I just returned from a two week vacation in Vancouver, BC and Alaska. It's the first real vacation I've taken in several years and the first and only break I've given myself from AdPulp since its inception in October 2004.

While every trip to the Pacific Northwest is filled with natural beauty, one of the more memorable pleasures for me this time was stepping back from the machine. I did check email every few days, make one travel log post on Burnin' and keep my Flickr page updated but that's it. The remainder of the time was spent breathing fresh cool air, spotting whales, moose and bear and visiting with friends, old and new, in person.

On the plane yesterday I read Kurt Vonnegut's final book, A Man Without A Country. He has many interesting things to say about a world gone mad with greed that blinds. He also slips in a wicked critique of online communities.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are heare on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different. (page 61-2)

I wouldn't say "nothing." But at the same time I am willing to look at myself and the patterns I weave. Danny G. asked recently when enough would be enough when it comes to social networks. I think now's a good time.

Actually, when I think about social networks, blogs and Web 2.0, I can't help but see it all as one giant advertising opportunity. Not just for companies, for all involved. Isn't your MyLinkedFacebook page some sort of new fangled self-promo ad? I believe it is.

Alaska gave me time to think and Vonnegut gave me something to think about. No doubt, I'll continue to blog and maintain a social profile here and there, but I'm also acutely aware of the need to step back and out and get some balance back in the mix. The tought is if I do less online, I might achieve more offline.

I was a bit startled to find the above leave behind when it was served with my on board breakfast yesterday morning en route from Anchorage to Seattle. I realize the US is a Christian nation, but there's a line here that Alaska Airlines willfully crosses. Their only out is the fact that this Psalm could be, and likely is, an intentional literary reference to the great state of Alaska (Denali means "the high one"). Even so, seeing a brand use scripture in this way could offend believers and heathens alike.

When you're writing to parents and asking them to involve their kids in the arts, the copy should sing. Thankfully, it does in this second phase of print ads from AmericansfortheArts.org and ArtsUSA.org.

Click image to read larger version

Other artists and thinkers in the series include Celia Cruz, Walt Whitman, Virgina Woolf and Homer.

...you get commercials like this stuck in your head:

So has anyone ever worked for/with The Ad Council? Is this the best we can do, pro-bono wise?

Oh, and while we're on the subject...

When is "Cop Rock" going to come out on DVD?

According to Ad Age, some universities are getting creative with their spots that run during NCAA football and basketball games. Stanford, for one, hired Dailey & Associates of West Hollywood to produce a TV campaign. The agency's three-spot campaign looks at the world-changing inventions developed at the college through a humorous lens.

Bruce Miller, president of Dailey and a Stanford business-school grad, said the agency came up with the campaign after a study of what other universities were doing with their free air time.

You know how agencies often find a niche to mine? Well, Portland interactive agency, Second Story, is pulling gold from the museum niche.

multimedia slideshow for New Bedford's Whaling Museum

The Oregonian did a profile on the shop in July.

Second Story, hardly known in its hometown, exerts national influence with Web sites for the likes of the National Geographic Society and PBS, with displays for the Museum of Modern Art, and with exhibits for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Second Story fuses databases, artifacts, animation, Web technology, video, text and breathtaking graphics into stories that adapt to different learning styles and interests.

Speaking on the pressing need for Second Story's services, Nik Honeysett, head of administration for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, says museums must draw in the "digital natives," the generation that has come of age taking Google, gaming and gadgets for granted. "We need to engage them," Honeysett says, "on their own territory."

Today's New York Times takes a look at the implications of AdBlock Plus, a Firefox plug-in that keeps ads from appearing on the browser:

The larger importance of Adblock is its potential for extreme menace to the online-advertising business model. After an installation that takes but a minute or two, Adblock usually makes all commercial communication disappear. No flashing whack-a-mole banners. No Google ads based on the search terms you have entered.

From that perspective, the program is an unwelcome arrival after years of worry that there might never be an online advertising business model to support the expense of creating entertainment programming or journalism, or sophisticated search engines, for that matter.

Not sure what the interactive gurus think of this, but it can't be all that favorable. Because, like I'm fond of saying lately, no matter the media or the content, somebody's gotta pay for it.

Emeryville, Calif. internet video house, Turn Here, is capitalizing on the amazing growth of the new medium. The company, which provides "high quality low-cost internet videos," has 803 samples in several categories on YouTube, including the one above, which sells real estate and a hip SE Portland neighborhood at the same time.

In related news, Spike points to this Wired piece on landlords who are placing video tours on YouTube and linking to them from Craigslist. Let freedom ring.

The Atlanta agency with a penchant for hiring CD's out of Fallon has changed its name.

Why 22Squared? Apparently, because the agency believes in "marketing brands the same way people make friends." And according to the website, everyone makes, on average, 484 friends in a lifetime. 22 squared=484. Get it?

I wish they'd showed a little more of that friendly side last year, when I was supposed to do some freelance work for them, which was arranged with the help of a recruiter, and they canceled without ever notifying me.

In another sign that digital creatives are hot shit today, Jean-Marie Dru, the chairman of Omnicom Group's TBWA Worldwide, flew from his office in New York to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for lunch. His task: sealing a top-secret deal to lure Colleen DeCourcy, then top digital executive at WPP Group's JWT.

The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.) asked DeCourcy, who is now chief digital officer for TBWA about training old-school creative executives who grew up on TV ads to be digitally adept. Here's what she said:

I think that people who continue to be culture eaters regardless of their age are trainable. In my mind digital is ubiquitous, you use it across your life in all its various forms and if you live doing that you understand what it needs to give you to be a good experience. If you do not, you will never get it. I have had creative and media people say 'I get it, I am reading up on it and I understand interactive is important.' I point out to them it's the same if I came to their shop as a junior creative and said 'I totally get TV commercials.' They would say, 'Where is your reel? I have shot 500 of them.'...People are mistaking recognizing digital as an object of conversation with having the craft to throw down. Let's face it, even the people who grew up in digital are still learning the craft. I'm 42, the longest I could have been making digital is 10 or 12 years and there are people who are talking about a TV shoot that took place 20 years ago....Let's not forget there has to be craft applied here. I wouldn't want anyone to let me loose on a $10 million TV shoot yet.

John Winsor weighs in on his first 90 days at Crispin Porter & Bogusky. His Boulder-based firm, Radar Communications, was acquired by Crispin last spring.

CP+B is an incredibly entrepreneurial place. While it creates some manic energy it also has intensity around the creative process that is so necessary for anything great to happen. This place is truly focused on creating cultural change through marketing.

I'm inclined to take Winsor at his word. And I like how his word has not a thing to do with selling more crap to more people.

"Offices need the sort of social milieu that Jane Jacobs found on the sidewalks of the West Village." -Malcolm Gladwell

I'm intrigued by the number of independent professionals who are adopting the idea of coworking. Maybe I'll do it myself one day. Thus, I was glad to stumble upon this resource.

While there seem to be several workspace models within the larger idea of shared space, the places that I find most attractive are organized by industry or some other common factor. Take TENPOD in Portland. TENPOD is "a creative services coop of 10 independently owned and operated businesses."

Wired Magazine is running a short bit on pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter"). According to the piece, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects have turned PowerPoint into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That's it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the hell down.

Perhaps the reason Facebook won't sell is it's already owned. By the spooks.

[via Desedo]

In related news, Hugh MacLeod doesn't really want to be my friend, or yours on Quechup (a social net with serious boundary issues).

A Brief Message, a new site from Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico, features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.

OK, I'll readily admit that when there's nothing worth watching on TV, I'm a a sucker for the Hardball-Countdown-type cable news talking head shows. But I did a double take when I saw Deutsch LA's ECD Eric Hirshberg on the Dan Abrams show last night.

The topic? The war in Iraq and President Bush's definition of success. And there he is talking alongside Arianna Huffington and Pat Buchanan, in a conversation that really had nothing to do with advertising or marketing.

It's not on YouTube, so just follow this link and click through about halfway in.

Hirshberg did fine, he wasn't any better or worse than any other talking head, but still, he seems to be an odd choice to pontificate on the war. I suspect Donny is giving Eric some PR lessons.

According to USA Today, digital billboards are taking hold in cities across the country, even as sign companies, federal regulators and opponents debate the legal status of the technology that makes them possible.

"When the sun goes down, you can't ignore it," Mark Legan says, gesturing from his living room toward the giant television billboard that recently went up a half block away on Santa Monica Boulevard.

"All this illumination comes into the house. My 7-year-old, when she sits at the dining room table, is forced to watch these ads. It's just not right."

Of the 450,000 billboards around the country, about 500 are digital, all erected within the past two years or so. Hundreds more are planned to go up later this year and in 2008, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, the industry's Washington lobby group.

In the latest entry in the scentvertising wars, The Los Angeles Times will run a full page ad for the Fox-Walden film Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium this coming Sunday. When scratched the ad will release "the universally beloved frosted cake scent," The Times said in a statement.

The film starring Natalie Portman and Dustin Hoffman is about a magical toy store. The aroma is supposed to remind readers "to be young and have fun."

In April, USA Today began a campaign in which readers could pull back a sticker on ads for a coffee-and-muffin deal at Omni Hotels and inhale the whiff of berries.

"Scent has the longest memory and is the most powerful emotional motivator, and that's what advertising is all about," said Carmine Santandrea, chief executive of ScentAndrea, a Santa Barbara scent-marketing company.

When the California Milk Processor Board pasted strips that smelled of chocolate chip cookies next to ads for milk in San Francisco bus shelters, people complained. The ads came down.

Tom Asacker shares an interesting piece on the state of quiet.

I just returned from a speech at the Wynn in Las Vegas, and while there I was struck by something. Actually, I was surprised by an absence of something: noise. I really didn't hear any clanging coins, dissonant bells, or spinning WHEELS . . . OF . . . FORTUNE! And it wasn't just in the casino. The same was true of other areas (hallways, meeting areas, restaurants, etc.); I experienced a distinct sense of calm. As casino resorts go, the Wynn is one of the quietest by far. And it's also one of the most exclusive and expensive.

This got me thinking about leadership brands and their inherent sense of calm. Organizations that truly take an outside-in approach to their brands, ones that strategically focus on their audience and deliver value with each and every activity (or lack thereof), seem to be quieter and more subtle than others. They appear to genuinely respect their audience and are thus less intrusive and less noisy.

Their customer-facing people appear more composed and self-assured. They talk less and listen more. Their internal organization appears more composed and focused. There's less redundant questioning and far less gossiping. Their marketing is also quieter, with less hype, less intrusion, and even less copy than others (see Apple advertising and packaging). It appears that the more valuable the brand, the less noisy it is (Harley's engine roar notwithstanding).

This leads me to think about agency work spaces.

John Winsor mentioned how vital Crispin's energy is. "CP+B is an incredibly entrepreneurial place. While it creates some manic energy it also has intensity around the creative process that is so necessary for anything great to happen." I longed for that type of atmosphere yesterday when reading his description. Now, I'm considering the polar reality as expressed by Tom Asacker.

Maybe "making noise," as agency people are wont to do, is the wrong goal. The higher order of things is simply being heard.

[George Lois care of AMCTV.COM]

Apple surprised some people yesterday by slashing the price on its iPhone by $200. The 8 gig model will now sell for $399, making it far more attractive to a wider group of mobile users. Steve Jobs also said Apple will stop selling the 4 gig model, as most consumers are opting for the device with more storage capacity.

new iPod Touch

In other Apple news, the iPod is looking more like the iPhone with a new touch screen. It also comes with Wi-Fi so users can connect to a new iTunes Wi-Fi store to download songs directly to their music players without having to connect to a computer.

In tandem with the new product, Apple said it agreed with Starbucks Corp. to let users buy music from the iTunes Store on free wireless connections in Starbucks cafes. Users won't have to pay a wireless connection fee to shop in the iTunes store, which they currently must do when accessing iTunes from a Starbucks. The deal also applies to Mac, iPhone and personal-computer users.

Starbucks plans to begin the service in October at 600 cafes in New York and Seattle, adding service gradually in other locations throughout next year. Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz said, "The big payoff is the sense of discovery that will exist."

[via The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.)]

The news of Apple's iPhone price drop and subsequent mea culpa from Steve Jobs brought out a legion of naysayers, including one on this board who called buying a product on its launch day an "idiot tax."

"Idiot tax"? Well, speaking as a genuine, stood-in-line-for-2-hours idiot, I wish more folks in corporate America would do what Steve Jobs did and try to make amends when they screw up.

I hope all the "let's have a dialogue with our customers" and "marketing is now a two-way conversation" gurus are paying attention. Because this is how some of those conversations should play out--like in real human conversations, "I'm sorry" is a phrase that's acceptable to use, and it goes a long way in patching things up.

For the first time, Bugs Bunny and dozens of his animated companions at Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. unit will be housed together on a single internet portal. The new Web site, dubbed T-Works, for "Toon Works," is scheduled to go live in April.

It is the latest effort by a major Hollywood studio to control distribution of its content while simultaneously playing catch-up to established social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook and virtual worlds like Second Life.

The ad-supported site will be free to consumers. Users will be able to watch classic cartoons and original animated programming designed specifically for distribution on the site; create virtual worlds using cartoon characters as their online identities, or avatars; and customize their online identities on their own computers and on social-networking sites. They can also digitally alter cartoon characters to their liking and play online games based on the animated characters.

[via The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.)]

[via The New York Times]

Click to compete.

Starting next week, labels touting the new prime-time lineup from CBS will appear on packaging and containers available at supermarket deli counters. So your half pound of sliced honey ham could bear a label that tells you to be sure to tune in for CBS shows such as "Viva Laughlin," "Cane" or "Two and a Half Men."

"We do like the supermarkets as a place" to promote programs, said George Schweitzer, president, CBS Marketing Group. "We get people when they are least expecting messages about entertainment, but they are very receptive to them."

The promotion involves the printing and distribution of millions of coupons and labels to thousands of grocery stores nationwide, including Safeway, Albertsons and Price Chopper, among others. CBS said 70% of shoppers frequent the deli, meat and seafood section of their supermarkets, which means its food labels will have the potential to snare attention.

[via Ad Age]

Are you a Virgin American? Apparently they're quite the quirky lot. Sean Gannan at Anomaly says, "Despite being a diverse and distinctive group of folks they can, impresario and idealist alike, find things to agree on - be it spectacular shoes, the relative merits of onboard plugs, or a celebratory bag of potato chips."

It's really too bad that Dr. Paul Springer, the author of Ads To Icons: How Advertising Succeeds in a Multimedia Age got saddled with, or settled for, a horrible looking book cover and a completely misleading title. Because you can really learn a lot from his book.

If you're like me, you've watched all the new media/viral/buzz/web-based/experiential ad campaigns get lots of fawning press and attention without a lot of explanation or context.

But that's where Ads To Icons comes in. Springer has taken about 50 or so non-traditional campaigns of the last few years, from ones you know like "Subservient Chicken" to all sorts of others (he's British so there's a lot of non-American work here) and outlines everything about them: their planning and execution timelines, project backgrounds, creative direction, marketing mixes, and ultimately, measurable results.

After the case studies, Springer lays out what is needed in the new media landscape, from new job descriptions to new planning techniques, and what can go wrong getting close to consumers using non-traditional means.

The whole book feels a little textbook-like, but that's primarily because words and case studies don't do non-traditional efforts justice. But Springer has done a terrific job of capturing the behind-the-campaign thinking of the work that has captivated the ad industry in the last few years. If you work in an ad agency that talks a big game about "new media" or viral this-and-that, or is led by senior management that is completely clueless about it, get a copy of this book. It'll show people exactly what it takes to be successful doing work that's non-traditional.

You can check out the book's website at www.adstoicons.com.

Special thanks to Kogan Page who provided me with a copy for review.

If you have taste, you don't flaunt it.

Not so, says Hennessy. The cognac maker asks instead that you defy convention and "Flaunt Your Taste." To help you do that, Hennessy has a neat little PDF download that you can memorize.

The obnoxious copy in Hennessy's manual suggests that:

• There is nothing more powerful in the world than beauty.
• Patience is the defensive strategy of the uninteresting.
• Quality and luxury and not "nice to have," they are the basis of value in life.

You can puke now. When you come back I'll be happy to share Ewen Cameron's thoughts with you.

The CEO and ECD at Berlin Cameron United (Hennessy's agency), said, "You could argue that taste is subtle, but we see having taste as flaunting it. Our audience wants to go out and be noticed, but for their good taste as opposed to objects."

In other words, Hennessy is the bling you can afford.

Image courtesy of Dooce.

Neiman Marcus is promoting its 100th anniversary via a video on YouTube. Neiman executives told Ad Age it's an unorthodox move, but they think there's a place for their luxury brand on the video-sharing site.

"Like with anything, you hear people in meetings say, 'Did you see the thing on YouTube?'" said Ginger Reeder, VP-corporate communications at the Dallas-based retailer. "And if it starts to permeate our consciousness, we can only assume it's in our customers' as well."

Buying the home page on YouTube for a day generally costs about $250,000, according to media-buying executives familiar with the pricing.

Joseph Jaffe, President and Chief Interrupter at Crayon, on the changes his company is undergoing:

crayon relaunches itself today as a conversational marketing company, specializing in helping its clients engage advertising-weary consumers through the power of community, dialogue and partnership. Think of crayon as a cross between a think tank and a strategic consultancy, with one major difference. Unlike most (if not all) consultancies, crayon won’t flee the scene of the crime once the 600 page report is dumped on the Mahogany desk of the CEO. Instead, crayon will stay the course, and if asked and required, will help bring the strategies and ideas to life.

News of which caused Ad Age's Jonah Bloom to have a fit.

Let us go through this slowly. Somewhere in there are thoughts, and they are leading to something. They are also thoughts that are very productive, hence we can call them prolific. And there's also vision, although we're not sure whether that's prolific too. So we've got the ability to see and thoughts that lead stuff and are productive. But we presume it's not stuff we want, because the new Crayon is, if we're reading this correctly, promising to change that stuff into something else. Specifically into solutions. But not just any kind of solutions -- solutions with sharp or serrated sides . . . . OK, we give up.

Neil Dingman, a mortgage consultant in Minneapolis and an iPhone owner, was unexpectedly charged $852.31 by AT&T recently.

According to Dallas Morning News, Dingman took his iPhone on a European vacation. For the 14 days he was there, he used it only a handful of times and had expected to see just a small increase in his next bill for roaming charges.

As it turned out, the phone made calls on a European data network several times an hour to check for e-mail messages. Because he didn't deactivate the feature, the phone went to retrieve e-mail more than 500 times.

According to Business 2.0, Fred Franzia, CEO of Bronco Wine, the nation's fourth-largest wine company, is fighting a war against pretentiousness.

Hating pretentiousness isn't just a business plan. It's Franzia's entire identity. His office is a wood-paneled trailer with carpet holes repaired with duct tape that looks like it might house the night manager of a troubled dude ranch. He uses his cell phone only in his car, and he has no computer; his assistant prints out his e-mail messages in the morning, and he handwrites his responses on them.

He's worked in the wine industry his entire life, but he calls the grapes "varieties" instead of "varietals." For a while, he has me convinced that he's planted some weird grape I've never heard of called "moh-ver-dee," until I realize he's talking about the Rhône varietal Mourvedre. Driving by a guy selling fruit along the side of the road in the hot sun might fill some with pity, but Franzia looks on with pride. He pokes me with a thick finger and says, "That's a real businessman."

While the crudeness seems like a put-on meant to test opponents, it's still startling. He's a giant, 62-year-old former high school football player who looks like a cross between John Madden and Shrek, and he utters very few sentences that don't contain at least one curse word.

The Franzia name may ring a bell. Fred's immigrant grandfather got the family into the wine buiness in the San Joaquin Valley in 1915. Fred's father sold that company to Coca-Cola in 1973, an act that caused Fred to stop speaking to his dad for seven years.

Danish mens' undergarment brand JBS believes men don't want to look at other, almost naked, men. So they found another, more attractive, scenario to sell their skivvies.

[via Nuacco via NotCot]

The Wall Street Journal (paid sub. req.) is reporting on ModelsHotel.com, a new social networking site that seeks to unite professional fashion models everywhere.

On the site, the thin and beautiful can post pictures, videos and information about themselves, find romantic matches and get deals on everything from cosmetic dentistry to clothes. Unlike other modeling-focused sites, ModelsHotel is for professional models only. No poseurs. No voyeurs. No exceptions.

"Our site is a digital velvet rope," says site founder, Jesper Lannung, who has rejected more than half of the more than 2,000 people who have attempted to register so far.

It's this promise of exclusivity that is drawing sponsors to the site. Among its high-profile marketing partners: eccentric fashion design house Heatherette, Diesel jeans and luxury jeweler Piaget.

Lemonade.com helps Internet users (like me) create kiosks, or virtual lemonade stands, which can then be placed on Facebook and MySpace pages, among others. Lemonade works like a master catalog that includes items from 250 online retailers, including Zappos.com, iTunes and Walmart.com. The startup is based in South Norwalk, Conn., and is the creation of former executives at Modem Media.

[via The New York Times]

Ad Age is running a story that will encourage adholes everywhere. It seems Cramer-Krasselt CEO Peter Krivkovich had some choice words for former client CareerBuilder after being told the No. 1 jobs site was putting its account in review following a poor performance in the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter poll.

"There are a few times in your life when you have to tell someone to fuck off and mean it," Mr. Krivkovich said in an interview shortly after the memo leaked.

The funny thing is his outburst earned him the respect of new clients.

"If anything, it was a positive," said David Pryor, VP-marketing at Porsche Cars North America, which awarded C-K its creative and media accounts last week. "I had a lot of respect for them standing behind their work and conviction. At Porsche, we want an agency that has conviction and passion."

The Porsche triumph gives C-K three sizable wins since the CareerBuilder split; heartburn drug Zantac and Bissell vacuums were the others.

Ed Cotton of Butler Shine and Stern wants social networks to deliver on the wisdom of crowds promise.

Facebook is attracting a ton of people and it's doing a great job with the basics, but the real "win" is leveraging the collective wisdom and power of crowds to do something interesting; to buy goods at a discount, to give loans, change the political system, raise environmental standards, reduce poverty and yes, even keep interesting business magazines afloat.

Jamie Kantrowitz, MySpace’s London-based SVP for European marketing and content, recently spoke to paidContent about the difference between MySpace and rival Facebook.

I think Facebook’s doing a really fundamentally different experience than MySpace - it’s more of a social software technology company, while we’re still fundamentally based on self-expression and culture and community. Our strength has always been about culture, community and also self-expression - someone’s MySpace page is much more an expression of their identity and what they love in their life than a Facebook page is, or maybe another social networking page.

Kantowitz also admits there's significant overlap among soc net users, just like there are many people who choose to maintain free webmail accounts at both Google and Yahoo.

I know MySpace is many things to many people, but to me it's a niche site. It's where I connect with bands and musically inclined people and organizations.