop in a CD of REO Speedwagon's greatest hits to help ease the stress. There, I beat Angry Youth to the punchline."

January 20, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Lewis Lazare: Element 79 Partners/Chicago has a new partner. The agency whose clients include Gatorade and Tropicana orange juice has acquired a Chicago interactive agency called Tractiv, formed last spring by two former Leo Burnett staffers, Chris Miller and Kurt Karlenzig. "Chris and Kurt are a remarkably good fit with our shop," said Element 79 leader Brian Williams.

Tractiv, with a staff of five, will be housed inside the Element 79 Partners offices, and will work with that agency's existing clients to help develop integrated campaigns that include an online component -- an increasingly important arena for many advertisers. Though Element 79 Partners has acquired Tractiv, an agency spokeswoman said the unit would also be free to pursue clients that are not on the agency roster and that do not pose a conflict with existing accounts.

Before the acquisition of Tractiv, Element 79 Partners had been using Tribal DDB/Chicago as its interactive agency. Tribal DDB is affiliated with DDB/-Chicago. Both Element 79 and DDB are part of the giant Omnicom Group agency holding company.

Miller and Karlenzig got their start in the interactive marketing biz as principals and founders of a Leo Burnett unit known as Chemistri that subsequently morphed into iLeo, which was then rolled into a new Publicis Groupe entity known as Arc Worldwide.

When the various rounds of rebranding of Chemistri began, both Miller and Karlenzig left to pursue other interests, before finally regrouping last spring to form Tractiv.

January 20, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Agency personnel, in a first, are speaking out in defense of their bad marketing blogs. They say they're good.

Grey to Jaffe:

I appreciate you taking notice of the fliptomexico.com website. But, as a member of the agency who created the campaign, I'd like to correct a few of your misconceptions.

Why didn't we link it to frontier's website? Because this campaign isn't from Frontier. It's not written in their voice. It's from Flip and his supporters, who are fighting Frontier. Why would they link their site to Flip's, and vice-versa? That wouldn't make sense. (To your point, most clients would have insisted on links. Ours understood the wisdom of leaving it off)

Concerning the campaign itself, Frontier's advertising is tremendously popular in Colorado. If you lived there, you'd realize this. It's a Denver thing, and the advertising connects with the target market on a deep emotional level which I've never experienced in my 15 years in the business. It's truely part of the public culture.

As far as Flip goes, anyone familiar with the campaign (which is nearly everyone in Colorado) knows that Flip is the fall guy who never gets what he wants: a warm weather route. The public is getting behind this guy, rooting for him. They clearly enjoy playing the game. (Take an hour and read the comments on the petition. I think you'll see that it really is genuine).

I encourage you to continue to visit the site. It is, by all accounts, a success so far. The "fake" news coverage has already been supplemented by real news. Articles have been written in all the local pubs (and some national ones, too.) And, if you follow it to the end, I think you'll enjoy how this will all play out. I know our target market will...and that's what really counts.

Oh yeah - and try to lighted up. You're so cynical!

For another dose of take-it-easy-you-blogger-nerds, let's examine how one character from a blog comes to life in the comments area of the ad blog that dared criticize her fakeness.

Well, I now see what happens when someone tries to spread a little extra love in the world, and it makes me sad.

McKinney is doing great work for me, and I take full responsibility for the content of the pherotones.com site.

I expected a vigorous scientific debate, not a slobbering geekfest over the ethics of advertising and marketing on the web (How oxymoronic can you get?)

If my ideas threaten the establishment, then let's debate them openly and strenuously, this issue you raise is a red herring meant to distract from the true question: Do Pheromoes exist, and if so, do they work.

My message of hope and sexual fulfillment for all of mankind deserves a thorough examination, but lets talk about my Hypothesis, not my marketing plan.

Let's have that debate at my blog pherotones.blogspot.com. I welcome all comers.

Very sincerely yours,

Dr. Myra Vanderhood
doctor@pherotones.com

Some people say some stuff and then the character comes back for more.

Lots of comments, here, and not a single audiologist, biologist, physiologist, neurologist or organic chemist in the bunch?

Sad...you don't even know enough to refute my science.

Hard to take any of you seriously until you can make a strong case that pherotones do not exist.

Science is a lot more fun than advertising theory and criticism.

The signal to noise ratio over here is very low.

Posted by: Dr. Myra Vanderhood on January 19, 2006 06:45 PM

To recap, we have two charcater blogs, one written by a dolphin for an airline, another for a yet to be announced client, possibly Qwest. Some ad critics say they don't like it, although they can see some charm in it. Representatives from the agencies involved defend their campaigns in the very bloatosphere that dares speak against their better knowledge. All sides have a laugh.

[UPDATE] The humor gets better. Steve Hall realized McKinney's media department had arranged to buy ad space on his blog, Adrants. Ouch! Now, he's "covering his tracks," making fun of himself.

While we understand advertising supports this site and, generally, makes the world go 'round, our pompous rantings at the doorway of our sales director were brushed off with a quick "go pointlessly bitch about another lame viral campaign. They pay for your ass, you idiot!" Our ego bruised, it is with our utmost apologies, dear readers, that we subject you to the hypocrisy Adrants has thrust upon you.

January 20, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

NYT: The Washington Post shut one of its blogs yesterday, saying it had drawn too many personal attacks, profanity and hate mail directed at the paper's ombudsman.

The closing was the second by a major newspaper in recent months. An experiment in allowing the public to edit editorials in The Los Angeles Times lasted just two days in June before it was shut because pornographic material was being posted on the site.

The Post's blog, open to the public since Nov. 21, was shut indefinitely yesterday afternoon with a notice from Jim Brady, executive editor of www.washingtonpost.com.

Mr. Brady wrote that he had expected criticism of The Post on the site, but that the public had violated rules against personal attacks and profanity.

In an interview, Mr. Brady said the site had been overwhelmed with what he described as vicious personal attacks against Deborah Howell, the newspaper's ombudsman.

"Transparency and reasoned debate are crucial parts of the Web culture, and it's a disappointment to us that we have not been able to maintain a civil conversation, especially about issues that people feel strongly (and differently) about."

January 20, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

NYT: Seed Media, which produces science publications in print and online, is seeking to broaden its audience - and its appeal to advertisers - by introducing a network of blogs, or Web journals, devoted to science and science-related subjects. The network is to be made available on a Web site, scienceblogs.com, that is now operating in beta, or test, mode.

The Web site will initially bring together 15 blogs bearing names like Adventures in Ethics and Science, Cognitive Daily, Living the Scientific Life and Stranger Fruit.

One of the blogs, scienceg8 (pronounced "science gate"), is part of Seed Media, and the rest are independent. In coming weeks, Seed Media is hoping to have as many as 30 blogs on the network.

Seed Media will sell advertising on scienceblogs.com as it does in its magazine, Seed, which is published every other month, and on its Web site (seedmagazine.com). The idea is to not so much to carry ads for beakers, test tubes and centrifuges as to attract ads from marketers wanting to reach bright, curious consumers who buy products like automobiles, books, cellphones, computers, liquor, music and watches.

The blog network is a sign of the growing interest among media companies and advertisers in using new media for an old purpose: selling.

Blogs in particular are popular, as companies advertise on them, post comments on them and even sponsor their own. Recently, Budget Rent A Car bought ads on 177 blogs, Audi of America on 286 blogs and MSNBC on 800 blogs.

January 20, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 17 Comments

Drop out of Business School today. Tara Hunt of Horse Pig Cow can save you two years, and free you from your mounting debt.

1. A good marketer is a Community Advocate

2. A good marketer knows today's brands aren't built in boardrooms or ad agencies or brainstorming sessions

3. A good marketer plans a little, but changes alot

4. A good marketer doesn't only respond to community needs today, but also knows what needs will arise tomorrow

5. A good marketer rewards the community members who stand behind him/her

6. A good marketer gets involved in the community

7. A good marketer is her/his own client

8. A good marketer knows when to back off

9. A good marketer learns to use the tools available to them

10. A good marketer never takes her/himself to seriously

Any questions?

[via Gaping Void]

January 20, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

WXIA News 11: Free beer while shopping -- it’s a new idea brewing in Atlanta.

While shoppers age 21-and-over browse $150 jeans at the stylish Bill Hallman Boutique in Virginia Highland, they can sip on a beer imported from Italy.

The lure might sound like exactly what’s expected from an upscale, designer clothing store. The wealth of foot traffic already flowing through the Virginia Highland neighborhood is providing great exposure for the store – as well as Peroni beer.

Anyone hoping to score a quick brew while browsing should know that the beer is kept behind the counter. A boutique clerk is needed to get a beer for a shopper.

Peroni spokesman Chad Wodskow said the beer company pays Bill Hallman for the space. Their idea is that if shoppers see the beer in a cool store, they’ll think the beer is cool.

“Atlanta is the launching pad of our national campaign,” Wodskow said. “New York is next, then San Francisco.”

Peroni is offering their beer free in 11 Atlanta stores, mostly located in Midtown and Buckhead. And, the stores don’t even need a liquor license. It’s actually legal to give beer away without one.

January 20, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 5 Comments

This week two notable communications organizations have used our comments as a dumping place for their handmade Spam. How thoughtful of them.

Today's "perp" left nothing but a URL in our comments. Earlier in the week a staffer at a Midwestern agency used our comments to blatantly promote a project near and dear to him. In both cases the unwanted comments were deposited in threads that had nothing whatsoever to do with their particular plug. They merely dropped them off in our top slots, within easy reach of their scroll wheel.

Concurrent with this development, there is a McKinney copywriter posing as a doctor on a blog and taking stands like this in the bloatosphere:

I expected a vigorous scientific debate, not a slobbering geekfest over the ethics of advertising and marketing on the web (How oxymoronic can you get?)

So here we are, awash in abuses by professional communicators--people who ought to know better, but do not. When The Hughtrain spouts off about how Madison Ave. does not, and likely never will, get blogs, I have countered, "They will!" Well, I can see Hugh is closer to the truth than I am at this juncture.

My question is, what's so hard about it? Why all the difficulty and stumbling idiocy? Is it on purpose or merely the wanton byproduct of ingrained cultural arrogance?

January 20, 2006 by Shawn Hartley | Permalink | 8 Comments

Indie band, The Postal Service, posted a note on their site yesterday commenting on the apparent shot-by-shot recreation of their video "Such Great Heights" in Apple's new ad announcing their Intel processors.

It has recently come to our attention that Apple Computers' new television commercial for the Intel chip features a shot-for-shot recreation of our video for 'Such Great Heights' made by the same filmmakers responsible for the original. We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties that this was executed without our consultation or consent. -Ben Gibbard, The Postal Service

Apple's new ad is available on their site. Might we remind you of Apple's ad featuring Eminem, which ignited controversy as it too closely resembled a previously made Lugz spot.

How is TBWA/Chiat letting these out the door? And why is Apple signing off?

January 21, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

January 22, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

The hippies are gettin' it done with mobile data.

Andy at Gadiel: Just go to your cellphone's web browser and type into the location bar:

M.jambase.com

The M is for Mmmmm...
mobile.jambase.com works too

It will take you to a quick form which asks for your Zip Code and then prints out an easy to read list of concerts within 50 miles of your location for tonight.

I'm a little unclear on that last bit about printing. Perhaps Andy meant "spits" out.

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

A new 30-minute piece of branded entertainment produced by the True Agency/New York for BET, titled "In Black," is intended to forge a strong bond between African-American consumers and Infiniti. Some commentarians don't buy it. In fact, Lewis Lazare of the Sun Times is trippin'.

That's not entertainment

It's a trend that's with us now, but one that, frankly, chills us to the bone because of what it may portend.

We're talking about the way more and more advertisers are doing less actual advertising, and more of what they politely refer to as "branded entertainment."

Don't be fooled though. That term is nothing more than a euphemism for programming that has been entirely produced by the advertiser rather than an independent production company. It's programming that is cunningly designed to showcase -- in a very softsell sort of way -- a product rather than simply entertain or inform as most purebred programming does.

In other words, what we're witnessing here is a trend that -- played out to the fullest extent -- could lead to deep-pocketed advertisers taking total control of the entertainment industry and deciding what gets offered to the consumer as entertainment. Consumers will have a say, thankfully, in whether this horrific scenario really catches on, because they can opt to watch or tune out.

It seems to me, so-called "independent production companies" make commercials everyday. Literally. And metaphorically.

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish has moved to Time.

In the summer of 2000, Sullivan became one of the first mainstream journalists to experiment with blogging, and soon developed a large online readership with andrewsullivan.com's Daily Dish. According to the Site Meter stats he makes available, 53,500 unique visitors a day make their way to his site, which is not simply "his" any longer.

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Brandweek: Coors Brewing has tapped Hershey's Andrew England to be chief marketing officer of the Molson Coors Brewing unit, effective Feb. 13, according to the company.

England applied his cross-category skills into identifying opportunities in the cookie, cracker and candy segments, which led to launches of Hershey's Cookies, Snack Barz and other products.

"Andy brings to this position 20 years of extraordinary experience in marketing, sales and strategy and a strong track record of driving profitable growth for some of the nation's most recognized brands," said Frits van Paasschen, president and CEO of Coors Brewing.

[IN RELATED NEWS] John Harris, a "young gun" at Integer, where he serviced the Coors business for the past decade, is now president of Denver ad firm, Karsh + Hagan, an Integer-owned agency.

January 23, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 0 Comments

According to the Philadelphia Business Journal, ad agencies in PA are trying to fend off a proposed tax on advertising. It's already passed in the state house, and If passed in the Senate and signed into law, Pennsylvania would be the only state that has an ad tax.

"A tax on advertising and public relations services through Senate Bill 854 would have a severe, negative impact on both agencies in Pennsylvania and the overall state economy," said Peter Madden, president of AgileCat, a Manayunk ad agency. "Our representatives in Harrisburg should be taking steps to attract businesses to work with Pennsylvania-based agencies, stimulating the economy, not driving them away from us and hurting everyone in the process."

To fight the proposal, Marc Brownstein, president of Brownstein Group in Center City, volunteered staffers to create a billboard campaign. He also led an e-mail drive targeting elected officials.

"We emphasized the potential loss of jobs, as clients may reduce advertising spending, which impacts agency income," Brownstein said.

Ad agencies would not be the only industry affected.

Media organizations would be affected as well, since companies would have to pay sales tax on advertising purchased. For example, buying a $2,000 advertisement would mean an additional $120 in state sales tax.

So are we to consider an advertising tax a "sin tax," the way liquor and ciagrettes are highly taxed? Has anyone seen the above-mentioned billboards?

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

NYT: As advertising conferences go, the take-home message at the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association meeting was a little unusual: Don't advertise.

At the conference, held here last Thursday and Friday, more than 450 advertising and marketing professionals listened to speakers tell them how to reach customers using some alternatives to traditional advertising, like viral and buzz marketing, that are becoming increasingly popular within the industry.

The conference was called "Word-of-Mouth Basic Training," and it was aimed at teaching attendees how to tap into the power of word of mouth, an ancient form of communication that many marketers have updated by using new technology like blogs, podcasting and online message boards.

At times, the conference could have been mistaken for a religious convention. Among Friday's offerings were sessions titled "Turning Customers Into Evangelists," "Word of Mouth in Faith-Based Markets" and "How to Create Brand Converts." (Later that afternoon, two speakers explained how to "Bring Brands Back from the Dead.")

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Fast Company: Every year, thousands of executives venture to Bentonville, Arkansas, hoping to get their products onto the shelves of the world's biggest retailer. But Jim Wier wanted Wal-Mart to stop selling his Snapper mowers.

Tens of thousands of executives make the pilgrimage to northwest Arkansas every year to woo Wal-Mart, marshaling whatever arguments, data, samples, and pure persuasive power they have in the hope of an order for their products, or an increase in their current order. Almost no matter what you're selling, the gravitational force of Wal-Mart's 3,811 U.S. "doorways" is irresistible. Very few people fly into Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport thinking about telling Wal-Mart no, or no more.

Selling Snapper lawn mowers at Wal-Mart wasn't just incompatible with Snapper's future--Wier thought it was hazardous to Snapper's health. Snapper is known in the outdoor-equipment business not for huge volume but for quality, reliability, durability. A well-maintained Snapper lawn mower will last decades; many customers buy the mowers as adults because their fathers used them when they were kids. But Snapper lawn mowers are not cheap, any more than a Viking range is cheap. The value isn't in the price, it's in the performance and the longevity.

Wier doesn't really think that a $99 lawn mower from Wal-Mart and Snapper's lawn mowers are the same product any more than a cup of 50-cent vending-machine coffee is the same as a Starbucks nonfat venti latte. "We're not obsessed with volume," says Wier. "We're obsessed with having differentiated, high-end, quality products." Wier wants them sold--he thinks they must be sold--at a store where the staff is eager to explain the virtues of various models, where they understand the equipment, can teach customers how to use a mower, can service it when something goes wrong.

And so in October 2002, with a colleague, Wier kept an appointment with a merchandise vice president for Wal-Mart's outdoor-product category. "I felt I owed them a visit to tell them why we weren't going to continue to sell to them."

"The whole visit to Wal-Mart headquarters is a great experience," says Wier. It really is a pilgrimage to the center of the retail universe. "It's so crowded, you have to drive around, waiting for a parking space, you have to follow someone who is leaving, walking back to their car, and get their spot. Then you go inside this building, you register for your appointment, they give you a badge, and then you wait in the pews with the rest of the peddlers, the guy with the bras draped over his shoulder."

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

High tech job board, Dice, wants unappreciated IT Managers to "get in there and get even."

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Associated Press: If you live in New Jersey, Virginia or Nevada and want to see the new Steven Soderbergh film Bubble in a theater, pack your bags. It won't be showing in those or more than a dozen other states.

The country's largest theater chains are snubbing the film because they object to it being sold on DVD and shown on cable TV the same day it debuts in a handful of theaters owned by the same company that produced the movie.

"Bubble" isn't the first film to be released this way. But the combination of a high-profile director and the backing of maverick billionaires Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban have studios and theater owners paying close attention this time.

"It's the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today," John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners, said.

The low-budget Bubble, a murder mystery set in a doll factory, opens Jan. 27 and is the first of six films to be produced under a partnership between Soderbergh and 2929 Entertainment. Founded by Wagner and Cuban, the company owns Magnolia Pictures, which will distribute "Bubble" in partnership with Landmark Theaters and HDNet Movies, the cable TV channel that will air it.

All six films produced by the partnership will be released simultaneously on DVD, television and in theaters. Bubble will appear on DVD a few days after its theater and cable release.

A typical film now earns about half of its revenue from home video and only about 25% from theaters. The remainder comes from selling the film to cable and broadcast TV and other sources.

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Ad Age: Some 13 months after his ballyhooed replacement of the legendary Phil Knight, Nike CEO William Perez has stepped down after clashing with Mr. Knight over the direction of the world’s biggest sneaker and apparel company.

Mr. Perez, who resigned as CEO of S.C. Johnson & Sons last year to take over at Nike, said in a statement that he and Mr. Knight “weren't entirely aligned on some aspects of how to best lead the company's long-term growth. It became obvious to me that the long-term interests of the company would be best served by my resignation.”

In his own statement, Mr. Knight said: “Succession at any company is challenging, and unfortunately the expectations that Bill and I and others had when he joined the company a year ago didn't play out as we had hoped.”

Nike brand co-president Mark Parker -- who has been with the company for 26 years and was long considered a potential successor to Mr. Knight, Nike's chairman -- will take over as CEO.

January 23, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 26 Comments

Ben Popken of The Spunker wants to be a copywriter.

Here's one of the spec ads from his developing portfolio:

Popken had a portfolio review at Y&R last week and people have been emailing him with suggestions. What a difference a few interweb years can make.

Wowzers. My portfolio got a really high response. Thanks everybody. Now I hate all my ads. But it’s a good hate. Really, my reaming was surprisingly gentle. Though it’s still galling to bust ass and get told, “Nice, you’ve demonstrated you can tell an ad from a nutrition chart. Do it again, with feeling.” That's how it goes. Take it on the chin and grin.

Good attitude. It's easy to get impatient when you're in Ben's shoes, wanting that big break so badly.

In the interest of helping Ben improve, let's examine the Kotex spec ad above. I have some opinions on it, but why don't you start.

January 24, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

NYT: Pat Fallon, the chairman of Fallon Worldwide in Minneapolis, unexpectedly fired his hand-picked senior creative executive yesterday after less than a year in the job.

Paul Silburn, who joined Fallon as executive creative director for North America in early February 2005, was dismissed along with Mark Taylor, a creative director hired from Crispin Porter by Mr. Silburn last summer. A search for a successor for Mr. Silburn is under way.

The firings came after months of turmoil at Fallon, part of the Publicis Groupe, that included the loss of major clients like BMW, Dyson vacuum cleaners and the Lee jeans division of the VF Corporation.

Although Mr. Silburn is "a brilliant creative, international talent, and a great guy," Mr. Fallon said in a statement, "I am not satisfied with our progress."

There are about 50 employees in the Fallon creative department in Minneapolis; the agency also has offices overseas in cities including Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Tokyo.

January 24, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

USA TODAY: Toyota Motor said Monday it will join NASCAR's Nextel Series racing circuit, marking another market long dominated by U.S. automakers where the Japanese manufacturer plans to compete.

Toyota, which has raced in the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing's Craftsman Truck Series since 2004, will join the Nextel and Busch Series beginning in 2007, the automaker and racing association said. Toyota's drivers will race with its Camry model.

"If you want to compete against the best, in America that means NASCAR," Dave Illingworth, Toyota senior vice president, said in a statement. "We look forward to February 2007, when the green flag waves to start the Daytona 500 and the starting lineup features the Toyota Camry."

The Nextel Series, which includes such well-known drivers as Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon, now consists of cars from General Motors' Chevrolet brand, Ford Motor and DaimlerChrysler's Dodge brand.

NASCAR runs more than 100 races each year across the United States through three racing circuits — its signature Nextel Cup Series, Busch and Craftsman Truck.

Toyota, which has been doing business in the United States since 1957, will become the first foreign brand to compete on NASCAR's top circuit since the 1950s, when Jaguar, Porsche, Volkswagen and other European brands competed.

January 24, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 2 Comments

Adweek reports on the finalists for Frito-Lay's Doritos account.

Four Omnicom Group agencies have made presentations to Frito-Lay in a review of the company's estimated $30 million-plus Doritos account, according to sources.

A decision is expected within a month, sources said.

Incumbent BBDO in New York is defending against DDB in Chicago, GSD&M in Austin, Texas, and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, sources said.

These are four divisions of the same company competing against each other and it's a waste of resources. I will never, ever understand this. As an Omnicom shareholder, I'm glad they're keeping the account, but not happy about all the wasted money and time spent on presentations.

January 24, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 4 Comments

Waco Tribune-Herald: As part of a private opening party for a new Hooters, Monsignor Isidore Rozycki, the head Catholic priest for the Greater Waco area, plans to bless the chain's newest location at New Road and Interstate 35.

“Blessings are part of the Catholic tradition,” said Rozycki, who is pastor of St. Martin's Church in Tours. “You bless the building so it will be a safe haven, so that the families that enter will be blessed, so the employees will be blessed—as they support their families.”

About 60 local ministers signed a letter this fall in which they expressed their disapproval of the restaurant. They said they oppose Hooters because it exploits women and bases its marketing campaign on sexual innuendo.

But to Rozycki, offering the blessing is just another way he can reach out and serve the community. He pointed to the biblical story of Jesus eating with a tax collector, even though men in that profession were considered among the worst of sinners. He says he doesn't see how attending the Hooters event is any different.

“God's image is in all of these folks,” Rozycki said.

[via Adfreak]

January 24, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Seattle Post Intelligencer: Yahoo! Inc., one of the first Internet search companies, has capitulated to Google Inc. in the battle for market dominance.

"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

Yahoo!'s comments underline the difficulties any Internet company faces in trying to challenge Google's dominance of the Web search industry. Google has at least double the market share of Yahoo! and Microsoft Corp. in Internet search, the largest and most profitable segment of online advertising.

"It kind of makes you wonder about how serious they are about search," said Danny Sullivan, editor of London-based SearchEngineWatch.com, which tracks the search industry. "It really ought to be their goal" to be No. 1, he said. "Whether it's realistic or not."

Yahoo! handled 19 percent of global Internet searches in November, a drop from 27 percent a year earlier, according to Web tracker ComScore Networks Inc.

Google's share, by contrast, rose to 60 percent from 47 percent.

January 24, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Katherine Stone of Engage, Inc. and the Decent Marketing blog, is former Director of Experiential Marketing at The Coca-Cola Company. Having led one of the only Experiential Marketing departments at the Fortune 500 level, she has a unique perspective on how to surmount the challenges that companies face internally, and with their customers as they attempt to create and execute experiential concepts. Stone is also eight-months pregnant with her second child, so we extend an extra thank you to her for complying with our line of questioning.

Q. How is experiential marketing different from relationship marketing, event marketing and all the other wonderful sub-categories we've managed to dream up?

A. I’m not sure that it is anymore, believe it or not. We have created so many sub-specialties of marketing that all cross over each other that it’s very confusing. I think they’re all similar in some ways. The difference for me was always that I was working with an external human goal in mind (create a situation that makes people feel xxx) rather than an internal objective (increase share by this much, sell this many, etc.) I think when you really focus on people and doing what’s right and interesting for them, the other things follow.

Q. What was your proudest moment at Coca-Cola?

A. Hmmmm. Good question. I think when they created the department and I was promoted to head it up, because I feel that I really worked hard to convince senior management that we needed to try more non-traditional methods of reaching consumers. I felt I really had a hand in convincing them to create the group and I was very proud of that.

Q. How did you get into this bleeding edge field? Was it something you planned, or did it occur organically?

A. I was definitely organic. I think we all have gut feelings about how we think things should be done, and we try to find ways to satisfy that. I always felt so uncomfortable marketing to people through aggressive, in-your-face tactics or meaningless messages. I really wanted to create delight for people and I felt most marketing didn’t do that. I’m left-handed, and I was really looking for the right-brained way to connect to people if that makes sense. I didn’t think spreadsheets and CRM software programs made any sense, because that’s not how we create relationships with people in the real world. Then I read the book “The Experience Economy” by Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore, and I said “Aha!” They were definitely talking to me.

Q. Does experiential marketing have the respect it deserves inside the Coca-Cola organization, or is TV still king of the mountain?

A. I’m not sure what the king of the mountain is at this point, but experiential marketing does not have the respect it deserves. When the CMO who created the experiential marketing department left, the department was thrown out with the trash so to speak. We had really just gotten started so it was a big disappointment. I think it’s now outsourced to agencies, but I haven’t seen much come out of them that I’ve been impressed by. Coca-Cola talks a lot about being non-traditional, and there are pockets of local Coca-Cola marketers around the world who are very creative and do a GREAT job creating experiences, but the corporate system itself has a hard time sticking with such things for the long-term. It always goes back to money and short-term results and shareholder value. At least it did when I was there, which was a real bummer – I understood the need for short-term results, but I was hoping we could dual-track and have another group working hard on building long-term equity. Hopefully the new CEO Neville Isdell will fix the problems Coke has been having. He took over after I left and I really hope for the best. I was there for seven years, and I will always love the Coca-Cola brand and the great potential it has, which as of late has not been met in my opinion. It really is a wonderful, magical brand if you know its history and the impact it has had around the world. Besides which, there’s nothing better than an ice cold Coca-Cola classic in 8-ounce glass. (And that’s true word-of-mouth. I am definitely an evangelist.)

Q. What are you up to with Engage, Inc.? Is it ultimately more rewarding to work for yourself?

A. What’s rewarding is not having to work long hours and travel a lot. I have a four-year-old son, and am nearly 8 months pregnant with child number two. I have a brain and skills that I want to use, but I’m not willing to spend my life working 60 hour weeks. I did that, and it didn’t get me any of the happiness I thought it would. Money, yes. Some recognition, yes. But not the really good stuff. I am significantly happier now, and I only work with people who want to do marketing a different way.

At Engage, I focus most of my time on speaking and writing, since that’s what I really enjoy. I’ve done a lot of speeches on experiential marketing around the country and I always have such a great time sharing thoughts with the audience. I always half expect people to start snoring or walk out when I talk, since I talk about less tangible things like emotions and feelings. Believe it or not, the CMO of Coca-Cola once called me a flake after he saw me speak. (Yes, this was the same guy who promoted me.) I guess I’m not surprised since it is often hard for businesspeople to relate to the truth of relationships – we’d all rather believe, to steal Staples’ idea, that there is an easy button or a 10-step plan to marketing. I don’t think that’s true. Every new product and new brand and new consumer can only lead to a solution totally specific to that situation, just like every new person we meet and every new relationship we try to build requires behavior and understanding specific to it. Anyway, the audiences have been truly welcoming and supportive of the subject of my speeches and that has been a wonderful surprise.

January 24, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

International Herald Tribune: According to a survey by Edelman public relations in New York, conducted recently in 11 countries, chief executives no longer command the trust they used to among consumers, and generally should not be pressed into service as media spokesmen.

Edelman said the survey findings were consistent with other indications of a democratization of the business and media spheres, as the internet puts powerful information in the hands of ordinary people more quickly, and lets them have their say on matters previously reserved for the mainstream media.

"There's something of a revolution going on in terms of how people pick up and value sources of information," Richard Edelman, the firm's CEO, said. "For business, it means they've got to change their game plan."

The credibility of information on the Internet generally remains suspect, according to the survey, but it has made strong gains in the last few years in some countries. In the United States, for example, 19 percent of the people surveyed said they turned to the Net first as a trusted source of information and news, compared with only 10 percent in 2003. In Britain, the figure tripled to 15 percent from 5 percent.

"Television is increasingly seen as 'infotainment,' not a credible source of information," Edelman said.

January 24, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Ecast: Heineken, kicks-off their second nationwide advertising campaign on Internet jukeboxes throughout the United States via Ecast’s on-premise, interactive jukebox network. The campaign, which supports the 48th annual GRAMMY® Awards, will run on over 4400 broadband-enabled jukeboxes in bars and taverns throughout the country until Feb. 15th.

The campaign features a Heineken micro-site, downloadable collections of music on Ecast-jukeboxes by Grammy-winning artists, and a Heineken-branded trivia game.

“Advertising on the Ecast network allows us to reach an engaged audience at point-of-sale and strengthens Heineken’s identity with music enthusiasts,” said Mike McCann, Director Integrated Marketing, Promotions and Sponsorships at Heineken USA. “We have already had success—the beta launch in select markets already secured response rates in excess of 14 percent, which is quite high.”

Chris Scott, Senior Director of Advertising at Ecast, said, “Heineken is definitely ahead of the curve when it comes to on-premise, new media applications.”

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

USA TODAY: Sex.com, long coveted as potentially one of the most lucrative sites on the Web because of its catchy name, has been sold for about $12 million in cash and stock, a source familiar with the deal told Reuters on Monday.

Escom, a group of anonymous buyers, said in a statement it had acquired the Web address Sex.com from Gary Kremen, chief executive of Grant Media and the founder of Match.com. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The new owners said in the statement that they plan to transform Sex.com into "the market-leading adult entertainment destination," which they said would include "adult dating opportunities," sex and relationship advice, erotica, video-on-demand and live chat.

The sale ranks as one of the most expensive Web domain name transfers ever and outpaces the $7.5 million paid for business.com in 1999 at the peak of the dotcom boom.

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Quizno's is 25.

To commemorate our 25th Anniversary, we’re making it possible for 12 lucky people to achieve their own American dream by winning their very own Quiznos restaurant. Throughout 2006, there will be a variety of ways to vie for one of the restaurants, so keep checking quiznos25.com for new ways to win!

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

I bet you didn't know there was such a thing as search engine optimization (seo) humor. Surprise! There is.

Yesterday, Steve Rubel said he was going to stop using Yahoo, because a senior executive there claimed Yahoo was content being number two in search, behind Google. Rubel only searches with winners.

sem | antics picked up on this Rubelian revelation, and then delivered these nuggets to the bloatosphere:

Sunnyvale, CA -- In a surprise move today, search giant and internet information portal Yahoo! restated its business goals for 2006. The company's new prime directive?

Bring back Steve Rubel.

In further fallout, CFO/EVP Susan Decker, whose original quote appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has been bridled as well. While no formal demotion is evident, reports from Sunnyvale indicate that in future interviews, Decker will be limited to answers of 70 characters or less.

Including spaces.

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Wharton: Can an industry that has spent a fortune on TV ads featuring mud wrestlers and talking frogs suddenly change its stripes to appeal to the wine-and-cheese, single-malt Scotch crowd? The makers of Budweiser and other brands of beer hope so.

Frits van Paasschen, president and chief executive of Coors Brewing, told Knowledge@Wharton that his company supports an industry effort to enhance the beer category. "We have agreed to empower the Beer Institute to develop a communications strategy to promote beer as the leading alcohol beverage in the U.S., but exactly what that looks like has not been decided," he notes. "It's up to our individual brands to give people a reason to come back to beer."

More than anything van Paasschen added, "...it's incumbent on brewers to make sure they have brands that are interesting and compelling to consumers. We have to find ways to reinforce core equities of each brand, find new and exciting ways to grab attention again, to make beer cool."

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Chicago agency, Hadrian's Wall, is blogging.

The entire staff of Hadrian's Wall is in Rome for a week, celebrating the shop's five-year anniversary.

I don't know which item is bigger news. The latter, I suppose.

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Ad Age: Continuing its efforts to expand online, Time Inc. today said it has bought the Web site Golf.com and the company that operates it, SirenServ. Terms were undisclosed.

The move comes two weeks after Time Inc. united the Web sites of four magazines -- Fortune, Fortune Small Business, Business 2.0 and Money -- at CNNMoney.com in a bid to aggregate a larger mass of readers to offer advertisers.

Time Inc. already operates Golfonline.com, which is Golf Magazine’s Web site, and the Golf Plus section of SI.com; the company has not yet decided how those sites will collaborate with Golf.com.

Golf.com, which offers professional golf news and content for recreational players, has an average of 1.3 million unique monthly visitors.

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 4 Comments

NYT: For decades, nearly every gathering of media or technology executives has defined the future in a single word: convergence. What exactly was converging remained in dispute, but most saw some combination of television, computers and an intelligent network that would give consumers much more control.

For once, the visionaries were right. Video is popping up on cellphones, iPods, TiVo's and Web sites. And as for blogs, photo-tagging sites like Flickr, podcasts and the rest of the bubbling digital stew, it's clear that lots of media are coming together in lots of devices in lots of ways.

Yet for all the time that media executives - from the towers of Sixth Avenue to the back lots of Burbank - had to prepare for convergence, they are now scrambling to figure out what to do about it.

One thing is clear—McLuhan is out. The medium is no longer the message. Anyone who wants to tell a joke, spin a tale or report the latest White House news can produce any combination of video, text, sound and pictures for viewing on a 50-inch TV, a laptop computer or a cellphone screen.

Anyone can create a "mashup" by putting together pieces from any medium and any source, distributing it to anyone anywhere. Today, it's the mashup that is the message.

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

News.com: BzzAgent, one of the world's leading word-of-mouth marketing firms, said Friday that it closed a $13.75 million series-B round of funding.

The marketing company, which has clients such as Anheuser-Busch, Cadbury Schweppes, Ralph Lauren and Levi's Dockers, uses what it calls buzz-marketing strategies to build consumer interest in products.

Buzz marketing is unlike traditional marketing, the company said, because it involves unpaid volunteers talking to friends and family about products they believe in.

The company said it will use its new windfall--raised from General Catalyst Partners and IDG Ventures Boston--to build new market share and add staff.

But while BzzAgent has had a lot of success in recent years, not everyone has been happy to be associated with the outfit. Last year, Creative Commons--which helps create copyrights that allow for fair use of all kinds of content--decided to end a brief partnership with BzzAgent after a vocal outcry by its community, many members of which were upset that the nonprofit would team up with a word-of-mouth marketing company that lacks transparency.

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Random Culture doesn't think too highly of Ad Age's new let's-jump-on-the-podwagon cast.

I'd love to be able to post here about someone doing podcasting right, but the bad ones keep popping up. Advertising Age is not an exception.

They've launched a podcast called "Why it Matters", and I have to say, I'm let down by the quality of it. The sound is pretty atrocious, and it makes the podcast come off as a very amateur endeavor. Come on AdAge, pony up for a good microphone!

It just launched, so we can't tell how often it's updated, but the format appears to be a guest/host format with each episode around 10 minutes or so. If they improved the sound quality, I might actually listen to it.

You can check it out in iTunes. I'd post a link to the podcast on their site, but AdAge doesn't want anyone to access their content, since they put a subscription wall around everything.

January 25, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

Let me say up front, the person who wrote this classified ad once hired, then quickly fired, me. I don't hate him, but I would not be doing my job here if I let this ego-fueled drivel go unremarked upon.

This is a chance to be part of a small award-winning creative staff (One Show pencils, CA, et al) headed by Minneapolis-bred, award-winning, veteran CD who has been in Denver for 7 years. Denver may be the scrappiest ad town in America, with small budgets and tight timelines and nothing but brains and talent to make up the gap. We like our clients. They're not perfect, but they've not stopped us from doing great work. We like our clients' businesses, because using marketing smarts to make a business successful fascinates us. We like to live near mountains. We like to not finger point at each other when things go badly. We don't pretend we're rock stars. We're pretty normal people, and just because we're quite good at making advertising doesn't mean we're going to a more special level of heaven when we die (like we'd get into heaven anyway).

[via Creative Hotlist]

January 25, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 4 Comments

Here's a tip: Getting a girl to desire your product isn't that different from getting a girl to desire you. So if it didn't work in your dating life, don't try it in your print ad.

So says This BusinessWeek article about marketing to teenage girls. It was written by 3iYing, an all-female market and design strategy firm that specializes in marketing to girls ages 15 to 25.

But the interesting part of the article is the deconstruction of this Jansport print ad.

What message is this ad sending a girl? It screams: "JANSPORT DOESN'T CARE." Clearly the company isn't looking to establish a happy relationship. Here are three negative signals that will turn girls off.

Start with arrogance. JanSport's ad says, "Take it or leave it, sister. I'm a big brand already, and I ain't changing for nobody. So stop being so hung up on looking cute. Just use this bag for your stuff, and zip it!" Well, excuse us, JanSport, but appearances matter to us! If we want an attractive backpack and you don't deliver, we'll search elsewhere. We're looking to form relationships with brands that respect our priorities and put in the extra effort to meet us halfway. And sometimes that means working on your appearance.

Problem two, insensitivity. JanSport says, "I'm not your shrink, I'm just your bag. Your self-esteem and boy issues aren't my problem, but I thought I'd bring them up just to push your buttons. Now buy me." JanSport, why are trying to upset us? Boys and self-esteem are two top priorities for girls, so if you're mocking these topics, you're either cruel or just clueless. We don't expect your bag to do miracles, but we do expect a little respect. We respond to care and compassion.

Finally, negligence. JanSport doesn't seem to notice that its relationship with girls goes way back and, more important, that us girls have worked to overcome our first dull and ugly impressions. In fact, we've moved on to developed a happy decorative partnership. For years, we've prettied up JanSport bags with markers, patches, keychains, iron-ons, embroidery, and glitter. We love it when people appreciate our efforts to make things work. We want the same thing from a brand.

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

NYT: Corona Extra, the best-selling imported beer in America, is buying big twin signs on 1600 Broadway, the new 27-story building at 48th Street owned by Sherwood Equities. The signs, which are scheduled to go up on Monday, each measure about 92 feet high by 35 feet wide and show open bottles of Corona with limes wedged into the necks.

The signs will face south, toward the big Budweiser sign attached to 1 Times Square, the southern anchor of the district.

"We feel the ads in Times Square will bring a lot of benefits," said Roberto Viejo, chief sales and marketing officer at Procermex in San Antonio, "not just for the New York market but for the world market."

Corona Extra is distributed in 150 countries, Mr. Viejo said, so the visibility the signs will derive from being at the so-called crossroad of the world will help build the brand's image internationally as well as in America.

Taking so prominent a place "is another way of saying it's our time to come in and say we're a player" in the global beer business, he added.

While the Corona Extra signs are big, they are not quite in the category of Times Square billboards known as spectaculars because they are made of flex-face vinyl panels that are backlighted rather than embedded with neon or other special lighting like the nearby signs for Wrigley, Budweiser and other advertisers.

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Thanks to Spike Jones at Brains On Fire for pointing us to this Miami Herald article on buzz marketing by Edward Wasserman, professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University.

Advocates do rhapsodize about all this with the fervor of real conviction, as the height of authenticity, a way to empower the lowly grassroots of the buying public. It brings a lump to the throat. The website of buzzmarketing.com makes the whole push sound like some proud insurgency. ''We don't think like normal advertising, marketing, and PR people. We defy convention'' Word of mouth is ''the oldest, most effective form of marketing on earth,'' which raises the question of what convention it could be defying.

One could be honesty. Commercial Alert, a commercialization watchdog, complained to the Federal Trade Commission in October about Procter & Gamble's Tremor campaign. That's a four-year-old program that, USA Today says, uses 250,000 teenagers to talk to friends about new things that P&G sends them. Tremor also purportedly rents out these teens to such pals as Toyota, Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods, and the watchdog group wondered whether the entire undertaking might not be fundamentally deceitful.

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

USA TODAY: Here's a new way to attack spyware: embarrass its purveyors.

A free website (StopBadware.org) plans to provide a list of programs that contain spyware and other malicious software. It will also identify companies that develop the programs and distribute them on the Internet.

Consumers can then decide if a program is safe to download.

"For too long, these companies have been able to hide in the shadows of the Internet," says John Palfrey, who heads the Berkman Center of Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is spearheading the project. "What we're after is a more accountable Internet."

The initiative is being run by Harvard and the Oxford Institute and is backed by high-tech heavyweights including Google and Sun Microsystems. Consumer Reports' WebWatch is serving as a special adviser.

Spyware invades PCs without users' knowledge when they download applications such as music file-sharing programs or screen savers, or visit certain websites. Often, spyware tracks Web-surfing habits and bombards victims with related pop-up ads. More nefarious versions monitor keystrokes to steal Social Security numbers or passwords for identity theft.

Also on the hit list of the StopBadware coalition are malicious "adware" programs that serve up onslaughts of pop-up ads or software that contains hidden viruses and worms.

At least 60% of home PCs are infected with one or more of these "badware" programs, says Forrester Research analyst Natalie Lambert.

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

According to Business Week, University of Michigan business professor, C.K. Prahalad, 64, has a knack for being able to change people's perceptions of the world around them. This skill has made Prahalad an incredibly influential corporate strategist. He has built a lucrative consulting career helping such multinationals as Citibank, Philips, and Philip Morris break out of ingrained mind-sets and craft new business models.

Prahalad and colleague Gary Hamel helped spark a management revolution in the 1990s with their idea of "core competence," which says that companies must identify and focus on their competitive strengths. Their 1994 book, Competing for the Future, is regarded as a classic. A decade later he co-wrote The Future of Competition, which argued that the traditional "company-centric" approach to product innovation is giving way to a world in which companies "co-create" products with consumers. That book gave Prahalad a reputation among designers. At the same time, he has been working to convince executives that today's needy masses, so often dismissed as subsisting largely outside of the global economy, are actually its future. Prahalad's 2004 work on that topic, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, has been hailed as one of the most important business books in recent years and turned Prahalad into a celebrity in the field of international development.

Now one of the management world's most creative thinkers has an even more radical idea: He believes that the entrepreneurial ingenuity at work amid such poverty, where success depends on squeezing the most out of minimal resources to furnish quality products at rock-bottom prices, has cosmic implications for executives and consumers everywhere. Some of the most interesting companies of the future won't emerge from Silicon Valley or other places of abundant means, he says. They will come from places many executives don't even think about because they have been considered too marginal.

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

A Blog Soup: I have heard now from a few very reliable people that Gawker Media, that powerhouse of blogging created by Nick Denton, is getting ready to launch a new site. It will, apparently, be a gossip/news blog focusing on the Silicon Valley tech scene.

Allegedly, the man picked to edit the site will be none other than our beloved Nick Douglas of Blogebrity fame. That is all the more poingant as I recall having an IM with Kyle Bunch, the publisher of Blogebrity, a while back where he lamented his inability to offer Nick any reasonable money as editor of Blogebrity. I was heaping praise on Nick, and Kyle agreed he was doing a wonderful job. His concern was that Nick might start getting offers to go elsewhere before Kyle could adequately, and with desire, pay Nick what he deserved.

It appears that Kyle's worries about those possibilities are now well grounded.

[via Random Culture]

[UPDATE] Original Gawker editrix Elizabeth Spiers is hoping to give her old employer a much-needed run for its money. Spiers will launch dealbreaker.com, a Wall Street gossip blog, in March. If it's successful, look for Spiers to spin off sister sites just like Gawker Media boss Nick Denton did. The Alabama native, who quit her last job as editor-in-chief of mediabisto.com to finish her novel, "And They All Die in the End" (out next year from Simon & Schuster), has some unlikely inspiration in her new digs at lead investor Carter Burden's TriBeCa offices: an oil painting of former Journey frontman Steve Perry with the caption, "To Protect and to Rock."

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

According to Media Daily News, lawyers, ad agency execs and a few creative types gathered for the annual Association of National Advertisers' Advertising Law and Business Affairs Conference in New York yesterday, got an earful from Commercial Alert Executive Director Gary Ruskin.

Ruskin, opened his speech by observing that polls show "most Americans really despise what you do."

Later, Ruskin said "Americans are tolerant, but they will reach a point where they will say that's it, they've had enough." Twisting the dagger, he later cited polls to the effect that "your industry is not yet as unpopular as the tobacco industry."

Apparently the criticism came as shock, as the attendees had just finished their mystery meat luncheon, and had not been given ample time to digest.

[via Adrants]

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

USA TODAY: A blossoming trade in Apple iPods and other digital devices pre-loaded with movies, TV shows and thousands of songs is raising alarms and legal questions.

For the past couple of years, people have sold their used iPods and other music players filled with music on eBay and other auction sites with little notice. But lately, a new breed of seller has popped up, touting like-new iPods jammed full of content — for prices hundreds of dollars more than the cost of an untouched new iPod.

An example from eBay on Monday:

• A 60-gigabyte video iPod loaded with 11,800 songs, with a starting bid of $799. The iPod alone would cost about $400. "I don't see how it's different than selling a used CD," seller Steve Brinn, a Cincinnati pediatrician, wrote in an e-mail to USA TODAY. "If the music industry asked me not to do it, I just wouldn't do it."

After USA TODAY asked eBay about the listing, eBay removed it. "That is a copyright violation, one that we don't even need to hear from the rights owner about before removing," says eBay spokesman Hani Durzy.

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

High Jive sheds light on this piss poor promotion from Spanish radio station "La Ley" WLEY 107.9 in Chicago.

The ad features a row of female butts and a headline reading, “25 Pegaditas.” It’s promoting a contest where listeners must name 25 songs in a row for a chance to win cash. The Spanish translation for “pegaditas” is “little ones strung together.” However, some folks (particularly Hispanic women) insist it’s also playing off the word “pegar,” which translates to “hits.” In this case, the dual meanings for “hits” are popular songs and ass slaps. Females United for Action, a primarily Hispanic women’s activist group, has launched a protest. Looks like somebody’s going to get spanked before this is all over.

January 26, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Today's Chicago Woman is running an interview with chief executive officer of Energy BBDO, Tonise Paul.

Q. How can someone build a personal brand or image? Is it as simple as wearing bright colored suits?

A. I had a male entrepreneur friend ask me once in a social setting, “Who are you at the office?” I answered, “I am me. The same person you know here. Who are you?” He answered in his usual jovial, fun-loving way, “Oh I’m an -------.” After I picked up my jaw, I realized there are a lot of people who build an image that suits them professionally, but is not consistent with who they are personally. For that reason, I draw a distinction between “building an image” and “living your brand.”

The way to go about “living your brand” is to uncover what you do best and what’s most important to you. Those two things are the primary guideposts for building a strong personal brand. As for wearing shocking pink, if you’re passionate about pink and it’s a genuine reflection of you and what you want to express to the world, it works. The key is authenticity.

January 27, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

NYT: In two Super Bowl spots — one 30 seconds, the other 15 seconds — Gillette will unveil the "Miracle of Fusion," a razor that has five closely spaced blades for regular shaving, and a "precision trimmer" blade in back, for grooming beards and mustaches.

If any of those Super Bowl viewers read newspapers or listen to talk shows, Fusion's introduction will probably be old news. CVS and a handful of other retailers began promoting Fusion in their free-standing inserts in newspapers last Sunday. And ever since September, when Gillette first unveiled its Fusion razor — or, as the company called it back then, The Future of Shaving — columnists, talk show hosts and bloggers have taken good-natured swipes at the whole idea that the more blades the merrier.

Peter K. Hoffman, president of Gillette's blades and razors unit, insists he is unfazed and predicts Fusion will be a $1 billion product by 2008.

January 27, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

USA TODAY: Shares of the Mexican-food chain became a hot tamale Thursday on Wall Street when they more than doubled in their first day of trading, gaining $22 to $44.

The stock's smoking first day says as much about initial public offerings as burritos. It's the first time shares of a U.S. company have doubled in their first day since November 2000, when computer-chip maker Transmeta gained 115%, Thomson Financial says.

January 27, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, the team behind the revolutionary and popular "Four Eyed Monsters Video Podcasts," premiered three new episodes of their series at the Slamdance 2006 Film Festival in Utah, earlier this week.

According to their press release, this was the first ever inclusion of a podcast in a film festival, confirming what Arin and Susan have been discovering for the past year—video podcasts are changing the face of filmmaking and are not only an imperative promotional tool but also a new medium for expression.

January 27, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Adweek: Carmichael Lynch takes a subcontinent turn at the exotic in a new television commercial for Gibson guitars.

The spot, shot on location at a palace in Mumbai, India, continues the company's strategy to present its guitars as the ultimate gift. The 30-second execution depicts an opulent Indian celebration. As an empress tries to impress her husband with luxurious gifts ranging from an oil portrait and jewelry to a Rolls Royce, he shows only apathy. When his attention is drawn to a musician playing a Gibson guitar, she commandeers the instrument as the perfect present. The spot closes with the line, "Only a Gibson is good enough."

The Interpublic Group shop enlisted award-winning director Gurinder Chadha (who directed Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice) to shoot the commercial.

The media budget was not disclosed. Gibson of Nashville, Tenn., spent nearly $2.5 million on advertising through November 2005, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

January 27, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Putting gross things--like a cockroach--in your mouth is disgusting. So why smoke? That's the gist of this new campaign for Washington's anti-smoking efforts, care of Seattle agency, Sedgwick Rd.

[via Adrants]

January 27, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

B.L. Ochman has some suggestions for pr flaks who want her to pay attention to their story.

What's Next's Pitching Rules for Flaks
Publicists, please paste these to your refrigerator or filing cabinet

1. don't pretend you're not a publicist
2. don't lie
3. if you forget rule 2, refer to rule 1
4. provide an email address from your company, not hotmail, yahoo, or gmail; and a phone number in case I have a question.
5. say who your client is and what you are pitching and why in 200 words or less (preferably much less)
6. if you make a mistake, admit it and move on
7. don't lie
8. pitch me before you give the story to everyone and her dog or don't bother me

January 27, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 8 Comments

Nearly every ad agency on the planet has a website, be it good, bad, or ugly.

Except for one, it seems: Southfield, Michigan's Doner Worldwide, who does work for Mazda, Six Flags, DuPont, and Blockbuster, among others. They do have donerus.com registered and for use as an email domain.

But no site. Poking around the web the other day, I completely came up empty on a search for Doner. Anyone know why?

January 27, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 3 Comments

According to Cellular News, Cingular Wireless has managed to get is applying for a patent on the concept of using emoticon on mobile phones.

While the aim of the patent is to enable the displaying of MSN style graphics on handsets, they also want managed to patent the delivery of text based emoticon - so presumably sending :) via an SMS - if selected via a dedicated or softkey, would be a breach of the patent in future.

[via The Spunker]

January 27, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 0 Comments

The State of Nevada is attempting to lure more California businesses tired of high taxes, and has started a website called Missing Bear to suggest that even the wild California bears are leaving. From the AP:

"We still think there is a real need there for companies that want a way out. There is an alternative — you can run for the border," said A. Somer Hollingsworth, president of the Nevada Development Authority.

Nevada's new ads — running in newspapers with links to similarly themed Web sites — jokes that even the bear on California's state flag has skedaddled across the state line to Nevada to thrive.

Oversized outdoor ads will be draped on downtown buildings in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Diego.

The $560,000 marketing blitz represents the most recent skirmish in an often-playful border war in which the neighboring states have tried to pilfer jobs from each other. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger once drove a truck down the Las Vegas Strip, offering to move any company to California.

January 27, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 53 Comments

Benoit Denizet-Lewis for Salon: Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, is the Willie Wonka of the fashion industry. A quirky perfectionist and control freak, he guards his aspirational brands and his utopian chocolate factory with a highly effective zeal. Those who have worked with him tend to use the same words to describe him: driven, demanding, smart, intense, obsessive-compulsive, eccentric, flamboyant and, depending on whom you talk to, either slightly or very odd. "He's weird and probably insane, but he's also unbelievably driven and brilliant," says a former employee at Paul Harris, a Midwestern women's chain for which Jeffries worked before becoming CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch in 1992.

Examples of his strange behavior abound. According to Business Week, at A&F headquarters Jeffries always goes through revolving doors twice, never passes employees on stairwells, parks his Porsche every day at the same angle in the parking lot (keys between the seats, doors unlocked), and has a pair of "lucky shoes" he wears when reading financial reports.

His biggest obsession, though, is realizing his singular vision of idealized all-American youth. He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips.

When I ask him how important sex and sexual attraction are in what he calls the "emotional experience" he creates for his customers, he says, "It's almost everything. That's why we hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don't market to anyone other than that."

[via Golden Fiddle]

January 27, 2006 by Dan Goldgeier | Permalink | 7 Comments

This is a must read. BusinessWeek reports on the MINI pitch, and the creativity of the pitch process itself.

There was plenty of face time and driving but the agencies were also required to perform in front of one another as each tried to impress the client-to-be, an unheard-of concept in the notoriously competitive ad world. "You don't expect the client in these situations to be creative...that's what they want us for," says Scott Goodson, president of Strawberry Frog, one of the four contenders.

First, each team had to introduce themselves and create interesting name tags on the spot. The team from New York-based Mother put pictures of their actual mothers on tags. Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners (BSSP) of Sausalito, Calif., in a nod to socially correct recycling and frugality, they riffed, reused plain name tags from a meeting the previous week.

Then each team took turns answering questions that tested improv skills. "If Arnold Schwarzenegger runs for President, who should be his running mate?" went one game question. (Strawberry Frog's team was divided between Sylvester Stallone and Papa Smurf.)

They also were sent out into nasty rainy weather to drive MINI Coopers and go on a kind of scavenger hunt for ideas and props to be used for a scrapbook. The book would tell a MINI story that the agencies and the client would all review over cocktails. Butler Shine's scrapbook centered on a story about a mannequin the team named Darlene, which it snitched from a local electronics store. Darlene and team motored in a MINI to a pumpkin patch, but the caper ended up, for real, with the team being grilled at the local police station. "It was unusual to mix it up with your competitors, but being small and independent, we are all kind of members of the same club," said BSSP Creative Director Michael Shine.

Can't say I've heard anything quite like this, although there are plenty of new biz stories out there.

January 29, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

NYT: A year ago Jacqui Rogers, a retiree in southern Oregon who dabbles in vintage costume jewelry, went on eBay and bought 10 butterfly brooches made by Weiss, a well-known maker of high-quality costume jewelry in the 1950's and 1960's.

At first, Ms. Rogers thought she had snagged a great deal. But when the jewelry arrived from a seller in Rhode Island, her well-trained eye told her that all of the pieces were knockoffs.

Even though Ms. Rogers received a refund after she confronted the seller, eBay refused to remove hundreds of listings for identical "Weiss" pieces. It said it had no responsibility for the fakes because it was nothing more than a marketplace that links buyers and sellers.

That very stance — the heart of eBay's business model — is now being challenged by eBay users like Ms. Rogers who notify other unsuspecting buyers of fakes on the site. And it is being tested by a jewelry seller with far greater resources than Ms. Rogers: Tiffany & Company, which has sued eBay for facilitating the trade of counterfeit Tiffany items on the site.

If Tiffany wins its case, not only would other lawsuits follow, but eBay's very business model would be threatened because it would be nearly impossible for the company to police a site that now has 180 million members and 60 million items for sale at any one time.

The Tiffany lawsuit, in addition to accusing eBay of facilitating counterfeiting, also contends that it "charges hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees" for counterfeit sales.

In 2004, Tiffany secretly purchased about 200 items from eBay in its investigation of how the company was dealing with the thousands of pieces of counterfeit Tiffany jewelry. The jeweler found that three out of four pieces were fakes.

The case will go to trial by the end of this year, said James B. Swire, an attorney with Arnold & Porter, a law firm representing Tiffany. The legal question — whether eBay is a facilitator of fraud — is a critical issue that could affect not only eBay's future but Internet commerce generally, said Thomas Hemnes, a lawyer in Boston who specializes in intellectual property.

January 29, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Bob Morris' "Age of Dissonace" column in the Sunday Times examines punctuality, or the lack thereof.

Are you punctually challenged? You're not alone. According to a San Francisco State University study, 20 percent of the population is chronically late for business meetings and social engagements.

Freud traced the inability to manage one's time to being late at toilet training. That's a dated notion. A more contemporary study by Cleveland State University found that tardiness is a trait of the unusually anxious and distractible. Some theorize that lateness creates thrills for otherwise dull lives or that being late is a bold form of power display. Or is it just anti-authoritarian?

I think it's mostly about power and lack of sensitivity to to others. Even though the megalomaniac responsible for wasting everyone's time will likely just say, "Sorry, I was busy."

January 29, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Hugh MacLeod describes the gap in thinking between traditional marketers and the new breed busy "open sourcing" their operations.

The Stormhoek boys were having a meeting with one of their largest customers, a UK supermarket chain.

After a long presentation explaining what they were trying to do with the blogosphere, an exec at the supermarket called it nothing more than "Chatroom Rubbish".

The guy obviously doesn't get it. So they sent him a paperback copy of The Cluetrain in the hope that it provides him some food for thought.

In supermarkets, everything is a commodity- the management, the products, the customers, the suppliers, the employees, and of course, the supermarket itself.

It's interesting to me that a exec in a commodity business would describe conversations between people who spend money in their stores as "Chatroom Rubbish".

Interesting, but not surprising.

January 29, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

[via lgarcia]

January 29, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Brandweek: A study out this week by interactive marketing agency Sharpe Partners shows that 89% of adult Internet users in the U.S. share content with others via e-mail. And while jokes and cartoons make up 88% of the forwarded material, a full 24% of business and personal finance information is also shared.

“We knew a lot of people were sharing content, but even we didn't expect it to be so pervasive,” Kathy Sharpe, CEO of Sharpe Partners, said in a statement. “The real challenge for interactive marketing agencies is developing content that these people will want to consistently share with a wide, yet focused circle of acquaintances.”

Sharpe's study found that for companies interested in launching a viral marketing program, adding overt brand messages only slightly reduces the likelihood that the content will be shared. Fifty-six percent of the respondents are less or slightly less likely to forward such content, whereas 43% said they are more or slightly more likely to send on marketing-related messages. Only 5% refused to share content that contains a clear brand message.

“While subtlety is often the key for branded content in a successful viral marketing campaign,” noted Sharpe, “it appears that overt branding will do little harm to the efficacy of the campaign."

[IN RELATED NEWS] ViralHQ.com is a new site dedicated to cataloging said "virals."

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

USA TODAY: Alka-Seltzer marketers have been among advertising's most prolific producers of jingles and catch phrases done in such infectious ways that they became pop culture staples of their times.

For its latest commercial, 75-year-old Alka-Seltzer reached back decades to resurrect perhaps the most famous slogan for the fizzy stomach remedy: "I can't believe I ate the whole thing."

Alka-Seltzer re-created the original ad from 1972. Playing the bickering married couple this time are Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle from Everybody Loves Raymond.

"Alka-Seltzer has some of the most famous advertising of all time and the brand has withstood the test of time," says Jay Kolpon, vice president, marketing and new business, for the Bayer health care's consumer care division. "This was a way to tap into the 75th anniversary. Tapping into the familiar, tried and true seemed a very natural place to go."

The ad will be used for Alka-Seltzer's first appearance on Super Bowl Sunday, in pre-game programming. Bayer health care, part of Germany's Bayer Group, also has 30 seconds during the game, but that high-priced slot will go to sibling brand Aleve.

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

PR exec, Steve Rubel, sees trouble ahead for Google.

In chapter eight John Battelle's incredible book, The Search, he astutely predicted that Google would increasingly fall under the watchful eye of the US government. As we saw earlier this month, John was right. The US government requested aggregate search data not only from Google, but from all of the major search engines. Only Google didn't comply.

Years from now we will remark that this was the beginning of the end of Google as we know it. The reason is one day - maybe sooner than we think - the government will try to break up Google. This may accelerate depending on the outcome of the 2008 election.

Whether DOJ would succeed here is entirely an open question. However, if this does indeed happen, it will certainly slow down the search giant and the Web economy overall, much as DOJ did for Microsoft and the PC economy.

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

Blogger and podcaster, Anina, who also happens to be a top fashion model based in Paris, has been told by Slides to drop the tech stuff or find another agency.

they say that fashion and technology do not go together. they say,that i can not do both things and that i must choose to either be a model, or do the tech stuff. they say i will not find an agency in paris who will accept for me to do the both. and so i have been thinking deeply about what i am to be doing.

Slides was created in January 2000 by Renée Dujac-Cassou, the owner and directrice. The clientele of Slides is the top fashion magazines and photographers and its objective is to represent a select group of young models, with character, who reflect the trends of the moment.

Perhaps someone can contact Slides at 16, rue de la Grange Batelière 75009 Paris (01 42 61 18 08), and mention that a model who blogs perfectly reflects "the trends of the moment."

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

George Parker of Adscam will be a guest on NBC's "The Today Show" tomorrow. The segment is being shot today in Boise and onlined to New York in time for Tuesday morning's program.

If this PR opportunity doesn't rocket him to victory in Ad-Rag's Battle of the Ad Blogs, then I don't know...I may begin to question TV's effectiveness.

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

According to Bloggers In Amsterdam, The Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions is sending 26 bloggers to Amsterdam for five nights at the Lloyd Hotel or the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky -- both five star hotels near the center of the city.

No blogging about the trip will be required. In exchange for the trip each blogger will [a] be interviewed about the trip (the Dutch Tourism Board may be using this for online/offline promotions), [b] give Holland.com one month of premium adspace, and [c] put the "Bloggers in Amsterdam" logo in their nav bar for one year, linking it to this blog post to disclose the nature of the trip. The mantra here is transparency.

Some of the bloggers chosen for this mission: Dooce, Blurbomat, Slice NY, Pandagon, Jossip and Coolfer.

[via Orange Yeti]

[UPDATE] Spot-On's Josh Trevino shares his contrarian take on the initiative.

If you can't beat them, buy them. Traditional institutions and power structures, having realized that blogs aren't going away, are co-opting the pajama-clad harbingers of the new era of journalism. And the bloggers are making it all too easy.

The latest example is the decision by Holland.com to send twenty-five American bloggers to the Netherlands. Presumably this is to promote tourism there. Indeed, if the Dutch wish to attract visits from tedious left-wing hairsplitters with all the social skills that passionate and frequent online argumentation implies, they've made a sound investment. Realistically, Holland.com just squandered a great deal of money for no discernible return whatsoever.

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

NYT: Move over, People magazine. The Wall Street Journal is invading your turf.

Yes, the business newspaper in the gray flannel suit is emphasizing its human side. Starting today, The Journal is expanding its coverage of people and running a comprehensive index of all the people who are mentioned significantly in that day's newspaper.

"People like to read about people," said Paul E. Steiger, managing editor of The Journal. "We're going to go with more names and a device that will help people if they or their best friends or worst enemies are somewhere in the paper."

The index to people will appear inside the back cover of the Marketplace section on an expanded "Who's News" page with a daily feature on an executive or business leader. Publishing consultants say that readers like such navigational tools, and many newspapers are making increasing use of them, sometimes on their front pages.

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

International Herald Tribune: Want to catch the new film starring John Malkovich and Naomi Campbell?

You will have to log on to the Internet. And perhaps "film" isn't quite the right word: The American actor and the British model star in a 10-minute video commissioned by Pirelli, the Italian tire maker, which plans to post it in March on a specially created Web site, where it will become the feature presentation in a new marketing campaign.

The short film - or is it a long ad? - is titled "The Call" and is set in the Vatican. It involves a battle between good and evil, featuring the ascetic-looking Malkovich as a priest and the modeling bad girl Campbell as the devil.

What does any of this have to do with selling tires - or even telecommunications cables, Pirelli's other main product? Though the film is still being edited and few details were disclosed, Pirelli says the story provides a metaphorical illustration of its long-running slogan, "Power is nothing without control."

Pirelli declined to say how much actors were being paid to appear in "The Call," which is directed by Antoine Fuqua, whose films include "Training Day" and "King Arthur."

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Dillon Snyder has attitude--the kind it takes to get a great job in this business.

I am a copywriter, which means, once you edit out all the fluff, I fill in the blanks. Simply put, blanks are what separate brands from the smiling faces of the general public. Using words, big ideas, strong concepts, green ink, and on occasion a bar napkin or two I fill in these blanks. Once filled, brands and people are united and begin to interact freely.

He's currently an intern at TM Advertising in Irving, TX. He also emerged intact from many hours of I-want-to-be-a-copywriter servitude at GSD+M in Austin.

Should you hire him, I'll let you know where to send the referral check. Thanks.

January 30, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

It comes as no surprise that a business full of clowns would add one more to its big top. Scratch that. What you are about to read is shocking!

Bassist Gene Simmons is a marketing genius. He turned the 1970s hair band Kiss into an almost $1 billion enterprise by licensing the band's name and looks to everything from credit cards to a Kiss-opoly board game. Coming soon: a Kiss Babies cartoon, Kiss Broadway plays, a Kiss casino and even Kiss toothbrushes. Now Simmons, 56, wants to market his marketing. With Richard Abramson, who managed Pee-Wee Herman's career and invented insurance-backed film financing, Simmons has started a company to help businesses sharpen their message. His first client: Indy Racing League, the Nascar competitor that runs the Indianapolis 500. He recently talked to FORBES about his new gig.

Q. How in the world did you convince Indy to work with you?

A. The first thing we said was that their logo sucked. I didn't know what it was, and it just didn't connect with me. And they were all over the place. You have to simplify the message. You go to Burger King and know you can have it your way. That's all you need to know.

Q. What are your plans for Indy?

A. We're going to have an Indy-girl clothing line. We're going to have Indy soapbox racers. Let school kids come up with a logo for a forthcoming race and compete for scholarships. The problem with school is that the reward is a grade, not money.

Q. Do you have any other clients yet?

A. Are we interested in other companies? Sure. But only at the highest levels. There aren't enough hours in the day to take vice presidents and secretaries through learning curves. If you're not talking to the head guy, it doesn't matter.

[via American Copywriter]

January 31, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

In the current issue of Business Week, the magazine explores the firing of William Perez by Phil Knight at Nike, in an article titled, "Inside the Coup at Nike."

AdPulp readers may be particularly interested in the following paragraph.

Perez, who came from a consumer-product marketing background, says he sometimes wondered if Nike's famously creative, irreverent advertising was actually conveying relevant messages about the product. The first commercial he saw was a 30-second spot aimed at last year's NCAA basketball tournament. The commercial showed ants crawling onto the basketball court. After 28 seconds, a voice would say "Nike basketball." His concern: The ad explained nothing about the product, and it had minimal brand presence. "I came from a rational world of communications," Perez said.

January 31, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

NYT: The specialty grocer Trader Joe's is coming to Manhattan in a few months, but will not be advertising its opening.

Instead, the company that has inspired cult loyalty by offering low prices on fresh produce, packaged and frozen foods will stick to its bare-bones marketing approach: sending direct-mail flyers to residents in the neighborhood. (In this case, the first Trader Joe's in New York City will open on 14th Street near Union Square sometime in March or April.)

But while Trader Joe's is inevitably associated with its Southern California roots, the online grocery service FreshDirect is trying to ward off its latest rival by introducing an advertising campaign next week playing up its local status.

In a series of commercials to run on channels including the Food Network, NY1 and CNN, FreshDirect is counting on the power of New York personalities to lure customers. Each commercial features a New York celebrity receiving a FreshDirect package at home and making small talk with the deliveryman.

The company was founded in 1999 and primarily serves Manhattan, but has expanded to include parts of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, New Jersey and Westchester County. In the summer, the service reaches to the Hamptons.

January 31, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 1 Comments

USA TODAY: A judge has ordered PepsiCo Inc. and its advertising company to pay $250,000 to the 1950s doo-wop band The Flamingos for using their recording, "I Only Have Eyes For You" in a commercial without permission.

A federal judge in Chicago on Friday upheld an arbitrator's decision in favor of the two surviving members of The Flamingos, Terry Johnson and Tommy Hunt, and the estates of the deceased members.

A collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists requires an advertiser to get permission and pay fees to the music publishers, the record labels and the artists themselves.

"In our case, they didn't even ask," San Francisco entertainment lawyer Steven Ames Brown said Monday.

Pepsi used the band's best known 1959 hit in a television commercial that ran nationwide for about six months in 1997, Brown said.

January 31, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Dave Pollard has a fascinating essay up about Americans and our sycophantic ways. It's mostly about how we're duped by our political leaders, but he ventures into the business realm, as well.

First, he quotes best selling author, Peter Block:

“Leadership” is a well-developed misconception. The dominant belief is that the task of leadership is to set a vision, enroll others in it and hold people accountable through measurements and rewards. It’s a patriarchal system used to create high performance through centralization of power. Most leadership training focuses on how to be a good parent. We teach how to “develop” people, as if they were ours to develop. We do a lot to create the notion that bosses are responsible for their people. All that parenting has the unintended side effect of creating deep entitlement and having employees stay frozen in their own development. Most management techniques are ways of controlling people so they feel good about being controlled.

These are the most common questions I get from my clients. “How do I get people to …” and you can fill in the blank after that. My favorite is, “How do I get people on board with my ideas/visions/whatever?” My response is, “How do you know you’re in the boat?” These are the wrong questions. They’re the questions of a parent about recalcitrant children. As soon as you start the sentence, you’re acting as a sovereign. All of these are components of the patriarchal way of thinking that dominates our culture. Put this in boldface: They are not your children. Once you realize that, real engagement is possible.

Then Pollard offers his insight on Block:

Peter Block understands the essence of complex systems: No one is in control. What gets done (for better or worse) gets done as a result of the staggeringly complex interactions and personal decisions of everyone. Even in the most hierarchical organizations, far more energy is expended finding workarounds for incompetent management decisions and policies (without offending management, of course) than is spent implementing the odd intelligent insight that management, with all the resources at its disposal, 'manages' to come up with. Employees, and customers (who are often treated only slightly less paternalistically than employees), actually have almost all the good ideas that would be needed to make any organization much more successful, but it is taboo to listen to them, to even be accessible to them. That would make the leaders look weak, as if perhaps they don't have all the answers. And that, of course, is unthinkable.

[via Robert Patteson]

January 31, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Lifehacker: MacGyver Tip: Dishwashing liquid ice pack

My wife pulled her sciatic nerve last week. An ice pack was recommended but one of our friends gave us a great tip.

Instead of an ice pack, partially fill a strong zip lock back with Dawn dishwashing detergent and freeze it. (I don¹t know if other brands would work just as well.)

Just to be safe, we double-bagged it!

The detergent stays cold much longer and it can be re-frozen over and over. It also molds to your back better than ice.

January 31, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Brand Noise reports that Coca-Cola will introduce Tab Energy this year. Comparable to Red Bull, Tab Energy will be available in 10.5 ounce slim cans patterned in fuchsia gingham. Tab was Coca-Cola Company's first sugar-free drink, introduced in 1963, and is still available in limited quantities.

The new soft drink will not use Saccharin like original Tab. Instead it will contain Sucralose.

In an odd twist, The New Yorker, also deemed this latest brand extension worthy of coverage. Ben McGrath in "The Talk of the Town" segment points out that Tab is popular with media elites, despite it's limited distribution.

January 31, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 0 Comments

Daily Bruin: Employers are beginning to use sites such as Facebook to access personal information of candidates for employment, said Kathy Sims, director of the UCLA Career Center.

And not all employers are pleased with what they find.

Sims said there have been several cases of employers rescinding job offers to student candidates because of information obtained through Facebook.

She said employers will find content they determine to be less than professional or inappropriate, and many students do not realize the consequences.

Sims said many alumni who work at companies can use school e-mails to access Facebook, since the site requires members to have a school e-mail account from the specified school.

At UCLA, all alumni are guaranteed their e-mail addresses for life.

[via PSFK]

January 31, 2006 by david burn | Permalink | 2 Comments

Eric Weaver, a Seattle-based marketer who believes that the Reign of Fluff is over, delivered his own State of the Union address today. One side is standing and loudly applauding his commentary, while the other is none too pleased.

Here are some snippets:

I'm sitting in on an American Marketing Association webcast/conference call right now called "B-to-C Customer Acquisition: Ten Steps to Success". And I'm stunned by the insanity of the current "best practices" of the direct marketing business.

The b-school buzzwords come fast and furious. Precampaign analytics. Customer acquisition models. Proprietary optimization. "How much data is the right amount to collect during the acquisition process?" the speaker asks. "How do you insure your email gets through the spam filters the customer has deployed?"

And I want to unmute the speakerphone and scream ARE YOU F***ING INSANE?!? DO YOU ACTUALLY HEAR WHAT YOU'RE SAYING?!?

All this effort, all this angst, all this handwringing over the power the customer has to avoid shoehorning your boring, irrelevant crap into their busy day. All these formulaic, me-too methods to reach them despite their desire to NOT hear from you. All these eager numbers-oriented marketers attending this webcast because they want to get your attention when you don't want to give it.

The speaker goes on: "if you undermine trust, relationships cannot grow or survive". But, umm, you ARE undermining trust...you ARE trying to get past barriers that consumers have put up.

This kind of interruption-, intrusion-based marketing, even under the guise of being opt-in and permission-based, is an aging model that needs to be put out of our collective misery.

Direct, despite this most timely and eloquent tirade, is not going away, just like TV advertising is not going away. Yet, firms with a service or product to sell would do well to consider other means to their ends. The best solution is clearly to produce a better product or service. When people truly want said product or service they will come to it unprovoked (or provoked in a way that is acceptable to them). Then, a real relationship can commence.

[via Adrants]